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.

---

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

 

[Yzarc]

Chapter 3 — The Infection

---

We walked down the corridor at an even pace, going at a constant speed so as to not draw unwanted attention. They'd probably done this a hundred times before, so I just followed them while I actually thought hard about how the hell I was supposed to get the hell out of dodge. Just walking around wasn't going to cut it, I'd need an actual plan so I did the only thing that made sense. I kept walking, my eyes open as we saw more and more important machinery.

The first was a security panel. I didn't slow down for it, just looked at it for a second and felt that same pull from the cell come back. I let the warmth flow though my chest and felt a new connection form as the process repeated itself.

'I suppose you're looking for something to put in the machine?' Breaker said.

'Yeah,' I thought back. 'I don't know what I'm going to do but hacking the base from the inside won't hurt.'

'Didn't say it wouldn't.' Breaker countered.

I did it again two doors later, this time with a wall panel then there was another one at a junction where there was a bank of monitors. Each time I reached for one, it got a little easier and a little faster, like I was getting used to doing this.

Then something weird happened as the demons started reaching for each other, the second one connected to the first and when I reached the third, it joined the other two just as easily. It was like the three demons were not three demons but one slightly bigger demon spread across three points, with each part already knowing what the others knew…

Wait.

I knew what this was. It was a hive mind and that explained why all of them knew whatever any one of them knew. I never thought I'd end up making my own, tech flavoured version of a freaking Teodozjia of all things.

But here we were.

As we walked, I got a better and better idea of just how big this place was. I'd thought that it would be a small base in the middle of nowhere when they first caught me, things like a handful of rooms, maybe some labs and whatever else they needed to run a secret project. Instead, my demons were mapping out something closer to an entire industrial complex buried under a mountain, with level after level of it stacked on top of each. There were laboratories, storage bays, a medical section separate from whatever passed for a hospital wing, security checkpoints at regular intervals, a communications room, staff quarters and branching off deeper in, sections flagged with clearance levels my network couldn't touch yet.

It… honestly reminded me of an X-COM base. I mean, I'd played the old strategy game when I was younger, the one where you build an entire underground base one room at a time and pray you've got enough of everything to keep up with the aliens. Now I was walking in the middle of one wearing a pair of handcuffs and being taken for 'processing'.

The more I thought about it, the more I started wondering where the central computer running this place was. In Halo, the UNSC usually had an AI keeping track of their bases and a place like this had to have something similar. The doors, the cameras, the terminals, all of it, a place this big couldn't just have every system running on its own…..could it?

Except there wasn't anything.

There was no AI running this place, smart or otherwise. I had the demons check three separate times because I genuinely didn't believe it and every time I got the same answer.

I mean, I understood why, even a dumb AI still needs maintenance, still links to whatever network it belongs to and so on. A secret ONI project can't exactly risk that, especially since they are working on human experimentation and involving an AI is the perfect way to get audited. So no AI means no witness answering to somebody else, that every single thing that happens down here depends entirely on the people actually standing in the room. Which is either extremely reassuring or extremely not, depending which side of that you're standing on.

The second thing my demons found was the base schedule and there were even outbound comms logged at regular intervals. Whoever was running this place was only reporting to the rest of ONI every few months or so. They checked in at set times, sent whatever they needed to send and then went quiet again.

I checked the timing again because I really wanted to be sure there wasn't some gap I'd somehow missed. The next window was a little under three hours away...three whole hours where nobody outside this mountain was expecting to hear anything from the people inside, which meant that whatever I did here wouldn't be reported the second it happened.

Three hours sounded like a lot until you started trying to think of a plan.

That was also when I noticed it. I started getting low on Essence somewhere around the fourth demon. It wasn't anything serious but I was definitely getting low on Essence, at least without tapping into my peripheral pool and that would flare my Anima banner which…..yeah.

Worse? It would take fifteen minutes of rest to get at least some of it back and at least half an hour if I really wanted to do something to get out of here.

'You're slowing down,' Breaker said. 'That's not good.'

'Yeah, no shit.'

'Then quit reaching for every piece of machinery in sight and start thinking about what you actually need.'

