Chapter Two: A New Beginning

A/N: Welcome back to Chapter 2 of Dawn of Valor: Lightning's Dawn! Will the Huntress survive? Read to find out!

I stumbled along, holding my right side as blood dripped from my left hand and limping from the piece of mangled and torn steel that was embedded in my left thigh. My crash had not been pleasant. I felt as if I'd been eaten alive, then mangled and clawed up, then spit back out to crawl away in terror from the very beast that had inflicted this pain. I fingered the safety on my sidearm, which was a classic keepsake from someone I knew. Looking at it now, I could tell exactly the gun it was. A 1911 longslide with galloping wolves and lightning bolts engraved in the sides of the slide. Just by the engraving and the quality of the wood that was also engraved for the grip, I could tell how valuable the damn thing was. Then I heard the whine of something charging up before there was the sound like a tree trunk snapping and I felt a pain in my chest. I didn't hesitate. If that pain meant what I thought it did, there'd be no living on. I whipped around and emptied the entire fourteen round magazine into what I had barely caught a glimpse of before I twisted too far and fell with a cry of pain from both my leg and my side. As I lay on the ground, I felt something pooling under me, soaking my flight suit. I barely caught a glimpse of the dark red pool's edge coming toward my face before everything faded to black.

Location: The Last City - Two days after the attack.

Huntress' POV:

I groaned in pain as I opened my eyes and moved my arms forward to push myself up. When my arms flailed weakly, I knew I wouldn't be getting up that way anytime soon. So I tried rolling over onto my back, but I had barely started the motion before I felt a tugging sensation in my right side, then… pain. Blistering excruciating pain so white hot that I was blinded and couldn't even scream. I could only whimper. Something had gone clear through my side, and whatever it was, I was lucky I haven't bled out yet. I used my right arm to reach down and find whatever was in me. It was sharp. That was the first thing I noticed when my hand clamped down on it, slicing through my glove. I didn't remove my hand like you would've expected, but I adjusted my grip so that most the pressure wasn't on the edges of whatever sort of blade was embedded in my side. However, then I realised that the blade wasn't flat like a sword or a knife, but triangular. I looked down at my side and found a shard of metal sticking through my sternum, meaning that I landed in a pile of debris from the attack. I shifted my feet to be able to kneel. Even the slightest movement caused pain like acid to burn through my body. I felt my blood pool under me and knew that I had to get up and try to find my Ghost or I would die there. I brace my elbows on the ground beside me and start to push up off the debris. I felt whatever had speared me start to slide out. That's not good, I thought, I need that to stay where it is so that I don't bleed out. People who get hurt like this and pull out whatever went into them first thing are idiots. You just bleed out faster that way. I chastised myself as soon as I thought of pulling out the shard. I started moving my hand under me to see if I could fit my knife under myself. As soon as I could fit it under my body, I grabbed my knife that was still on my hip, thankfully, and started to try and cut it so that I could move. After about 20 minutes of cutting, I managed to cut through the object. I then slowly, gingerly moved to get off my back, again causing severe pain as the flesh around the object shifted around the object as I stood up. I almost immediately hunched over due to the state that my body was in. I could feel that my right arm was broken, as were some ribs on both sides of my diaphram, more than I had when I fell. My head was pounding, whether from the collective pain of my injuries or from maybe splitting my skull, I didn't know, probably both. I slowly limped down the street that I was on, looking for my Ghost and scanning my environment for any Cabal.

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About half an hour later, I was starting to feel faint, my wounds sapping my strength. Just when I was about to collapse to the ground in a heap I heard a voice.

"Guardian? Oh thank the Traveler I found you!" my Ghost said as he floated towards me as fast as he could. He stopped about 2 feet in from of me and scanned me.

Not being able to stand anymore, but feeling much better now that I found my Ghost, I fell to my knees panting and clutching my side with my non broken arm.

"About time you showed up. I was about to hit the bricks a second ago." I said, prompting a near pout to show up on my Ghost's eye. "You okay?" I asked, visibly concerned.

"Besides a lack of Light, I'm good." My Ghost replied, "I'm more worried about you and your new addition to your stomach."

"I'll live. Would like some help with this thing though." I said, pointing to my new addition.

"I have just enough Light to heal you fully, but no shields."

"What are we waiting for? Let's get this thing out of me and get out of here. We need to hit some caches that we hid for cases like this." I said impatiently. You see, I never really trusted the vaults in the Tower to hold all of my stuff so I made caches that only I could get into. Well… me and the old Iron Lords. I have duplicates of everything I had in the vaults, due to the fact that I never left any one of a kind gear in the vaults.

"Alright then, let's get this show on the road." My Ghost said, breaking me out of my thoughts. "I'll need you to take out the shard in your stomach."

