Chapter VI: Never Give Up

Just as the surface comes in sight, Sammy hears a thunderous crash followed by a steadily growing hiss coming from behind him. Looking over his shoulder, he sees the explosion rapidly coming upon him. Right as he emerges from the collapsing tunnel opening, the fireball envelopes his vehicle and sends it cartwheeling across the landscape and into the side of a small rocky ridge, forcing its driver out of his seat and onto the ground below. With the ghost totaled and his shields mostly drained, Sammy shakes off the sudden shock of being ejected from his hovercraft and slowly regains his footing before glancing around to survey his new location. As he does so, his shields finish fully recharging. Battle-readied once more, he notices a single contact on his motion tracker. The target lies straight ahead on the other side of what was the tunnel's end, but it seems to fade in and out periodically, as if to imply that it is moving, stopping, and moving again repeatedly. Not afraid of taking any chances considering what he had gone through only moments before, he turns on his camo and warily approaches the enemy, which turns out to be none other than an ex-elite Flood creature wielding a storm rifle. Unimpressed, Sammy takes it out with his focus rifle at medium range. Immediately upon eliminating his initial target, his motion tracker lights up with hostiles all at once, toward which he instantly spins around to face. In front of him, a group of angered ex-grunt and ex-elite Flood, several dozen smaller Flood buggers, and five bugger-spewing Flood scramble to execute their dead ally's assailant. Thankfully, Sammy's active camouflage is more-than-effective enough to fool the Flood for an extensive enough length of time to allow for him to obliterate them all with his last remaining thrown plasma grenades, a few thrown spike grenades, and the last flurry of plasma shots remaining in his plasma repeater's first battery without detection. Swapping out the old plasma repeater battery for the fresh one and putting the old one into his plasma repeater battery recharger, he puts all of those things and the plasma repeater itself away in his hypercube before retrieving his beam rifle, focus rifle, and Kig-yar sniping eyepiece and defense gauntlets. Strapping the focus rifle onto his back, the gauntlets onto his cuffs, and locking his eyepiece firmly in place in front of his right eye, he climbs up onto a large nearby boulder, lies down into position, activates his eyepiece's night vision to help see through the relative darkness of the planetoid's surface, and patiently awaits his next set of targets.

"All units, this is Commander Sim. I'm still alive, but I'm in the perfect sniping position and don't wish to be disturbed until my sniping foray is over. Continue on approach to my current location, but be on constant lookout for enemies that could appear randomly and without warning. Commander Sim out," he notifies his squad before going silent and looking back into his beam rifle's scope. One minute passes. Then another. And another. And another. After five minutes of waiting, Sammy begins to get slightly frustrated with the sudden lack of activity, but presses on with it anyway. Five more minutes pass. Then another five. And another. And another. By now, the amount of time his active camouflage can remain in use for has started to get low, not only due to how much time has passed here with it on, but also from earlier as well, as it had not completed recovered from its relatively frequent use inside the mines. Fearing it might run completely out later when he needs it most, he deactivates it. Shortly afterward, several ex-brute and ex-elite Flood come lumbering into plain view many meters ahead of his sniping post armed with more storm rifles, plasma repeaters, plasma rifles, brute plasma rifles, needlers, and even a couple focus rifle of their own. Taking his time, he snipes each target one by one, taking special note of how most of the ex-elites and some of the ex-brutes have functioning energy shields of their own, several bars of it in a few cases, taking little to no return fire in the process. Fifteen seconds after the last enemy falls, more come to take their place. Sixty more dead ex-Covenant Flood later, a huge swarm of little Flood appear from the same location and making a beeline directly for Sammy's position. Most of them are dead by the time they get there thanks to precision focus rifle firing on his part, but a few remaining ones climb up the boulder and are able to leap onto Sammy. Freaking out, he almost falls from his vantage point, but he resists and stays on the big rock. However, he learns a new tactic—if one of the little Flood beasties contacts his shield, it gets "zapped" by the shield and is immediately killed off, taking down virtually no shielding in the process. He figures that while it could be a useful strategy for saving ammunition in the future, it could inadvertently drain his shielding enough to make him more vulnerable to far greater threats, despite even having twenty-one whole bars of shielding to work with.

