Adrian Pearson
First appearance: Happy, chapter 9
Last appearance: Crucible, chapter 63
Appears in: Happy, Armageddon, Timeless, CrucibleLatest status
Death and Taxes guitarist/coordinator, running communications and tactical direction for the guild
Adrian Pearson is a bard who channels music into a battlefield weapon, using guitar-driven buffs, crowd control, and showmanship in equal measure. Starting as a frightened novice desperate to escape a dead-end life, he partners with a mentor whose brutal training reshapes him into a capable fighter, and together they build the mercenary guild Death and Taxes, with Adrian as its business strategist and flamboyant public face. He balances genuine loyalty with an appetite for spectacle, growing more calculating and theatrical as his reputation and responsibilities expand.
Abilities
- War Chant — Book 5.5
- Wailing Despair — Book 5.5
- Deathwish — Book 5.5
- Battle March — Book 5.5
- One-Man Band ability — summons phantom instruments and weaponizes music — Book 6
- Amber light teleportation — Book 6
Book 5.5: Happy
Adrian is a bard rejected by The Jackals guild for wanting to play a musical class and recently fired from his tavern job. Desperate to escape his dead-end situation in Aislen, he ventures into the jungle to find Dom, a survivor The Jackals have mentioned. He reaches Dom during a panther and monkey attack, and despite his terror chooses to help rather than flee, forming an immediate partnership. Adrian then undergoes Dom’s death-training methodology, dying repeatedly to build his stats and endurance until he earns the Deathwish skill, gradually shifting from a man who requires protection to one who can hold his own in combat while playing guitar.
During an S-difficulty Egg Hunt event, Adrian debuts War Chant and Wailing Despair, musical abilities that buff Dom and control crowds of attacking creatures, and begins to wonder whether he too is coming to enjoy the danger. His guitar, which he treats as a cherished companion nicknamed “Baby,” is destroyed by a newly hatched chick that later becomes Dom’s pet Wingman; devastated, Adrian channels his grief into an “anti-monopoly” scheme, partnering with a marginalized blacksmith to fund a replacement instrument and, later, an amplified guitar. He grows close to Wingman, developing a musical partnership with her that lets him blend performance with battlefield support, and grows wary of The Jackals’ attempts to recruit or monitor him and Dom.
When Sean of The Jackals betrays and tortures Dom and Adrian during a raid, Adrian endures the torture with defiance and afterward learns of Dom’s terminal cancer diagnosis; he refuses to let Dom give up and proposes using the game’s real-money economy to fund Dom’s treatment, turning their partnership into a business alliance. He helps negotiate the collective-bargaining agreement that binds the goblin civilization to the casino, voicing moral outrage at the Gambler’s abandonment of them, and earns “Revered” standing among the goblins by engaging with their customs. He assists Dom’s raid on The Jackals’ guild hall (relegated to lookout duty to his disappointment), records their exploits, and launches a crowdfunding campaign that helps establish Death and Taxes, with Dom as guild master and Adrian as its business strategist and public face, explicitly preferring fame to fortune.
As the guild grows, Adrian coordinates recruitment and trains new members, at one point demonstrating in combat that his musical class is far from weak. When Dom is trapped during the siege of Boomtown, Adrian steps into command without hesitation and coordinates the team’s defense. During the final campaign against The Jackals he adopts a mask and a colder, more detached persona, explicitly rejecting his earlier, “weaker” self as he oversees Wingman’s brutal revenge on Sean for the loss of her eye. By the guild’s founding celebrations he has folded his criminal activities into a maintained celebrity persona, welcomes the defeated Booker (now “Smokes”) into the guild, and manages Death and Taxes’ public image and hostages alike with the same showmanship he once used only for music.
Status: Alive — jobless bard rejected by The Jackals, alone in Aislen → Alive — co-founder and public face of Death and Taxes guild
Dom: Adrian goes from a stranger seeking Dom’s help to his trusted partner and eventual guild co-founder, becoming the first person Dom confides his terminal cancer diagnosis to.
Wingman: Adrian’s initial mockery of the chick (who destroys his guitar) develops into a musical partnership and protective bond, culminating in him overseeing her revenge kill of Sean.
Sean: Adrian’s hostility toward Sean, who tortures him and Dom, ends with Adrian coldly allowing Wingman to torture and kill Sean in retaliation.
Booker: Adrian’s enmity toward Booker as a guild threat ends with him welcoming the defeated Booker, now called Smokes, into Death and Taxes.
Key quote: “After everything we’ve been through, are you really going to throw in the towel over one little death?”
Book 6: Armageddon
Bard is a flamboyant guitarist in Death and Taxes, fighting with amber energy, speed, and musical magic, and acting as Dom’s second-in-command; he is comfortable challenging Dom’s judgment (questioning whether their client Gloria can be trusted) while remaining loyal to him. Under the disguised identity “Preacher,” he runs manipulation operations for the guild: he stages a fake religious movement, “Kingdom of Nerfle,” to publicly humiliate Jason and Frank and extract money from followers while gathering intelligence on them, and later incites a mob to attack the Deus Ex guild hall as a coordinated distraction ahead of a larger guild operation.
