Reaching for home (Exalted SI/Halo)

[Yzarc]

Chapter 1 — The Welcoming Party

---

Date: Who the hell knows.
Location: No clue.

If you're reading this, then something has probably gone horribly wrong.

Maybe I'm dead, maybe I've left this somewhere and never come back for it, maybe I actually made it home in the end and decided that all the crap I've been through was something I was better off forgetting. I honestly don't know but if you've found this then there must be a reason for that and you deserve to know why.

See, it all started when I fell through a crack between worlds and that's not some figure of speech by the way. One second I was in my bed fast asleep and the next I was dropping through nothing, stuck somewhere between universes where I should've simply stopped existing.

That's where he found me.

He was a Blood Ape, a demon of the First Circle, holding on to a broken Exaltation. Even as I'm writing this, he still hasn't told me just how the hell he ended up there too. Still the important part was that he offered me power and I took it because there wasn't exactly much choice when the other option was both of us dying in the void.

That's how I became an Infernal Exalt.

There was nothing particularly impressive about the whole thing. I woke up in a world that didn't have Essence, with an Exaltation that wasn't working properly and none of the Charms, Yozi or otherwise, that I was apparently supposed to have. I had some passive mutations but I had no real way to use my Exaltation unless I fixed it. Even better? There was nobody around to explain any of it to me, no mentor, no guide, nothing. Just bits and pieces from the life of the previous wielder, a demon called Breaker living in my head and the start of a zombie apocalypse. I barely made it to safety the first time when I fucked it all up due to my paranoia.

Then I met a young girl called Lana.

I…made mistakes with her and some of them were serious enough that I don't think I can pretend that I wasn't being an idiot. I nearly got her killed because I was impatient and then got us both trapped in a vault as she slowly started turning. I couldn't save her, not as I was…but I didn't give up. I fixed my Exaltation with a ritual I made up from sheer desperation and a little pushing from the fragment of the Unconquered Sun.

That's when I became a Primordial 2.0.

Now, my Mythos is not a copy of the Unconquered Sun and I'm also not a Solar, no matter what the 'Glorious Golden Glow' may make you think. My Exaltation works differently, it's about getting past whatever is in front of me through effort, perseverance and mastery. If I fail at something, that just means I haven't worked out how to do it yet.

Then I saved Lana from my stupidity and we made it to a safe zone. I'd promised to help her, so I saw it through and got her back to her mother. After that, life almost started feeling normal again or as normal as anything can get in a Zombie apocalypse. For the next few months, I helped run the camp while teaching myself Sorcery and Alchemy, trying to work out what I could actually do because there was nobody around who could explain any of it to me. Most of what I learned came from trying things, getting them wrong and trying again until I finally got something to work. But I still wanted to go home and when I finally found a way to get there…

…I was too impatient to wait.

I should've spent more time learning Charms, more time mastering my Martial Arts style, I should've understood my own Exaltation before I tried to rip open a way through reality. I'd only been an Exalt for a few months by that point and the bits of knowledge I'd inherited from my past life weren't enough to turn me into an expert. I knew enough to do something dangerous, which isn't the same as actually knowing just what the hell I was doing.

So…yeah, I opened the Gate anyway and went through it expecting to finally be home.

Except that's not where I ended up.

Instead I found myself in another mess entirely and if you've found this journal after that happened, then how I got here probably isn't the part you're worried about.

No, what you're probably worried about is what I did after I found out where I was and more importantly, when.

---

The Gate closed behind me before I could even turn around to look at it. One second, I was walking through the gate, the next my feet were slipping on the wet ground and I was falling face first into mud and soil. Needless to say, I went down hard on a slope I hadn't seen coming.

…yeah, not my finest moment.

'Ugh,' I thought to myself as I pushed myself up again and stomped the ground for a bit. Zombies, demons and eldritch horrors beyond mortal ken? Sure, I could handle that and more but a slippery slope? Not so much apparently.

'Nice entrance,' Breaker said, finding the whole thing funny. 'How long before the next one?'

'A year and a day,' I thought, not at all bothering to reply to his sarcasm as I already knew it wasn't going to work on a Blood ape like him. Still…a year and a day, that was how long the Gate needed to recharge before I could open again.

I'd spent the last few months in the safe zone practicing Sorcery and alchemy whenever I wasn't running the camp or hanging out with Lana. I could still feel the bond between us and send her essence if she needed it, but with an entire world between us? All I could get was the vaguest idea of how she was doing.

