Dal Kar-Oqule, more colloquially referred to as "the Locust" was a prominent bandit leader in the 250's and 260's of the Kingdom of Ravenna's history, menacing towns, the countryside, and even some cities alike as he murdered and plundered his way into infamy.
Dal was originally born as the son of a minor Ravennan noble who had accrued their wealth through military conflicts against multiple enemies. Dal was the bastard son of this noble, said to have been conceived when the noble procreated with a prostitute, and thus teetered on the edge of openly disowning and throwing out Dal or otherwise taking him in and tutoring him like a real son. Deciding to toe the line, the noble father beat him severely. While this was not ideal for young Dal, introducing hatred and resentment into his heart, having his father be a strategic mastermind had its own benefits. Whether by virtue of eavesdropping or his father attempting to instill something of a strategic mind into his son, Dal began to learn the ways of running an army and defeating enemies.
Eventually the noble Oqule would die, leaving the minor noble name to his son Dal. The Oqule's estate was immediately cannibalized by dozens of Oqule's enemies, tearing apart whatever remained of their meagre funds and fortunes. Dal was thrown out onto the street, not even mentioned once in the inheritance and left with practically nothing. It was those years on the streets that gave Dal the bandit part of his bandit commander title. During this time Dal earned a reputation for undisputed cruelty in his fights with other street urchins, often ending up in fatalities or severe injuries whenever he engaged with a regular fistfight with one of them. He also gained a reputation and a twisted sense of charisma. It's the type of charisma where everyone thinks he's just brutally honest, but in fact he's just brutal, using the veneer of honesty to espouse how much he hates everything else.
His time on the streets netted him a small following, which when he grew up, Dal used as the first building blocks in his bandit gang. One day they snuck out of the nowhere city and took up a hideout in a nearby hill, where they spent their days stealing from farmsteads and hamlets, small locales where a few missing things wouldn't really go noticed, occasionally gathering members to join in the gang. Dal's big break came with the end of a war between two noble houses which ended in one or two towns changing hands without any real definitive outcome, yet still a high number of dead. The peasants and farmers pressed into the war were abandoned just as quickly as they were picked up, left with knowledge of how to kill, a weapon in their hands, and their homes gone or destroyed.
Dal managed to leverage his twisted charisma to convince a large number of these fighters to join his gang, boosting his power and numbers exponentially. With this new advancement he began to launch bolder raids, shaking down unguarded merchants, postage deliverers, and lone farmsteads. From here he began to snowball, in all ways. His lust for violence escalated, leading to murders and beatdowns that came out of nowhere, sometimes against those he raided, and sometimes against the weak or unruly parts of his gang. His numbers snowballed, word of this rising gang attracting a few members to his flock, and Dal's big set pieces in taverns and inns drawing groups to his name.
By this time he had taken to larger and larger exploits, raiding hamlets, barns, and even sometimes striking into towns, though not so much as to lose too many of his numbers. He stood out from other bandits for his tactical ingenuity and sometimes excessive and unneeded violence. Oftentimes he would run circles around militias only to lure them into a trap and wipe them out in a single battle, often against forces much larger than his and with minimal losses on his side. Dal ran his bandits like a pseudo-army, with the killing skills but without the discipline.
One of Dal's biggest early achievements was his conquest over one of the minor noble houses that cheated him out of his inheritance. The Meyers house was by no means an extremely powerful entity, but it was powerful enough to stand on its own and even scratch out something of a niche in the ultimate trial that is Ravennan politics. Living in a modest manor and guarded by a large contingent of both militiamen and mercenaries, they were certainly no slouches. Dal, with his hundred men attacked the town, drawing out some of the defenders and splitting the defending force up, when the rest of his force utilized this opportunity to hammer home the advantage, using surprise and planning to defeat the better armed and more numerous defenders, before doubling back and crushing what remained of them in the town.
When Kar-Oqule came across the Meyers family cowering in their manor, he tortured and executed each one, displaying their heads on pikes as either a warning to others, or as a way to stroke his own ego. After his destruction of the Meyers he continued to snowball in power, fighting off mercenaries and militias sent by both nobles worried about his power and local towns that didn't want him to raid and destroy their homes. Dal managed to fight both forces off for quite a while and dodged those he couldn't fight off, all while growing his own fame and personal army.
By the time the Lieutenant Emperor rolled around, Dal had made a name for himself for his ability to lead troops and produce quick, efficient, and needlessly brutal victories against his opponents, who were myriad. He was nicknamed "the Locust" due to his tendency to lead scorched earth campaigns, leaving once thriving towns nothing but burnt wrecks in his wake, so much so that he often went out of his way, even when it would be more profitable for him to spare settlements, to pursue the total amount of violence possible.
When the Lieutenant Emperor did come knocking, he and Dal skirmished for a bit before coming to an understanding. Dal would serve as Marshal underneath the Emperor and retain full control and autonomy over his forces, just as long as he remained loyal to the Emperor and didn't work against him. The Locust agreed, and became Marshal of the forces of the Lieutenant Emperor, propelling him into history.
Under his command Dal significantly expedited his rate of successful battles and conquests, beating army after army with the increased resources at his disposal. He crusaded across the Ravennan south, destroying and looting anything in his way, a Marshal and an ever-victorious army without a state, without equal. Dal's raiding was so bad that it caused a notable percentage of the population to move out of the countryside and into cities to find protection there, causing a rise in metropolises and the emergence of Ravenna as one of the world's more populous cities.
Even in the cities the citizens of Ravenna weren't safe. In one instance, a fervent enemy of the Lieutenant Emperor (and a member of the nobility) had been driven out of her manor and had fled to a city which she controlled, thinking that the bandit army, so dependent on their mobility and scavenging, wouldn't dare to get into a lengthy siege, which would destroy all of their advantages and leave them sitting ducks for her allies. Dal, who wasn't having any of that, decided to break into the city himself, slaughtering his way through an unprotected back entrance someone forgot to block off during the hectic day before his assault along with a cohort of his most elite and trusted warriors. He managed to open the gate enough to allow his forces to pour through and loot the city for all it's worth.
Eventually though, the Lieutenant Emperor would meet his downfall, and then so did the Locust. The Order sent their soldiers after them in a massive military expedition. Despite a plan of numerous hit-and-runs and guerrilla warfare against the Order, the majority of the bandit forces would be caught and forced into a pitched battle, a battle which, despite Dal and the Lieutenant Emperor's best efforts, they would lose. With that battle, a majority of the bandit's numbers, supplies, and morale would disappear into thin air. Dal, worried about being caught and thoroughly annihilated a second time decided to try and take his men and run. The Lieutenant Emperor, already dealing with a terrible situation, decided that this crossed the line, and decided to just kill Dal before he could further fuck things up.
This failed, with Dal rallying his loyal troops against the Lieutenant Emperor's. Eventually the Lieutenant Emperor and his loyalists won, but at the expense of being caught and destroyed by the Order. Dal Kar-Oqule would meet his end there, in the green forest of the Shining Forest.