“Hold!” The whisper came our harsh, garbled by the team comm link, and Toshiro immediately crouched down at the sound of it, obscuring himself in the undergrowth. The armour plating on his chest rippled as bush branches touched along its surface, shattering the camouflage in a string of white static lines. He leaned away from the swaying bush and waited. His mission timer ticked the seconds away, and he turned his head over to one side, where his companion held an armoured, half-obscured gauntlet into the air. “What?” Toshiro asked. “Sensor blip,” she replied. “Just for a second.” Toshiro immediately switched his attitude to high-alert, scanning the towering redwood trees above him. “Where?” “Five meters,” she replied. “North West.” Toshiro looked over at where two trees stood flanking a line of mossy rocks. Shadows danced over them from where the moonlight bled through the branches and leaves high above them. Toshiro furrowed his brow. ”You sure?” “Ninety-nine percent,” came the reply from his left. Shifting his shoulders, Toshiro rolled his eyes. “We can’t work off ninety-nine percent,” he said. There was another silence, until his companion edged herself forward and flattened herself onto the ground, into a line of golden-leaved bushes. “I’m activating VISR sweep.” Toshiro side-eyed her prone figure. “You’ll need to drop cam, is that a good idea?” “No,” she said. “Just cover me.” She held a hand up to her helmet, and went to press on the side of it, hesitating in a way that told him she was about to regret what she was doing. Toshiro happened to take that moment to scan the branches above them, and held up a hand. “Wait!” it was his turn to hiss. He observed the spot for a few more seconds, watching how the branch jumped up, then back down like it would if immersed in a glass of water. He traced along its path, and saw another jump off to its side; the obvious refraction of the wood betraying an active-camouflaged enemy. “What?” She asked. “Up,” Toshiro said. “The left tree. Third branch up. Looks like we got ourselves a Spec Ops.” Another period of silence hung between them as she made the same observations, with eyes infinitely keener than he had. “Sneaky little bugger,” she scoffed over the comms, turning to face him. “How’d you see him?” Toshiro lifted the MA5K Carbine from his back, and affixed a scope to it with all the slowness of a house cat sneaking up on a bird. Every move was made to limit his visibility in his half-cloaked state. “Because I was looking for him,” Toshiro replied. “We’re being hunted,” Akari said. “No. We’re the ones hunting, now.” He sighted the light-bending mass atop the branch, hesitating. “Calling us hunters is generous,” Akari laughed over her comms. “Then we’re vultures,” Toshiro said, pulling the trigger of his MA5. “Spartans, you are being hunted.” The man stood up on a raised platform. Behind him, the draped flag of the UNSC hung stoic, ever-watchful, imprinted with stars and an eagle, wings outstretched among them. The man carried himself like a seasoned veteran, arms behind his back, and shoulders straight. Toshiro eyed his uniform; neat-press and starch lines standing out as the pinnacle of perfection. His slick-back hair and beady eyes studied all of the two-dozen faces in the room, which stared up at him in turn. Campaign ribbons and medals dotted his left breast, and a shining silver badge on his beret glinted under the harsh lights above them. Toshiro kept himself at parade rest as the man spoke, hanging onto his every word. “We have received word that Spartan teams are being ambushed in the field by Sangheili kill-squads,” the man said. “Highly advanced, highly trained, and highly dangerous.” There was a flash of movement among the ranks in front of Toshiro, as they digested this information. “These teams seem to be specially trained to hunt Spartans, and kill them,” the man took a breath, and stepped off the raised platform, down to the Spartans’ level. “Which means you,” he said, “you will be better.” He raised a hand up to a control and observation room, set into the side of the room, up high. There was a period of stillness, then the expansive, cyclopean room began to rumble and whir. The Spartans broke their composure for the first time since they were gathered, and looked around. The walls were shifting, the floor and ceilings opening up, and revealing tan and gold metal panels. The room arranged itself into a configuration resembling a scaffold system, depositing walls and walkways in positions that would create elevated firing lines, depressed defensive locations, and close-quarters interiors. The manipulating arms began quick-riveting the walls and walkways to the floor, or the ceiling, or to each other to keep them in place. Toshiro watched in awe as the entire room went from empty and expansive, to sealed-off and full of challenging terrain. He, and the rest of the Spartans, turned back to the uniformed man, only to see more of them file into the entrance zone, carrying crates, weapons, and helmets. They set their cargo down on the raised platform, cracked open the lids of the crates, and left the room. The man stepped up to the crates and reached inside, lifting out a chest plate, and holding it up with a strained expression. “These suits,” he said, “are outfitted with enhanced electronic warfare suites, and enhanced av-cam.” A murmur of excitement