Author's Note: I ended up cranking out almost the entirety of this document last yesterday (The 25th). I saw that a story I've followed for a while uploaded, and given the popularity, some of you may know of it. To Infinity, by creamofwheat2311, is probably one of my favorites, and they're the type of writer that I aspire to be. I don't know how they do it, but if you enjoy my writing, you can thank them for giving me the motivation to bust out this chapter as quick as I did. Go ahead and give them a read if you're looking for something to fill the void. On that note, BlueWay also updated recently, always another great writer that gets me in the mood to write. Plus I love the dynamic they have between their own Six and The Rookie. Thanks for sitting through this longer than usual author's note, now on to the story.

"After I'm finished with Truth, I'll-"

"Don't make a girl a promise, if you know you can't keep it."

Noble Six was alone, her armor covered in the droplets that continued to stream down the steel and titanium plating. Green fluid and gore was splashed across it, even the red of Human blood on some areas.

Second Lieutenant Strauss and his men, taking losses of half of their force, had fallen back, aiming to meet up with the rest of the quarantine line, and knowing that they were ill equipped to deal with the Flood the closer they got to the downed cruiser, Six couldn't shoo them away fast enough.

She had been slogging through mud, blood, and more bodies than she could count in the three mile long trek to her objective. Her assault rifle lay discarded somewhere on the way to the end of the industrial park that had been her only cover and solace. A magnum was clutched in her armored hands, and it had only a few more magazines left. When that ran dry, she would have to switch to her knife, her bare hands, whatever rocks she could find on the ground.

Her heart rate, always a constant beat, even under heavy fire, had risen steadily, and it was hanging at just over a hundred beats per minute and staying there. The constant howling, the warped cries, the staccato cracks of UNSC assault rifles turned on their own. It all added up to a cacophony of nightmare fuel that had left even the rock hard sole survivor of Noble team mentally and emotionally exhausted.

Her heartbeat thundered in her ears, and every scrape on the concrete had her turning to check it. She was sorely missing her motion tracker. What little solace she had was the light rising from the crash site, where thick, oily black smoke rose in heavy banded ribbons to pass up and into the stormy skies.

The rain had slacked off slightly, but not enough to comfort her in the darkest night she had witnessed in years. The sound of a Human scream sounded off to her right, and her breath caught in her throat, but she clamped down on it as best she could, gritting her teeth and forcing herself to keep moving forward.

Another sound entered the fray, the high pitched whine of something just as good as a Pelican at this point. Overhead, the running lights of an AV-14 Hornet passed, the nose of the vehicle lighting up with the heavy roar of its rotary cannons, drowning out even the rain and her deafening heartbeat.

Static filled her helmet, a voice that sounded like gravel coming through soothing her addled nerves. "Keep moving, Spartan. I'll cover you until I'm out of ammo or the storm picks back up again. Callsign is Yellowjacket, Jawbreaker Three Seven."

Six obliged him, picking up her pace as she rounded a corner and saw more tracer fire stream into the ground ahead, hitting dark silhouettes that were hidden in the light rain and the darkness that had come with the clouds and the setting of the sun.

The golden visor flashed in the rainfall, the tracers and the muzzle flash of the Hornet bringing a flickering light to the area that was as if the world lit up for every round that went out. Six's helmet lights had long ago turned on, and they struggled to compete with the Hornet's devastating fusillade.

"You've got a swarm of pods coming, your 11 o'clock. I'll light them up." The Hornet roared again, missiles firing from the wing mounted pods as it strafed left and right, dragging unguided rockets across the infector line in hopes of blowing them all to pieces. The pods popped easily enough, with little effort by even the weakest of weapons, and the force of their pops was enough even then to blow their allies up, causing a rippling reaction that provided some form of solace to the Spartan.

Six was on the shredded line in seconds, scrounging for whatever she could find in the remains that the Flood may have been carrying, and she was rewarded for her prudence. An older MA5B assault rifle lay buried in the muck, and she snatched it up from the ground and slid it onto her back. Other weapons lay in their own places, but most were damaged or outright destroyed from the Hornet's attack.