He was right because of course he was right. I couldn't keep doing this door by door, camera by camera, I'd run out of Essence before I got there. Which meant I needed something bigger, one move instead of doing this a hundred times and I already knew what that move was. It was one of the few things I'd actually gotten good at instead of just fumbling my way through it.

'Mist,' I thought at Breaker. 'The Mists of Eventide spell at full power.'

'Finally.' He said it like he'd been waiting for me to catch up. 'And you couldn't think of doing that while you were still in the cell because...?'

'The mist itself only lasts about a minute or so. I mean yeah, everyone caught in will be out for hours and I can rewrite their memories then but if I want to catch anyone who wasn't already in range once that minute's up, I'd have to cast it again. So I need to get all of them together.'

'...waiting till you have more Essence?' Breaker asked.

'That's the plan.' I agreed.

Which left me with one small problem in that I, technically, wasn't the one in control. My two very helpful escorts were still taking me wherever they'd originally been told to go before I'd borrowed them. I hadn't actually told them to go anywhere else, mostly because I didn't want to waste Essence changing orders when I could just let them keep doing what they were already doing.

Obviously, I didn't ask for directions, I just kept walking between the two of them while they did most of the work for me. I kept listening to whatever I could pick up along the way and let them carry on towards wherever they were supposed to take me.

We passed two more checkpoints on the way down and both opened for my escorts without anyone giving me more than a quick look. Knowing I had to do something, I let some of the rapidly diminishing warmth in my chest flow out. I sniffed the air and caught something faintly medical which was...close enough. I mentally ordered my two guards to go there and somewhere along the way, the corridor turned into an actual elevator, one of those big ones meant for equipment as much as people and it took us down another two levels before the doors opened again.

The air got colder as we went down, cleaner too and the smell kept getting stronger, an antiseptic smell. Looks like we were walking in the right direction. We stopped outside a door that had a pair of guards and one of them spoke up, his voice was completely flat, like he'd said the same thing to a hundred prisoners before me.

"Through here."

The room on the other side looked like an unholy mix of a torture chamber and a hospital operation room…if hospitals did the illegal human experimentation. There was a table with restraints built into it, monitors on wheels and a tray of instruments, all arranged so neatly that I really didn't need anyone to explain what this room was used for.

The equipment along the walls was also much better than I'd expected. Then I thought about it for a second of course the medical wing here was going to be good. They'd been doing this for years, probably with patients a hell of a lot more important than me. Two people were already waiting inside, one of whom was Dr. Greene from the interrogation room, both wearing white instead of the grey I'd seen everywhere else. Neither of them looked particularly surprised when they saw me, though Greene seemed to feel…guilt?

I let them examine me, I mean I could've resisted obviously, but what would that actually get me? I'd made the same choice in the forest and again in the cell. I still had no idea what they knew about me and the fastest way to find out was to keep playing along for a little longer and see what they did next.

'This is a bad idea,' Breaker said, watching them strap my wrist down. 'You're not really just going to let them do things to you right?'

'I'm low on Essence and I don't want to flare my Anima banner.' I explained. 'They're just doing checks for now so I'd wait till they're done to recover some essence and bust out of here then.'

'It's you on a table while strangers decide what they're going to do with you.' He pointed out. 'I don't see how that's supposed to end well."

'Trust me.' I thought as the strap bit in, a little tighter than it needed to. For a minute I let myself relax into the assumption that this was just that, standard intake and the same trial they'd apparently run on every Insurrectionist they'd ever dragged in here. Dr. Greene didn't bother explaining what she was doing before she did it, she just swabbed the inside of my elbow, slid a needle in. I watched the vial fill and didn't really care as my blood wasn't going to tell them anything about the Gate, Essence or what I actually was. They hadn't found any of that in the last world and wouldn't find it here. I'd put that particular worry to rest a long time ago, so there wasn't much reason to think about it again.

They took the vial to a machine against the far wall, fed it in and started talking to each other in the low, clipped voices. I couldn't follow most of it but I caught enough words to know what they were checking things like baseline, panel and standard markers.

Then I heard them say something that made my heart stop for a second.

"That's not right."

The second one leaned over Dr.Greene's shoulder and read whatever was on the screen, then went quiet. Dr.Greene ran it again and the machine hummed through whatever it was doing a second time before the same result came back the same because of course it did. I already knew exactly what they were looking at before either of them said it out loud.

