Of Demons and Angels

By Chief Ratchet

A.N: A new year, a new fic! I've been fairly recently introduced to Burst Angel, a very fun anime. It may not be the best plot-wise, but it's certainly a good and entertaining watch. Anywho, I got hit with a random idea of mixing Halo and it together, and the result? This fic, obviously.

To be honest, I've had the idea of an AU Halo fic going around my head for a while, but I never got around to begin writing about it. Then Burst Angel came along, and I mixed that AU Halo fic with Burst Angel to get this.

I want to make a few things clear. I am aware that the setting of this story is a bit similar to that of 'Eve of Fate', a very well written Halo story that may or may not have caught your eye, i.e. that of a war-torn Earth occupied by Covenant, but please bear with me. Okay, enough from me. I'd better let you off to read now, before this Author's Note itself becomes a story.

Since this is a, lets just say, experimental fic, being my first AU Halo story and Burst Angel fic as well, I might or might not continue this fic. If enough people express an interest in it (through reviewing, what else?) I'll continue it. If feedback is insufficient however, I'll be putting this on the backburner until whenever I feel like reviving it again. I won't tell you how much is sufficient, or how much is insufficient, but I'll leave you with a few words of advice that hopefully will be clear enough: you can never have too much of a good thing. Yes, and the crossing over of characters will actually happen next chapter. I just wanted to find a (fairly) believable reason for the Chief to cross universes.

Alright, I'll look forward to receiving people's opinions and until then, here's to a hopefully fantastic 2009!

Disclaimer: I do not own Halo, as it now belongs to Microsoft. Let's hope they don't decide to fuck it up so badly like Vista. I do not own Burst Angel or Bakuretsu Tenshi depending where you're from (they're one and the same), as it's owned by Gonzo and whatever studio that distributes it in your area.

Chapter 1

"…ef? Chief? Can you hear me? Chief, wake up…"

The voice. The warm, familiar voice. Blackness. What else was there?

"Chief, wake up…"

Was it always there? Had there always been voices in his head?

"…your architecture isn't much different from the Autumn's…"

"If I still had fingers, they'd be crossed…"

"Don't make a girl a promise…if you know you can't keep it…"

"…you…found me…"

He opened his eyes, and saw. White, misty fog hung about his massive armoured form as the pod's door slowly opened up. He blinked. Or tried to, at any rate. His eyelids felt like they were a tonne of bricks, and every inch of his body ached and stung. After effects of cryosleep while fully armoured. It was a trivial matter: it was hardly the first time he had woken up from cryosleep in the full MJOLNIR suit. He sat up slowly, shaking his head to clear the disorientation, raising an armoured glove to his helmet. Then the pedestal in front and slightly off to the side flared up.

"Good morning sleeping beauty," the purple avatar of Cortana smirked.

He grunted in response. "Give me a sitrep."

"Always business before pleasure with you Chief?" Cortana pouted childishly. Her ability to mimic human actions was astounding, even to him after all these years.

"Sitrep Cortana," he said again, slowly climbing out of the cryopod and beginning to stretch his limbs. Or at least, as well as he could considering that he was floating in zero gee.

"Fine, fine." Her avatar held both hands out in front of her in a submissive gesture. "Same as usual: we're floating through space, we're still transmitting an emergency beacon and we're still months, if not years, before the UNSC can arrive to save us."

"Then why'd you wake me?" He sounded vaguely annoyed.

"Because I picked up an anomaly not too long ago. Thirty four minutes, twenty eight seconds and forty nine milliseconds, if you want to be precise."

He could almost feel her smirk.

"How long has it been since the Ark was destroyed?" he asked. Cryogenic sleep had a tendency to really throw one's perception of time right out the metaphorical window.

"No more than six months," Cortana answered.

"No precise numbers?"

"Do you really want them? I can give them to you right down to the millisecond if you really want them," Cortana grinned.

"No, that won't be necessary," he replied emotionlessly, though it was hard to not crack a smile. He began running a diagnostic on his suit.

