Standard disclaimer: I don't own RWBY or it's characters, I don't own Halo or it's characters. My permutation of Noble Six is my idea but I ain't making dough off it, so lay off Microsoft.

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A leaping dodge to the right was followed by the hiss of ionized air as Spartan B312, Noble Six, was nearly bisected straight down the middle. Even as he lobbed a Plasma Grenade at the bloodthirsty gold armored Elite Zealot, sticking his left arm, Six was only half paying attention to what was happening. He was feeling so... empty.

The Zealot exploded in a showy flash of light blue energy, his roasted jiblets raining softly upon the dirt of a world condemned. Except for that leg, it kinda made a SPLAT sound when it landed.

Backing up while unslinging his M319 Individual Grenade Launcher before pivoting on his left foot to bring the boomstick to bare on two red clad Elite Captains who were taking cover behind some portion of a mostly collapsed concrete security station, he popped the 40mm projectile in their direction just as one was ducking back down beneath the collapsed wall. As Six moved sidelong and away from the two hiding contacts, all he could see were their faces. Not the blue bloods' mugs, no. The faces of each of his Team members. Losing them, it was just like...

Both of the red armored aliens leaned up, one prepping a plasma grenade while the other attempting to take Six's head off with rather accurate shots from a Carbine. Several of the green projectiles hit their mark as the sole survivor Noble Team strafed, dropping his shield down to 50% and the red helmed warrior aiming to put more down range from over the debris wall the two were hunkered behind before said cover exploded from the detonation of the planted 40mm, Six's finger having just released the trigger as he turned away from the scattered remains. Dying without really getting a chance to personally avenge his lost Team. It really was, just like...

Six was making his way, subconsciously, to the lure of extensive cover - what could be seen as an oasis in this hell of constant engagements of ever more aggressive and numerous Covenant forces - a mostly intact fortified bunker at the end of the shipyard, some forty feet off. He was making good time, even as two more Elites, wearing the cobalt blue of the rookies of their kind, came from behind the wreck of a recently ruined Warthog; blood staining the blue squid head to the left's hooves and the body of a marine, her head totally flattened and unrecognizable. Seeing the dead woman, bloodied beyond belief, he was forced to remember. Remember his first failing.

Bloody hooves suddenly found he had a little blue sprite who wanted to give his ugly face a hug. Bloody hooves must have made his fellow blue armored buddy weep in jealousy, because he took off running. But that's okay; Six was feeling generous and donated another sprite for the cause. It, well 'she' stuck to his back and burned with the fires of friendship. The love between pixies and space squids was consummated in a twin flash of sky blue explosions, sending their miserable souls to the great ikayaki stand in the sky.

He was just about ten feet away from the small three story complex by that point, just a chewed up road before him and some barely standing and fully collapsed structures in his immediate vicinity.

If there was no way off this rock, then he was going to go down fighting. And if he was going to go down fighting, he was going to take as many of those damn aliens with him. The armored heavy door of what he designated as his soon to be tomb was slightly ajar, the side opposite the hinges bearing a smearing of red blood.

Red blood runs in rivulets down the doorframe. Why is she smiling?.. Why-

A cacophony of garbled roars, followed by the thundering CLANK of heavy metal falling, one after the next, each with the force to drive small cracks into the asphalt; Six, obviously, hearing them before he sees them. He breaks to the right, putting a devastated Scorpion tank in his path as the footfalls grow nearer; one slowing to a lumbering advance, the sound of its weighty false limbs scraping against the blacktop while the other lumbers on - either ignorant of its partner slowing or impatient to crush its enemy.

The charging Hunter roars again as it bares down on twisted wreck of the human heavy vehicle. The stupid insect thinks it can hide. It will be flattened. It will be-

BOOM!

The implanted 40mm and the Fragmentation Grenade do their work in tandem after being laid at the nexus of the tracks of the wartorn Scorpion; the first explosion lifting it up slighty even as the second causes it to slide forward slightly.

-smashed, the Hunter is knocked back, stunned and enraged, its auditory senses ringing from being so close to the epicenter of two explosions, deafening it to the warning cries of its bondmate; it hefts its Heavy Shield high to bring it down on the intrusive burning scrap to smash it down and out of the way only to collapse in halves, cut in half as its torso is utterly cored.