….it was probably for the best.

I looked around and saw a whole lot of pine trees or at least things close enough to pine trees that it didn't really matter. I looked up and saw a pale, overcast sky, which explained why the ground was so god damned wet. The air was cool and a little damp but didn't smell like anywhere I remembered, though considering I was in another universe, that wasn't exactly surprising.

I checked myself next and was mostly fine, just some mud on my clothes. No phone or any other modern crap either, what with electricity being a luxury in the middle of the freaking zombie apocalypse. Still, even if I had brought a phone with me, it wouldn't have helped much here anyway.

With nothing else to do, I started walking in a random direction as I had no idea where I was. I could literally be anywhere in the multiverse and while I could have ended up in a nicer universe, I could have just as easily ended up in 40k. I shuddered at that though because I REALLY hoped I didn't end up in 40k. Exalted or no, that was not a 'fun' universe to be in.

Still, I was fairly certain this was not in fact 40k as I couldn't see anything supernatural in the air. That was good….and bad because that meant that this was another world without Essence or anything magical. Thankfully, I'd solved the whole 'no essence to power my awesome powers' problem with the Oricalcium tattoos.

'We're not alone,' Breaker said suddenly, jarring me out of my thoughts. 'Someone's maintaining this place and that means it's someone's territory.'

That got my attention and I looked again, this time for signs of civilization and found it embarrassingly fast once I knew where to look. Thankfully, it didn't take long before I started seeing signs that people had been here recently. A cut branch, a piece of wood broken too cleanly to be weather damage, a patch of flattened grass that could only have come from a boot stepping on it. I even heard something that might've been an engine somewhere in the distance, though maybe it was nothing after all.

"Okay." I said out loud. "There's people."

'There's people somewhere,' Breaker corrected. 'Question is what kind. The sort you can talk to, or the sort you watch from a distance until you know what you're dealing with.'

As I walked, I stayed off anything that looked like a proper trail, keeping to the bush and staying close enough to follow it but far enough that nobody could track me or even really threaten me. Not that they could as I had a few Charms that helped, even if it was only a couple that worked and a couple more that I still hadn't got a damned clue on just what the hell they were supposed to do. Still, after a while it got boring because despite my stamina being effectively unlimited, there was only so much greenery you could look at before it got too much.

As I walked, I got the feeling that someone was watching me, maybe more than one person. I didn't react or do anything obvious to show that I knew, nothing like stopping or looking around, but something had definitely moved in the treeline, right at the edge of my vision. Something a normal person probably wouldn't have noticed…except I wasn't normal. I'd also spent a few months in Zombie land by this point, so this kind of thing was pretty much second nature.

'You're doing that thing again,' Breaker said.

'What thing.' I asked, confused.

'The thing where you jump to conclusions,' Breaker said. 'You know, the whole 'make an ass out of you and me' thing?'

'It's called paying attention.' I argued back.

'You're the one making assumptions,' Breaker fired back. 'And not good ones.'

I didn't reply, instead I just kept walking like I hadn't noticed and was very thankful that I'd sacrificed my ability to feel fear for Sorcery. Five out of seven, would recommend…still, I couldn't help but think that whoever was out there was good. I mean, I had a literal magic power that made it impossible to track me without magic and here was someone getting around that by following me visually without really giving themselves away.

'They're there alright,' I thought. 'Probably were already out here doing something else and we walked right into it.'

'Could be nothing,' Breaker said. 'Could be something. We don't know yet.'

I stopped walking, suddenly stopped, in the open where anyone watching could see me.

'What are you doing,' Breaker hissed.

'Giving them a reason to come out instead of a reason to put a bullet in me from forty feet away.' I thought.

'Do something else, call for help or...' Breaker insisted. '...anything but…this.'

'Who? We're in a different world,' I asked, 'and even if we weren't, the only way I could reach them is with Sorcery and while Infallible messenger's fast, they still need time to get here and by that time it'll be over. Even if I beat them up and erase their memories? The people back at the base will still know.'

Then I lifted my hands so whoever was watching could see I wasn't holding anything. It felt stupid standing in the middle of a forest with my arms up like that but I didn't want to spook them and it seemed to work because nobody had shot me yet.