Next, several critter-emitting Flood creatures waddle into the combat zone alongside a tightly-packed cluster of ex-grunt, ex-jackal, and ex-skirmisher Flood. Once the ex-jackal and ex-skirmisher Flood armed with a beam rifle have been taken out, Sammy easily sends the remaining Flood in the area to oblivion, although he runs out of beam rifle shots for his first battery while doing so and has to swap batteries with it the same way he did for the plasma repeater and complete a similar set of actions for it as well. After concluding that no more enemies will come, or at least any time soon, he leaves the safety of his boulder and walks over to all the many Flood bodies littering the ground looking for any useful weapons to scavenge, especially the beam and focus rifles. Before he has the chance to do so successfully, a huge number of fairly small neutral-colored contacts appear on his motion tracker from the other side of the large boulder. Not knowing exactly what to expect, he puts away his beam rifle and readies his focus rifle. At last, they arrived: it was a very large group of some kind of airborne Flood form that, while not much bigger individually compared to the other small Flood creatures from before, were equally hideous and formidable in higher quantities. Wasting no time, Sammy begins firing on them with his focus rifle nonstop, only pausing briefly to avoid accidentally overheating the weapon. Once the vaguely birdlike Flood things close in enough on him, they unleash a greenish-black torrent of presumably toxic ooze at Sammy with remarkable accuracy, which he either dodges or blocks with his now active energy shield gauntlets. To combat these new creatures effectively while evading the majority of their attacks, he intersperses dodging and blocking with moving and shooting his energy gun. Eventually, all hostiles have been quelled, and in their wake, a great mass of heaped ex-Flood corpses lie.

Next, without a moment's notice, more contacts appear, this time in a small nook just around the boulder. Seeing that these enemies are stubbornly holding out behind cover, Sammy decides to pursue them, but stealthily with his active camouflage on again, even though it had hardly recharged from its last use. The foes in question were three ex-elite and three ex-brute Flood. Each of their personal armaments varied: the first ex-elite Flood carried dual energy swords, the second ex-elite Flood wielded a concussion rifle, and the third ex-elite Flood hauled around a large portable plasma cannon that had been forcibly removed from its original base, giving it a limited amount of shots left in its battery. As for the ex-brute Flood, the first was armed with a plasma launcher, the second with a fuel rod cannon, and the third with something Sammy had never seen before—dual gravity hammers. Though he was highly curious to know how one would effectively utilize two gravity hammers simultaneously in combat, that curiosity would have to be set aside for another time. Instead, he sticks a spike grenade to each one, only to realize that the ex-elite with the plasma cannon, the ex-brute with the fuel rod cannon, and the ex-brute with the dual gravity hammers all have shields. In response to that little problem, he continues to stick each one with a spike grenade until the each target expires. Right as he narrows their numbers down to the double hammer-toting Flood, the sole surviving savage somehow senses Sammy's presence, leaps into the air at least twenty feet toward him, and comes down with both hammers in unison, nearly crushing him and sending him flying back several feet, draining nearly one third of his shield in the process. Stunned, Sammy gets back on his feet, jumps back five feet, and unleashes his focus rifle on the savage mutant brute all-out before it could even think about getting in another attack. "Well, that was certainly not quite what I expected!" he mumbles to himself, feeling somewhat amazed by what he had just seen. "Squad, what's your status?" he asks via the squad's open comm channel. "Don't worry sir, we're almost there!" the familiar voice from that same gunner grunt squadmate from earlier assures him. "Great, looks like I'm all clear over here for now. Let's hope it stays that way too. Commander Sim out," Sammy radios back just as his camo runs out and automatically enters its rather lethargic recharging cycle.

Suddenly, like a freak bolt of lightning out of nowhere, the biggest non-vehicular red dot he has ever seen in his life appears on his motion tracker and quickly moves in to corner him. Surprised at such a startling sight, he looks up at a gargantuan Flood monster with a pair of immense tentacle-like appendages flailing about on both sides of him. Both enthralled and terrified at the discovery of such a Flood form, Sammy stands there motionless and with his pulse racing as the ferocious beast roars at him sinisterly, discharging a dark green saliva-like goo from its "mouth" every which way. For most soldiers, thinking on the fly was not typically a requirement for successfully serving in the Covenant military. Conversely, in a few very specific circumstances, being able to do so in the heat of the moment could mean the difference between life and death in the field. Since he was a well-respected champion skirmisher, though, Sammy was quite the notable exception to the rule. After pondering which tactical course would be the best to take in mere fractions of a second, he chooses to snap out his hologram projector, attach it to his armor's chest plating, and activate a temporary decoy of himself to escape being so close to such a dangerous entity. Fortunately for him, the Flood monster takes the bait and begins lashing its tentacles out at the hologram while the real Sammy makes a break for the boulder. Back on top of the boulder again, he decides to get out his banshee and simply bombard the creature from the safety of the air, but as soon as he prompts for the hypercube to relinquish the banshee, the giant Flood beast has already deactivated the hologram and rams into the side of the boulder, knocking Sammy down and shoving the banshee over the boulder's edge…right into the grasp of the creature's tentacles!