Six kept moving, following the trail of shell casings that littered the ground, Yellowjacket sliding the Hornet to and fro as small arms fire from the Flood came at him in badly aimed and ill coordinated bursts. Ricochets were sounding loudly, some of the rounds bouncing off of the heavy armor and hitting the gyroscopic turbofans.

Yellowjacket, his voice calm despite it all, called to her once again. "Taking minor damage, right engine is leaking oil and has a minor fuel leak, there's some shakiness in the pedals. Almost out of bullets, too. Radiation alarms are starting to hit my HUD at this distance. Your armor sealed for that?"

"Affirmative, Yellowjacket. Are you going to be able to keep her up?" Six responded, clutching the assault rifle as she looked up at the Hornet. Puffs of smoke were being belched out of the bottom of the right engine, a light gray rather than black or white.

"Uh... probably. I won't be much more help around here. I'll go until I'm dry on guns, just leave it to- SAM launch, going evasive!"

The Hornet was lit in the flash of a dozen burning flares popping from either side of the fuselage, and bundles of chaff were launched from the belly of the craft, between the two landing skids. Six frowned, her stance tightening as she watched the Hornet juke left, and then to the right.

A single missile flew up at it, passing between the left engine pod and the fuselage, before detonating not 15 feet to the rear. Shrapnel flew through the air, pinging off of the buildings, the Hornet's fuselage, and Six's armor. Multiple small holes appeared in the Hornet's fuselage at the rear, where several maintenance panels were lightly armored and vulnerable.

"Wave off! Get out of here, now!" Six called out to him, urging the pilot away in hopes he would make it out.

The Hornet began to spin, coming around and continuing its evasive maneuvers, and another rocket climbed up from the direction of the cruiser as more flares and chaff were ejected from the ailing Hornet. It dropped altitude, and went behind a building, but Six couldn't watch any further.

The scream of a combat form tore her away from it, and she wheeled about in an attempt to find it and end it. She wasn't fast enough, and a tentacle whipped across her back with enough force to shove her face first into the muck.

She grunted, wheezing as her air was knocked out of her from the force of the hit, and rolled onto her back in a slight daze that was just clear enough to bring up her assault rifle and pull the trigger down on it.

The Flood form, a Human corrupted by the influence of the parasite, was right on top of her, tentacle raised and ready to come down on her and likely knock her out or injure her, if not worse. The jacketed rounds tore into the spongy mass and sent green viscera and chunks of rotten bone flying through the rain, before a lucky pop left the Flood form without its puppetmaster, and the body fell limp, its strings cut.

Her ears were flooded with comms traffic from Yellowjacket. "Jawbreaker Three Seven, mayday, mayday, mayday. I've lost avionics and oil pressure on my right engine, moving to evacuate now. I'm sorry, Commander. Good lu-"

The Hornet had risen into view, trailing an inky black smoke from several new holes in the aircraft, most fist sized, and the right engine was trailing flames that licked angrily at the thruster housing. It was still flying, but Six saw the world in slow motion as Spartan time kicked in.

A final rocket, rising up from the next street over, climbed up to the Hornet, baying for blood as the rocket motor roared. The rocket, moving faster than Yellowjacket could dodge or pop countermeasures, slammed into the cockpit with enough force that Six flinched and bit her cheek to keep herself from cursing as she looked away.

The flaming chassis of the Hornet split into multiple pieces as the remaining fuel and ammunition blew, secondary explosions engulfing it as the craft went down into another street several blocks away.

Six shook her head and reloaded her assault rifle as she pulled herself out of the mud, her communications network opening up with a blink in the right place.

"This is Sierra 312. Jawbreaker Three Seven has been shot down, rocket to the cockpit. Confirmed KIA. Does anyone read me?"

Nobody answered her, only static talking back to her, and she bit back another curse as her frustration and feelings of helplessness grew deep inside.

She was meant to fight aliens hell bent on wiping Humanity out. Not… space zombies. She was meeting her match, running dry on ammunition and, even with her prodigious skills, rivaled by only one other, she was reaching her limit.