No, instead, four people came out of the woods with their guns raised and pointed straight at me. They had me completely surrounded and were clearly professionals. I'd worked with enough soldiers in the safe zone to recognise military training when I saw it and the way they covered each other's blind spots without crossing each other's line of fire told me they knew what they were doing.

As they came closer, I got a better look at them and….what the hell? They had what I could only describe as some kind of futuristic armour. At least they were carrying guns that looked like guns, so there was that. One of them, slightly behind the others, kept looking back over his shoulder every few seconds at wherever the hell they'd come from.

"On your knees. Hands where I can see them. Who are you?" The one in front shouted as he continued to point his gun at me.

…Right, because that question always has such a fun answer.

'Just don't do anything stupid,' Breaker said again and for once he wasn't joking.

I kept my hands where they could see them, got on my knees and spoke slowly in a calm tone I used to use for new arrivals back at the camp. A soothing voice to avoid triggering anything in people who'd just watched their neighbours eat each other and were highly stressed.

"I don't know how I got here." I said. "and I'm lost."

Nobody's rifle moved an inch.

"Try again." the leader said. "Where'd you come from?"

"...I honestly don't know how to explain it." I said which was true and also exactly the kind of thing that was going to get me shot. "One second I was somewhere else and the next? I was face down in the mud a couple of miles back."

Nobody looked convinced and, if anything, the whole group tensed up more.

Two of them slowly came closer and patted me down in a fast practiced way while the other two still kept their guns pointed at me. The search was done quickly and they didn't find much except for the knife I always carried with me, some rations and the pistol with two magazines the soldier at the gate gave me in the last world. Something that got some raised eyebrows for some reason.

One of them actually frowned at that, like he had never seen a gun like that before.

Then one of them did a double take as they noticed my oricalcium tattoos while another just stared at my molten golden eyes for a second. No one said anything about it but they had definitely noticed and their expressions went back to the blank ones from before.

"Get up." the leader said again. "You're coming with us."

'Don't,' Breaker said.

'You have a better idea?' I said mentally. 'Because I've got no idea who they are or where we are but they aren't shooting at us so I think we should go with them for now.'

'You're assuming they won't just put you down anyway,' Breaker argued.

'It worked in the last universe didn't it? I was overthinking things there and besides which, they're disciplined enough to try and find out who I am and where I came from before doing anything like that.' I thought, looking towards the leader. 'Look we don't know where the hell we are and this is a good way to find out.'

'And if you're wrong?' He shot back.

I didn't have an answer that didn't involve fighting my way out of whatever mess I was getting myself into and Breaker knew that as well. I looked at the leader, saw him seriously considering what to do to me and I knew that I really needed to push him if I didn't want this, whatever this was, to end badly.

"Look, I'm lost and don't know where I'm at." I said, feeling the warmth flow through me as the words suddenly came to my mind. "You've got me surrounded and can take me down hard. Why don't we go somewhere safe and talk it out like adults? Because if I'm somewhere I'm not supposed to be, it's really not my fault."

Nobody moved for a second, so….progress?

I'd spent the last few minutes watching them, how the one at the back kept glancing backward, how none of them had raised their voices through any of this. All of it pointed to a few things, that these were people who'd rather bring me in alive to interrogate me than to kill me and not know just how I got here, wherever 'here' was.

"Cuff him." the leader said finally. "We're bringing him in."

The two from before approached me again with cuffs and I let them put it on me. Then they pulled a blindfold over my head and I couldn't see anything after that.

'Terrible bargain,' Breaker said. 'You gave up your only advantage because you're hoping they'll do the decent thing.'

'Traded it for information,' I thought back. 'I don't know where we are and the armor means we're in a world more advanced than the last place. If I fought them it would've gotten someone killed, maybe even me. Call it stupid if you want, but it's worked out before'

Breaker didn't say anything as they grabbed me roughly and frogmarched me forward. I couldn't see anything but I could roughly guess how far I was walking from where I had been and we'd probably walked a couple of kilometers before the ground changed, going from forest to something paved.

We stopped for a few minutes as I heard what sounded like hydraulics moving something big, followed by the noise of a door opening. Then we started moving again and I was forced down a flight of stairs, probably going underground. I was pretty sure of that because I could smell the change in the air, going from the fresh outdoor air to the musty smell of being inside. Through it all, they kept a firm grip on me as they moved me through whatever underground place we were in.

