Okay, caught up. It's a pleasant story so far. Thingguy's always a nice character to follow, even if he acts -one might say justifiably- somewhat more serious in this one. He makes for some fun dynamics with other characters and fits with your writing style.
For some specific notes:
I felt that Thingguy's Skyfalls narration in response to Fiddleton in Ch. 2 was a bit abrupt and unprompted. Fiddleton's question was simple and it could get a simple answer, even if the underlying explanations were more complicated than that. However, Thingguy just starts rambling without warning and it felt off. On a similar vein, the subsequent flashback from the battle felt out of the place in the particular story, or to be more specific the level of detail of describing that fight sequence was. It doesn't seem very connected to the rest of the story and while I understand you wanted to go into more details as to what happened back then, they're not very relevant to the story you're telling right now, I think, and don't add much other than a joke that could have probably worked even without being so extensive.
"Martin briefly raised a hand, and Thingguy slapped it as he passed, turning it into a High-Five": that's basically me. Every open hand is a target.
The monkey speech overall was great. I like how you presented everyone's doubts over joining the war as well as Thingguy's approach to convincing them. Epic yet funny, all in Thingguy's style. I did think though that Thingguy kinda left what he actually wanted out of the Merry Band a bit vague. Cause "becoming allies" and "joining the war" aren't very specific, like the earlier conversation between Stir and Thingguy of what the Merry Band could actually do instead of just fighting showed. Which doesn't make it the best pitch, if it's left implied that he wants them to physically fight when they're not particular fighters.
"I personally know...Perhaps a few hundred lonely, brave souls scattered across Militiregnum who would call themselves KOTOS."Â Um wat? Seriously, what the heck? There's barely twenty known members of KOTOS or at least thereabouts, I'm not sure if the KOTOS page has them all down, what with all the later generation Knights that aren't actually officially Knights and Thingguy wouldn't know about them anyway, but still the point remains.
"The general word is that he's not dead, but a prisoner in Orlan!" There are many reasonable reasons why Thingguy would have wrong information, but I just wanna ask is that intentional or did you just forget he's in Thunderclap at that point?
"Sometimes I can listen to the spaceships": Hmm, okay that's a bit of a "Whoa there!" moment. I've told you before that the Nexus Force and people who built communications from scratch would use different protocols and thus not be able to actually communicate and that's without even considering the possibility of encryption (which I didn't bring up before, because the focus was on Milt. contacting the blockade, not Milt. intercepting the intra-blockade communications). But if we assume there's no encryption in some of their communications even then, Oswald would have to have known how NF protocols work in order to be able to decipher what their signals mean. If he already has that knowledge and technology that potentially poses a problem as to stuff we've discussed before. Maybe you wanna jump in DMs at some point to discuss what the plan is here.
The Nexus-Forcer mentioned by Oswald is very intriguing, because if we don't count Paradox Rogues, there's very few of them on Milt. so there's only some very specific people this could be. Especially once you rule out all the people that couldn't have access to that kind of communication (like Perry post-capture or the Ninja brothers). It might not necessarily have any more significance other than setting this plot point up, but it's still interesting to speculate who it could be.
Overall, it's been a good execution of stuff that I more or less knew of beforehand (and thus could not be particularly surprised about).