Fighting through Installation 05, through the Flood on High Charity, through the jungle and Crow's Nest, and now, with the final push, she was facing the Flood again. She was alone, she was tired, and she was sick of it all. She felt it even now, the pit that had been in her stomach as Jorge disappeared in a meaningless sacrifice, as Kat went limp in her arms with a hole in her head, as Carter smashed his Pelican into a Scarab, and as Emile was run through from behind.

While Reach burned and her family was taken from her, she had felt the pit form. She wanted to throw up, to rip her helmet off and just bring an end to it. All she had to do was open her mouth and the magnum would do the rest. Would it really be that hard? It couldn't-

The static gave way to a voice, something familiar. "-cus calli – le Six – Do y – ad me, over? I repe – ocus calling – ble Six."

Six's mind, buried in the dark place it had led itself to in its deluded thoughts, flashed. She immediately went to respond. "This is Noble Six, I read you. Hocus, is that you up there?"

The static was still there, but the voice that came through was clear and understood, a tone in it that soothed Six's heavy gut. "Whooo wee! Still alive! Damned good to hear that voice again, ma'am. Music to my ears!" The heavy southern accent the woman had was enough to bring a hint of a smile to Six's face, a ray of sunshine in the darkness. Hocus was coming for her, bringing reinforcements, supplies, anything would help at this point.

"You didn't think it'd be that easy to get rid of me, did you? I still owe you that drink."

The laugh that filled the air waves was like music, deep and hearty, one that came from the pilot's toned belly. "You aren't gonna let me forget about that, are ya? I'm supposed to be the one reminding you! But I'll do you something better, Commander. I've got reinforcements and guns. Now you owe me two drinks!"

Six shook her head, pulling herself up completely and scanning the area. "Yeah, yeah, just get yourself down here. I'm scared of the dark, y'know."

"If there was ever a bigger lie..."

Six was positive the pilot was shaking her head, even as the Pelican's heavy duty engines roared off to her rear, swinging into view a few seconds later with the rear door facing her.

Six stood, her rifle held at the ready, and the ramp began to drop, with Six's jaw following it down.

In the hangar bay, a massive figure stood, one even taller and broader than her. Clad in olive drab Mjolnir Mk VI, with a bright white 117 stenciled in the blocky UNSC script on the left chest plate, John-117 stood with his gold visor impassive in the red emergency lighting of the Pelican's bay. Six's helmet lights played over his figure without a word, and she nodded at him. He nodded back, before grabbing a box that had been resting at his feet and stepping out and into the muck.

Hocus, the engines whining as she fed power to them, called out to her once more. "Call if you need me, Commander. I'll come runnin'. Good luck in there, alright? Continue on to the cruiser, don't worry about Jawbreaker Three Seven. He didn't make it out. When you reach the cruiser, call and I'll come snatch you up."

"Copy all. Stay safe, Hocus. Six out." She listened to the engines retreating, their whine slowly fading out, before she heard another sound. The Spartan in front of her cracked open the box he had brought, revealing new battle rifles and even a shotgun. She was quick to grab the shotgun, loading it and sliding it onto her back, before restocking her assault rifle and pulling to its cradled position in her arms. With an afterthought, she pulled up the squad roster, seeing the new Spartan's name attached to her on a separate squad roster, callsign "Blue One". His vitals showed up next to it, a steady, strong green.

The two shared a glance, and he spoke, his deep baritone sounding in her helmet as he used the internal comms between the two sets of armor.

"Commander, ma'am."

Six slowly nodded back, standing face to face with the legend himself. "Master Chief. Please tell me you're fresh and ready to go."

"Always, ma'am. Brief me as we go on what happened."

He turned on his heel and started stalking forward, his stride all business as he walked with purpose, in comparison to Six's alert movements that had her hunched slightly, like a snake ready to launch forward.

"Parasitic life form, known as the Flood. They infect the living and the dead somehow, take over the body and use it to their advantage. Keep in mind they're classified as-"

She was cut off as he finished the sentence for her, his vital signs spiking for all of an instant before his words came out. "Dark Black. I know about them. How did they get here?"

Six was quick to take up the conversation, scanning up and down streets to the left as the Chief did the right. "Forerunner ring world, they were on it. Managed to get on the Covenant's holy city, probably brought it down, and a cruiser jumped in not even three hours ago before crashing here and spewing the damn things all over the place."