When the guild traps the avatars in the Mile-High Club’s deadly games, Bard operates as an announcer and host, treating the life-threatening trials as entertainment and a branding opportunity. During the games he kills his own partner Queen once she becomes a liability while fleeing a transformed Eliza. Confronted directly, he reveals that his confidence, physical conditioning, and abilities all stem from Dom’s intensive training, which pulled him out of being “Adrian” — a weak, frightened man with a broken guitar — and that his fear of reverting to that former self, more than tactics, drives him to keep fighting Eliza and the avatars even as his planned grand finale performance unravels.
His showmanship keeps causing problems: he nearly compromises the guild’s operational security by posting careless social-media content for his own side business, and he later deliberately tips off an approaching traveler army so the resulting mass battle can double as the biggest “concert” of his career, treating the carnage as artistic material. When his makeshift stage at the excavation site is destroyed, he briefly despairs at losing his finale, but rallies to join the final defense after Dom’s example, ultimately fighting alongside Jason’s coalition and goblin forces against the traveler assault.
After Dom switches sides and the game world’s transformation upends the guild’s plans, Bard grows uncharacteristically quiet. He remains loyal to Dom’s crew, which by the book’s end has become allied with Jason’s group through that shared crew connection as everyone adjusts to the post-transformation world.
Status: Alive — theatrical guild performer → Alive — subdued, part of Dom’s crew, allied with Jason’s group through crew loyalty
Dom: moves from second-in-command who openly challenges Dom’s decisions to someone who credits Dom’s training entirely for his transformed identity, and ultimately follows Dom’s side-switch and joins his crew.
Queen: their working partnership ends when he kills her himself after she becomes a liability during an escape from a transformed Eliza.
Jason: moves from a targeted opponent working guild schemes against Jason’s group to a battlefield ally defending the excavation site, and by the book’s end is allied with Jason through Dom’s crew.
Key quote: “This one is for you, Smiles.”
Book 7: Timeless
Bard is the in-game handle of Adrian Pearson, a member of the Death and Taxes guild who serves alternately as comic relief and battlefield support. When the group is surrounded by hostile travelers, he uses speed enhancement, illusion, and charm abilities to talk down the crowd and buy time for an escape, treating the danger with irreverent humor while still contributing real tactical value, and needling fellow guild member Alexion along the way. Immediately after, in combat, he shifts into a dedicated support role, playing guitar to sustain magical buffs for his teammates throughout the fight and prioritizing their effectiveness over his own recognition. Later, at an event Jason specifically calls on him to host, he appears in a velvet tunic with a real guitar, using amplified voice projection and call-and-response crowd techniques to manage the audience’s energy while showcasing Death and Taxes’s capabilities for publicity; this performance appears to double as cover for an infiltration mission happening elsewhere at the event.
Status: Comic-relief support member of Death and Taxes, using charm and illusion to help the guild escape hostile travelers. → Flamboyant entertainer hosting a Death and Taxes publicity event, his crowd control apparently providing cover for a concurrent infiltration mission.
Jason: Jason personally calls on Bard to host the guild’s public event, entrusting him with a visible leadership role beyond his usual battlefield support duties.
Key quote: “Why hello there, army of angry travelers! I get that you’re upset, but, well, Wingman here might be even more angry”
Book 8: Crucible
Bard announces Finn and Eliza’s Death Ball match as a theatrical spectacle, manipulating arena rules and summoning an artificial eclipse to control the narrative, but is left dumbfounded when Finn exploits a design flaw in his shield structure that he had not considered. He later helps present a championship match offer to Finn and Eliza, treating the negotiation as a performance and threatening them with blackmail and mocking songs, though he backs down and follows orders the moment Blaze threatens him, revealing that his showmanship covers a willingness to defer to the team’s real authority. In a subsequent exhibition match he sets aside his usual flamboyance to play sustained guitar buffs for his team, a role Daniel identifies as important enough that Fluffy Rules target him first; he is eliminated during the fighting when Eliza triggers a mass blackout. He later resurfaces coordinating Death and Taxes’ movements from the Mile High Club, running the loudspeaker system, directing players toward a staged event through an air mana gem network, and offering to silence Julia Harris when she interrupts with unwelcome revelations.
Status: Mile High Club announcer, confidently orchestrating match spectacle and rules → Death and Taxes guitarist/coordinator, running communications and tactical direction for the guild
Key quote: “The arena isn’t supposed to be about murder - well, not just about murder. It’s supposed to be about me!”
Appears in
- Happy — 34 chapters
- Armageddon — 23 chapters
- Timeless — 3 chapters
- Crucible — 4 chapters