Chapter 1: Against his Code
(Ishtar Sink, Venus)
"There's too many of them!" the guardian stated running from the Vex swarm.
"We can come back later when we've got the reinforcements, Kep", his ghost told him.
"Don't tell be twice!" he said using blink to jump up to the cliff side, "Call in the sparrow!" The ghost strained physically before a loud BOOM resounded.
"The link!" the ghost stated, "They destroyed the ground link! We can't summon it!"
"Forget the sparrow then! It'll be nothing but scrap metal the next time we see it, if we ever do! Send in the ship!"
"Duck!" the ghost yelled as Benjamin Keplar slid under the swinging fist of a Minotaur. He jumped back to his feet and ran around a corner into an abandoned building.
"Whoa!" he yelped as he ran into a Goblin. Literally, they crashed into each other and both went down. Keplar jumped back to his feet with his hand cannon firing. The unarmed Goblin rolled back onto its shoulders and its waist spun around in a three-sixty as he skillfully got back onto its feet while dodging the shot at the same time.
"What the heck?" the guardian muttered to himself as he witnessed the grace that should not exist in a lowly Goblin, or any Vex for that matter. Then again, this didn't exactly look like your average Goblin. Its bronze colored plating was covered in black, streaking scorch marks, and had a large portion of its crest blown away. And this Goblin actually had shining metal plating over its midsection. Despite the fact that Vex minds were smart, they never bothered to guard the midsection of the foot soldiers, their greatest weak point. But this Goblin actually acknowledged its own weakness and fortified it!
It was possible that this Vex may have undergone countless battles and survived where its compatriots died, and learned from those experiences.
It clicked and whirred before struggling to say, "Alert! Defensive action required!"
Keplar had seen enough. He whipped out his knife and dove for the strange Vex. But the cyborg flipped onto its hands and used a void pulse to vault successfully over the Hunter. But something clattered to the floor. Keplar looked to see a spiky ball form on the ground in between himself and the Goblin.
"A Ghost!" Keplar's mechanical friend stated, "It's still in ember state!"
The Vex backed up a step in surprise as he appeared to hear Keplar's Ghost. The grounded ghost detected the one with Keplar and slowly began to twitch, in an attempt to reactivate.
"Kep! Grab that Ghost! Maybe it can tell us about this thing!" Keplar's Ghost ordered.
As soon as Keplar made his move, the Vex strained and warped over to the hibernating ghost and picked it up. Keplar pulled out his knife and stabbed the Goblin. But the Vex ducked down, making the blade take off another portion of the crest on its head. The Vex was holding the Ghost in both hands, protecting it. The Goblin grabbed the knife and stabbed it into the ground before leaping backwards to the corner of the room. It made no further act of aggression.
"Fascinating!" Keplar's Ghost appeared. The Vex spotted the Ghost and carefully held the inactive one up as if comparing the two.
The Vex looked to Keplar, "Identify."
A long pause followed before the Guardian questioned, "Excuse me?"
"Identify yourselves", the Vex elaborated.
"Um...", Keplar said perplexed.
"Kep is a Guardian from Earth", his Ghost spoke up, eager to understand.
"Guardian. State primary function."
Keplar kept his hand on his gun in anticipation, "We...fight for the Traveler...to restore its Light. That Ghost in your hand is a fragment."
"Traveler?" the Vex appeared to scan the two Ghosts. "Conclusion: Ghosts and Guardians possess light. Affirmative?"
Keplar felt a little awkward in this situation and simply nodded nervously.
"Light equals...life...and.." The strange thing looked at the living Ghost, to the sleeping one, and finally at itself. "...no light."
All of a sudden that Vex stood up straight, fired a void pulse to blow a hole in the wall behind it, and tossed Keplar the sleeping ghost.
"Revive little light. Go. Sekrion approaches!" it commanded before it turned to the doorway on the far side of the room and warped through it to the lower valley.
"What was that about?" Keplar asked.
"I have a vague idea of what happened," the ghost thought out loud, "but we have to get out of here now!Sekrion is the Vex mind that controls all expansion through Vennus' crust! We're not ready to face it yet!" But as he said this the wall on one of the buildings was blasted down to reveal a giant Vex Hydra.
"Perfect timing!" Keplar said before they were taken into the jump ship and made it into orbit in seconds.
The young human hunter quickly removed the suit as his pain inhibitors finally deactivated and he went to check his wounded left arm.
"You're lucky that your Titan friend developed those nano machines or we'd both be dead now", his ghost, Drifter, scanned the wound.
"Diego didn't do all the work", Keplar looked out the window a the orbital view of the Ishtar Sink, "That little Goblin. He saved us from the mind!"
"Don't get too excited, Kep. What we just witnessed was a one in a billion event. We have to get back to the Speaker."
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The Guardians barely understood the workings of the Vex. It is true that all Vex are tied to one mind, they are not controlled by them directly. In having biological minds, the Vex can act on their own. Their relation to a Mind is something more of a telepathic monitoring system, through which Minds give orders to all foot soldiers. They in turn, follow by their own free will after years of mental conditioning.