The Chief glanced back at her. "Another Halo?"

Six nodded. "Cortana said the same as soon as we saw it. She-"

He froze in place, his gaze solely on her. "Cortana. Where is she? Do you have her?"

Six didn't respond immediately, shaking her head a moment later. "She stayed behind, on High Charity. Made me go on without her while we tracked one of their Prophets. I told her I'd be back for her, and I intend to keep that promise."

With the golden visor of the Master Chief on her, she could feel the weight of the eyes behind it more than anything else. When he finally spoke up, he uttered a single word. "Understood."

Six frowned behind her helmet as he turned, but kept speaking. "Halo, the Prophet of Truth nearly fired it, nearly wiped us all out. Commander Keyes and Sergeant Major Johnson stopped him before he could, said that it left the rings in some sort of standby mode to be fired from the Ark, wherever that is. The Covenant have been here, on Earth, for a month. They started digging something up here, and they got some kind of portal open. Home Fleet is in pieces and now we're dealing with this. Things… aren't looking good, Master Chief."

He kept moving, weapon up as he scanned, his form perfect. "If the Flood manage to get out across the planet, then Humanity is finished. Worse, whatever planets are still out there will be in danger."

She shook her head. "That's why we're going to blow the cruiser's reactor, finish the place off like that."

"Wouldn't be the first time a ship's core has been blown to deal with them," he muttered.

Six could guess what he meant, but didn't probe any further. She followed along behind him, the howl of more Flood forms going up as they got deeper into the quarantine zone.

The buildings were concrete ruins little more than broken reminders of what had been the Voi Industrial Zone only a month prior. Heavy fighting, even before the Flood, had rendered places all over the globe into shallow remnants of people, places, and more. Blood, of all colors and origins, were splattered on the walls and the concrete ground, their bodies long gone under the Flood's merciless hunger. Only those that had been broken beyond even the parasite's repair could still be found in the shadows and buried under rubble, ruins of their past life.

The rain had thinned out until it was only a light misting, and the clouds began to shift off to the side, finally giving Six a reprieve from the storm. With the weather cutting down, air assets could get back into the fight, but with the Flood having come into possession of UNSC heavy equipment, it might be too risky to keep moving Marine forces in by foot, due to infection, or air, lest they go down the way Jawbreaker Three Seven had.

The shotgun in Six's arms was a reassuring presence, and she looked up to see the clouds pulling away from a full moon, one that shined brightly and gave the two Spartans a light to guide them should their helmet lights fail.

The Master Chief, in front of her still, saw it as well, his helmet shifting up slightly before going back down to it. Then his deep voice filtered into her helmet again. "What's your status?"

She went through the list in her head before replying. "Motion tracker is gone, chest armor has been melted down. Green otherwise."

"And yourself?"

"Fighting since 2 November. Two weeks of slipspace downtime prior, no cryo. Before that was scattered fighting on Earth and Reach."

The silence after was enough, and Six wanted to ask what had happened to him, to keep him out of the fight only to come back at the perfect time, but now wasn't the place or the time. The mission came first, blowing that cruiser was more important than anything either of them could do.

The road in front of them stopped abruptly, a trench dug into the Earth that was over a dozen feet deep and twice as wide, cratering the ground as it went off to their right. The two Spartans, following the trench, saw their objective.

The downed cruiser was cast in an eerie light as blue fire coated several portions of the hull, massive gouges torn into the side and revealing the infected innards of the ship. Several scars marred its hull, and sections were sometimes outright missing from the force of the impact and whatever had happened to it during its capture by the Flood. There were areas of plasma damage on the hull as well, including a hole straight through it from an energy projector that had nearly sheared off the front half of the ship, and now left it broken off and in pieces a kilometer away with black smoke pouring out of it in waves.

No Marine forces had made it this far, and any that had were dead or worse. Bulbous growths could be seen in areas where the hull plating had been splintered in the crash, or broken off entirely, and Six's HUD blared a radiation alarm that she quickly silenced, relegating the red radiation symbol to a corner of her HUD. Mjolnir was sealed against radiation, and as long as she didn't get a suit puncture she was fine. Then again, if her suit got punctured here, she had more to worry about than cancer.

