Prologue

06:15 hours, September 18th, 2552 (Military Calender)/ Epsilon Eridani System, Planet Tribute, city of Bahl'al

Sergeant Major Jacob Reynolds' eyelids twitched as he came back to consciousness. He half opened his eyes, blinked, and looked around. The building he was in had nearly collapsed from the impact, with most of the building above him incinerated and the wall to his left was half destroyed and the rebars in what was left of the ceiling above him were hanging down. He had been knocked flat onto his backside from the shock wave.

He looked at his left arm... well, the stub of which was left of it. The energy sword had cut his arm off a few inches above his elbow. A plasma burn is an incredibly painful wound, a plasma bolt through your gut, which to his displeasure, he had, is twice as painful, having your arm chopped of with a plasma sword and you've got one of the most painful wounds you could ever have. And the one thing Jacob had found out was that plasma would not stop burning, it just kept on burning and without treatment or if the soldier started panicking, they could easily pass out from the pain or die of shock.

Jacob had to train himself to keep calm under stressful situations and when he was hit as well. Due to this, soldiers had given him the nickname "Ice man", but his most used nickname was "Devil Dog", because of the way he fought his battles, like a dog outta Hell.

After a few moments he tried to move. Once he tried a wave of pain spread through his body, starting at his gut. He gasped heavily, his eyes went wide and he reached his right hand up to his gut, but felt something sticking out. After a moment, he slowly looked down and saw a large rebar... Sticking through his back and out of his gut.

The shock wave from the impact must've knocked a rebar loose and also knocked him in it. Feeling bold ,and possibly a little Rambo, he tried to move forward to try and get himself free of the rebar. The pain was immense, he felt like his insides were on fire and he felt the warmth of his blood on his hands. He screamed in agony and stopped trying to move forward.

He hung his head and began to sob. He wasn't crying from the pain, he had gotten used to it after the hell he had gone through over the past 7 years. But that was physical pain, a pain much easier to deal with than the pain of what he had done. His whole battalion, eleven hundred men, wiped out from a single explosion and, worst yet, he had ordered it.

Eleven hundred men died, because he sent them, along with himself, to their deaths. And there would be no memorial for these soldiers, no tribute to their lives given, no memory to the bravery of their last stand against an unstoppable foe. But that was the life of the 82nd Ranger division, wasn't it? To never be remembered because, technically, you didn't even exist, and neither did the rest of the division. To be used by the UNSC as, in mild terms, an expendable asset. The division was kept classified because if people back home found out men were being used as, to put it bluntly, cannon-fodder, the repercussions to follow would be devastating to the already devastated government. And, because of it, no one would remember what this battle was like.

But Jacob didn't want to be remembered, he hadn't joined the UNSC for that, he wanted to do his part in the fight against the Covenant. He never asked to be a leader, nor had he asked to be a part of this unit, who's sole creation was to fight one force and one force only, but he had no choice. But he wanted his men remembered, because as his dad had said before, "Any man who gives his life for this colony deserves to be remembered".

This was, by far, one of the best divisions in the entire UNSC, and he had the honor of leading these men through some of the toughest engagements of the human-covenant war.

But now, these men, every last one of them, were now gone...and it was all because of him.

He stopped sobbing when he heard a sort of screech... one he had come to recognize in his combat experience... as well as his nightmares.

The screech was followed by the sound of something stumbling out side the door of the building. Jacob looked around for a weapon, an assault rifle, pistol, knife, anything to help fight. But he couldn't find anything, he was defenseless. There would be no one to help him, there would be no rescue for him, all he could do was sit and pray that God could forgive him of all wrong he did, 'cause Jacob sure couldn't forgive himself.

The source of the screech slowly peeked around the corner of the door. It looked like the cross between a raptor and a vulture, and acted just as nasty. Once it saw that Jake was un-armed, it's face twisted into, what Jake thought, an evil grin.

The skirmisher, a subspecies of the covenant jackal, stepped out of cover and started limping slowly towards him, holding a Plasma pistol in it's hands. It stopped just in front of him, and aimed the pistol at his head.

The pistols' end started to glow with a green aura and Jacob knew what it was going to do. Execution style kill, typical for the covenant once they found any civilian or un armed soldier, it actually surprised Reynolds how blood thirsty these alien buggers were and how intent they were to destroying all humans... And he knew he had ticked this particular covey off, he'd be pretty ticked of too if his leader was killed in such a fashion. Jacob had, narrowly, which was an understatement, escaped this kind of situation multiple times before.

But this time Jacob knew that there was no way out of this one, he knew that after all of this time of fighting, all of this time of cheating death of his rightful victory... Death would have his victory.

There was no doubt in Jacob's mind... He was going to die.