I hate fire thought Doymon. On reach a demon tried to kill me with a flame thrower, whenever I disappoint a brute they put me on a spit and threaten me, my family was killed in a fire storm on my home planet and now the corridors are ablaze.
Alarms are going off left and right. Finally Oykit shut them of and told us what happened. "A huge pulse of energy blasted our slip space drive off its mounting and destroyed 95% of all systems" he yelped.
"How many people are left on board?" I yelled.
"Us and two elite zealot's" he replied.
"Us" meant 5 grunts (we are the night watch in communications)
"Uh oh" yelped Doyp
"Oh no more FIRE right?" I shot at him.
No there's only one working escape pod and those zealots are headed there. If we beat them there we might be able to escape. When we get there the two zealots were fighting over who got the escape pod. We all took out our plasma pistols, over charged them and opened fire because we knew we wouldn't get the pod if any of them were alive. There shields flared and failed.
They were about to attack us when a support Colom landed on them. The last thing one of them said was,
"dam covenant piece of trash"
"I blame the demons"
the other roared
We piled in to the pod and hit the launch switch, only then did we look out the window. We saw a halo ring, just like the one the prophets told us about in all of its glory.
Once we landed, we took a head count, in all the action we grunts can get confused and forget things. There was me, Doymon a forerunner to grunt translator, a technician called Yoku, coms operator Oykit and two security grunts Luroot and Kipipen. We striped the pod of anything useful and then started to look for shelter and found a small cave. When we looked through our stuff we made a list of what we had, 7 plasma pistols and 3 needlers, 2 short range com units and 6 emergency shelter kits. After we took stock we decided that first of we needed a leader and second of that we needed to find out more about the ring. We decided that we would vote in a leader. The vote ended like all grunt votes do, with everyone voting for themselves.
We were about to wrestle for the right to lead when a small round glowing ball with a big yellow eye (it looked like the oracle the legends told us about) moved out from behind a rock. It said "hello, my name is 343 guilty spark, nah I'm just kidding I hate that pompous jerk, my real name is 424 crazy spook, yeah, that's my real name. The forerunners can be real jerks, nah there fine. They told me that that was the name of a famous forerunner historian. They told me that and everything! They made up his whole life as a joke. I figured it out eventually. But by then they all died of some stupid plague, do I sound long winded to you? Some people say I'm long winded, how are you?" we all sat there stunned, in silence for a few minutes before Kipipen jumped to his knees saying how he wishes to pas to the great beyond.
Then it was spook's turn to be stunned. After 1 minute he said "you know this thing destroys all in intelligent life in its blast radius to kill the flood, right" "oh" we all squeaked at once. "why do you need to destroy all intelligent life to stop a flood" said Yoku. "Not a flood, the flood" "what a big flood that happens once or twice a year. So what you can float can't you?" " no the flood is a parasitic life form that can only affect intelligent life, if you remove the food it will starve, at least thats what they thought" "like when we don't disappoint a brute enough and he has no one to eat" "exactly"
After that we went to sleep confused about what parasitic means.