As the Hunter saw red and was blindsided by several tons of multimillion dollar military refuse and tried to bat it aside, it opened up its guard on its soft orange midsection; an opening Six capitalized on. With three successive rounds fired from his M392 Designated Marksman Rifle, each impacting the meaty conglomeration of writhing orange worms of its center, splattering their ichor all over the road behind it as well as some of its own armor.

Its bondmate bellowed in a mixture of sorrow and fury, its Fuel Rod Cannon charging an angry green as it marked Noble Six for death. Well, deathier death, because it was going to try to kill Six anyway. Six was already throwing another Frag at the feet of the weaponized worm colony while on the run, cutting a diagonal advance between the Hunter and a dilapidated hangar. The hulking armored hive in turn unleashed a stream of green energized vengeance and the wall just behind Six was blown out and melted, bringing the rest of what used to be a vehicle hangar down and kicking up a cloud of dust.

Oh, and the Frag exploded, but that only made the Hunter more pissed off. Still warbling in its agonized war cry, it charged forward to where it last saw the black armored human, its loping steps thudding as it charged up its Fuel Rod Cannon again, even without a target in sight before lobbing an irradiated missile at where that insect had to be hiding.

Only to come under fire from behind. The Hunter swung around as quickly as it could, lowering its shield across it's vulnerable belly but not without taking one round to the outside of its midsection; it growled in anger and pain as it charged up its Fuel Rod Cannon again, before pouring a beam of green death in the direction it sensed the sound of gunfire originating from. All was silent, save for the scratching of the slowly advancing Hunter's feet on the asphalt. It impatiently moved past its fallen bondmate's corpse, then it sensed sound from off to its left - a single TAP - and the Hunter angled its already charging Cannon in that direction and fired.

And then it was shot twice more in the back, falling 'face' flat, dead.

Six sat up from where he had been laying prone, flush against the first dead Hunter. Stirring up the second's anger with the Frag Grenade and remaining mobile while wearing it down had been his original plan; the hangar collapsing was pure luck and provided a smokescreen to further obfuscate and frustrate his aggressor. The Spartan circled around the big red blob on his motion tracker of the remaining worm factory and its deceased hivemate, he stopped when the fallen was between himself and the still living alien. He fired off a shot from his DMR and then tensed, waiting for the return fire to come; Hunters have a tendency to aim slightly above center mass, and when it fired its Fuel Rod Cannon, he went prone and crawled underneath the radiant lance, right on up to the fallen Hunter's body. The rest was waiting for the lumbering artillery piece to get just close enough. Well, and tossing that pebble.

In any case, with the action dying down again and not commanding his immediate attention, Spartan B312 made his way back toward the building he had first identified as his last stand.

If he could not continue to bring slaughter to the Covenant beyond Reach, then he would make sure as many died with him before the very world itself exhaled its last sigh.

In the building before him, he would construct a monument for the fallen out of the dead of his hated enemies.

Their flesh his bricks; their blood his mortar.

He would honor those he was too weak to protect in the distant past and not fast enough to protect in the recent present.

He-

WAS then smashed straight through the doorway from behind, his instincts kicking in only in time enough for himself not to be impaled on the white blue blade of an Energy Sword, it instead sinking into the floor beside him, but coming close enough to cut his shields down to nothing.

Blood pounded in Six's ears as a Gold armored Zealot held him down, a grip on Six's throat as he pulled the sword out of the pierced floor, ready to not miss a second time as he pulled his arm back so the blade tips could begin to radiate their heat against the Spartan's chestplate.

But that gave Six just enough space for leverage as he drew his legs up, bending at the hips lashing out, mule kicking the Sanghelli off him and into just the side of the bloodied metal doorframe. Six forced himself NOT to look at the door before quickly rolling to the left, his right hand reaching across from him where his DMR lay.

The Elite recovered from his winding and roared in an alien tongue, charging the fallen human with the Energy blade crackling against the dust strewn air. The first shot caught the Elite in the left knee and as he caught his stumble - to resume his charge - the human was now in a crouch and firing another shot at the same leg except lower, causing his leg to sweep back from the force. The third and fourth shot followed the second's trajectory, knocking the Elite's leg out from under him and causing him to fall in an almost push-up position. The Elite lifted his head as he began to push himself to his feet, looking up at the contemptuous heretical heathen that dare humiliate him so, only to see nothing before-

Six landed on the gold Sanghelli, bringing down the butt of his DMR on the back of the Elite's head with a wet CRACK. One less Zealot.