The Master Chief kept moving, skirting the side of the trench with his weapon up. He had been more than ready to take command, to lead the way. With his experience, Six was more than happy to let him go, content at watching his back in case something got too close. He likely knew more about the Flood than she did, and given that no matter what happened, she had never seen Kurt lose his cool, even at the worst. Even Jorge had been rock steady until the end. Another Spartan II, the Spartan II at that, was bound to be an ice cube in this situation. But the spike she had seen in his vitals meant something to her, it had to.

She followed along behind him, her shotgun watching the rear, glancing over her shoulder every so often. The ground beneath her feet was unsteady, the broken concrete sagging under its own weight as it hung over the trench. She chose her steps carefully, sticking well away from the edge. They would have to angle their approach as they went, the cruiser having come down and spun, going from a smooth plow into a catastrophic roll that had flung other debris away from it, and made the trench into a wide, shallow ride that sloped up and down along the path it had taken. Now, sitting on its side, it was an ominous fortress to storm.

It wasn't far now, less than half a mile away, and growing closer by the second. The heat radiating off of the downed cruiser was coming from several breaches in the lateral plasma lines, and likely also from the reactor core. Given the radiation flooding the area, the core had definitely been breached, and that made their job that much harder. Navigating a downed cruiser filled with Flood and flames, reactor coolant, radiation, and all manner of hazards was a death sentence for anybody but Spartans. The Flood made that a bit more skewed against them, and it was painfully obvious to the pair that were moving towards the downed ship, rather than running screaming away from it as fast as they could.

The two moved quickly and quietly. They had switched to laser based comms, to prevent any type of jamming or interference until entering the cruiser, where things would get more dicey. By then, it wouldn't matter if the Flood could intercept comms, since the Spartans would have the parasite breathing down their necks.

With the cruiser looming, Six heard her radiation alarms again, silencing them with a glance and a blink, and pushing them off to the side. It was getting worse, and she could hear a static buzz in the air. Something was wrong, and she didn't like not knowing what it was. It put her nerves on edge, and a glance back from the master Chief indicated he had seen her vitals spike. A look at his own showed her they were unchanged and steady, no sign of the jump from earlier. With a nod from her, he turned back and kept moving, no words passing between the two.

The ground widened out, filled with rubble as the crater came to an abrupt end, hanging down into the main body where the cruiser sat in its grave, all but buried at the end of its life. It would never see the stars again, and no living being would roam its halls after they finished. If everything went to plan, then nobody within a hundred miles would ever come near this place again.

Six glanced back up at the portal, off to her left where the artifact remained, and frowned. If they managed to contain this outbreak, they would have to fight through it and find out what was on the other side. More than once, single Human ships had found the Halo rings, had stopped whatever plans the Covenant had on the other side. With the damage to the human fleet, and Earth itself, she was less than enthused about trying to send a handful of cobbled together ships through and fight the Covenant's last major fleet that she knew of, not even mentioning whatever other ships could come form the reaches of space. The Siege of the Inner Colonies was less than concentrated, and the Covenant had more ships than Humanity could counter like that. The Fall of Reach proved that in many ways.

But now, all the chips were down, and Humanity had bet everything on the defense of Earth. If she fell, then Humanity would too, lest they be little more than vagabonds amongst the stars, hunted down until they ceased to exist as a species.

Six pushed the thoughts out of her mind. It was for someone else to decide where to point the guns. Six's job was to pull the trigger, and it was what she did best. If she could just go back to it, the thought process of being just another weapon to be aimed and used… would she do it?

No, no time for this. She shook her head, clearing the thoughts from it, and the Master Chief looked back as he stood at the lip of the crater.

She mirrored his gaze, nodding. "Once more into the breach, Chief."

Wordlessly, he stepped forward and sunk into the crater, the slope having his heavy armor slide down and destabilizing the dirt as he went down, forming large ruts until he hit a stone outcropping that was barely big enough to stand on. Six followed along, several feet to the left, and she felt her balance come to her naturally as she slid down after him.

