Blake Harding

"You know, you have your mother's eyes . . . and my smile."

- Reginald Harding

Blake Harding, later going by the name Blake Mordaunt, was a serial killer known to target augmented humans and the son of Reginald Harding, the Project: FREELANCER operative known as Agent Wyoming. Conceived just before the abduction of Reginald's wife, Adeline, by the Director of Project: FREELANCER, Blake was born while his mother was still a prisoner, and taken by Director Leonard Church to groom as an experiment or possible protege later on. Within three years, however, the project was destroyed from the inside by its own rebelling agents, and Blake was all but forgotten about in foster care on Earth. As a teenager, however, Blake would suffer severe trauma after he was almost killed trying to protect other bystanders by Morgana-G018 during a counter-insurgency mission, and began to develop a hatred of augmented soldiers thereafter.

When he was twenty, Blake was approached by Counselor Michael Colgrove, a former member of Project: FREELANCER's leadership, who revealed Blake's parentage to him, and that while Reginald had known about Adeline's captivity, she had died without his help. Growing further disgusted as he learned more about FREELANCER's shady history, he came to hate his father and the transhumanist program that had turned him into such a proficient killer, viewing the FREELANCERs and SPARTANs as something inhuman and wrong. With Colgrove's help, Blake created a device which put Project: FREELANCER's data on splitting an AI's personality to use by manipulating the emotions of anyone with a neural implant, and with backing from Syndicate carried out the assassination of his father.

Afterwards, however, Blake was caught up in a power conflict between the Syndicate and a movement called the Underground, and lost his left arm in a fight with the rogue SPARTAN-III Simon-G294. After escaping custody of his father's comrades, Blake allied himself with the artificial intelligence Diana to begin hunting down and killing augmented humans, voluntarily going through augmentations himself and becoming what he considered a "monster" in order to destroy those necessary evils which had saved humanity during the Human-Covenant War, and were now no longer necessary. At first, he attempted to carry out the killings himself, but in the course of his work discovered the promise of a weakness in the most fundamental augmentations and began working on a plague which would target augmentees.