— Series · Book 1 · Out now —

The Hambledon Free Company

Another world. Same bad shift. A Pittsburgh ER nurse, yanked into a dying world mid-trauma — a system bracer on his wrist, a free company at his back, and three women who each decide he’s theirs to keep alive.

The Setting

Tait Halloran ran a Pittsburgh trauma bay — charge nurse, two tours as a combat medic underneath that, the kind of man who triages a room on instinct and keeps his hands steady while everyone else loses theirs. Then a bad shift turned into the worst one of his life, and he came to on cold ground in the Wisden Empire: an older, colder, dying world, with a system bracer already fused to his wrist and a job to do he never applied for.

The Hambledon Free Company takes him in — a working mercenary outfit out of the Trent Bridge chapter-house, down one field medic since the spring. Bedser is dead. Tait is the only successor he left. There are people vanishing along the Hammond’s Reach road, something Chantry-trained unmaking the dead at the far end of it, and a contract that was never going to be as simple as it read.

Tone

Grimdark isekai with a working man’s pulse. The progression is real — the bracer levels, the kills count, the power curve climbs — but the stakes stay human. Triage discipline as character. Dark humor as a professional norm. A slow burn that turns fast once it decides to. Competence, chemistry, and a body count.

The Three

Bell goes through the door first and holds the line that everyone else stands behind. Sciver reads what you are before you’ve decided to be it. Wyatt you never hear coming. Each of them, on her own terms and in her own register, decides that the new medic is hers to keep alive. None of them is sharing.

Comparable Reads

He Who Fights with Monsters with a trauma-bay heartbeat; Cradle’s climb dropped into a grimmer, Cornwell-shaped world; the competence-under-pressure of a good medical drama handed a sword and a free company.

Book One

The first book in The Hambledon Free Company. Out now; the rest of the company is on the way.

Out now Chirurgeon — Book 1 of The Hambledon Free Company, cover by Alex Savage
Book 1

Chirurgeon

A Mercenary Progression Fantasy

One second I had my hands inside a dying man in a Pittsburgh trauma bay. The next, the patient was a woman, the wound was a halberd through the thigh and the bracer on my wrist told me the save had just leveled my Triage to two.

I had six years in the ER and two tours as an Army medic before that. But this new world sorts its magic into divine and profane and nothing else. The problem is, mine is neither and just keeps leveling. It’s turning a trauma nurse into the one thing a mercenary company on a death-contract can’t afford to lose: the man who drags you back from the wound that was supposed to kill you.

So they keep me close. And three of them keep me closer. One holds the line alone, calls me hers in front of the whole company, and breaks fingers when men forget it. The other decided I was hers the first time she watched me work, and tracks every rival like a hawk. And the last barely speaks, reaches the bodies first, and those who get too close to me have a way of turning up among them.

We’re hunting an apostate who carves travelers into a working that won’t let them die. And the Witch Hunters on his trail burn whole villages just to be sure, then turn on anything they don’t understand. Like me.

Every wound I close levels me higher. And by the time the Chantry, the Colleges, and the Hunters can agree on a name for what I’m becoming, the three who’ve claimed me will have made damn sure it’s too late to stop me.

Buy on Amazon → Book details → Released June 8, 2026