Long time ago when you still had to walk outside and go shit in a ditch, people wanted to hurt each other in new and inventive ways. Big sticks and rocks were fine, but there had to be something better, something that could get the job done in a fraction of the time.
At some point, metal was discovered. Then, someone accidentally cut themselves on that metal one day and thought "Hey, what if I made this the length of an arm and gave it a handle?".
Thus we got swords, and shortly thereafter, the origin of the word "decapitation".

In more recent history, swords became a main armament in the Gargoth War once everyone realized bullets weren't doing shit to the Gathians. As any good military does, history was referenced for any similar situations to determine what the best course of action would be.
Unfortunately for everyone involved in that war, the only conclusion was that if swords and knives worked back then, they'll certainly work now. Centuries later and people are still vulnerable to getting their torso slashed and perforated by a sharp piece of metal with a handle. Cool, great, heat up the industrial sized forges and let's get this war crime underway.

After the war a lot of those people, mostly those that went on to join GDS, retained their experience with swords during the Gargoth War, so it only made sense that we'd pack swords as well just in case. The purpose of a legionnaire's kit and weapon loadout is to have the tools required to handle whatever situation comes up. Enemy is somehow immune to bullets? Some kinda abatement field prevents projectiles from passing through it? Pull out a knife or a sword, get up in their face and start stabbing, maybe shove a grenade down their throat while you're there.

Per our usual bullshit we figured that while sharp metal was great and all, what if we could make it better? What if we made that metal so sharp it cuts through other metal? Or through rock? Hell, what if we made blades so sharp that it could pass through a chunk of tungsten like it was made of wet sand?
Our end result was all of the edge treatments you can read about elsewhere, but in terms of swords our #1 winner was Shade Steel. Submit the blade to that treatment and you could bisect a man in half using a single arm.

Soon we were issuing Marrow Talons to our cav scouts, and those cav scouts were finding it incredibly easy to silently ride up alongside enemy armor to slash their tracks off.

Buuuuuuuut we had a problem.

The swords were too good at their job and were fully capable of biting us in the ass if we weren't careful.
_{You should coin a phrase for that sorta situation. - Azan
I cannot tell if she's doing this on purpose just to get on our nerves or if she's really this infuriatingly ignorant. - Dr. Baddarick
It's both. – Iza}

You see, when our weapons started getting sharper, we kept treating them like any old blade. This led to numerous instances of blades cutting their way out of holsters and then falling point first to embed itself in either the floor or a legionnaire's foot. That was bad enough with the knives.

When this shit started happening with Marrow Talons, I was a mixture of happy at the effectiveness of the blade and outright joy at the invoice I was about to deliver to Iza's desk.

Special blades need special holsters.
All 323,513 of them.

With swords, we got ourselves the following classes:

- FrW Nahli Lok-Riveria