His shields had just begun recharging as the Spartan was in the process of shouldering his DMR with one hand while reaching down to scoop up the Energy Sword with the other when he saw a blur of brown out of the corner of his eye. His hand darted quickly, grabbing the hilt of the blade and tried to activate it just in time to bring it up between him and a Brown armored elite. The sound of Energy Swords crossing reverberated in the otherwise empty room, the impact pushing Six back slightly but he kept from stumbling. Looking past the locked blades...

He saw... HIM. That BASTARD. The one who killed Kat!

Six saw red. Literally and figuratively. Figuratively? Because he was consumed with rage and the oppurtunity for vengence.

Literally? Because the sword sizzling and crackling against his was, well, red. A vibrant, pulsating red energy that was nearly white at the blade tips while motes of flowing and dispersing black emanated near the hilt, which in itself was black with dark grey on its handle - but what does that matter?!

The BASTARD! He's here!

Six grit his teeth as his adrenaline kicked into overdrive, his MJOLNIR Powered Armor sympathizing and augmenting his rage fuelled chemical cocktail infused muscles into breaking the sword lock and nearly cleaving the damn Field Marshal Elite in half.

The brown Bastard stepped. STEPPED. To the right, parrying his blow past him before laughing, LAUGHING, and bringing up one of his funky alien knees into Six's gut, driving him back several steps and causing his shields to flare warningly, before the monster lunged forward, aiming to cleave Six's sword arm off at the shoulder.

The response was simple; Six lunged forward as well, even though his footing wasn't as sure, and they once more locked blades. This time, the Spartan had a surprise. Six brought his free hand up in a fist to strike at the Elite's ugly face. It was, predictably, intercepted with his forearm and gauntlet. However, if one could look past the visor of Noble Six at that moment, they would see a grin with too many teeth.

Six disengaged the blade lock, leaping back as the Elite was now becoming acquainted with Six's present; a palmed Plasma Grenade to the Elite's arm. The alien bastard roared in his bastardly alien tongue, like a bastard. And then did something Six didn't expect. Six blinked as the brown armored Sanghelli took his sword and cleaved his own arm off, it dropped to the floor, or would have, but the Elite pulled another 'what the fuck' by kicking his arm at Six.

Six dove back into the corridor to escape the explosion - which he did - only to be tackled by 400 pounds of pissed off Field Marshal, red Energy Sword raised high for slicing or stabbing, slamming the Spartan back first into the armored doors of an elevator shaft. The Elite snarled, swiping at Six's head, which Six only barely ducked; though, it did carve straight through his shield bubble, as well as the doors behind him, leaving him with only 5% energy remaining. The brown armored Sanghelli shoulder checked him into the now compromised door of the elevator and it gave, as did Six's shield.

As the Elite and Six fell down the shaft, Six engaged his Armor Lock, the whisps of blue energy swirling around him as he plummeted. The Elite had a different plan, digging his sword into the side of the elevator shaft, while trying to to slow down his descent by grinding his boot clad hooves into the wall. The Sanghelli had more success carving up alot of the supports for the reinforcement beams on the inside of the shaft on the way down than he did actually slowing himself.

Needless to say, one tactic worked better than the other. They landed at roughly the same time. The Elite, surprisingly, landed in a crouch that wasn't accompanied by the sound of shattering limbs, only the thud of boots on concrete and the whining cry of an overshield stressed to its limits.

Then Six landed in Armor Lock mode, completely unharmed. The Elite began rising to his feet, having lost an arm but none of his bluster, roaring at the Spartan only to be cut off by the Spartan RELEASING the Armor Lock, which blasted a sizable EMP shockwave off his armored form, into the Elite and up the already stressed elevator shaft.

The effect on the brown BASTARD was immediate. He was blasted through the reinforced doors of the shaft's lowest floor, into and through a room of some sort whose biggest draw was some horizontally large window, and having his back pressed into it.

