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Published:
2025-01-07
Updated:
2025-01-28
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4/?
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Raise the Hammer

Summary:

In the wreckage of Old Russia, a Guardian reawakens to Celestial acclaim.

This, as it turns out, is everybody’s problem.

Notes:

One of these days I’ll get my muse under control…

Chapter 1: You’re alive?/I’m alive.

Summary:

Restart the Forge…

Notes:

Beta’d by Sesparra

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

There wasn’t much that separated unattached Ghosts from one another.

Most of the personalities that the truly unique Ghosts had managed to accrue over their time came from their interaction with their Guardians, something that, as sparks of the Traveler’s Light only just dreamed into being separate entities from their nominal parent, they hadn’t had the chance to experience.

As such, the decision of any Ghost to journey to any one location in the solar system was, absent external interference, more or less up to random chance.

Even if something else was capable of interfering, which would necessitate either some form of paracausal awareness or time travel in order to know to intervene in the first place, the very nature of the Ghosts as sparks of Light, which defied causality in its own right, had a tendency to resist paradoxes, especially when they would have, absent such interference, connected to a Guardian that would have become skilled at wielding the Light. Their existence tended to place a thumb on the metaphorical scales, seemingly random events in actuality dragging the Ghost in question to a time and place where they could find their partner and raise their bones from the embrace of the earth.

One could, if they were of a more poetic or romantic bent, even call it destiny.

None of this, of course, was common knowledge amongst Guardians who hadn’t made a study of the exact relationships that the Light had with causality, let alone a Ghost who hadn’t had more than five minutes of interacting with other beings since coming into existence. As such, the Ghost in question took the fact that they ended up in the grandiose ruins of Russia’s Cosmodrome when they did to be a product of their wanderings, and not the Light within them gravitating towards their partner, the one that would shape them as much as be shaped in return.

Neither, it must be said, did the Ghost know about the shroud of secrecy that prevented the more advanced paracausal forces, such as the Heart of the Garden, from reaching across time and preventing them from finding their partner, but then again, the Celestial Forge had always had its own means of ensuring its existence despite the first death of its host.

No, when this particular Ghost came across the bones of the woman who had, before her untimely death, carried the greatest potential of all of humanity within her, just barely peeking out of the soil of the irradiated crater that she had been killed in during the Collapse, they thought that they were just lucky, chancing upon a Guardian that was so compatible with the Light, and not playing its part in reawakening humanity’s greatest mind at the behest of a force as far beyond the Traveler’s comprehension as the Traveler was an ant’s.

Perfectly unaware of the weight of the events that were about to unfold, and wary of the threat of the Fallen that roved the Cosmodrome, the Ghost whirred in closer to what had, once, been a human, and let some of the Light they carried within themselves bridge the gap between them and this particular potential Lightbearer.

The bones soaked in the Light like a sponge dropped in the ocean, and the Ghost cautiously forged the foundation for the link between themselves and, once that was done, opened the floodgates, letting the Light crystallize into the shape of a human again until-

The fabric of the world shuddered as the newest Guardian took their second first breath. Not enough for most beings to notice it, even amongst those most closely bound to the world or those most distantly situated and best suited to see motions of the whole.

Not everyone was unaware of this, mind- on a ridge, drawn in by the eddies of time itself, there stood a steel-shod soul who could sense as this Guardian awoke, and more distantly, vaster existences than her became aware that, for better or worse, the world had just changed itself forevermore, but not one of them could perceive it as it truly was- as a cosmic hammer rang out against a starry anvil once again.


“Eyes up, Guardian,” I heard, and… was that me? Guardian felt… right, somehow, but I could tell that there was more that I should be able to remember-

As if triggered by my efforts to attempt to remember, memories flashed through my head, too many for any normal human brain to carry within them- but I wasn’t an ordinary human, now, was I? I was the Master Builder, a Forerunner in human flesh, and my combat skin was more than up to the task of holding my memories of constructing, designing, destroying, and reconstructing the technology of my species.

But no, that wasn’t right- I knew these memories weren’t mine, as much as the thought processes matched up with what I thought I’d do- even ignoring how these memories and skills were almost entirely devoted to creating things, it felt almost like watching them through a pane of frosted glass, distant and not completely faithful to what was actually happening for all it conveyed the general outline of things.

Dimly, I felt the loss of that other me’s ancilla- she would have helped me manage this conundrum much better than what subroutines remained in the combat skin I’d been stuffed into, but I supposed there was nothing to it- I just had to handle things on my own, at least until I could find the time to put a new one together from scratch.

Underneath the memories of the Master Builder, though, there were… fragments of others. Here, there was an instant of pain, world-consuming for all its brevity, and there, the memory of a triumph at a drafting table, and I was aware, somehow, that these were mine. I knew there were supposed to be more memories, but apparently something had happened to me and I couldn’t remember just about anything.

“It worked. You're alive!” I looked up and there was something floating there, like eight tetrahedrons stuck together surrounding a central sphere with an eyelike screen on the front, that had apparently spoken to me.