I nodded and started to gingerly pull the shard out of me. I could feel the blood starting to gush out of the hole that I was making and looked at my Ghost with a pleading/pain filled expression.

Ghost bobbed up and down in a nod and started to heal my other wounds, while I finished pulling the fragment out of my body.

When I pulled it completely out, my Ghost healed the hole and the blood flow and pain stopped. I stretched and sighed in relief. "Well, let's go kick some ass!" I exclaimed, causing an echo to bounce off the walls of the buildings that were around us.

"Shhh!" my Ghost snapped, "We are in no condition to fight right now. We don't have the Light and we don't have a way to get off planet right now!"

I just smirked. "You do know that I rarely use my light abilities. Remember? I only use the damn gunslinger's golden hand cannon when i'm facing a specifically tough enemy.

"It also means that we can't heal, not fully anymore at least. I used up quite a bit of my remaining Light reserves and you have almost none from not using your abilities very much."

"I didn't use them as often as everyone else because I never really needed them!" I argued

"Mmm hmm. What about against Crota hmm? You had to use the Light to just survive down there. What about Oryx? SIVA? You used the Light just to keep yourself going and you didn't even realize it." my Ghost retorted.

"That's passive stuff, I don't consciously use it very often." I shot back.

"Yes but it still drains what little reserves you have and right now, after that battle and using the Light to keep you going, you're out of luck. We don't have the ability to take anyone on right now. Even your armor and guns are broken! You only have that sidearm that we came here with as a backup!" my Ghost pointed out.

I sighed, realizing that I wouldn't get out of "daddy Ghost's" complaining until we got out of the City and to one of our caches.

"Alright we'll do it your way. No big and dangerous stunts." I relented, "At least ones that won't kill me." I muttered under my breath.

"Also, their not as broken as you might think, I only lost my auto rifle, nothing else, and my sniper rifle is just scratched. I've still got Ace of Spades in near perfect condition, although it's covered in blood at the moment." I explained.

My Ghost nodded and vanished into my palm. I really wish I knew how he did that. I thought to myself. It'd be very handy in a lot of situations.

I shrugged then. "Let's head for the wilderness. Hopefully I can kill some deer or something for food. I can shoot just fine. That's a skill I know I had before you revived me. Besides, Saladin has wolves, and I think we'll be able to find him somewhere in the Twilight Gap if we're lucky. You know how he likes to wander."

"Yeah I know. I was the one who told you remember?" my Ghost said playfully. "We could probably find him near the Twilight Gap complex. It was a contingency that he told me about should the City fall. I know that Shaxx might be there, but I don't know about anyone else."

"I don't expect many other Guardians to have survived after the Light was taken from us. You and I got lucky considering I didn't use it that much. I technically didn't need it in the first place." I stated firmly before making a beeline to leave the City.

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Location: Twilight Gap

Date: 7 days after the attack

I shoved my feet through the snow as I walked. I was exhausted after walking almost non-stop for 5 days, only stopping to eat something or sleep. Because of my hotshot marksmanship, I've managed to nail as much food as I need, and preserving the meat by making jerky out of a deer I nailed right through the eye during my first hunting session after I ate my first meal from it. Since then I haven't really needed to hunt much unless I wanted fresh meat, which by then I hunted the occasional rabbit. At the distances that I can shoot, along with my combat born reflexes, and skill as a sharpshooter, it's damn easy for me to nail a rabbit between the eyes, even with how fast they move, with either my suppressed rifle or Ace of Spades. And since I don't care about the head, it's fine if the head goes pop due to the high caliber rounds my weapons use. The only downside about a "clean" kill like that is that taking the rabbit, and cleaning it to get a hold of the meat is messy. "Hey Ghost?"

"Yeah?"

"Could you play my most recent music playlist please? I'd have you play it inside my helmet, but as you can tell, I'm not wearing one. I took it off so I could look directly into Ghaul's eyes."

"You got it!" Soon dubstep and edm music filled the area around us, and to be honest, I couldn't help but dance next to the fire I'd made this evening to cook the rabbit I nailed before setting up camp. I let my Ghost out and he laughed as I started doing a russian kick dance that I didn't even know I knew how do to. That's where Saladin found us.

"Thank the Light you're- what are you doing?" Saladin asked incredulously.

I froze in the middle of a kick and immediately whipped my head around to the source of the voice.

"Saladin!" I exclaimed before I blushed a deep red at Lord Saladin finding me doing a dance that I just remembered. "It's a dance I think I learned in my past life that I just remembered. Ghost, would you turn the music off please?"

"You got it. Time to get serious again?"

"We've got some time." I replied before I walked up to Saladin and hugged him tightly. "Good to see you're still alive you Old Wolf." I whispered to him.