"You might want to arm up, just in case. Though by what I can tell using the ship's remaining sensors, we're still in the middle of nowhere, and the chances of running into hostiles are less than zero point four percent…"

"Life has its surprises," he answered for her, as the diagnostic was complete. Armour integrity within parameters, his shields, though in need of a jumpstart, were predicted to be at full capacity once the charge was applied, targeting software was functional, HUD was functional. There were dozens of other systems in the report, but at least most, if not all of the primary systems were still intact. He still had over eighty minutes of oxygen left in his armour's tanks, so air wouldn't be a problem…for now. The only thing left to do now was to grab a gun or two.

"Cortana, armoury," he said simply, knowing the AI knew what he wanted.

"Out the door, sixty metres down the hall and second door in the left hall. It's the door that says 'Armoury Z-1'," Cortana reminded him helpfully. "Or failing that, you could just follow the directions on the floor."

The door to the armour was closed. That was the first problem.

"Cortana? Can you get this door open?" the Chief asked, seemingly into thin air.

The pedestal in front of the door flared to life as Cortana's avatar rose up. "Reactor's up Chief, which means that most of the ship's functions have power. So right now, you could open that door. But since the door's sensors aren't responding, I'm guessing that the door's been jammed. And so, I've prepared two solutions for you: one, you go around and find another armoury whose door isn't jammed, or two, you use those big strong arms of yours for more than bludgeoning Covenant," she teased.

The Chief didn't respond, and sized up the doors. He was willing to bet that the door's locks were engaged: after all, they didn't have power, and with the suit and his augmentations…

He floated forward, and grasped onto the seams of the door. He magnetised the bottom of his boots, and was suddenly drawn back down to the floor, very firmly attached. Now with something to brace himself against, he pulled. The door groaned in response to the sudden amount of force applied to it, and slowly began to open. With a screech of metal on metal, the door was finally opened wide enough for him to go through.

"Nicely done," Cortana commented as she disappeared from her current pedestal.

Without comment, the Chief disengaged the magnetic soles and pulled himself through the open door. Racks upon racks of weaponry greeted him, ranging from pistols to rocket launchers and even a few AIE-486H HMGs in the corner. However, all that heavy weaponry was going to be next to useless in space: if a Phantom found him, he was as good as dead. With that in mind, he grabbed a pair of pistols, and placed them on his magnetic holsters, along with as many magazines as he could carry in the armour.

"Are you done yet?" Cortana asked, 'her' arms folded as the Chief grabbed a rifle off the rack, inspected it before grabbing a handful of magazines and slipping one into the housing.

"Am now." The clacking of an MA5C's bolt rang through the armoury.

"Okay Rambo, me inside your head. I can't do much here without seeing what's going on," Cortana said.

The Chief automatically reached for the AI chip slot on the pedestal, before realising that there was no chip there: Cortana's chip was all the way back in the hangar bay.

"Is your chip still in the hangar?" the Chief asked.

"Yes, but didn't you overlook something?" Cortana asked.

"What?" the Chief instantly whirled around, rifle raised to his shoulder and scanning the entire room.

"Not an enemy, silly," Cortana sighed. "I can travel in your suit, remember? Your armour's crystal matrix…or have you forgotten about that already? And grab that length of rope over there: we'll be needing it."

The Chief wordlessly placed his gloved hand on the pedestal, and received the familiar icy sensation and jab of pain as Cortana entered the suit.

"Nice to be home…glad it hasn't changed too drastically over the last couple of months," she quipped.

"Cryosleep doesn't change much," he answered, before walking for the door, a length of rope coiled under his arm. As he headed for the part of the ship that was exposed to space, Cortana outlined her plan. The ship was still sawed in half, so some compartments were indeed exposed to space and its vacuum, so it was a matter of heading off to that end, securing himself with enough rope or something similar and then venting small amounts of his suit's atmosphere to act as miniature thrusters. Cortana would be guiding him, so the chance of a misguided thrust was minimal at least. He came upon one of the many airlocks Cortana had managed to activate, and noticed the emergency release lever. Magnetising his boots once again, he held on tight to a handle, and pulled the lever.