rippled through the Spartans. The man set the chest-plate back down into one of the myriad crates, then reached for the helmets. He held it aloft, the golden visor glinting, the reflective olive panels shining. “These contain specialised sensors for you to identify cloaked targets easier.” Motioning between it and the suits in the crates, he stepped up and down the gathered line of soldiers. “You will use them in conjunction with one another to train in this environment.” Toshiro looked between the suits and the training floor behind him. The man continued to speak. “Your weapons will be fitted with tactical training rounds. If you get hit, your av-cam will no longer function.” He paused. “Your objectives will be to separate into teams of two, and utilise your new assets to hide from enemy sensors, while in turn attempting to identify and eliminate other fireteams. You will continue until only one fireteam is left standing.” He set the helmet down, and it thudded on the raised platform. Toshiro raised his hand. “Excuse me, sir?” “What is it, Spartan?” the man asked. “How long will we repeat this exercise?” Toshiro asked. The man shrugged. “Until the day is over,” he said. “Until it becomes second nature. Until you can no longer find out be found by other Spartans. Until you are worthy to be called the best. That’s how long!” He looked out over the gathered Spartans, and waited. Seconds ticked by while the Spartans stood up straighter. The man turned, setting the helmets back in line, and inspecting the armour. “You come back here when the buzzer sounds, you clean your armour, you go back in. The floor will reset every exercise, and the configuration will be different. Understand?” Toshiro and the others snapped salutes. “Sir, yes sir!” He nodded at them all, and clasped his hands behind his back. “Then suit up!” They strung the Elite up from a length of rope, wrapped up and over a tall-hanging branch. They’d tied one end to the body’s legs, the other around the trunk, and hoisted the alien up fifteen feet off the ground. It took both of them pitching in, even with their augmented strength, to get the body up where they wanted it. Adding a personal touch, for good measure, they slashed the alien’s throat and let the blood collect in a pool of iridescent purple, shining in the light of the planet’s three moons—just to make it nice and noticeable. Now, the two Spartans sat on the branches, much like the Elite once did, staring out at the forest floor below them. Waiting for the Sangheili team to come investigate their comrade’s death did nothing but tick away their mission clocks, and fill them both with a sense of boredom. It was a miracle that the rest of the team weren’t with the Sangheili when Toshiro shot him, but he reasoned that they were using him as a scout, or a sentinel. The others were likely hot on their heels, and the one they had lashed to a rope were making sure they knew exactly where the two were. Akari looked up from inspecting her pistol, staring over at Toshiro with a cocked helmet. “What makes a world a ‘deathworld’?” she asked. Looking over, Toshiro echoed the cock of her head with one of his own in lieu of a proper facial expression. “You’re gonna ask this now?” “Well,” she shrugged, putting her pistol back on her thigh, “now’s when I’m thinking of it,” Toshiro scoffed and settled back down onto the branch, sweeping his VISR over the forest floor. It picked up each individual blade of grass, discarded leaf, and twig hidden in the dirt. If he were closer, he’d wager it’d be able to pick up the stones in the topsoil. The branches and leaves he covered himself with twitched in a gentle night-time breeze, and he looked to all the outside world as a clump of detritus latched to the bark, nestled in the furrow between the trunk and its gnarled, outstretched branch. “I guess it’s gotta be natural disasters, right?” Akari asked. “No,” Toshiro shook his head. “Plenty of worlds have them. Most of them are even worse than those on Earth, like the Monarch-class storms on Tribute,” he said. “Yeah,” Akari hummed, “but they don’t cost lots of lives. Monarchs only happen out at sea, and most don’t touch coastlines.” “So the disasters need to cost lives?” Toshiro asked. “Sure,” Akari nodded. “Lots, all the time.” “Humanity doesn’t tend to build stuff where they know that disasters are gonna destroy them every other day,” he replied, slinking back into his furrow as his VISR picked something up moving beyond the clearing’s edge. “Uh,” Akari’s tone switched to one dripping with sardonic venom. “Volcanic islands, tectonic faults,” she counted off on her fingers, Toshiro blew air threw his lips in response. “We haven’t built stuff that can crumble to a simple earthquake in three centuries. And volcanoes are basically childsplay to induce controlled venting.” “That’s not how it works,” Akari said. “You can’t control a volcano with induced venting.” “Well, then it’s not disasters that make a world a Deathworld, is it?” Toshiro bit back. Akari huffed and folded her arms, staring out across the forest. Movement registered on Toshiro’s tracker, and his VISR started to outline a vaguely-humanoid figure approaching underneath the tree. Toshiro hissed, and Akari perked up, creeping to the edge of her branch and staring down at the forest floor. “They’re here,” Toshiro said. More figures began to coalesce into