Whatever this was, it wasn't the compatibility screening I'd braced for nor was it my Exalted bullshit. I realised what it meant a half second too late and immediately thought about the zombie world, the virus and everything that came with me out of that place. Memories, scars, a bond with someone I might never see again and apparently, without me ever noticing, something a hell of a lot less sentimental than any of that.

Oh.

I'd never gotten sick there, not once, even when I was wrestling with zombies, covered in their gore. I'd chalked that up to Exalted bullshit, which seemed reasonable enough given everything else it had changed. I had never thought about the fact that it might also mean that the virus was still in my blood, quietly failing to do anything to a body that had stopped being ordinary a long time ago.

Because in the end? Being immune didn't mean I wasn't a carrier. Something I was only realising now after being strapped to a table in a black site on Reach.

'The hell?" Breaker spoke up, sharper this time. 'What did they find?'

'The virus,' I thought back. 'From the last world. It's still in me.'

'You're not sick.' He pointed.

'I know.' I thought back. 'That's the problem.'

The two of them didn't look afraid, which was almost worse because their faces showed something closer to excitement than alarm.

"Get…" Dr.Greene started, then caught herself, glanced at me and swallowed whatever name she'd almost said. "Get him in here NOW."

"What is that?" the second one said. "I've never seen a signature like this. It's not viral in any pattern I recognise and it's almost…"

He stopped himself again and looked at the screen for another second before continuing.

"It's doing something to its own structure...actively, while we're looking at it."

More people arrived faster than I liked, three, then four, gathering around the monitor while they started murmuring numbers and words I half recognised and words I didn't recognise at all. Someone wanted a second sample, someone else wanted tissue, not just blood and a third voice from further back asked whether it was viable outside the host, whether it could survive transport and whether it could infect someone that wasn't me.

I thought about how much Essence I had left and what I actually could do while they kept talking. My Essence was already low enough that I could notice the difference and I didn't have the whole base under control, only parts of it. That meant if someone decided to move the sample, I couldn't just stop them from taking it out of the base. My comms window was closing as well, whether I was ready or not and there was an actual vial of my blood sitting in a rack against that wall right now, already drawn and already in their hands for all the practical purposes, which was very fucking dangerous. The virus had doomed an entire planet once already and in the hands of ONI….

I couldn't burn the place down either, because there were the two Spartans still in cryo somewhere in the building and I still needed to figure out what the actual plan was going to be.

'You're thinking about doing something stupid again,' Breaker said.

'I'm thinking of a way out of this mess.'

'Well, do it fast then.' He said.

Dr.Greene, who had been waiting at the door came back through with the leader guy behind her. I didn't need to read his mind to know he wasn't here just to have a look.

"Full panel." She said, already reaching for a fresh set of gloves. "And I want a second draw before anyone touches that sample again."

I could give them a few minutes, sure, but I was already running short on time and another draw was only going to give them more of my blood to work with. I couldn't afford to let that keep going so I reached for the little Essence I had and started gathering it slowly, keeping it quiet enough that nobody noticed, not that they could notice anyway. As far as they were concerned, I was still lying there, still cooperating, still the strange thing they'd found and were slowly figuring out. For the moment, that was enough.

But I wasn't cooperating anymore and they were going to find out exactly what that meant.

---

AN: Let me know what you think so far?

 

[Yzarc]

Chapter 4 — The Reckoning

---

The moment they came towards me, I stopped holding the spell back and let it go all at once. The mist rose rapidly and rolled off the table, across the floor and it started filling the whole room. Then it kept going out through the gap under the door, up into the vents and down through whatever the floor grates connected to. My little network of demons was already working hard to spread it around the base, opening doors where I needed the mist to spread and shutting them where I didn't.

The scientists and the leader guy went down where they stood, Dr. Greene was still holding a fresh set of gloves she hadn't even managed to put on. My two escorts were still standing though I ordered them to go back to sleep. They stayed upright for maybe half a second longer before their knees gave way as well.

The plan worked for the most part, almost all the people in the building went down hard but see, ODST armor have their own air supply and wouldn't you know it, there were some ODST walking around with their helmets on.