Third Person POV:

Saladin was surprised and confused to see his Young Wolf dancing a strange dance. But he was even more surprised when she hugged him tightly. In all the time that he has known her, he had never seen her hug someone, it just wasn't in her personality to. He returned the hug before releasing her and taking a step back.

"Good to see you too Young Wolf. Were you in the City when it fell?"

She nodded. "I even faced off with the bastard who led the attack. He was a Cabal to be sure, but he was different somehow. I can't really put my finger on it but it sounded like he was obsessed with the Traveler and the Light."

Saladin looked troubled by the news. "Then he is a dangerous foe if he is trying to steal the Light for him and his army." Saladin stated

"Technically he already did. The other Guardians have been helpless, I already came across about 10 others of various classes and orders, all dead."

"Then we must keep a watchful eye for any ambushes. Thankfully I still have my ship. We can regroup in the Plaguelands once we're done here. Access the cache and arm yourself Young Wolf. We have some hard times ahead."

"Yeah… about that, I kinda left the sword you gave me with Ikora, she said she was going to give it a few upgrades. It's probably destroyed along with the Tower."

"Why did you give it to Ikora Rey?" he asked

"She's a friend, and she said she could try to buff it up with arc or something. She's well known among some us to do things that most warlocks find impossible. That's one reason why she's part of the Vanguard."

"You do know that in all of our research into Light, the branches of Light could never be mixed together without causing a massive detonation before separating again?"

"I've heard about it, but then how do you explain this?" she then held up two fingers, one on each hand, one that sparked with arc energy, and the other that had a slight orange flicker of flame at the fingertip. They then fizzled out, the flame before the Arc energy, after a second due to her Light running out faster due to maintaining two forms of Light. Saladin noticed the timing of the two going out, but didn't comment on it. "I'm a Gunslinger, I rarely use arc, since the last time I did I ended up being extremely unstable, but I've never used both at the same time. I've never seen anyone do that either."

Saladin sighed before replying, "Every time you use different Light classes you switch between subclasses as I believe they're called now. So now, if we had the Light, you would be able to materialize an Arc blade."

She thought about that for a moment. "So you're saying that now I can't get my Golden Gun out if we get our Light back because I somehow switched subclasses?"

"For you yes. I haven't done anything with my Light in decades at least so I don't know which subclass I had before we lost it."

"That's you, since you've been around for hundreds of years, I've been a bit more active recently as you know. Besides, you use that heavy machine gun of yours, you don't need Light when you have something that belongs on a turret. I call that cheating. Snipers, scout rifles, and hand cannons take real skill to nail quick moving targets at distances."

"That's why you're a Hunter Young Wolf, that's why you're a Hunter." Saladin chuckled. He then became serious, his face set in a grim expression. A veteran warrior that had seen to much war and loss. He walked towards a wall and put his hand on a specific section. After a moment, a portion of the metal wall slid back and split down the middle before parting, revealing a vault that looked like it hadn't been used in a long time.

"I will stand guard here Artemis. Equip yourself with armour befitting an Iron Lord." he ordered.

She nodded and walked briskly into the vault's entrance before looking back and seeing Saladin put his helmet on and grab his weapon off his back.

He turned to see her standing there and said, "I'll be fine Young Wolf. Do what you need to do and meet me here when you're done."

She nodded and he closed the door, leaving her Ghost to use his flashlight feature.

"You know, if I have to use then one more time, I want you to get your own flashlight." he huffed.

She laughed as she started running down the hallway to the armory in the vault. She had a oath to keep after all, and she wasn't going to break it.

A/N: There it is folks! Chapter 2 of Dawn of Valour: Lightning's Dawn! Sorry for the shorter chapter but the later chapters will be longer. I think that our norm is around 5-9,000 words give or take. So what was the deal with Artemis, as Saladin called her, being able to use two forms of Light at once Hunter? (Hunter Dracon: As far as I've come up with, it may or may not be a side effect of losing her Light, a kind of glitch is what I'd call it. Don't worry, that's probably the only time it'll happen.) Thank you Hunter. Now Saladin has made an appearance! It won't be his only one for those of you who are die hard Iron Lord fans. As far as his role goes in the story, we decided that we'd make him sorta like a surrogate father figure or mentor to Artemis. (or maybe that badass cool uncle.) No, more like machine-gun slinging badass grandpa. (now i can't get that hilarious image out of my head.) What? An old man with a walker swinging around a machine gun saying, "GET OFF MY LAWN YOU YOUNG WHIPPERSNAPPERS!"? (maybe.)

For those of you who are saying, "Will Chief be in the story?" don't worry. He will be, along with Cortana and Blue team. (As for someone you may know from our other stories, you can expect nothing.) Yep, this is it's own thing right now and we don't plan on changing that at all. (Although, we did get a couple of ideas for the story's future. But you'll have to find those out as you read.)

See you in the next one folks.

Arisentactica and Hunter Dracon over and out