As we walked, I heard people talking. I wasn't in one place long enough to catch much but caught fragments.

"...wants an updated sweep before the next supply run, so if activity's picked up again out past the ridge…."

"...not sending anyone else out here till the backlog is cleared, so whatever we need, we get ourselves…"

"...the thing's above my clearance, I just do what I'm told…"

We kept walking and I kept overhearing more and more stuff, but none of it really told me where the hell we were. I heard the sounds of soldiers, a lot of them, moving around though, so whoever these people were, they were well armed and well funded if what I was hearing was anything to go by. Well, that or they were using stolen equipment or were AWOL.

Then the two who were frogmarching me slowed down, then stopped and I was forced into a room where I felt a pair of hands push me down into a chair. Someone fumbled with my blindfold and I pretended to blink as if the light had blinded me for a second. I looked up and saw five people in the room, all of them armed though their guns weren't pointed at me at least. They were busy with something, but all of them kept at least one eye on me at all times.

With the brief respite, I looked around and saw that the room itself looked like an interrogation room, though there was no convenient one sided mirror. I was sitting on a chair with my arms handcuffed behind me, a desk in front of me and five people who had some...awkward questions they wanted me to answer.

Great.

I quickly took in the room and noticed the recruiting poster on the wall next to the door. It was a picture of a figure in futuristic power armour. There were words written on it but I didn't need to read them to recognise the figure. The scarred olive green armour, the helmet with the golden visor, standing over a bunch of dead aliens…I…knew that armour. Not in person, obviously but I'd played enough of the games to know exactly what the hell I was looking at. All those arguments I'd gotten into online, all the books I'd read…there was no way I could mistake it.

'Oh, hell.' I thought.

'What?' Breaker said, picking up on it instantly. 'What did you just figure out?'

I didn't answer because what the hell could I say? That I'd seen a poster and was making assumptions again? That I was jumping to conclusions? For all I knew, it was just something someone had printed and put up as a prank or something. I looked back at the men and saw one of them checking something on a datapad, reading a line off it without even thinking about who could hear.

"...subject found two miles south of Visegrád, at oh six hundred, June first, twenty five fifty-two…"

…..Visegrád….June 01, 2552...I sat there stunned as it hit me all at once and I genuinely forgot to breathe for a second.

Reach.

'The hell is going on?' Breaker asked and I wanted to say something but I didn't have a short version.

---

AN1: Hi all, so here is the first chapter of the re-write. The old one had WAY too many problems and stuff that made many things trivial, Nexi being the main one. I am restarting from zero and am directly taking the lessons learned from my "What the Wolves left behind" story and am following the general style and theme of the SI having a handful of powers and making clever use of them to get what he wants.

To be clear he has only around 5ish charms and doesn't know what half of them do as an Exaltation does not come with an instruction manual. He will also not be able to purchase new charms as this is not a RPG where you can buy any charm you want from a list. He has had a few months of meditating on Martial arts, Sorcery and learning two spells but that's the limit of it. I'm also removing the influence of his past life and so Past life ass pull.

The charms I am using are based on canon solar ones from 2E and the infernal ones from ExWoD.

AN2: Still writing this for fun. Have around 27 chapters outlined and already written in various stages of editing with only Chapters 29 and 30 outlined but pending.

The story is MOSTLY written. I still do not have a lot of free time and am using AI to help me, so you have been warned. Will update every 2 days till I complete the story.

AN3: So this is a sort of, kind of, sequel to my story Long Way home.

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/long-way-home-exalted-si-multicross.1246385/#post-113792243

 

[Yzarc]

Chapter 2 — The Unmasking

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I didn't have a short version because there wasn't one. I mean how the hell were you supposed to explain the story of Halo to a voice in your head while five strangers with guns were watching you the whole time?

'Focus on the room first.' Breaker said. 'The story can wait till you're not handcuffed to a chair.'

He was right of course, so I took a closer look at the people in the room. The leader from the forest was sitting closest to me, still wearing the same futuristic armor which I was fairly sure was ODST armor. Behind him was a woman in a lab coat with a datapad while two more waited by the door, rifles in their hands, ready to use it if things went sideways. The last one, a younger guy standing off to the side, kept staring at my tattoos like he was still trying to convince himself he'd actually seen what he thought he'd seen.

Then I saw it.

