FBF - To The Death: Forged by Fire

Story: Simon Furman

Art: Geoff Senior

Letterer: Martin Baines

Design: Amazing15

Plot

Following the birth of his son, Aleksy Dryagin decides to re-enlist for his second tour of duty as a Pacifier, to be able to provide money for his family, despite his wife, Lena, disapproving of the idea.

Aleksy and his team are soon formed, and are shipped out to the Borderlands to take on some violent alien species, whoa re giving their current troops problems. They arrive on the planet Asphodel, where they encounter weird creatures, and have a full battle with an army of Sentinels protecting their leaders, by literally forming themselves as a dome around them.

The battle eventually ends when  Aleksy tosses a belt of grenades into the lava surrounding the capitol island, and detonating them, destroying the bridge and most of the defending army, allowing them to slowly defeat the rest of them, and pacify the planet for the Tri-Corp.

After the battle, Aleksy and his team head towards another planet to conquer, when Aleksy thinks back to his wife's thoughts on his mission, she believes that the Tri-Corp reached out to him to take on another tour of duty, just so they can kill him off in battle, since no-one normally returns from even one tour alive, let alone two. 

One year later, on Earth, Deacon Snow and his team prepare for a simulated detonation of the "Asphodel Extinction Weapon", and comments on how beautiful it is to use an entire planet's molten heart and soul for this device, but that it is also terrifying too....

Characters

Pacifiers

Aleksy Dryagin/Komodo

Diamond Bill

Jonas Huey

Dolan Rekt

Hash Flynn

Megan Umber

Leone

Bette Larssen

Josiah Kraken

The Echelon (Mentioned)

Other Pacifiers (Mentioned)

Other Human

Lena Dryagin

Leo Dryagin

Deacon Snow

Energy Corp Development Team

Alamo Staff Member

The Tri-Corp (Mentioned)

Other

Asphodel Denizens Wiped Out by Pacifiers

Borderland Combatants

Notes

• This is the special prequel issue of the series, which has only been released on the To The Death website and at conventions, such as TFNation, which is where I got mine.
• The cover doesn't normally feature the scribbles that are on mine, as I said before, I went to TFNation.
• This story takes place mostly five years before the events of To The Death, with the epilogue taking place one year after that.
• This issue shows that Aleksy left Earth shortly after Leo was born, not just before like I assumed in issue 2
• Aleksy mentions that he doesn't know if Diamond Bill's name is a codename or his actual one.
• We learn here that Aleksy personally recruited Leone, Larssen and Kraken to the team, we knew this about Leone already, and Kraken is shown in the issues to be dangerous, but Larssen hasn't shown any dangerous tendencies so far..
• We keep hearing about "Tri-Corp" this issue, but in the series proper we only hear about the Energy Corp, which appears to be just a branch of it. Unless this is just an abandoned plot line from this prequel that is.
• We learn that the pacifier teams are given their orders from a group called "The Echelon", who we haven't heard of in the main series so far.
• In his cryo-sleep, we see Aleksy dreams that his wife is taken from him by a three headed monster (ie his wife being seemingly killed by the Triumvirate) and Earth being burned and destroyed in the aftermath (this hasn't happened yet) we can probably assume this is some sort of prophetic dream.
• In the burning Earth scene, we see a human-looking guy seemingly floating in the flames...do we have a fire-bender or something on the way?
• Deacon Snow is revealed to be a member of the Energy Corp, developing a super-weapon...huh...I wonder why he left them to form the White Noise team?
• The old man next to Snow hasn't appeared in the main series yet (unless he's just changed his appearance since then) so he's likely either died in the interim, or has just not appears yet.
• So the Asphodel Extinction Weapon appears to be made from the spoils of the planet Asphodel, meaning that more than just Helium is being harvested after all...what are the Triumvirate up to?