Who you fight in Valor Mortis: the Eternal Guard, the Relentless, and the plague

Valor Mortis has a clear enemy hierarchy, and One More Level have named the parts of it that matter. This page collects what is officially stated — the Steam store description plus the developer updates posted to the game’s own Steam news hub — and keeps it separate from what the demo actually let us fight.

The short version

You are William, a soldier of Napoleon’s Grande Armée, pulled back out of a battlefield grave. The enemies fall into three groups:

Group	Official description	Status
The Eternal Guard	”the plague-ridden abominations of Napoleon’s Eternal Guard” — the store page’s named faction	Confirmed by Steam store text
The Relentless	Elite soldiers, “endlessly loyal to Napoleon’s cause,” wielding enormous great swords	Confirmed in the official dev update
The plague itself	A mysterious plague sweeping the continent, whose “corrupting power” is also in your own veins	Confirmed by Steam store text

The Eternal Guard

This is the faction the store page names directly, and the phrasing does a lot of work: “plague-ridden abominations of Napoleon’s Eternal Guard.” Read carefully, that means the Guard is not simply an elite unit standing between you and the truth — its members have been changed by the same plague you carry.

The store page also tells you how you are expected to handle them: use your newfound mobility to outmanoeuvre them. Mobility is listed as the counter-play, not raw damage. That matches the demo, where positioning mattered more than trading hits.

The Relentless

The most detailed enemy description One More Level have published came in the “Emerging from Winter” dev update on 27 March 2026. Their words, on The Relentless:

• Elite soldiers, endlessly loyal to Napoleon’s cause.
• Legions of volunteers attempt to join their ranks, and few are accepted into their secret training facilities.
• They wield enormous great swords.
• They “will prove a challenge in any environment.”
• In battle they hide their faces — the update showed concept art of what is under the helmet, hinting at why so few survive the preparation.

That last point is the interesting one. The studio explicitly links the hidden faces to the brutality of the training, which puts The Relentless in the same category as William: soldiers who have had something done to them.

Nephtoglobin: why the weapons look wrong

The same dev update named the in-fiction reason the arsenal is not purely historical. Weapons “blend themes from the historical era with the supernatural fiction and technology enabled by the discovery of Nephtoglobin,” and the post shared concept art of William’s blunderbuss as the example.

So Nephtoglobin is the setting’s enabling substance — the thing that lets a 19th-century alternate history carry supernatural powers and strange weaponry. The studio has not explained what it is, where it comes from, or whether it is the same thing as the plague. Anyone telling you otherwise is guessing.

For what you can actually wield against these enemies, see the weapons and abilities page.

What the developer said it was changing for readability

After the playtest, One More Level published a developer update addressing the three most common combat complaints. Two of the three are directly about fighting these enemies. The post describes planned work, so this should not be read as proof that every change is already in a particular Demo build:

1. Combat readability — stronger attack windups, stronger pre-attack audio cues, and a clearer visual and audio distinction between blocks and parries.
2. Target lock and camera — smoother, more reliable tracking, smarter target prioritisation, and extended range covering both melee and ranged combat, after players flagged it as inconsistent in multi-enemy fights and in the boss fight.

(The third was keyboard bindings — blocking on CTRL and using ALT were called uncomfortable, and rebinding was highlighted as the fix.)

For the developer’s exact stated scope and a build-aware report checklist, see Combat Feedback Update. Our demo boss guide covers the one fight where defensive timing matters most.

The world they live in

One More Level’s technical director Krzysztof “Dalton” Pachulski confirmed a detail that shapes encounter design: Valor Mortis is not an open world, but Unreal Engine 5’s World Partition lets the team build sprawling environments “much larger than what we were able to do in both Ghostrunner games.” Nanite and Niagara VFX handle the fidelity and effects.

Bigger arenas, but still authored ones — which is consistent with the demo’s mix of tight corridors and larger set-piece spaces.

Confirmed vs not confirmed

• Confirmed: Napoleon’s Eternal Guard is a named enemy faction and its members are plague-ridden; The Relentless are elite Napoleon loyalists with greatswords, secret training facilities and concealed faces; Nephtoglobin is the discovery enabling supernatural weaponry; mobility is the intended counter to the Guard; combat readability and target lock were reworked after the playtest; the game is not open world but uses World Partition.
• Not confirmed: the full enemy roster, whether The Relentless and the Eternal Guard are the same organisation, what Nephtoglobin is, how many bosses there are, and which historical figures appear as enemies. None of that has been stated.

Launch is 13 October 2026. See the road to launch page for the schedule, the characters & lore page for the full cast and factions, and the demo walkthrough for the encounters we have actually played.