Then an alarm started and the lights along the corridor ceiling changed from a white color to a dull red. Through the cameras I still had control of, I watched blast doors start closing, shutting down corridors, section by section.

'That's not good,' I thought at Breaker.

"Depends what you were planning next." he said. "If you're getting out, not so much. If you're staying, who gives a damn?"

Then it got worse because of course it did.

I got reports from the demons that there was a spike of activity somewhere deep in the building. There were systems my demons had never touched, which were suddenly lighting up all at once. Cryogenic seals were releasing and the two life signs that had been flat and steady were climbing fast.

The two Spartan-IIs were waking up.

I didn't need my demons to tell me what was going to happen next because I could probably figure that part out myself. Brainwashed child supersoldiers getting pulled out of cryo by an alarm? No, they had probably spent years being drilled to respond and weren't going to sit around asking what was going on. They'd wake up, figure out what the problem was and start dealing with whatever had caused the alarm.

Sure enough, my demons informed me that two power signatures came online almost together as their armor started booting through the same possessed network that was supposed to answer to me…and I felt both of them start moving almost immediately.

Toward the disturbance….

…Toward me.

'The mist isn't going to get them,' I thought to Breaker, working through it as fast as I could. 'They have sealed suits with their own air supply. They'll walk straight through that fog and won't even slow down.'

'Good thing you've got other tricks, then,' he said and I could hear him getting interested despite himself. 'How long's the fog holding?'

'A minute at the most…probably.' I thought back.

I tried to think up a plan but as it turns out I didn't have enough time. The doors opened and this time four ODSTs came through in a formation that told me all I needed to know before any of them said a word. Two went low while the other two went high, their weapons up, each one covering a different part of the room instead of all four keeping their eyes on me the way they had back in the forest. They were more heavily armed than anyone else I'd seen in this building, one having a freaking rocket launcher strapped on his back. They walked straight through mist that had put everyone down and didn't so much as slow down.

I considered trying to talk my way out of this…except I had a hell of a lot less time to do it and even if I did? There was nothing short of mind control that was going to work here. None of them so much as glanced at the unconscious researchers on the floor, like keeping them safe wasn't actually their mission.

I was.

I could see that they trained together, cared about each other, about finishing whatever job they'd been sent in here to finish and about getting back out the door they'd come through in one piece, in that order. Unfortunately, none of that gave me anything to work with. Yeah, I definitely wasn't going to be talking my way past four professionals in sealed armor who'd already decided I was a problem that needed to be taken down hard. I needed an opening, needed something they actually wanted that I could offer instead of a fight and the only thing these four wanted was to pound me into the ground.

'So,' Breaker said. 'Talking's not getting us out. What's the plan?'

I didn't answer him with words but with action. The warmth spread out from my chest, except I didn't hold any of it back this time and I didn't keep it small either.

I drew more and more warmth, causing my anima to slightly flare up even as I remembered the fighting style of that Solar asshole. Warmth filled my body with Solar Glory as it settled into my muscles and suddenly there was nothing awkward about moving anymore. I knew where my hands needed to go before I thought about it, how to step, how to turn, how much force to use. I just moved and every movement felt like I'd always been able to do it for years. I was not afraid, couldn't feel it despite being outnumbered, running low on Essence and being held in a secret underground base I sure as hell didn't want to be in. None of that mattered though and I just let it all go and focused on what happened next.

The nearest one already had his rifle most of the way up when I closed the distance between us, three steps that shouldn't have covered what they covered but did so anyway. By the time his barrel finished tracking where I used to be standing, I wasn't there anymore.

A round from somewhere off to my left caught me high in the shoulder anyway, one of the others adjusting fast enough to shoot me even without a clean shot lined up. It hurt and felt like that whole side of my body was on fire but I kept moving. I closed the last of the gap on the first ODST before he'd finished getting over the sheer disbelief of a high caliber bullet simply bouncing off me.

He brought the rifle around fast, taking another shot that would've worked on almost anyone else, anyone who wasn't a Solaroid that is. I caught the bullet in one hand and punched the side of his helmet, which immediately shattered. Then the man took a breath full of mist and went down hard.

One down.

