Colonel Schaeffer

Colonel Schaeffer commands the 13th Penal Legion, the Last Chancers, an officer of the Commissariat who believes a suicide mission is a kinder sentence than a wall. He picks murderers, thieves, and the wrongly condemned, then walks them into the worst ground in the Imperium until the Emperor's books balance.

Most troopers offered the chance choose the firing squad. The ones who do not learn that Schaeffer has never failed a mission and does not intend to start. He will pardon a corpse himself if the corpse died on task. Kage survived him more than once. That was not mercy. It was staffing.

He is older than he looks, rebuilt by priests, and still leading from the front of a unit designed to be expended. The Last Chancers are not a regiment. They are a method. Schaeffer is the method walking.