The effect on the elevator shaft was just a bit after the alien squid head was making snow angels on the vertical screen of shaped silica. With but a gasp, the shaft collapsed in on itself, with Six just ahead of the raining mountain of debris. Six, however, was not running because of the issue above and behind.

No, Six was running at the BASTARD dead ahead. Six cleared the small room without taking in any of the details, shoulder ramming the still recovering brown Elite through the wide spanning glass, sending him down one last floor into some... lab or something. Six wasn't paying attention to that at this point. He idly noticed his DMR which was pushed free of the lift shaft due to expulsion of air pressure. No, there was only one thing on his mind.

With roar of his own, Six leaped through the broken window and aimed his fall like some human shaped missle, feet first, for the Elite's back. The Elite heard Noble Six's battlecry and performed a combination of rolling and jumping that only a Sanghelli could do what with their alien bastard legs. The Spartan tucked slightly instead of landing full on his booted feet, as he could already see the Elite - who had somehow maintained a grip on his sword's hilt - move out of the way. As Six landed in a roll, he looked back over his right shoulder as he reached up with his right hand to his grasp his Combat Knife mounted on his LEFT shoulder.

The Elite had taken the hilt of his Energy Sword and replaced it on some... some sort of ornate piece of armor Six hadn't bothered to pay attention to before on his thigh. There was a brief flicker and the Elite's shield rippled. Six wasn't going to sit around and see what the split chin was doing; he grasped his now drawn knife and once again, charged the brown BASTARD. The Sanghelli's eyes both widened and narrowed, the pupils becoming thin slits in his golden yellow eyes; he grasped at the hilt of the Energy Sword and detached it from it's thigh mooring and activated its bloody red blade.

Seeing he was potentially running to his death, Noble Six spun the knife in hand so it's blade was in his grip, then threw it at the Elite. The squid head did manage to dodge the impromptu projectile, but he did not dodge the bigger impromptu projectile. Too quick for the alien warrior to raise his sword, Six was in his face, fist having been already cocked back before surging forward with the might of a runaway freight train. The Elite tried to roll with the blow and was rewarded by his head not being blasted off his neck and painted on the walls behind him like the rebirth of Van Gogh as a woman having an explosive blue period. No, instead he was rocked off his feet slightly and staggered back. The right side of his face - the mandibles - crunched in and almost down his throat like a gnarled old man's fingers with arthritis.

The alien bastard half grunted, half coughed as he tried stabilize his stance, to bring the Sword to bear in the blinding pain of both a cauterized missing appendage and a busted squid mouth, but Six had him right where he wanted him. The Spartan locked his left arm around the Elites remaining arm so that it was between his bicep and his body - the Sword held uselessly behind Six. Noble Six then snaked his forearm around the inside of the Elite's arm and clamped his gauntleted hand around the Elite's bicep.

And then he engaged Armor Lock again.

The armor, going into a pre-programmed protective stance, wrenched and twisted the now howling Sanghelli's arm like a macabre pretzel with blueberry filling, in order to assume the Lock position of the Spartan's fist touching the floor. The limb was barely hanging on by this point.

And then Six DISengaged Armor Lock.

While still holding the Elite's ruined limb, the EMP surge issued forth once more, catapulting the now armless brown bastard into the wall around ten feet behind him. As the Elite was was crumpling into the white tiled wall behind him, Six turned around, found the Elite's custom energy sword hilt, turned BACK around to face the brown BASTARD, flicked the sword back on and LUNGED at him.

The sound of searing flesh and grunt of pain were the last two sounds the unfortunate Sanghelli heard as he was ended by his own blade.

Noble Six was breathing heavily for a moment or two before settling back into his usual, efficient calm. His rage buried back down deep, deep within where its only company was that which birthed and nurtured it.

The Spartan, now thinking clearly again began to take a look around just where he had ended up. It was, as he had briefly mused earlier, some sort of lab. It's purpose wasn't entirely clear yet. The room he was in was oblong in shape and when he momentarily observed it from the other side of the now shattered window, it somewhat resembled the capital letter D, except with the flat side being near the proper entrance to the room - just below the upper observation area - and the curved portion beyond it.