The remaining three didn't freeze, I'll give them that much credit. One of them was already calling something out while a second reached for a grenade and the third peeled off toward what I guessed was a flanking position behind a bunch of equipment. Somebody had clearly drilled them hard on exactly this kind of thing, an unknown hostile inside a secured facility and it showed more in how fast they adjusted than in how well their opening play had actually worked.

I went for the one flanking first because a man who tries to out-think you is more dangerous than men who are still standing exactly where you last saw them. He got one clean burst off before I closed the distance, I dodged them but they were close enough that most of it almost hit me. I used the time he took to reload to knock his weapon out of his hands. He dropped the rifle and I didn't give him time to reach for anything else, just a controlled sweep of his legs and he went down hard. Then a stomp to his helmet put him to sleep.

Two down.

While that was happening, the other two had stopped standing still and started trying to box me between them instead. It was…smart as it forced me to pick which one to close on while the other kept a clean line on me. Then a grenade came out of freaking nowhere, rolled underhand not thrown as it was more area denial to push me somewhere predictable rather than actually hurt me. So I moved somewhere predictable on purpose, straight at the man who'd thrown it.

Predictable was fine as long as it was also fast.

He got a hand up in something that might've passed for proper close quarters training against anyone slower than me. I caught the strike and threw him into the equipment behind him hard enough that the whole rack came crashing down on top of him. The grenade went off a second later, an explosion that rattled the room and…did absolutely nothing worse than what the earlier gunshot had already done.

Three down.

The last one actually got close. Whatever training he'd been through made him good enough that I had to work for the final few seconds instead of coasting through them. He managed to hit me hard enough that it snapped my head sideways and left a ringing behind my ears. I gave that back as good as I got and finished it the same way I'd finished the first one.

Four down.

I took a moment to catch my breath and saw that the room looked wrecked, two equipment racks were down, scorch marks stretched halfway across the floor from the grenade and a table was on its side with one leg bent at an angle it hadn't been built for. Four ODSTs were down and staying down, they were still breathing but none of them were getting back up any time soon even without the mist doing the work for them.

All in a few seconds.

'They're getting close,' Breaker said. 'Those Spartans of yours.'

I heard them before I saw them, sounding heavier than anything human, power armor more advanced than what the ODST had and some small, stupid part of my brain was still expecting… I don't know? Something smaller? Less real? Then the door swung open again and they walked through it.

The Spartans.

They wore the same iconic Green armor, though it was scarred and worn from countless battles. I'd seen Spartans online and even in the recruiting poster when they brought me in, except nothing about any of that prepares you for the real deal standing in the doorway. The golden visors gave nothing back except my own reflection staring at me, looking small and out of place. They moved in the same trained professional way the ODSTs had but faster, much MUCH faster.

They didn't hesitate, didn't stop to ask questions and they sure as hell didn't look at the ODSTs on the floor longer than it took to understand what happened. Whatever protocol had woken them up, whatever the lockdown had told them, they had already made up their minds long before they'd walked into the room. I was the glowing golden problem and dealing with me came before anything else on the list.

They pointed their guns at me even as they finished walking in. I was already moving before the first rounds cleared the barrels, getting a support column between me and the nearest line of fire when I felt two rounds punch through it close enough to spray concrete dust across my face. Then used the half a second that bought me to get close to the Spartan that had fired them.

The Spartan reacted instantly, he tried to hit me with the butt of his rifle and I almost didn't block it in time. It really says something about how strong a Spartan in armor is by the fact that the strike drove me back a good distance, my boots skidding on the floor. This was different from the ODSTs, this was someone who could actually kill me if I made a single mistake.

It also says something about their teamwork in that the second one didn't wait for an opening and came from my blind side while the first was repositioning. I turned just in time to take a punch to my solar plexus that forced most of the air out of my lungs and nearly sent me flying from the combination of pain and the sheer force of the punch. I hit the ground, rolled through the momentum instead of fighting it and came up while putting some distance between us…

…or so I tried, which was the only reason the follow-up punch just barely avoided caving my skull in.

That was pretty much how the whole fight went on for the next minute, one of them pressing while the other repositioned, trading who led and who covered so smoothly I couldn't find a flaw in their teamwork worth exploiting. I couldn't isolate either one of them for more than a second at a time and every opening I found closed the moment I tried to use it because the other was already moving to close it before I'd even finished so much as thinking about it.