It looked somewhat like a monitor, if the monitor had been built by a human military operation from before they were de-evolved to be as modular as possible.

“You don't know how long I've been looking for you. I'm a Ghost. Actually, now I'm your Ghost. And you... well, you've been dead a long time. So you're going to see a lot of things you won't understand.” It looked me up and down, taking in the combat skin and managing to somehow convey its bemused state through nothing more than the moving of its tetrahedrons. “And things that I won’t understand, apparently. That’s some impressive armor.”

“Thanks, I think,” I said hoarsely. “Sorry, I have no idea where it came from.” After a sluggish moment, my armor moistened my throat, far slower than it would have with an ancilla to run its systems, but well enough to work for now, in…

I took in my surroundings, spinning around to take in as much of the environment as I could and gaping the blasted wasteland full of rusted-out shells that had been cars years ago, overgrown with weeds and covered with rubble, and frowned, before nearly facepalming for forgetting the spectroscopic sensors that would have allowed me to take it all in at once. “Not to be rude, but, uh, where are we?”

“The ruins of the Cosmodrome, in Old Russia.” The Ghost cast around, almost warily. “We’re not exactly safe here, in Fallen territory. We need to find a ship so we can get to the City, and-”

There was a crack, like someone had smashed down a door, and my combat skin’s energy shielding flared to incandescent visibility as a projectile the size of my clenched fist spent its momentum on the defensive arrays. My helmet materialized in the space between two heartbeats, and the sluggish algorithms backtraced the projectile to a hulking, four-armed figure perched atop a ridge, flanked by smaller figures bearing circular panes of light on their arms. In the four-armed figure’s arms was a rifle that looked to be almost as long as one of the smaller figures was tall, which, from the calculations crawling around the edges of the HUD, were about of a height with a relatively standard-pattern post-devolution human.

I launched a hardlight mortar round from the armor, then winced at the abrupt flashing of the warning indicators that, after a moment, swam into focus enough to tell me that I needed to be careful using the built-in energy weapons while the shield’s capacitors were recharging.

“We really need to get out of line of sight,” said the Ghost, spinning about as if to see where I could find cover. “That kind of high-powered railgun slug will go right through a Guardian and then detonate to try and catch the Ghost in the backblast, and I’m not sure how much we can rely on your armor against something like that.”

I could feel that the Forerunner that the memories had come from would have rankled at anyone questioning their designs, but to be entirely honest, I wasn’t sure I wanted to rely solely on the shields either, especially with how precarious my power situation was at the moment.

“Yeah, okay, lead the way,” I said, watching with one eye as the mortar landed squarely on top of one of the circular panes of energy that had been raised to block it, detonating with a flash and killing the unfortunate creature it landed on and the handful closest to it but only managing to throw the rest around.

“Right, towards the Wall,” said the Ghost, and a white square inside a gray one flickered into being on my HUD. The screens inside my armor whirled around to show what it was denoting, and I was thankful to see the maintenance corridor was relatively close to me, right smack dab in the middle of a patchwork expanse of slowly yellowing probably-ceramic panels.

I waited a handful of seconds for my shield array to fully recharge, then fired off another mortar round before launching myself off the ground hard, flight systems kicking in half a second after I started feeling the stomach-swooping sensation of freefall. As blue-white etheric impellers propelled me away, the Ghost dematerialized in a shower of bluish-white sparks and, abruptly, my combat skin started responding more as it should, if it had a properly installed ancilla.

“Whoa,” said the Ghost, “this armor is… really something else!”

“Well, it’s no war sphinx, but it’ll do,” I said, tracking the mortar round as it plunged towards the rapidly retreating creatures. “Those are… Fallen, right?”

“Indeed they are,” the Ghost replied. “The House of Devils is, from what I will be hearing, one of the biggest threats that the City has to reckon with, and even if we’re lucky enough to be able to avoid them now, we’ll probably have to fight our way through at least some of them in order to find a way out of here.”

“That figures,” I said, flipping the thrusters around so I could avoid plowing through too much of the grating that was apparently the floor inside the Wall. Then, a specific wording choice that the Ghost made registered to me. “Wait, will be hearing?”

“Yeah, time doesn’t… it isn’t linear like a lot of non-Guardians think of it, especially once you get the Light involved. Things like, uh, hearing intel reports before you’re told them, or flashes of a potential death.” Now that the Ghost mentioned it, the world felt… different than it had, in a way that shouldn’t have really made sense with so many missing memories but did, despite what all logic would suggest. It was like I could almost peel reality back for a moment, and expose the void into which the universe erupted in fire and lightning.

“That sounds…” My audio receptors, with an ancilla of a sort running the sorting algorithms, picked up a skittering sound. “That sounds like a conundrum for later.”

A thought brought up the weapons systems built into this combat skin, and I cursed, low and guttural, in a language that I somehow knew was called Russian. “No beam weapons, limited projectile options, and barely enough matter tolerances for a blade, with most of the power generation geared for hardlight explosives… it’s like whoever put this tin can together didn’t even think about fighting in enclosed spaces!”

