I've just read through the whole work. The whole work sparkles. An excellent way to generate febrile situations and toss chaos in the form of the PCs into the middle. 

I love the skills list and its relative simplicity - I do wonder if there's a way to carve down the complexity of the combat system even further.

It reminds me of reading either 40k's Inquisitor or original Rogue Trader - but with much less rules gonk, and much more situation setting.

Thank you for your feedback! I appreciate your encouragement and recommendation, and will consider what I can do to refine the game's combat.

I love the idea of Inquisitor, but I agree that it does seem to need a stronger campaign framework; also, the idea of continually fighting roughly-matched warbands isn't quite right for the material. I was inspired by both the Inquisitor game and Dark Heresy with this, Dark Heresy because the Inquisitor (as a character) seems to have almost limitless legal power, and relies upon his or her retinue for a good deal of activities, and so an Inquisitor could theoretically dragoon any Imperial citizen into the retinue depending on what's needed. 

Minimizing rule gonk was a keen consideration for me when coming up with the combat rules; I wanted it to fulfil a number of requirements while being light and fast:

-Use the same skill roll system as noncombat skill checks

-Have a single roll decide the outcome of a discrete fight rather than record the infliction of partial damage, *with* the possibility of a clash of arms not resolving that particular fight

-A single skilled fighter should pose a serious threat to a group of low-level enemies, while also having a distinct possibility of defeat. A Sword Saint should be *able* to solo enemy warbands, but a very lucky peasant should also have a slight chance of bringing him down

-Ganging up on enemies should be incentivized, without removing the ability of a Sword Saint or Investigating Censor to potentially scythe down all comers

-Significant emphasis on archery, as this was a primary retainer/aristocratic warrior mode of fighting across the world before golden ages of armor and metallurgy and subsequent proliferation of firearms. With the archery emphasis in mind, I chose to structure combat with continual mutual shooting and alternating movement, inspired by Advanced Squad Leader; however, this may still be too complicated and unnecessary, especially in a game without rules for suppression given the lack of semiautomatic+ weapons, and so possibly it would have been better to have fallen back to my final consideration:

-Unless otherwise noted, use the assumptions of known games, so that movement, shooting corner-to-corner, and disengaging are the same as or similar to 5E

I think if I update the combat system at all, I may present the "continual fire with alternating movement" as an option, while having "one side moves and shoots before mutual melee" as the default.