As Sammy recovers from the jolt, the monstrosity grabs hold of the fallen aircraft and tosses it directly at him at an alarming speed, missing his head by only half a foot and exploding the banshee upon impacting the rock wall behind him. He then tries to jetpack skyward and rain down fuel rods upon the creature from above, but this strategy fails as well, for before he can even lift off a few feet from the boulder's peak, the raging beast grabs ahold of his left foot during midflight, spins him around like a ragdoll, and chucks him far across the area and into a small group of rocks around thirty meters away from the boulder. Lying flat on his back, Sammy now suffers from a concussion and almost passes out several times, but manages to maintain his consciousness just long enough to heal himself with some instant healing antidote. Noticing that his jetpack and hologram projector were either destroyed or damaged beyond any feasible repair, he then sees the Flood monster begin flinging large rocks and pieces of banshee debris at him. Not wanting to delay his offensive capabilities any longer, he immediately acquires, primes, and places a bubble shield just as the oncoming projectiles arrive. "Heh, nice try buster!" he thinks while he takes out his fuel rod cannon and prepares to fight back.

By now, the foreboding Flood fiend has taken notice of its potential victim's defensive countermeasures, has already broken into its equivalent of a sprint, and is charging straight for Sammy when he zooms in with his fuel rod cannon's scope, lines up his target, and lands a perfect series of five shots into the creature's tentacles. However, since the monster was using its tentacles in a defensive posture, it took no visible damage from the assault and continued bolting toward Sammy without hesitation once the fuel rods' explosive effects had worn off. Astonished at the big beast's level of inter-combat adaptation, predominantly its overt belligerence, he almost welcomingly accepts the fact that he will have to devise some fresh attack method just to handle this new enemy; after all, he was almost starting to grow bored with the original Flood foes he had formerly faced. Upon reaching Sammy's position inside the bubble shield, the monster slams its tentacles onto the ground, barely missing Sammy and destroying the bubble shield's shield generator. Seeing the perfect opportunity for retaliation, Sammy begins throwing spike grenade after spike grenade onto the creature's body, but to no visible effect. He then switches over to using incendiary grenades once the spike grenades run out, and after nailing the enormous Flood hostile with the last of those, it seems to be considerably weaker than before and is now resorting to attempting a few failed hit-and-run attempts on Sammy and staying mostly in a defensive stance. To counteract this, Sammy baits the creature by firing a barrage of fuel rods at it, forcing it to either dodge or block the attack with its tentacles. Once the beast's guard is down enough, he hastily switches over to his needle rifle and unleashes on its preliminary weak spots—the tentacle's connection points to the rest of the creature's body. Several fuel rod cannon and needle rifle clips later, the creature loses its first tentacle. Several more of each later, and the Flood behemoth has finally been rendered effectively "armless" by Sammy's persistent fuel rod fusillade and needle supercombines. Feeling somewhat cocky, Sammy's blurts out, "hey you big Flood freak, try to come and get me now!" before sticking his tongue out at it mockingly.