Knowing I had to change things up, I blasted them with Golden Solar flames, surprising them long enough for me to get a good hit in on one of them. Thankfully it only took a single hit for the shields to go down and when they did, I managed to hit a joint at the shoulder and his arm on that side went a half second slow on the next swing. It wasn't much but just long enough for me to get inside it and drive an Essence empowered knee into a panel low on his side. Sparks jumped when it cracked, his rifle caught the edge of my next strike and came apart at the stock.

But the other Spartan caught on the moment I was committed to that strike and used it to tackle me, which took me off my feet entirely and put me through a bank of equipment. The whole room went a little grey at the edges for a few seconds but I threw the half a ton Spartan away from me and got back up.

The fight went on like that for a few seconds, me keeping them at bay with my Golden Solar flames while they rapidly adjusted. That was when it happened, the one I'd already hurt tried to press the advantage instead of falling back to reset with his partner and it left him vulnerable for half a second. I let him close the distance he wanted and tanked the hit, then I felt warmth suffuse my arm as I put everything I had into a hundred blows aimed square at the side of his helmet.

I hit his helmet so many times in the exact same spot that the shields went down fast and then the helmet cracked, gold spiderwebbing across the visor. The hundreds of follow up strikes shattered the helmet completely and what was underneath was…a man, sweat soaked, bleeding above one eyebrow, looking at me like I was some kind of monster.

….which, yeah was fair.

I didn't get to look at him for longer than that as his partner was already coming and I'd spent everything I had getting that helmet off instead of finishing the exchange I was still in.

Worse? The mist was almost gone and I didn't have enough Essence left in me to cast the spell again without making my anima banner visible from orbit. I needed this finished fast and I had exactly one thing that was strong enough to do it.

So I drew from my peripheral pool and my Anima immediately flared harder as the little warmth that had been carrying me through the last few minutes suddenly flooded me with power which gathered into my right fist. To his credit, the Spartan only hesitated for a second and charged at me again. I caught his punch on my forearm, taking a hit hard enough that my feet shifted but not enough to lose my balance, then I grabbed his chest plate with my left hand and cocked back my right hand.

"HEAVEN THUNDER HAMMER!" I shouted as I drove my fist into him.

The actual force of the punch sent him flying so fast that, for a second, I actually lost track of him. Almost half a ton of man and armor was sent flying backwards as he crossed most of the laboratory and hit the far wall in just a few seconds. The wall cracked around him when he landed, pieces of his armor flying across the room, one of them skidding halfway back towards me.

He didn't get up.

I watched him lying there at the edge of the mist, already caught by what was left of it. His partner was still trying to reach me, staggering and bleeding, with one shoulder barely working from the damage I'd done to it but he still managed another two steps before his knees gave way and the mist finally took him.

Then it was quiet.

The mist thinned to nothing over the next handful of seconds and left the room exactly as damaged as it had been a moment ago, minus the two people still capable of hurting me in it. I stood there and took it all in, my Anima banner slowly cooling down till it sputtered out. A number of researchers were unconscious, lying where they'd fallen. Four ODSTs were down and staying down. Two Spartan-IIs, one against a cratered wall, the other collapsed a short distance short of him, both were still breathing and very much not going anywhere for a while.

I let myself feel exhausted for exactly five minutes before re-evaluating again. My Essence was mostly gone, my shoulder ached where the round had hit me and my ribs hurt worse where the second Spartan had punched the air out of me. I was fairly sure I was going to be finding new bruises for days even with how fast I healed.

I looked at the two Spartans properly for the first time…two men who'd been kidnapped as children, augmented into being outright superhuman, trained and armed with highly advanced power armor….and I'd just fought them to something close to a standstill while injured, exhausted and completely unprepared. I mean, I was one of the Exalted, an Infernal Exalted too but….standing over them now, that felt wrong.

I didn't know what I was going to do about any of this but I knew, looking at the two of them, that whatever came next was going to involve a hell of a lot of trouble.

'Well,' Breaker said, sounding more satisfied than I'd heard him all day. 'Now that's what I call a good fight.'

I didn't have the energy left to argue with him and for once? I wasn't sure I wanted to.

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AN: Hope I did the fight justice. Let me know if you liked it.