In the center of the room were three concentric circular platforms, each on top of the other, each raised slightly higher than the last and also each slightly smaller in diameter. They formed stairs leading up to a dais. The bottom most of the steps had numerous cables running out of them, along the floor and into a bank of terminals that were facing the entrance to the room. In the center of the dais was some sort of pod.

Back along the curved wall were nine more pods housed in recesses in the walls there, as well as one recess that was empty. Both the pods and the far wall did not look like they bore either human nor Covenant construction. They were as angular as they were smooth and the one on the raised dais had holographic glyphs floating along its surface at the very bottom - in a ring - and at the very top - also in a ring.

Before Six could make his inspection of the monitors, he heard a clatter from behind him, where the Field Marshal's corpse was. He flicked the red Energy Sword on and turned around. It was a false alarm; the corpse was right where it'd been left. Six was about to tear his eyes away before they alighted on the strange and ornate device, once on the Elite's outer right thigh, now on the floor before the body. Six made his way over to the device and bent into a crouch looking more closely at it, picking it up as he did so. When he did, he could feel a slight magnetic attraction to it and the gauntlet of the hand he was holding it in. Raising a brow he lowered the strange piece down to his own right thigh and let go.

It clamped and locked in place onto his MJOLNIR's right thigh piece. He was about to attempt to remove it when a bit of scrawling code warbled onto his HUD, followed by it clearing and a notification that an unkown component had tapped into the MJOLNIR's power grid.

This made Noble Six want to remove it even more before he remembered what that brown bas- that Elite was trying to do with it. Having put down the sword hilt of the red Energy Sword, he then picked it up and after a moment of internal debate, placed it onto the device. The sword, which was at 60% power, began rapidly recharging; at the same time, his shield drained rapidly at the same rate to 80%. Once the sword was fully replenished, his own shield system recharged right back up to full.

Raising a brow, again, he decided he would be keeping this. Well, for however long it mattered seeing as Reach was being glassed. He then went back to looking back about the room.

The Spartan idly mused that even though he had Armor Locked on this floor twice, all of the electronics seemed to be functioning normally.

He made his way around the bank of terminals the dais seemed to be linked with and noted he may have been a bit hasty in thinking the Armor Lock hadn't had any affect; the computers were running in a sort of safemode that bypassed a need for a login and such. From what he can bring up on the monitors, the strange Pods, according to the research notes compiled on their study, seem to be some sort of escape or storage pods designed by a race that may have some connection to the Covenant - though it was only speculation. The researchers had also apparently gleaned the Pods operated by the use of a micro Slipspace Generator, as they were each emitting small scale Slipspace fields though not keyed up for use - the central Pod being the exception and generating the most by far. Perhaps ready for use?

In any case, that these constructs were generating Slipspace fields and had the potential to jump explained away why the human tech down here was EMP shielded; jumps released a backlash of EMP in their wake, so it was forward thinking. That the terminals had ended up in safemode, the Spartan could only guess at. In the end, the 'why' wasn't important.

Spartan B312 walked over to the dais and began to ascend the stairs before a wave of light headedness began to wash over him. Deciding against it for now, he turned back and looked over the information on the terminal bank again.

Now, the Spartan was no expert on Slipspace theory, but he attended the mandatory physics classes just like all the other Spartan IIIs back in his academy days; in other words, he knew the basics; objects in Slipspace cannot interact with anything in normal space. Thus the ceiling and nearly 50 feet of rock above might as well not even be there, which in Six's mind, meant these Pods were possibly his ticket off the planet.

His eyes widened slightly; a way off means a way to keep fighting. Of making up for his failings.

His decision was made.

Before that though, he headed out the lab's door, up the stairs to the observation deck he smashed the now deceased elite through and in front of the elevator shaft they'd crashed down.

He looked along the small amount of debris scattered about the floor before finding what he sought; his DMR. Swapping out a new fresh clip, Noble Six left the observation deck and headed back down into the lab, retrieving his Combat Knife from where it imbedded into the wall near the former Field Marshal before heading over and stopping just before the steps onto the raised dais and the Pod upon it. Affixing the DMR to his back next to his M319 IGL, he took one brief moment to consider what he was about to do.

