Lysander's finest champion dies in Victra's ambush, hacked apart and beheaded after he leads fifty Gold knights into a prepared three-to-one fight.
Ajax au Grimmus was Atalantia's fearsome young war champion, a towering Olympic Knight whose old friendship with Lysander au Lune had pulled him into Lysander's emerging coalition. During the Phobos assault he became the operation's physical engine, breaking the bulwark into Sector Seven and accepting a debt to Kyber after she stopped a suicide bomber from killing him.
When Victra landed a counterattack behind the Society advance, Ajax volunteered to strike its head before the force could close around Lysander's overextended columns. He led fifty Golds through a hauler shaft toward what appeared to be Victra's main position, coordinating with Cicero's vanguard. The position was a trap. Victra and a second knight, identified by Diomedes as Thraxa au Telemanus, waited with Obsidian fighters and outnumbered Ajax's party three to one.
Ajax's knights are killed and scalped. Ajax fights on between Victra and Thraxa until the two slowly whittle him down; he repels Thraxa's attack but cannot stop Victra, who hacks him apart, cuts off his head, and roars over his body. His death collapses Lysander's bid for a swift Phobos victory into the prospect of an attritional war. Ajax is dead.
A towering, heavily muscled dark-brown Gold warrior in full black-and-gold armor, with hard golden eyes and a battle-scarred face. His canonical living appearance holds the severe confidence of an Olympic Knight and a hot, easily read anger beneath his swagger.
Ajax was Lysander's most devastating close-combat weapon and the personal ally whose death makes the cost of Phobos immediate and irreparable.