The mark was on the leader's helmet, small enough that I almost missed it. Three interlocking shapes with a triangle in the center and some kind of banner underneath, too small to read from where I sat. Like the poster, though, I didn't need to because I knew that logo from box art, fan wikis and an embarrassing number of online arguments about whether they were more competent than Cerberus from Mass Effect.

ONI….I had been captured by ONI and I could practically hear Breaker saying 'I told you so' already. I decided that denial was a good idea and forced myself not to think too hard about what that meant because it was nothing good. I was captured by ONI, almost the moment I landed on Reach just before the invasion…

What a great start.

As he cleared his throat, I focused on the here and now because thinking about what was going to happen while sitting cuffed in a room full of soldiers wasn't going to end well and I needed my head clear to get myself out of this mess.

The man, I really needed to get his name, pulled his chair forward and sat across me and removed his helmet. He was middle aged, not that older than me, bags under his eyes and in a desperate need of both sleep and a shave. He just sat there, looking at me and no one spoke as he lazily brought out a pad from his pouch and started slowly reading it.

The whole thing was a power play as there was not enough about me to read about for that long, not unless he was browsing the internet while on duty. Still, the guy was clearly in charge, going by how everyone deferred to him and that was a point worth knowing.

"You gave us your name." he stated, not asked. "No last name?"

"Don't use one." I said, which wasn't quite a lie.

My culture was a bit different and last names, while we had them, worked a bit differently. I also wasn't in the mood to remind myself of all that I'd lost while five hundred years and a multiverse away from my home and family. He clearly wasn't happy but it wasn't as if he could do anything about it. The woman, Dr. Elizabeth Greene, if her ID was anything to go by, paused while in the middle of whatever she was doing for a second before reaching somewhere out of sight and pulled out a bag. She then set it on the table and started putting things on the table in front of me, things like my knife, the rations and the pistol and laid it out like it was evidence of some kind of crime.

"The weapon." he said, nodding at the stuff on the table. "Where'd you get it?"

"Someone gave it to me." I answered honestly. "Before I got here."

"Someone gave it?" He asked, raising his eyebrows. "An antique from earth, in working condition, which has been field used and professionally serviced?"

"Yeah." I kept my voice level. "A guy I know gave it to me for self defense. I know that's not what you want to hear but that's the truth."

"Tell me about the man who gave you the pistol." He asked and so I did…

…Or at least, I tried to. I gave him a story that was believable enough, even with holes big enough to drive a starship through. I mean what the hell was I supposed to say? That I came from another universe, spent a few months on an earth that was in the middle of a zombie apocalypse? That now I was in a third universe on a completely different planet light years from Earth? If I said any of that, I'd go from a possible threat to being labeled officially insane.

That's why I gave him a version of the truth, that I had no idea how the hell I'd gotten here, that one moment I'd been on Earth and the next I'd been face down in the mud a couple of miles from where his people found me. I told him I couldn't explain it any better than that and yes, I knew exactly how it sounded.

Say what you will, but the people in the room were professionals. No one gave anything away but I was one of the Exalted and I picked up some things…like the fact that they didn't know what the hell was up with me and what my deal was. I wasn't a spy, not with how I acted, wasn't an insurgent and my clearly Earth like mannerisms were really confusing the hell out of them as they probably checked for recent or past arrivals and didn't find anything. That last part wasn't something they said but something I got from how they kept asking me about how I got to Reach.

'They don't know what to do with you,' Breaker said, sounding almost amused about it. 'Just like you don't know what to do with them.'

'Not helping.' I thought back.

'Wasn't trying to.' He said smugly.

Then the younger guy finally spoke up for the first time since they'd pulled the blindfold off.

"The marks on your arms." He wasn't looking at my face when he said it. "They're not tattoos, are they? Not normal ones."

I knew what he was talking about but I couldn't help but look down due to sheer reflex. Oricalcium was a magic material, magic sun gold basically and they were…eye catching, very eye catching. It didn't help at all that the light reflecting from them seemed to move with my heart beat. I'd gotten used to a lot of strange things over the last few months but having someone stare at that while it happened still felt weird.

"Got it done before the regulations really hit." I said with a shrug, which answered exactly nothing. "I choose them because of how bright they are."

"Regulations?" He asked.

"To cut down on dangerous body mods." I said, giving him the same bullshit I'd given that soldier who tested my blood when I'd first made my way to the safe zone. It was…not exactly true but given I'd said I was from Earth? I figure that they'd think it was some kind of local regulations or something.

