That is awesome!
Refusing to battle as a hero. Really awesome.
It shows how even the greatest heroes can have flaws.
I play a hero who charged Daimons as the last ruler of a dying realm and somehow failed to die when they beat all of his men to death and then deported him.
I spent the next couple or four years playing him as a "hero" who failed to die with his men...aka...a total failure at what he was supposed to be.
He later became the ruler of his realm when someone had to stand up because the previous ruler disappeared, then watched his realm sink beneath the waves when Atamara sank, and washed ashore on another continent as a man who ONCE AGAIN failed to die with his people.
A couple years after that...he became the ruler of ANOTHER realm when someone had to stand up because the previous ruler went into seclusion.
He's had an interesting character arc. He keeps throwing himself at impossible battles and the bad guys JUST KEEP MISSING him. They keep killing everybody AROUND him, but they JUST CAN'T seem to hit HIM.
The really funny part? He's the first character I created over ten years ago when I first started playing BattleMaster. He's been a hero most of that time, and JUST CAN'T SEEM TO DIE, no matter how many hopeless battles he fights in. Not that I WANT him to die, mind you...but I do keep on looking at the family fame point that goes into heroic deaths and such...the one I still haven't gotten. Heck, I haven't even had a single one of the my nobles DIE in all that time. So I don't even have the fame point for THAT. I guess I suck at making enemies who dislike me enough to execute my characters. 
To me, that story reads to me like the bad guys enjoy torturing him by killing everyone he knows and leaving only him to tell the tale and suffer the memories alone...and lack of glorious death in battle. Akin to ancient rulers killing one's heirs and wife in front of them and then gouging out their eyes and letting them live the rest of their days...