He had little idea how this was going to play out; the science team researching the Pods had stopped just short of the phase of actually testing them out with live subjects. Sure, they were large enough to hold something slightly larger than a human of above average height, but there was no guarantee that it was meant to hold organic matter. When he had gotten close to it earlier, it had made him dizzy which was likely the fault of the Slipspace field; he could be sequestered inside that Pod for untold years; what sort of effect would prolonged exposure to that have?

Furthermore, if the Pod itself wasn't designed to actually go anywhere but just store things in a pocket of Slipspace wherever the shell of the Pod was, taking this chance would be pointless as the Pod would be destroyed when the eventual glassing extended to this facility - fifty sim odd feet of rock wouldn't protect against the concentrated streams of high temperature plasma fired from Covie cruisers.

And say it does function as an escape pod and sends him off somewhere, would he even be able to be recovered where he was sent or would he just be adrift for centuries in Slipspace until the Pod's power failed and he could do no more than wait for his death in the void of space due to asphyxiation or hypothermia? All of these thoughts flew by in less time than it would take an average human to blink.

In the end, Six decided, it was the best option for possible survival available; he had no way to safely clear the a way through the debris cluttering the elevator shaft, nor did he have the time to try or even search for another way out - Reach was being glassed; the clock was ticking.

Affirming his decision, the Spartan walked up the dais and ignored the slow onset of light headedness due to his proximity to the Pod.

Six merely raised a brow as the alien metal of the Pod split before him, as if sensing his intent; a portion of it sliding to the left and revealing an entrance for him. Stepping through and noting the dizziness was rapidly receding, he looked around the inside of the Pod for some way to get it to do whatever it was supposed to do. Turning until he faced the hatch he came through, he found a static holographic panel along the inner wall with a specific glyph that... inexplicably felt that it was what he needed to interact with. Placing his left palm onto it, the inside of the Pod came to life - unknowable glyphs began rotating in circular bands that encompassed him completely, as many clockwise as there were counter clockwise.

Each band fluctuating from vibrant greens to blues to purples to reds then yellows and greens again growing brighter and brighter while revolving faster and faster still, until the entirety of the inside of the Pod was a pure yet gentle white. During this, but unseen by Six due to the impromptu lightshow, the hatch that opened initially, noiselessly slid shut making the Pod seem like an impenetrable cylinder once more.


Just as the Slipspace field began to spin up within the Pod Six activated, the underground facility was breached from above and immolated by an orbiting Covenant Cruiser's ventral plasma cannons. This specific ship had been tasked with this sector of the hated humans' planet, though if everything proceded according to plan, the location where the subterranean facility had lain wouldn't have met with holy light for another half hour yet.

Wouldn't, that is, if the connection to the Covenant battlenet that the Field Marshal was tapped into hadn't been severed in a way that could only happen in the event of his death. The shipmaster of the Cruiser who believed he smote the human scum that slew the Field Marshal wouldn't let the indignity of a lowly vermin killing the Field Marshal go unanswered.

Jets of white hot plasma burning at 3,000 degrees Celsius would have been how Six met his end if he had been just a fraction of a second too late activating the Pod. Activating the Pod any earlier and the The Spartan would have met his end in a similar manner as one he'd considered - except, he wouldn't have outlived the systems failing in the Pod; no, he would have expired while adrift in Slipspace, the oxygen in his MJOLNIR Power Armor not meant to be recycled on the scale of years without outside means of breathable atmosphere.

The Pods themselves, unbeknownst to both the scientists who'd begun to study them and Six alike, were unlike the cryogenic variety the UNSC fielded; they did not place their cargo into stasis but merely transported them away to wherever they were programmed to go; a design flaw for this particular variant.

The ions of the plasma that spelled the lab's doom interacted with the Slipspace field as it folded on the cusp of transport in an unusual and, obviously, unintended way. The stream of white death supercharged and harmonized with the rift the Slipspace Engine used for its jump vector, causing the Pod to fold space in just such a way that it folded right out of the universe.


XX

And, that's the first chapter. In case, you know, you can't read. :P

EDIT: I realize I should have corrected this earlier, but hindsight is 20/20 and all that; at the time of writing this chapter, I hadn't watched a single episode of RWBY, merely pulling knowledge from the Wiki and other fan fictions; now, however, that isn't the case. I am all caught up to the end of Season 4 now.

So, this fic is no longer roughly a blind man stabbing in the dark.