existence besides the first one, outlined in yellow where the edge of their light-bending camo systems ate at the undergrowth and debris littered across the dirt. They stopped in their tracks at the base of the tree, staring up at the message the two Spartans had left for them. Around a dozen tall, imposing Sangheili stood in a semi-circle around the pool of blood. One of them dropped their camo, revealing ornate purple armour, and a fully-enclosed helmet. Instead of two separate visors for eyes, this one featured a full band across his head, shining red in the moonlight. His plasma rifle seemed elongated, with inlaid patterns on the barrel and handle that went beyond simple functionality. Toshiro studied him with an intense gaze, recording the entire thing. The Spartan watched as the others dropped their camo as well. These ones carried much simpler-looking weapons and armour, and gave the leader a wide berth as he stooped down to touch a hand to the pool of shining purple. Nothing was done for a few moments, until the Sangheili lifted his bloodstained hand up to his helmet, and pressed it down, making a perfect imprint on the surface. Toshiro turned to Akari and cocked his head. “You know what this means?” he asked. She shook her head. Toshiro reached to his belt and pulled a grenade off, pressing the button on top to prime it. “His shields are down.” Akari nodded, and Toshiro tossed the grenade down into the midst of the gathered Sangheili. The movement instantly attracted their attention, but by the time they lifted their weapons up to see what had moved, the grenade had bounced on the ground, the priming fuse inside igniting in response to the impact, and the entire thing detonated with an ear-splitting crack a moment later. Two of the twelve Sangheili were consumed in the fireball. The leader was thrown forward, into the pool of blood, and hit with several bits of shrapnel. The rest suffered to varying degrees as their shields splintered, their ears popped, and their skin prickled in the heat. Toshiro leapt from the tree a half second after the explosion, landing on top of the lead Sangheili and driving his boot into the alien’s skull, shattering the cervical vertebrae and leaving the alien internally decapitated. It twitched once, and didn’t move again. Toshiro brought up his MA5K, sighting the nearest alien who stumbled about, swatting at its ears in a daze. He dropped it with a burst of fire to the thing’s chest, and it collapsed into the undergrowth. The next target he sighted as the smoke cleared, and he saw the rest of them start to recover. Stepping off of the twitching corpse beneath him, Toshiro found level, steady ground and fired a burst of four rounds at the next target through the haze. Two bullets bit deep into the alien’s shoulder, while the other two pinged off of an armoured plate. The Sangheili roared and spun around, plasma pistol up and charged. Toshiro leapt to the side as an acrid blast of plasma sizzled past his ear, frying and boiling away the air itself and burying itself two inches into a tree. Embers, smoke and ash were kicked up by its impact. Toshiro jammed his finger down on the trigger, another burst of fire hitting the Sangheili in the helmet. A bullet shattered the right eye visor, and shards slid into the Elite’s open eye with ease. The alien screamed in pain, holding a hand up to the wounded socket and moving away. More Elites were looking over at him, roaring in challenge, barking in their guttural, alien tongue. He jumped up and darted behind a tree as more blue and green plasma bols chomped at his heels. “Any day, Akari,” Toshiro said on his comms. A second later, there was a thunderclap, and the sound of a crumpled body hitting the Earth. Toshiro dared a peek from around his cover to see the vapour trail of a .50 armour piercing anti-materiel rifle shot, and a dead Elite on the ground. Akari sat up from her perch in the tree, leaning into the rifle and setting an elbow down on her outstretched knee, sighting the next target. Another roaring snap echoed in the otherwise-silent forest, and another Elite dropped. In the confusion, two Elites looked up at her tree perch just in time to see her armour fade into the night. Her camo recovered from the sudden motion of her body jerking from the recoil. The two Sangheili warriors raised their pistols at her, and Toshiro jumped out from behind the tree, bearing down on his rifle as he emptied the rest of his magazine into the two tall aliens. Both of them jerked under the fire as it raced up and down their exposed sides, then crumpled into a heap. Fire lashed out at Toshiro from somewhere beyond the clearing, causing the tree beside him to explode in a shower of wooden shards. He ducked back behind it, ejected his magazine, and slammed a fresh one home with a click. “Four left, one wounded. Didn’t get a bead on them. Assume av-cam.” “Copy,” Akari replied, displacing from her perch and jumping down onto the Earth. She abandoned the SRS before she jumped, tucking her limbs in and rolling as she hit, coming up into a dead-sprint, and covering the clearing in a second. The movement was either too fast, or too unexpected for the remaining Sangheili to track, so by the time they fired at her, she was already gone. Toshiro stepped out of his cover once more and pulled up his rifle, sighting the muzzle flashes of the plasma, and