Chapter 1: Things That Lurk

[July 23, 2552

2235 hours

Ichinabis forest

Planet Reach...]

The barrel of an MA5B poked through the tall, dense underbrush of the expansive forest. The rest of the weapon followed, and then a man stepped through and into a clearing, scanning the area for any hostiles. As an Insurrectionist, there was plenty trying to kill him.

"Clear," Jonesy eventually said.

The rest of his team emerged alongside him, weapons up.

"How much longer 'till we get there?" Butch, the heavy weapons guy, asked.

"Still a few klicks north," his CO replied, eyes darting from the trees' branches above to the ten feet tall walls of bushes surrounding them. He was expecting an ambush.

"So, what exactly is the plan?" Private Mark Andrews asked, the uncertainty he was feeling reflected in his voice.

His CO sighed. "What is it, Andrews? You've already been briefed, and reminded of our objective at least five times on our way here. Are you scared? Is that it?"

"Well, yeah," Mark admitted. "Aren't you?"

"No. Thanks to our shady friends, our identities are now those of troops of the UNSC, presumed dead, but classified as missing-in-action. They'll never find out who we really are. Not if we play our parts well."

"But that's not what I mean. I'm talking about," he took a quick glance at the underbrush ahead of him, "Zulu Team."

At that moment, everything seemed to stand still. The wind stopped blowing on leaves, the indigenous wildlife ceased its chatter, and their surroundings seemed a lot darker and foreboding.

Then Jonesy ended it all by laughing.

"Are you kidding me?" he said. "Zulu Team? The 'big, bad' group of freaks? You know they don't exist!"

"Shhh!" Private Andrews urged him.

"Really, that's what you're scared of? UNSC propaganda?" He snorted. "I can't believe you. Well, actually, I can, but this is just fucking ridiculous."

"Yeah," agreed a female voice from behind him. "That's too unreal."

They all turned in the direction of the unwelcome woman, only to see there was nothing there. At first glance, at least. The more they focused, the more visible the shimmer in the air was.

"I mean, a team of five highly trained, death-dealing monsters with the single purpose of acting as merciless agents of 'seriously fucking your shit up' without a leash?" With each second, the voice got closer to Jonesy, the shimmer took another step forward and became less of a reflection of light and more of a person. By the end of her sentence, the person was revealed to be a six foot tall figure encased in red-with-blue armor.

Somehow, Jonesy could tell she had a twisted grin behind her visor as she leaned over him.

"That's just fucking ridiculous."

All at once, the innies snapped out of their trance and fired at the hostile. She jumped into the air higher than any of them thought possible, easily making it over the surrounding trees and going invisible again. There came a rustling from just a few yards away as she landed.

Mark looked around, doing a full three-sixty on his heels. "She's still out there," he cried. "We need to get out of here. Get back to base!"

"For once, I'm inclined to agree with you, Private," his CO said, struggling to keep his cool. He pointed in the direction they'd come from. "Let's go! We've been found out. This mission is scrapped!" They were all too happy to oblige, running back into the underbrush to escape whatever horrors awaited deeper within the forest.

Their professionalism had fallen to pure survival instincts; the choice between fight or flight, but fight wasn't an option. Low-hanging branches and tall shrubs slapped at their armor and obstructed their view. Adrenaline ran through their veins, blood pounded in their ears, fatigue quickly settled in, but fear kept them going. The only one who dared to look back was Butch, who was willing to lay down suppressive fire. He spotted movement to his left. He tracked it.

The thought of stopping for breath crossed Mark's mind a few times, but he pushed it away every time, his fear encouraging him to go on. Then he noticed that they were a man short. A strangled cry came from somewhere behind him, giving him enough reason to stop and turn.

Butch seemed to have tripped and fallen forward, but was being held off the ground. By the way the flesh on his neck was being manipulated it was simple to deduce that he was being strangled by an invisible hand with a steel grip. Then some sort of cosmic force seemed to bend him so far back over something Mark was sure his spine had broken. The next few seconds were a blur.

Butch's eyes bulged as his windpipe was ripped put and presented in front of him, an agonized scream fought to escape his lungs. The wet, sticky clump of flesh plopped to the ground with a sickening squelch. A tray spurt of blood shot out of the hole in his neck, splashing onto the deadly figure that had mutilated the proud man and revealing some sort of visor, similar to the woman they'd encountered earlier. It let Butch fall to the ground, and looked directly at Pvt. Andrews.

Andrews had his magnum out and leveled without even having to think of it, and emptied his magazine in under four seconds; a frenzied attempt at saving his skin. Dirt was kicked up as the being slid to the side, evading the incoming rounds. Mark didn't even care that he had missed his target; at that point he was running again. The act he'd just witnessed renewed his adrenaline, and before he knew it he was running alongside Jonesy.

"Hey," he said to Mark, "where's Butch?" He got no reply, but from the look on the private's face, he could tell Butch wouldn't be seen again.

Before the feeling of losing a comrade could fully settle in, some movement out of the corner of his eye caught his attention. His assault rifle was up by the time their CO was knocked down by an unseen menace. His sidearm was out in an instant, and he yelled at his assaulter as he shot. The air in front of him flared a bright orange that covered a tall, burly figure. A figure that held a giant hammer over its head.

The weapon came down before anyone could react.

A final gunshot rang through the air before a giant blade split the innie leader's head in two, passing neatly through his open mouth. He went limp as a river of crimson shot out of his severed head and soaked the soil underneath.

Mark stayed frozen in fear, while Jonesy was running in some random direction. "Run!" he yelled. "Snap out of it and run!" Mark obliged.

They ran like a couple of bats out of hell, neither of them saying anything until they reached another clearing, this one being much smaller than the one they'd run away from. Jonesy paced back and forth while Mark looked at him with a thousand-yard stare. "That's it, then. We're screwed." He stopped pacing and looked at the private. "And you know what? You were right." He chuckled nervously. "You were absolutely right. Now we're dead. We're dead! We. Are. De-"

The crack of a sniper rifle interrupted the innie's descent into madness. Mark blinked, and suddenly Jonesy was missing his lower jaw, tongue hanging out with nothing to hold it in. All kinds of gore dribbled down his throat, before he fell into a pool of his own blood.

Mark sank to his knees, his face showing no emotion, his will broken, sanity destroyed, and courage depleted. The sound of grass crunching under heavy boots made him look up.

The same woman who had scared them off appeared out of thin air, followed by another armored super-soldier to Mark's left, one to his right, and two more behind him. The woman approached him, one hand on her visor, and the other reaching for the M45 on her back. "Heh, that was fun. All good things must come to an end, though. Oh, and don't worry about the whole 'agents-of-whatever,' whatever, thing." She pressed the muzzle of her shotgun to his forehead. "We're actually much, much worse."

Mark finally opened his mouth to scream and express his anguish, but he never got to.

He was silenced by a pull of the trigger.