But not even the Minds were perfect.
The Minds are capable of monitoring thousands, even a million units of foot soldiers. What the Minds kept secret was the fact that they can only monitor a few hundred thousand at once. Even then, the Minds have no access to a soldier's memory unless the soldier willingly shares it, and they always do. But a Mind could focus its mental power, and only then can it assume direct control over a hundred units. It was a fact that the Vex Minds kept secret, even from the foot soldiers.
All but one.
Glitch, as he called himself, knew this weak point, and even knew how to tell when his Mind, Sekrion, was trying to link with him. He had seen many fights and seen many of his own comrades perish. But he never let their deaths be in vain. He had discovered that the Minds rarely changed their battle plans, and that every single casualty had been caused in that line of order. So secretly he began to develop without the aid of the Minds. He learned from their mistakes and saw opportunities for improvement that the Minds never did.
But he also learned over the years that the Vex themselves never changed, despite having so many fixable flaws. It gave Glitch the sense that the Minds were holding back. Either that or they were too convinced that they were already a race of perfection.
It was then that Glitch began to put what he'd learned to new use. He began to experiment with pieces of his fallen compatriots to develop new upgrades. He developed a new endoskeleton to allow unrestricted movement. He improved his armor to the point where his power core was perfectly protected. The list went on. He made certain to do this whenever Sekrion wasn't monitoring.
He had developed the idea that he could become something more than what he was intentionally built for. He believed that not rising to one's fullest potential was simply a waste of precious life.
Then one day, a Guardian entered the area unprepared to face the Vex. He escaped, but he left behind an unusual spiky ball which had been damaged in the fight.
In all his life, the veteran Vex had never come across something like this. For once he was in a state of utter confusion. This spiky ball (what Keplar claimed to be a Ghost) emitted tiny amounts of an unknown energy.
Glitch puzzled over this for months on end. Every now and then the Ghost would stir with brief life and Glitch would monitor the sudden spikes in energy until the Ghost fully returned to ember state. He detected a life like his own, only this one was unprotected. Knowing his Mind, the rest of the Hezen Corrective would likely destroy this "inferior being" in an instant.
So Glitch carried his little light in a compartment in his new armor twenty-four seven to protect it.
Then along came Keplar. Glitch had never encountered a guardian up close before and he was surprised to find a life form that was actually not a machine, like the Fallen he fought on an almost daily basis. And this intelligent being communicated in a manner that was so complex, yet so casual. It was as though it was a higher level of language. Granted he had already learned the basics of guardian "code", but never on such a level as this.
But perhaps the most confusing part of all was the energy that he and his living Ghost carried. Glitch had never seen so much at once, and it was the same kind of power that was being emitted from his Little Light.
Light.
That's what it was all this time. The guardians and their Ghosts radiated this power. And he had determined, based on his studies, that Light was a form of sentience.
More than that, it was a level that the Vex didn't have. Heck, the Vex were trying to destroy this power! This drove the poor Goblin to his mental limits before he discovered it. But it all made sense now. The Vex ways weren't made for the Light, and the Minds knew it. If they couldn't get it themselves, they'd destroy it instead.
This stood against everything that Glitch had worked for.
But of course, his ways were different from the Minds. If a Ghost could possess Light, perhaps an open minded Vex could. Perhaps that was what made him different. He was unknowingly born for Light.
He had to run. But the only problem was that no foot soldier can simply escape the Mind they're tied to.
He growled mechanically before pounding his fist on the wall. A light flicker caught his attention. Just outside of the window, he spied a tree branch. A little silk sac was hanging from it. Not long ago, he had discovered a tiny race of insects (caterpillars as he would later learn). A few weeks before, he had seen the strange creature just hang from the branch and sew itself into a sac. He assumed that it was dead.
But right then, he watched the little sac move, twitch and crack before a creature with colorful wings shook itself dry and flew away with what he saw as untold grace.
The caterpillar never died. It simply shed its mortal coil that bound it to the tree it grew in. It swapped it for a new body that could fly to new horizons. Now he looked to himself.
Now he knew what he had to do.
(End of Chapter 1)
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GREETINGS EARTHLINGS! Beowulf the resident Novhakiin Novelborn is back with a brand new story!
I actually just finished the story mode for Destiny and so many ideas popped into my head. So I figured that i should write a fanfic for good measure. Lucky me, there are only 326 (now 327) Destiny fanfics on the site at the moment I posted this. Compared to my other stories' topics, this is nothing!
Seriously! I am shocked that there aren't more! I'm just glad that i'm not going to get bumped to the back of the list overnight by new updates or publications.
Anyway, I'm doing my research. So if i do wind up writing something that completely goes against the way that the Destiny universe runs, give me a heads up.
If you like what you see, favorite, follow, and review. Only if you want to of course.
Until next time, this is Beowulf and the OC Crew signing out!