firing at it. Two of them were coming from between a bush and a tree, and they appeared in spotty waves as the bullets grazed their unprotected armour. One of them ducked back behind the tree, but the other fell backwards, scrambling to find purchase on the soft Earth. Toshiro bore down on him, the entire thirty-round magazine leaving his smoking barrel and eating up the dirt around the Alien. Some shots found their mark, and the Elite began to jerk and writhe sporadically as his spine shattered under 7.62mm NATO rounds. “I got it;” Akari said to him over the comms. “The wildlife.” “What?” Toshiro barked, turning his head in the direction of his earpiece. His eyes flashed with fear as he saw movement behind him, and a flash of red light. He ducked just in time for a crimson energy sword to flash over his head, and bury itself into the tree bark. He hit out at the shape holding the blade on reflex, his elbow crunching into the thick armour of the Alien. It staggered back, energy sword wrenching free of the tree with a sizzling. Toshiro rolled out of its guard and shouldered his rifle, sliding his knife out of its sheath. “A deathworld,” Akari spoke again. “Gotta be the wildlife that makes it, right?” A shotgun racked somewhere off to Toshiro’s left, but he didn’t notice it, staring down the Elite in front of him. He brandished the knife, and the Elite charged. “Everything on Earth can be deadly to humans,” Toshiro said, side-stepping a stab and driving his knife into the alien’s elbow. “Iis Earth a Deathworld?” The Sangheili warrior roared in pain as the serrated blade poked out of the other side of the joint. Toshiro twisted the knife and popped the elbow, and the Elite’s hand opened on reflex, dropping the sword to the ground. “You know, that’s been debated ever since the Domus Diaspora,” Akari replied. A few more shotgun blasts sounded out in the air, along with pained alien yells. Toshiro dodged a desperate punch from the alien and wrenched his knife free, dropping low and raking it across the alien’s legs, cutting deep into the tendons and muscles. The alien dropped to its knees, grabbing at its new wounds with its one good hand. Before it could even scream again, Toshiro spun and drove the point of the blade straight through its eye, shattering the glass-like material and embedding itself deep into the alien’s skull. It jerked once when the blade went in, and once when Toshiro twisted it. “And I say it’s absolutely not,” the Spartan said. The Sangheili dropped to the ground. Akari emerged from the bushes on the other side, pumping her shotgun and letting the brass fall to the forest floor, still smoking. She pointed at Toshiro. “Then what do you think makes a Deathworld.” “Something worse than Earth,” Toshiro replied, sliding his knife over his armour to clean it, before putting it back in the sheathe on his thigh. Akari rolled her helmet. “Every world is worse than Earth, if you wanna be technical about it.” “Don’t be pedantic,” the man said to her. “I’m not!” Akari replied. Sighing, Toshiro motioned to her. “How many did you get?” “Two,” she said. Toshiro did the math, and furrowed his brow. “There’s still one left,” he said. Akari dropped into a firing stance and pulled up her Shotgun. Toshiro immediately turned around and saw the Elite barrelling down on them, two swords in its hands. Blood dripped down its shoulder, and from one of its eyes, and it was roaring. Akari went to push Toshirop out of the way, but he didn’t move. The Elite was moving slow to his eyes, but he knew that was just an illusion brought on by the adrenaline in his augmented system. Toshiro gripped the pistol around Akari’s thigh, and brought it up, falling to one side. Akari pulled the trigger on her shotgun, and Toshiro began squeezing off rounds from the M6. The hail of bullets struck the Elite, forcing it down onto the ground. Silence came back to the clearing, absent even the chirruping of night creatures. The two of them watched the writhing Elite as it struggled to even breathe, chest pockmarked with buckshot and pistol rounds. Toshiro turned to Akari and shrugged, handing the pistol back to her. “Maybe it’s humans that make worlds into Deathworlds,” he said. “Okay,” Akari said, grabbing her pistol from him. “I didn’t know you were going through that kinda phase.” “Oh, shut up,” Toshiro sighed, unable to keep the smile from his words. “You know what I mean. Maybe it’s us that defines worlds as Deathworlds individually. Maybe trying to classify entire planets is just too broad a thing to try.” He held his hands out. “No one world has one defining feature, or one biome. You can die on any world if you’re stupid.” “Every world can be a Deathworld, huh?” Akari rolled the phrase around in her head and nodded. “Yeah, okay. Sure.” Holding up a hand, Toshiro tacked something onto her sentence. “If you don’t watch your step.” The sounds of the dying Sangheili brought them back to the aftermath of their firefight. Akari motioned to it. “This guy didn’t.” “Too bad he won’t live long enough to learn that lesson,” Toshiro said, slapping his companion on the shoulder. “Come on. We’re burning moonlight.” He walked off towards the tree they used as a vantage point, clambering up it once more. Akari took one last look at the alien as it stopped moving, before she turned away, too. |
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