Wildercorps Hunters

The Wildercorps are the crusades' eyes, sent days ahead of the column to learn what the land intends to do to it. They travel light: crossbows, snares, weatherproof cloaks, and hounds trained to smell daemon-taint and dead men walking, and they fight only on their own terms: from cover, at dusk, with the first bolt loosed before the enemy knows the direction of the war.

Hunters are recruited from the borderlands: trappers, road-wardens, and poachers offered a pardon and a purpose. City soldiers find them unsettling company, too quiet and too honest about the odds, but no crusade marshal will march without them. The Wildercorps' grim joke is that they have never once been wrong about a doomed route, merely ignored, and the wise commanders are the ones who can hear a warning in the way a hound refuses a valley.