User:Phalanx Actual/LIFE PROJECT

Chapter One.

The infinite sands of the Kalahadian Deserts stretched out before them, the tainted snow of nuclear winter washed away the purity, the soul of the land. The remnants of Echo Team struggled to stay the path to the shelter. A group of once thirteen strong reduced to a mere eight men and women, once children of the Covenant War. One donned the armor of a thousand battles, a thousand fought, and a thousand lost, each he had marked his shoulder pauldron with the names of his nameless enemy written in their blood. In the darkened corner of his mind he kept his reason to fight, his reason to survive; the fading memories of his greatest loss. The Spartan couldn't remember their faces, but he could remember their voices - the memory of their screams as the Covenant took away what little he had, what little he loved so long ago. He shared his fight with the rest of his team, they were all orphans in the Covenant War.

And yet here he was, Jeffrey-A013 and the survivors of Echo Team, forgotten, and abandoned at the site of humanity's greatest loss. He carried the weight of a thousand dead men on his shoulders on top of the two week supply they had scavenged. They trudged forward toward their last bastion; A small settlement that had survived the relentless Covenant onslaught for so long, it was almost frozen in time before it had been blanketed by nuclear winter. Little had changed in the villa since it was built generations ago, ancient woodwork and sand was all that kept the buildings together.