Banner of the Chosen Dead A Story of a Titan and his clan's defense of the Tower It was cold. Bitterly. Biting it's way into the skin, burrowing down to the bones, making the scarred hands of the rifleman ache as they clutched the scuffed and battered Eastern bloc automatic weapon. Under the thumb coated with blood and missing a nail, the faint manufacturers stamp of Khvostov could be barely seen. The rifleman shifted his hands slightly, tensing, waiting; touching the safety, ensuring it was off, ever at the ready to use. He pushed the cold from his mind, ignoring its insistent torment, checking the cracked reticle sight perched atop the rifle. Slowly he scanned the snow laden terrain, marveling not for the last time at how similar yet vastly different the Russian landscape was compared to his home on the other side of this tortured world. Buried in the snowdrift he had found, his back up against the vehicle encased inside the drift, he kept vigil for those hunting him. He could hear them. Their eerie cries and calls drifting in and out on the gusts of the cold soaked wind. He had managed to kill more than a few in the past couple days. But even his tactics were starting to fail him as the Fallen scoured ever harder for him, eager to create another human corpse. The Fallen. And just the thought of the name, of his enemies, of what they represented, what they had done to him and all he held dear was enough to make his blood surge, warming him against the mind numbing cold. He squeezed the rifle harder and pushed the sadness from his mind, clearing his head of bitter memories, focusing on the moment at hand. Faintly past his left shoulder, looming over the lines of vehicles marching toward it in solemn death, stood the wall of the mighty Cosmodrome. Colony ships, abandoned and mute, towered in memorial of a Golden Age now gone. Through the wind and snow they stood silent watch over the lone rifleman as he shifted in the snowdrift. Finally hearing nothing but silence on the wind, the solitary human slowly moved out of his hiding place, creeping forward on the balls of his feet to the next vehicle in the procession of dead. Skeletal remains gave silent witness to his progress as he moved ever closer to the thick walls of the Cosmodrome. The charred and blackened remains of the deceased did not affect the rifleman; he had seen his share of the dead before this day. He paused; scanning and looking for his hunters. He repeated the process again and again as he moved from one vehicle to the next, slowly moving to the walls that promised some relief from the cold. He was less than a mile from his destination when he thought he heard the faintest echo of a sound. Barely audible; almost as if he had imagined it. The icy wind blowing in his ear did nothing to assist him as he strained to hear it again. Nothing. He waited almost an eternity before setting himself to continue his push forward. He stood and turned the corner of the next vehicle, just as a brown misshapen hunk of metal floated into his face. The golden sensory equipment on the Shank immediately detected, processed, and evaluated the lone human. And that was just long enough for it to belch out a metallic alert, just before the rifleman smashed the butt of his weapon into the droid. The metal intruder crashed into the ground, sputtering in the snow, hissing in a broken heap. But the damage was already done. Cries from Fallen voices sounded from every direction. Shapes loomed closer in the driving wind and snow, their foreign language drawing closer. The rifleman knelt behind a vehicle, rifle at the ready, knowing this was his final stand. He sighed, forcing his breath into a regular rate, and sighted down the reticle of his weapon. Then they were upon him. A pair of Dregs came into view, daggers in hand. The human fell back upon his years of training, reflex taking over as he put a short burst of fire into the head of the first Fallen target, then into the second before it could find cover. The corpses had barely hit the ground before more Fallen appeared. Dregs with pistols, followed by Vandals wielding wire rifles. The human kept his eye down the sight and proceeded to empty the rest of his magazine into the new threat, putting out as much lead as he could down range. Crouching, he sidestepped to his right and another vehicle, dropping out the empty mag, replacing it with a full one and racking the slide on his weapon in a mere second. Training the muzzle on the nearest Vandal he squeezed the trigger again, walking a line of bullets up the torso of his enemy, dropping the Fallen soldier into the snow. A hot line of arc energy sizzled by his head, the crackle of the super heated round deafening in his ear. He ignored it, sighted in the next target, and emptied another mag into his assailants. The last Dreg went down, a fresh clip went into the rifle, and the human kept his weapon trained on the corpses, looking for signs of life. For just a moment he thought he might be clean; that he had escaped. Then he heard a crunch in the snow, and before he could react, a huge form emerged in the driving blizzard and slammed into him hard. He felt himself fly through the air, and then the mind numbing pain from his body slamming into a vehicle engulfed him. He pushed the pain aside as best he could, blindly pointing his weapon in the direction of his attacker, clamping his finger down on the trigger. The spray of lead went wide of his target, a large, hulking Fallen Captain. The big creature rushed him again, and in an instant had picked the rifleman up with two of his arms, and with a third, ripped the auto rifle out of his hands and flung it into the howling blizzard. For just a moment the Fallen held him up off the ground, their eyes meeting; then the Captain hurled him straight down into the cracked and crumbling pavement. The human felt a flash of pain, excruciating. Darkness.