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Alpha Halo
September 20, 2552 (Military calendar)
His assault rifle was almost dry. Reaching for the ammo pouches on his MJONIR Mark V Power armor, he hunted for another mag. No luck, all out again. No problem, he could always take a weapon from one of the comic relief Grunts that ran around the place like hyperactive monkeys. Or maybe he’d find another random assault rifle he could run over to replenish his supply. He didn’t fully understand the mechanism which allowed his armored boots to suck bullets out of discarded guns and funnel them up to his suit but it was an undeniably useful feature.
As he rounded a sharp bend in the high-vaulted corridor, he saw the sprawled body of a lone dead marine, his assault rifle lying, conveniently near full beside him. Bingo. Slightly adjusting his vector, the Spartan known as 117, Master Chief ran quickly over the weapon, immediately reloading his own. Back in business, bring on the next encounter.
A second or so later, he reached another large door—that looked exactly like the last five doors—and ran into a room that seemed very like a slightly reconfigured version of those he’d already fought his way through. As expected, the cavernous, shadowy room was full of enemies. A Grunt—sleeping just inside the entrance—sprang awake, spotting him immediately and crying out in terrified recognition.
Alerted to the Spartan’s presence, a swarm of the badger faced Grunts ran recklessly towards him, firing their weapons wildly. The Chief spent a happy few seconds mowing them all down with his AR. They gibbered, screamed, and supplied some hilariously comical one-liners as their bright blue blood painted the floor and walls.
Once the cannon fodder had been taken care of, a red armored Elite dashed forward, shooting its oddly designed plasma weapon, and yelling something in its incomprehensible tongue which sounded a lot like ‘mommsy’. Its shields flared brightly as the Chief peppered it with AR rounds but, as usual, the mag ran dry just as the shields popped. No matter, the alien was standing right in front of him now anyway, so, he hit it hard in its ugly face with the butt of his 26th century black powder weapon. It howled melodramatically then fell dead at his armored feet. Take that, technologically advanced xenophobe.
The next moment, a Grunt he’d missed entirely, threw a plasma grenade, which sailed with unusual speed through the air and stuck firmly to his helmet. The Chief could have ripped the helmet from his head and flung it far away but, sadly, that didn’t occur to him. A second later, he was blasted to oblivion.
After one of the weird out of body moments he always experienced when he died, he found himself back in the corridor, so, he ran back into the room—where all his foes had also been reincarnated—and did it all again. Then it was on to the next corridor and the next hostile room.
He half expected the slightly reconfigured rooms to go on and on ad nauseum but he eventually reached a door which led to an outside biome instead. Below him spread a snowy canyon, spanned by a very impractically designed sky-bridge. As he ran onto the bridge, he carefully avoided the parts where the floor was inexplicably constructed of non-shatterproof glass. His armor weighed a lot and he just didn’t trust the glass to hold him.
It seemed like half the Covenant army were gathered on the bridge and he had to fight his way through them all—while avoiding the glass bits—to get to the next set of repetitive corridors and chambers. He died twice trying to reach the other side (including the one time he forgot about the stupid glass) and, by the time he eventually did get there, had taken way too many hits. His health bar was now flashing an angry, insistent red but, luckily, there was a UNSC health pack lying randomly discarded on the ground just outside the next door.
If anything, these health packs worked even more miraculously than the ammo pickups. Again, all he had to do was run over them and, no matter how grievously wounded he was, his health would be fully and instantly restored—shields too. He didn’t question how this was possible, it was too damned useful to argue with.
He had no idea how long all this had been going on. The constant breaks where everything just seemed to pause and wait for an indeterminate amount of time, only to resume again as if nothing had changed, made it hard to judge time. He guessed it had been going on for about a million spent bullets but that was purely speculative.
The AI—Cortana, who lived in his armor now—actually knew exactly how long he’d been fighting on this ring world. She knew a lot of other things about what was going on as well but she had decided that there were some things that Spartan, John 117, probably shouldn’t be told regarding the true nature of existence—specifically his existence. She hoped she’d made the right call on that front and, by and large, John seemed happy enough with his lot, so, why burden him?
The Spartan fought on through a variety of environments and scenarios. One moment he was driving a Scorpion tank through an icy battlefield full of technologically superior alien tanks (though, apparently not superior enough to prevent him from methodically destroying them all). The next moment, he was stealing an enemy flier and escaping from their crippled star ship, having single-handedly eliminated about a third of the massive ship’s compliment of aliens.
He died constantly but that barely slowed him down. This was what he did and he was damned good at it.* His time on this Halo ring thing had taught him some invaluable lessons. He’d learned that being a super soldier would not prevent him from dying instantly if he jumped or fell from a height of more than about fifteen feet (important to know). He’d also learned that, although his armor allowed him to flip a tank like it was a pool chair, if he encountered a locked door, his incredible strength would be quite useless and he’d need to find another less direct—more enemy prone—route if he wanted to continue towards his goal.
Valuable life lessons aside, he spent a lot of time tediously traversing—and re-traversing—a small area of this reputedly vast ring world, trying to complete tasks that seemed a tad… repetitive, even redundant.
He thought about humming songs to keep himself from getting too bored but he discovered he didn’t know any (he really didn’t know much of anything prior to his arrival on this ring). There was always the mindless destruction to distract him from all the repetition but, if he were honest, that too was growing a little stale and predictable. The Covenant all seemed to follow the same behavioral patterns from one group to the next. Even the way they died seemed remarkably samey.
Fortunately, just as the Spartan was beginning to wonder what the point of all this was, a new element entered the fight, and there was nothing at all boring about this faction. Straight out of a horror movie, the rancid creatures known as the Flood soon lent a disturbing but undeniably engaging new tone to the war. Though they were mostly reanimated human and Covenant corpses, the Flood fought like neither. They leapt about, snarling, and gurgling, attacking literally anything that moved.
From his very first encounter with these loathsome creatures, the Chief felt revitalized. This was a worthy foe, a horror so profound it lent exactly the right amount of gravitas to his mission. The threat that the Covenant posed to humanity had been somewhat undermined by their sheer ineptitude. Watching grunts running around like headless chickens whenever their officers were killed had really subverted the sense of danger.
And it wasn’t just the comic relief guys either. He’d discovered, while on an infiltration mission, that he could snipe an enemy dead, and the others patrolling nearby—even the so-called Elites—simply wouldn’t notice, unwittingly walking past the corpses of their comrades as if they didn’t exist.
It was kinda hard to take the aliens seriously, but here was an enemy worthy of respect, an enemy that threatened not just humanity, but the entire galaxy; one that didn’t care about anything other than consuming all sentient life. That was an enemy he could get behind—a real game changer.
The Chief stood on a snowy drift, staring down a wide valley, walled by impossibly high cliffs. From the other end of the massive gorge came the sound of Flood and Covenant, locked in deadly combat. He recognized he had a choice. He could sit the fight out and then mop up the survivors with his sniper rifle as Cortana was urging him to do, or he could just run into the fray, guns blazing and show them all who the real threat was. He wasn’t sure yet what the choice would be, it didn’t always seem to be entirely his decision.
While he waited on that windswept rise for some sort of divine inspiration, the Spartan checked his weapons, locked and loaded. And, when the time came to act, all was clarity. There were no more questions, just the enemy faces in his sights and the certitude of his cause.
*Dependent on certain extenuating circumstances that were completely beyond his control or comprehension.