The cruiser blocked the moon as the two Spartans stood under it, little more than ants in the face of a sleeping giant. A gaping hole had been ripped into its belly, and already, Six could see the sickly biomass that filled the carrier, making it look all the more like the hive of disgust that she had come to equate with the Flood. Stepping inside and immediately sinking a few inches into the mass that had covered the deck, she was grateful that her armor could filter the smell out, because if she had smelled it, she would have vomited. Even now, she could feel her stomach turning.

The Master Chief moved in behind her, the laser comms still active, but he instead used the status light indicators that would flash on their HUDs for rapid status updates. Six looked down at the bottom left corner of her HUD, and the light that belonged to him flashed green once, solid and reassuring.

Ready.

She flashed it back and started moving. The natural light in the cruiser had been snuffed out, and only a dozen feet in, all light had been swallowed up. Helmet lamps came on and played across the ruined interior.

It was a mess. Bulbous sacks of Flood mass pulsed like lungs, breathing in and out as whatever controlled them gave it life. Drooping spikes hung from the ceiling, and rose from the floor, covered in more of the boils and pustules that could have held any number of other things. The sound of skittering filled her ears, and she cursed the loss of her motion tracker again and again, before she cemented her mind into combat mode. She refused to let the fear and disgust take hold. The adrenaline was coursing through her rapidly, and her heart rate had gone up slightly at their entrance.

The howl of a combat form echoed from deeper in the ship, turning into little more than a screech as it pitched up before it catered off into a wail. Either it was just something that had happened, and they were fine, or their cover had been blown, and they were not fine.

Two flashes of yellow from the Chief. Caution. Move slow.

She did just that, her shotgun up, hand on the slide and finger on the trigger as they slogged through the muck that was now covering their boots. A wet squelching noise sounded with every rise and fall of boots, before it would suck against them whenever they came down. It made Six want to shudder, but she kept rock steady.

The opening room they had entered through went deeper into the hull through a tunnel made of Flood biomass, some of the original decking and walls uncovered, and only a thick tentacle hanging through a half opened door kept it from sliding shut. Despite the loss of all power, it seemed to keep wanting to shut, whirring against the tentacle as the motor whined, before opening and repeating the process. At least the first door was open to them.

She kept moving, stepping through the door carefully as the Master Chief covered her back dutifully, a reassuring presence in a fortress of darkness.

The hall led further on, and dropped down through a gaping hole in the decking. Six flashed a yellow status light, a burning green one returning solid. A one way trip unless they found another way out.

Six went first, shotgun up and sweeping the room that she dropped into, her knees absorbing the shock. Nothing came at them, not yet at least. The halls went deeper in, twisting and turning for a time, before a light shone from off to the right side, leading into an open room.

Six slowed her pace, shotgun up as her lights played across the walls, turning into the room and seeing the ceiling was missing, several dozen feet above them. But more than that, a light from below caught her eye, one shining an electric blue.

Inside of a sealed container, one held on top of a pedestal, a blue light flashed sullenly, one beckoning to her. One that brought a flare of pain to the Spartan III's neural interface port, one that had her stop in place, as time slowed down for her. Her vision flashed blue, nearly whiting her out, and she felt the weight of what very well could have been worlds upon her shoulders as a reflection of electric blue eyes that seemed all too real met hers. For a single instant, the secrets of everything began to clear up for her, but her mind couldn't comprehend it, and it was lost in the fog of her subconscious once again. But something else joined it. A voice that she hadn't heard in far too long.

You are the light that a billion souls cling to. Will you carry this this burden? Will you keep the promises you made to them?

The blue flashed back to normal, and Six's eyes were clear. The pain had stopped. A single red light flashed repeatedly in the bottom of her HUD. She flashed it back green, and the returning yellow voiced all the concern that the Master Chief didn't say. Another green sent to him kept anything further from coming in. She would explain later.

Moving closer, she saw what was shining beneath the glass canopy. A Covenant device, whatever it was quickly lost to them, displayed a small blue woman, one who rose out of it with a sense of urgency as her arms reached out to those she couldn't see.

"Morgan!"