Almost as if the creature understood Sammy's boastful challenge, it immediately runs straight for him, absorbing clip after clip of fuel rods. Nervous about just how much more resilience the hellish leviathan has left in it, Sammy preemptively activates all four of his auto-turrets and swaps out his other two weapons for his focus rifle. With the auto-turrets now in play, he retreats back to the large boulder as they distract the creature for a few precious seconds. By the time he has arrived back on top of the boulder, the last remaining auto-turret has already been destroyed by the beast's humongous legs and he has already started to open fire upon it with his focus rifle. The creature reacts by charging the boulder again, but this time taking a giant leap onto the boulder itself, causing Sammy to slip off the boulders edge by the sheer force of its landing atop the boulder alone. His fall's impact breaks Sammy's left defense gauntlet and possibly his left arm as well, for once has landed on the ground, he feels a searing pain spread throughout most of his left limb. Cringing at the onset of such an agonizing bout, he heals his injury without a moment's hesitation. Then, before he could even begin to react, the Flood giant jumps off the boulder and lands… right onto Sammy! The considerable pressure of the initial blow takes down nearly half his shielding, but it is not long before several follow-up attacks from the creature's feet easily drain the rest. Struggling to move from the beast's immense weight and now coughing up blood, Sammy wonders if these are his final moments alive. "Well, I lived a good life while I did," he reflects. "But wait," he recalls, "I'm not prepared to go out like this! I'm prepared to live many more years before that day comes, and when it does, it'll be peacefully lying upon my own deathbed in the comfort of my own home with Zoy at my side! Not like this, cold and alone and at the mercies of a huge Flood scumbag!" Then, all at once, he remembers what Commander Djima had advised him earlier that day: "Listen to your wild warrior's heart!" He closes his eyes, clears his mind, and listens for an answer from far within the deepest depths of his skirmisher psyche. "That's it! I'm a wild warrior, and if there's one thing this wild warrior has learned through all his life's experiences, it's this—NEVER GIVE UP!"

All of a sudden, he felt like he had miraculously regained a heightened level of strength and a fully restored sense of vigor, and using his regained power, he successfully removes his powerblade from his hypercube, snatches it, and slices the Flood monster's left ankle open, causing it to stagger backward in pain and allowing for Sammy to heal himself of his internal injuries, scoop up his fallen focus rifle, get some distance between himself and the creature, and reassess the current situation. He determines that his greatest course of action to take is to dodge around the beast's body and unleash fuel rods upon its weak points, as getting out the anti-air wraith, as tempting as it was, sounded a bit too risky, for if the creature got too close for comfort, it could easily leap onto the hover-tank and disable its onboard weapons systems with its massive legs, leaving Sammy with no more feasible attack options. Plus, it would make him a much bigger target for the monster as a whole, and at extreme close range, it would make firing with the vehicle's built-in fuel rod cannons potentially suicidal due to all the inescapable splash damage he and his wraith would undoubtedly receive in the process. After riling up the angry anathema with a quick burst of focus rifle fire, he puts it away for his fuel rod cannon, but after realizing how low on fuel rod cannon ammo he is, he decides to get out the needler instead, as he did not have time to waste with the needle rifle's meticulous precision requirements. Once within range, the creature attempts to corner Sammy against the rock wall again, but Sammy nimbly thwarts this plan by building up some momentum, hopping onto the side of the wall, turning around, and rebounding off the wall and between the beast's legs, ending up behind it. While it tries to relocate Sammy from the temporary confusion incited by the use of such a sudden maneuver, he takes advantage of its acute lack of perception by unloading several full clips of needles into the vulnerable connective tissue surrounding its right leg's joint. The resultant supercombine explosions detach the leg completely, prompting the Flood monster to bellow in pain and fall from its newfound weight imbalance. Sammy does the same to its still thrashing left leg.

With the abomination lying defenseless at his feet, he breathes a sigh of relief and decides to plant all of his remaining fuel rod clips into the creature's "mouth" and detonate them with his final fuel rod cannon clip. As he prepares to do so, though, a large group of plasma launcher- and fuel rod cannon-wielding Flood of all different Covenant species show up to spoil Sammy's victory celebration. Seeing no better opportunity to literally go out with a bang, Sammy unloads the fuel rod clip from his fuel rod cannon, shoves it into the giant Flood monster's "mouth" along with the rest, stows the now empty fuel rod cannon into his hypercube, retrieves his invincibility power-up from it, and screeches out a blaring skirmisher war cry, to which the Flood open fire with their weapons and after which Sammy activates his invincibility, climbs on top of the colossal Flood creature's torso region, and jumps upward just as all the fuel rods begin to explode. This vaporizes the monster's body and sends Sammy soaring high into the air, giving him the perfect amount of time needed to pull out his beam rifle and snipe down all the raving Flood zombies below him, and entirely in midair too. After landing in style, he looks over to notice none other than his gunner grunt friend staring at him in total disbelief of what he had just saw.