Onion lore

Hundreds of tracer rounds whistle towards a shelled building, pinging and crunching collapsed concrete and broken glass on contact with the crumbling ruin of a structure.

Two figures struggle to stay out of the path of the bullets and periodically point their rifles out of cover to blindly return fire at the metal monster that had trapped them there in the first place.

One, a pale young man with navy hair and blue eyes, fires the last of his weapon's ammunition and calls out to his partner. “I'm dry sir!”

     Orion, his hair a snow-white mess and his white suit now grey from the dust of rubble stands up and casually walks over to the soldier, a deadly flurry of bullets following close behind him as he moves. “I gotcha Shiney.” Orion drops his rifle, a barely recognizable M1903 Springfield with hundreds of little tally marks scarring the stock and denoting the rifle's effectiveness. The barrel of a Hecate, and the carved up stock once belonging to a G3A3, the weapon was heavy in the young rifleman's hands. “That gun saw both world wars, the Korean War, and the Afinian-Orronian war. Take good care of her for me, eh Shiney.” He concludes as he draws his sword in his left hand, vaults over the makeshift cover, and sprints towards the Dredg siege trooper and the roaring chain gun that had pinned them.

     “Sir?!” The soldier screams in fright and surprise at the sight of his president and leader running to his death at the hands of an enemy unit.

The trooper turns the gun towards Orion, but doesn't fire. Instead, it draws a large cleaver from its back and quickly lumbers towards the smaller man, murder in his eyes. "Yul Nevar sea tha lite uv day uhgan!" It slurs painfully, the thing's face not truly meant for speech.

The President laughs a cliche hero laugh as he dances round the oafish construct with ease, his simple and sharp blade cutting and rending his foe with sweeps and jabs, occasionally parrying the jagged edge of the siege trooper's cleaver to the left. “You're clearly no swordsman, so why bother carrying a blade?” He teases as he prepares to parry the next vertical swipe of the large cleaver.

Suddenly, the trooper's other hand grabs the handle of the knife as he brings it down, angling it upwards and straight through Orion's arm. “Evree butsha gats too avva gud charp nife to cot is' meet!” It gleefully howls, throwing the now one-armed Orion to the side and feasting on the raw flesh of the dismembered limb.

A single well placed shot from the young soldier enters the trooper's skull an inch below the cheekbone, continues upward through his right eye, clips the brain, and exits through a nasty crater in the back of its head.

Orion stumbles to his feet, blood flowing freely from his armless shoulder. “Touché.”

Then his world is converted to pain, figures and sounds rush in and out of his blurry vision and faded hearing, all providing the meager assistance they can.