Six's heartbeat fluttered, her stomach spinning in her armor. "Cortana?" She looked over Cortana, the bulk of the Master Chief at her side the instant he had heard her voice.

"Cortana, what are you-" He was cut off as she went on, her message being little more than a recording.

"High Charity, the Covenant's holy city, is on its way to-" It cut out, Cortana looking off to the side almost fearfully, before disappearing back into the device and going dormant, the light fading out of it.

"Cortana!" He cried out, reaching for it, but something stopped him, and Morgan had only a second to react.

The Master Chief was knocked to the ground by a Flood combat form, one that had snuck up on the two as they were lost in the return of someone they both held dear. It pounced on the downed Spartan quickly whipping the large tentacle arm back and readying itself to deal the final blow to The Demon.

A blue armored boot, covered in Flood mass, came up and sheared the offending form in half, before her hand went to the downed Spartan and hauled him up. Grabbing the device and hooking it to her belt, she broke radio silence. "We need to move, now."

The Chief didn't argue with her, his assault rifle back in his hands as they went to retrace their steps.

Instead, something else came for them first. Flood swarmed into the room, several of them coming for the two Spartans that had entered their lair, all of them brandishing whips, tentacles, claws made of rotten bone, whatever they could do to stop the two from getting away.

Six's shotgun roared, the muzzle flash lighting the room up completely as the first several forms were simply shredded by the spread of buckshot. The slide racked loudly and the smoking shell was sent on its way as another entered the shotgun's chamber. Another blast had the Flood being blown back bit by bit. Already, Six knew that her reload would be problematic.

The Master Chief moved up to her side, firing into the horde that was flooding in several at a time. The two Spartans worked together, reloading when the other was finished, until they knew their ammunition supply was starting to suffer from the heavy fighting they were being forced into as they were pushed back against the opposing wall.

Too many Flood had entered the room, and there was no other way out save for straight through, everything else in the room covered in a solid wall of the Flood's biomass. They didn't have the ammo or the time to try and chew through the walls at random points either.

Six unhooked a grenade and lobbed it into the horde, the grenade blowing a few seconds later and opening a second hole in the wall, where several other Flood forms waddled out of.

Aw, shit.

She nearly screamed, her frustration getting the better of her as she loaded her last seven shells into the scatter gun. The Master Chief had already discarded the empty assault rifle, his magnum coming into his own and spitting several shots out, all of them on target on infection forms and dropping the corpses that they controlled.

"We're running out of options, Chief."

"I know."

His response was clipped, and he knew as well as she did that they were both boned. Making it inside and getting to the reactor core had been a fool's dream, apparently, and finding Cortana had done little more than fill the two with questions, those that would go unanswered in death.

The two had their backs up against a wall, buried deep in a heavily armored cruiser, filled with radiation and a parasitic life form that threatened the galaxy and possibly even more, and Humanity was on its death bed. The rhythmic pump-shoot of her shotgun was lost in the combat high and the feelings that burned at the back of her mind, that had been pushed down since she was a little girl, watching her world and her family burn. She had been told that she would be like The Green Knight, that she could kill all the Covenant, save the day, all of that, and here she was. She couldn't save her brothers and sisters, she couldn't save Noble or Reach, and now, she would be failing Cortana and herself. She felt the pit in her gut boil away to what may as well have been a lead brick, and if it hadn't been fake, she'd have requested it be her tombstone if nothing else. Then again, Spartans didn't get tombstones, only a number and three letters.

As the last shell in Morgan's shotgun was emptied, she hurled it forward, ripping her magnum off of her thigh and firing into the swarm, but something else was heard over the roar of magnums and the screams of the Flood.

Plasma rifles whined in the distance, growing ever louder as the swarm seemed to falter, some even turning back and returning the way they had come. Plasma bolts were already tearing through them and splattering against the back wall, the swarm being used up completely as their saviors stepped into the light of their helmet lamps.

The last Flood form in front of them fell, and the Master Chief swiveled his pistol to fire on the Elites now entering the room with plasma rifles already scanning for more targets.

The hand that grabbed his arm and pointed it up caught him off guard, and his golden visor looked down at Noble Six, questions in the mirrored gaze.