I had some tools on hand, secured within the suit and ready to release, but there was only so much I could do without somewhere to set down and overhaul the thing, and I was a little too far behind enemy lines to feel safe doing that.

I could feel… something, shifting, a sensation not unlike raising a hammer to strike down on an anvil, but it subsided quickly, leaving only gooseflesh and chills in its wake.

“Whoa,” said the Ghost. “Did you feel that?”

“I did,” I said, frowning. “That’s… it doesn’t feel like the Light does, I don’t think. The light is more an… underlayer to the world, and this is… internal. Do you have any useful hunches?” I tried to reach for that underlayer, to see if it would reveal anything to me, but it remained frustratingly out of reach.

The Ghost was silent for a long moment. “It doesn’t feel dangerous,” they said, finally. “Beyond that, I have no idea. Something about it muddies the future too much for me to really try and learn about it.”

“Well then,” I said, extruding a footlong blade along the back of my right hand, extending about six inches past my knuckles. “Hopefully that doesn’t come back to bite us in the ass.”

With that, we delved into the depths under the Wall.

Notes:

And that’s that!

Perks Earned:

Master Builder (Halo - Forerunner Saga, 600 CP): The Master Builder was the most powerful Builder of their rate. They had the most wealth, the most intelligence, and the most political power of any builder. The current Master Builder is Faber. While morally ambiguous, at best, it cannot be denied that Faber was a genius. He was the one to design the Halo array, among other things. Even their use on the San'Shyuum didn't keep him out of power for long. Taking this perk would put you on a similar level as Faber when it comes to understanding Forerunner technology and science. This would include general knowledge of the inner workings of the various great works of engineering of the Forerunners. The megastructures they made. The weapons they created. The technology of the forerunners is waiting to be brought into reality by your hands. While you may not have exact schematics of all of their many devices within your brain, you certainly know enough about how the technology works that it wouldn't take too much effort to recreate most of it.

Armour (Halo - Forerunner Saga, Free): Forerunners wore personal armour at all times, for their entire lives. This full body armour was designed to assist them in their everyday lives, in every way possible. It protected its user both physically and medically, to the extent of extending their lifespan from centuries to tens of thousands of years, gave them a near perfect memory, and afforded them heightened perception. Necessities such as nutrients and oxygen can be provided by the suit. This means that users could survive several years without having to open the armour. On top of this, most personal armour came with some form of energy shield, for additional protection. By the final years of the Flood war, all armours had one. The armour can be configured to hover a foot above the ground instead of walking. Forerunners wearing one were provided with constant access to a vast wealth of information stored within the suit, as well as a connection to the local net. The appearance of one’s armour was commonly used to denote one’s role and position in forerunner society. The armour is extremely malleable and can mold itself to the shape of any other species, and can also change in appearance and colour in relation to its wearers mood. Every armour comes with its own personal ancilla, programmed to cater to the wearers needs. This ancilla interfaces directly with the mind of the user, and is what facilitates the increased cognitive abilities as well as access to local networks. Touch is all that is required to transfer data between suits, and can be used to have silent conversations between users. For now your armour is beret of any ancilla, though one can be added with extreme ease. When taken off, the suit will fold into a compact bundle. The one you receive is a standard civilian model. Most forerunner facilities come with small engineering units that can be used to produce additional suits quickly and efficiently, and as such you will also gain one of these with this purchase. They only take an hour to grow a personal new armour around the user."

Combat Skin (Halo - Forerunner Saga, Free): The combat skin was the type of armour worn by Forerunners for battle. Combat skins came in a classification system from Class 1 to Class 18, in increasing strength. For scale, the armour worn by UNSC Spartans was rated as Class 2 armour. By the ending years of the Forerunner-Flood war, civilians were required to wear at least Class 8 armour unless in safe areas, and Warrior-Servants wore Class 12 armour at a minimum. You will be getting a class 12 combat skin, able to be worn over personal armour without affecting either. Aside from being extremely durable with strong shields, and augmenting the users physical abilities, this armour is also able to adapt itself to better counter specific types of attack. The combat skin comes with the ability to produce restraint fields which, as the name suggests, can be used to restrain targets. The skin also comes with several energy weapons embedded in it which can vary in type, from beams or rapid fire, to forceful shockwaves. Despite all this, trillions of Warrior-Servants were still lost to the Flood. This purchase comes with a design seed that can produce more, provided you have enough raw material.

Tools of the Trade (Halo - Forerunner Saga, Free)

Terminals (Halo - Forerunner Saga, Free)

Remaining descriptions available on FFN, SB, and SV

I also have a discord sir ver for author stuff- if you have questions or comments that you'd like a more direct line to ask me, or if you want to see me chatting about my writing process, that's another option: https://discord.gg/NHRUKz8jyy

That’s about it, so read, review, enjoy, and have a nice day!