Then they started again, going over the same things. Where my Neural Interface was, whether anyone was looking for me, how good I was with a gun and a knife, if I'd ever served in the armed forces or had any sort of training and so on. I answered whatever I could honestly answer and, for the most part, managed to keep my story straight.

It didn't take me long to notice that they were coming back to the same questions, usually about four rounds in but changing the way they asked them each time. They'd use different words or come at the same thing from a different angle, trying to see if I'd give them a different answer without realising it. After a while they started getting frustrated and if I had to guess, it was because they couldn't find anything wrong with what I was saying or fit me into any of the profiles they had.

At some point the woman left the room and came back five or six minutes later looking like she'd just been told something that she wasn't happy about. She didn't say it out loud, so I didn't know just what the hell was going on but there clearly was some kind of internal communication going. The leader guy set his pad down and looked at me for a whole minute, then he then put his helmet back on and turned to look at me again.

"We're done for now." he said, more to the room than to me. "Get him settled."

The two nearest to me grabbed me by the arms and pulled me up, they weren't being a dick about it but they weren't exactly being gentle about it either. They then frog marched me down the corridor and looking around, I noticed the same spotted more signs that this was an ONI facility. Oh, there were no conveniently placed ONI logos around but there were plenty of hints I picked up in all the UNSC logos that were plastered practically all over the place.

We walked down a different door than the one we'd come though and went further underground with multiple paths and doors leading to different places. Then we finally got to where they were taking me….a cell.

It was a small room with a bed in the corner that was bolted to the wall. There was a camera above the door and….that was it. They pushed me in, took off the cuffs and closed the door behind me, leaving me alone with my thoughts and Breaker too. For the first time since they caught me I was truly alone and could finally plan and think now that I knew where and, more importantly, when I was.

I reached for the bond out of sheer habit, checking without really meaning to and got almost nothing. I got enough to say that Lana was alive and was…somewhere. The bond was barely there, present but not much else, which made sense, this being a different universe and all that. I let out a sigh and let it go as there was no point trying to reach out to her and I'd cut ties for a damned good reason after all. So, left with nothing else to do, I sat down on the bed and let out a breath of air.

'Alright,' Breaker said. 'So let's stop dancing around it, what is ONI? You heard that name and looked like a man who'd just seen his own grave, so start talking.'

'You don't need me to explain it,' I thought back. 'You were right there when I figured it out.'

'I was right there when you decided not to think about it. That's not the same as me knowing what it means.'

'They're….a black ops group. You remember how I fucked up because I was afraid of what the Government would do to me in the last world? Well, ONI is why.'

I then gave him a summary of everything I remembered ONI doing, everything from the games to the wiki to the books.

'Charming people,' Breaker said without missing a beat. 'So, you wanna talk about the part where you let them lock you in a box?'

'I let them ask questions,' I thought back. 'The cell's a side effect.'

'That's a choice you walked into with your eyes open.' He didn't wait for me to argue. 'You had a whole forest to disappear into but the moment they showed up, you decided the smart move was to let them chain you, march you into a building you'd never seen and hand your fate to people you didn't know. Now you know exactly what they are and here you are, in a cell, wondering what happens next instead of already deciding.'

'What do you think would happen if I fought them?' I said, trying to not shout at him. 'I didn't know shit, still don't but at least I know enough to start thinking about a plan. Enough to know what's coming and when.'

'So you threw away the only advantage you had and bet your life on strangers being decent?'

'I trusted that they'd be disciplined enough not to shoot first and ask questions later.' I said. 'So yeah, I was right, we know where we are and are alive.'

'For now.' Breaker countered.

I ignored him, focusing on the here and now. So what exactly did I get in return for being thrown into a cell by this universe's version of Cerebus? I knew that I was stuck in the Halo universe for a year and a day as that's how long the gate needed and couldn't be rushed. I was on Reach, the date was June 1st, 2552 and somewhere out there, the Covenant was preparing an invasion force that was going to attack the planet.

I looked around and saw the camera again but this time something felt…off. Something about it pulled at me, at my Essence and I felt the instinctive urge to reach out and push, to make it mine, to dominate it. The more I looked the stronger the urge felt.

'You feel that?' I asked Breaker, mostly to make sure I wasn't imagining it.