"Hold fire, the Elites are with us now, and they just saved our ass." She explained, her hand not letting up.

He looked back at the Elites, still scanning the area and the second hole that had been made, before he lowered his pistol. All of them were covered in the closed in armor that Sangheilli Rangers wore, their own reflective face plates hiding their reactions as some looked over at him.

He eventually holstered the pistol, and she did the same, before she let out a sigh and a silent saying of thanks to the Rangers.

The whine of a Phantom's impulse drives sounded overhead, and the two looked up to see a Phantom had hovered into view above them, a small floating blue orb coming down slowly, humming of all things.

When he reached the bottom, he set his single eye on the olive armored Spartan. "Ah! Reclaimer! It is so good to see you again!"

The Spartan's stance shifted, and she could feel the aggression radiating from him in it, even though nothing else had changed and he had barely moved. Reading others through armor had become second nature to Spartans.

He looked at the other, blue armored Spartan. "Another? A surprise!" Looking down at Six's thigh, he bobbed in approval, a beam shooting from his eye and grabbing the device holding Cortana from Six's thigh, observing it. "We must move quickly, before your construct suffers any further trauma!"

The Master Chief moved quickly, grabbing the orb in one hand and Cortana's device in the other, pulling her out of the orb's beam.

His voice came through his helmet speakers in a low voice, one filled with threatening undertones. "Leave her alone."

The orb sputtered at him, looking back and forth between his visor and Cortana's device. "But we must! If we don't get it to a safe location where I can make repairs-"

He was cut off as the Master Chief snarled at him. "On Halo, you tried to kill Cortana. You tried to kill me."

"Protocol dictated my response! She had the activation index, and you were going to destroy my installation. You did destroy my installation. Now, I have only one function: To help you, reclaimer, as I always should have done."

Six entered his field of view, and he looked from the orb to her, and she blinked a single yellow light to him. She didn't like it, and she knew he didn't either, but he finally relented after several tense seconds. The orb snatched the device into his beam once more as the Phantom's gravity lift activated and sucked them into it, pulling them up and into its bowels.

Rising up, Six could see an entire fleet of Covenant ships had arrived, several cruisers burning the world with glassing beams as they hovered in a closing circle, and a CAS class Assault Carrier stood watch several miles off.

The Phantom's deck lurched slightly as it started moving, a familiar face waiting for them inside. The ornate armor of the Arbiter was recognizable instantly by Six, and the Master Chief had to force himself to keep from pulling his magnum again, especially when the Arbiter's mandibles spread in greeting to Six.

She nodded to him. "Thanks for the save. Any longer and we would have been toast."

He shook his head. "Toast? You would have been killed and infected, not this… toast."

Six felt some of the tension leave her, even as the Master Chief focused on the orb that was fiddling with Cortana's device. "It's a Human saying," she explained, sliding to the floor and letting herself rest for the first time in what felt like forever.

"Your Human sayings are so convoluted, so confusing. I do not understand them. But no matter. You have recovered your construct?"

Six nodded. "Yes. I had no idea she was there until you came in."

"I knew nothing as well, Spartan, until our fleet arrived and sent a coded message to me. The shipmaster marked it as the highest importance, and that it needed to be retrieved immediately."

Six shifted, her helmet coming off and revealing a face marred by sweat and tiredness. "So they're with you? And they're glassing the place?"

The Arbiter craned his long neck in a nod. "We must take no risks with the parasite. You know as well as I do."

She frowned, but knew she couldn't argue with it. He was right, and as much as she hated it, she hated the Flood even more. This place was nothing more than a graveyard now, and Six wanted more than anything else to leave it behind.

She watched out of the open bay door as the Phantom arced off towards the Sangheilli carrier, eyes glued to the closing circle as it burned away all that remained of Voi and the infection that had set into it. It was a cancer that had attempted to plague Earth, and with the scorching plasma raining down on it, Humanity might survive. Maybe.

Tearing her eyes away, she took one last look at the artifact, barely out of reach of the glassing beams, and looked into the portal that had been opened.

Morgan-B312 stared into the void, and the void stared back.