The atmosphere for that particular part of the ship was sucked out, and the Chief would've been as well, had he not braced himself. Now he could see space: an endless sea of black.

"Tie the end of the rope there," Cortana ordered, placing a navpoint marker over what would be his anchor. "And make sure it's tight."

"I know," the Chief replied simply, slowly making his way to the anchor and tying one end of the wire to it before tugging on it. The wire itself was strong, and after several experimental tugs, one of which he applied a great deal of force behind his tugs, he deemed it as ready as it could ever be.

"Cortana?"

"Already on it. Firstly though…you'd better deactivate the magnets on the soles of your boots," she casually suggested.

It took little over twenty minutes for him, with Cortana's assistance, to find the source of the anomaly: a black, cylinder shaped object. From then on, with a firm grasp on the mysterious item, it was a fairly simply matter of pulling himself back to the Dawn. Cortana helped him occasionally with the slight readjustment of his trajectory by means of venting a little of his suit's atmosphere. As he pulled himself back, he was struck with a sense of deja-vu: it was almost exactly how he had rescued Linda's cryopod from space after the events of the first Halo. With nothing more to do other than to pull himself inside, his mind wandered. What happened to Linda, or the other SPARTAN-IIs for that matter? The last he had seen of them was arrival on Earth after destroying the Unyielding Hierophant. Back when defeat seemed inevitable, and victory unthinkable, impossible.

"This seems familiar to the time when you rescued Spartan-058, doesn't it?" Cortana interrupted his thoughts.

"Yeah," he answered.

"Hard to believe we've won," she continued her musing. "You know, I calculated the odds that we'd win this war after Reach fell.

"Minimal?" the Chief guessed.

"Dismal, even," Cortana grinned. "But to be fair, I suppose I didn't factor in the fact that the Covenant would split up and engage in civil war with each other…or your probability defying good luck."

"We still haven't won, have we? What about the rest of the Covenant?"

"There's still a few fleets of Loyalists still around, and we haven't made any offensive into Covenant territory either," Cortana confirmed. "As well as what's left of Truth's fleet. But we've destroyed their leadership, and now the Loyalists will probably be affected by internal power plays as all parties scramble to take the position as the leaders of the Covenant. They will fight for it as well," she added, almost as an afterthought.

"But we've done enough to consider it as a victory," the Chief said.

"Technically Chief, the human race has won: we haven't, because we're still drifting here, in the middle of nowhere," Cortana corrected. "But then, maybe that's why you're our greatest soldier: you don't think of yourself, only about what you need to achieve."

The Chief didn't reply. Matter of fact, he didn't know how to reply to that one.

"But right now Chie—John, don't think about the human race as a whole. Think about yourself for once, and how you and I are going to get out of here," Cortana suggested.

Once back inside the frigate or what remained of it at least, the Chief settled the object down, and sat down on the floor.

"Strange…I think it's of Forerunner origin," Cortana mused as the Chief looked over it. "If my databanks are correct, then this is similar to the Deep-Space Artefact found by the Apocalypso."

The Master Chief had no idea where the impulse to somewhat awkwardly touch a few of the symbols on the thing came from even as Cortana rambled off facts about the artefact. It felt natural, it felt right. Just like those icons on the first Halo.

But what he did know was that by touching some kind of symbol on it, he had activated the thing.

"Chief, I'm getting extremely strange readings coming from it," Cortana warned, sounding very alarmed. "What did you touch?"

"Never mind that! What's it doing?" he demanded.

"I have no clue! We've never documented anything like this before! The other one that we found, it—…"

She never got to finish that sentence, for the world around them became a blinding white flash.

And when the light disappeared, the easiest way of telling that something had gone wrong was that the Master Chief, and Cortana, had completely disappeared.