'Feel what.' he asked.

'That.' I said as I kept my eyes on the camera.

Whatever that feeling was, he didn't seem to feel it, which meant it was me and not something else. This feeling? It felt like a bridge between Charms and Sorcery so I let the feeling go and felt the warmth flow through me and into the camera. Through it all, I made sure to keep my eyes on the camera as I somehow knew that was needed.

Now, the camera wasn't alive, not really, but I felt that there was something inside the camera that my Essence was flowing to. It took me a second to realize that it was the camera's microchips and the moment the Essence reached it, I felt something click into place. I couldn't explain how I knew it had worked, just that I knew it had. Then I felt it, a new connection between me and the camera, one that hadn't existed a moment ago.

…a familiar Connection. Somehow I'd created a First Circle demon and made it into my familiar.

'So that's what the charm does.' I thought to myself. I'd known it was there but….yeah, I didn't exactly have an instruction manual to help me out.

It didn't talk to me like Breaker did but I could feel it through the bond. I knew what it was, a First Circle Demon born from my essence, more like an Autochthon machine spirit than anything from Malfeas. If this was creation, then it would take the place of the least god of an item. Basically, it possessed technology, understood what it was possessing and could control the thing directly, not just hijack its software.

The down side though? They needed Essence to do…anything. In a world without essence, it only had what I gave it from my own limited reserves and when it ran out? It got booted out of whatever it was possessing.

I gave it some simple instructions through the bond, basic things like 'Watch the door, don't let anyone notice anything has changed' and I got the sense that it understood what I wanted it to do. Then, on impulse, I gave a second set of instructions 'Find out what this place is' and it got to work immediately.

Through the connection, I could feel it burn through the Essence I gave it to use the camera network or whatever systems the camera was connected to get the info I'd asked it to get. Now I had no idea how the hell any of it worked but somehow it was reaching out through the base's systems and the first thing it found was almost disappointing. The lock on my door was connected to the same network as the camera and it had stopped reporting anything unusual from my room, making up the video feed to show me resting in the bed. It wasn't much, but it told me the demon could do more than just move through the system. It instinctively understood how the device it was possessing worked and could change things.

Then it found a terminal somewhere farther into the facility. It was logged in, unattended and open to a document that confirmed what I'd already suspected, this was definitely an ONI facility, then it kept going.

SECTION III.

I'd seen the symbol on the leader's helmet and knew enough about ONI to know it was bad news but the problem was that 'bad news' meant a hell of a lot of things. To be more specific, the things Section III did was what people talked about whenever ONI did something especially questionable. It was the experiments, the secrets, the people who answered to almost nobody and were given problems everyone else wanted to pretend didn't exist. If the document was accurate, then I had just been grabbed by ONI's morally bankrupt people who thought kidnapping and experimenting on children as young as four years old was a perfectly wonderful idea.

'That another one of your mystery words?' Breaker asked, picking up on the shift at once.

'We're in the exact place I'd been worried about ending up in the last world,' I thought back. 'We need to find a way out.'

'Good thing you like a challenge.' he joked.

'That's not the words I'd have used.' I said with a sigh.

For half a second I wondered if I'd somehow ended up inside of CASTLE base or somewhere like that but I quickly dismissed it as the scale was wrong. The base I was in was too small, too quiet and there weren't nearly enough people running around for that. Whatever facility this was, it clearly wasn't important enough to make it into the games or the wiki. Then again, considering this was freaking ONI, that was probably not a good thing as what they did here was probably buried so deep that most of the UNSC didn't even know this place existed.

As I waited in the room, the demon kept digging through the facility's systems and the next thing it found…was disturbing. It found hundreds of medical requisitions, staff records full of doctors, researchers and specialists, certain words that just kept showing up over and over again in different files and that was when the demon found it. Buried deeper in the files, in one the demon spent longer getting into, were prisoner intake records. Rebels, insurgents, whatever term the government used here for people it didn't like, captured, kidnapped and quietly moved into a cell in this facility. The files called it a compatibility trial and never called them test subjects outright…but they didn't need to. A list of names next to survival percentages told me everything I needed to know.

This was exactly the thing I was afraid of in the last world, sure it was a different century, different planet, different everything but it was the very same bullshit I was afraid of in the last world. People in charge deciding some lives mattered less than others and making it look official.

Then the demon found the cryogenics files.

Two active suspension pods sat behind security clearances far above everything else in the facility. By itself, it was interesting but what caught my attention were the medical files attached to them, actual medical notes and not experiment logs. For the first time since I started looking through this stuff, it looked like somebody here had been trying to help them instead of….yeah.

There were two names but the demon couldn't get them as both were redacted, blacked out at a level even the terminal it was borrowing wasn't cleared to see. Why would ONI redact the names of their own patients? I had no idea but it was probably not something I wanted to know the answer to. Then I saw it, see the names were redacted but what wasn't redacted was the words underneath both the names.

SPARTAN-II.

…fuck.

'You've gone quiet again,' Breaker said. 'That's the other kind of quiet though, the kind that usually means somebody's about to make a very stupid decision.'

'They're two Spartan-IIs in this building,' I thought back. 'Actual fucking Spartan-IIs.'

'Good for them. Now tell me what it does for us because I'm not seeing why I'm supposed to be impressed.' Breaker said, dismissively.

'This tells us what kind of place we're actually in,' I thought back.

I was starting to think I'd figured out just about everything about this place when the demon found one more thing and this one was recent.

A note timestamped less than an hour old, sitting in nothing more official than an internal message queue. My description was right there, along with all the stuff I had on me which had been flagged as pre-spaceflight and anomalous, which was….fair, given what I'd had on me. Whatever they'd gotten while searching me were listed underneath, along with stuff I really didn't like. Then there was the recommendation, already half-signed by somebody whose title I couldn't see, to move me to Secondary Intake for a full workup and what the file called a compatibility assessment.

I read it once, then I read it again because surely I'd gotten it wrong the first time.

Nope.

It said exactly the same thing. I'd told Breaker, not even ten minutes ago, that cooperating was getting us information without much of a downside…that apparently had been true right up until it wasn't. They wanted to do to me whatever this place did to the people they decided were 'undesirable'. I didn't get much time to think about that though because the demon, still connected through the network, caught movement in the corridor. Two guards were coming this way and it was clear that they were here for me.

'Company,' I thought at Breaker.

'Finally,' he said and I could feel the bloodlust underneath it. 'Fight now?'

'Not yet.' I shook my head.

'They're walking you to the room where they cut people open and you're still saying, 'Not yet.' You planning to wait until they've got the knife out?' He asked in disbelief.

'If I fight these guys now, they'll set off the alarm.' I shook my head. 'I need to time it right.'

The door slid open without a knock and two people, different from the ones from the interrogation room, walked in, rifles already up, with one of them levelled square at my chest the moment the door cleared.

"On your feet." the one in front said. "You're coming with us."

"Where?" I asked.

"Move." He simply said, aggressively pointing the gun at me.

That was apparently all I was going to get out of them. I looked at the two of them and already knew where they were taking me and exactly what was waiting at the other end of that corridor. Cooperating anymore wasn't going to help me at all and they were the kind of soldiers who would say, 'I was just following orders' if asked why they shot children.

Warmth flowed from my chest, stronger this time and it was already moving as soon as I'd consciously decided. Now, I still didn't have a plan on how to get myself out of this mess, not really but I at least knew what to do with these two.

As the warmth hit my lungs, I leaned towards them and breathed out slowly, a small amount of mist came with it. It didn't look like much at first, just a puff of smoke that the two soldiers didn't notice until it was too late. At the same time, I felt the demon reach out and alter the camera feed to hide what I was doing to them.

The two soldiers were still reacting in confusion and annoyance when their eyes went unfocused. By the time the first one's knees buckled, the second was already falling down. I naturally caught them both before they hit the floor and lowered them down.

Then I did the part I still wasn't completely comfortable with.

I reached into their minds, their dreams to take control of it. I didn't have to look around for long, I found the subconscious part of their minds and twisted it. Within seconds, they started standing, walking and living out their dreams in the waking world.

Both of them got up, seeming fine but if you knew what to look for, you could tell that there was something wrong with the way they moved, a fraction too smooth. It worked though and I walked out between them, the two of them led me into the facility and nobody I passed so much as glanced twice. I mean why would they? Two guards escorting a handcuffed subject was exactly the kind of thing that was unfortunately common here.

I still didn't have a plan and I knew that I had maybe an hour to do something before things went to hell.

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AN: Got the editing done quickly. Let me know what you think.