Chapter 14: Legacy of Noble Team.

Noble Six had wanted to go into the Emerald Forest first thing in the morning, actually she'd wanted to go straight away but she'd been shot down by Coco and Velvet who insisted they needed sleep to act as proper guards, and as much as Six didn't want to admit it, she also needed it. Without her augmentations she was struggling to get by on as little sleep as she used to.

This didn't make Six happy but they made a good point. What actually got on her nerves was the fact that, when they woke up the next morning, the weather had decided to make itself an obstacle.

The rain was pounding on the windows, smashing against the glass of the hotel room's window. The grey sky was so dark that it required turning the bedside lamp on, the orange light reminding Six of several-day hikes she'd take during training, sheltering in her tent away from the fire everyone else was sitting around.

Still, at least this time she had someone nearby.

It's nice to have… comrades? Again?

Nah, Comrades isn't the right word, haven't fought enough; all in all everything with them has been fairly chill outside of one Covenant raid.

So what are they then?

We know that answer.

Six shook her head, looking at Coco and Velvet, eventually speaking for the first time since her nightmare the previous night.

"You don't want to go out in that, do you?" She hesitantly asked, watching for the couple's reactions.

"I wouldn't want to go out." Coco answered cooly, standing up and putting her hand on the window, as if to feel the battering of the rain against the glass. Then she stopped, turning around and looking at Six, who wasn't sure what to think of the expression Coco was giving her. "But you do, don't you?"

Six just nodded, feeling Velvet put an arm around her shoulders. She didn't pull back, but she did stiffen up a little bit in response to the touch.

"You're not going out in the forest like this with no shoes." Coco said firmly, before her face softened and she added: "Thankfully, I know the best places to get those, so come on, we're going shopping."

To Six's immense relief Coco only insisted she get some footwear and something to keep the rain off her. She was very clear that they weren't done getting her clothes yet, but for now she had enough.

So with a flight back to Beacon to recover weapons and the rest of team CFVY, they set off into the Emerald forest. Six's feet were protected from the dirt via a pair of sporty trainers and the rest of her protected from the rain via a lavender hoodie.

Well, maybe hoodie was the wrong word, with its loose fitting sleeves that stopped before the elbow and a back that hung down further than the front. Still, it kept the rain out of her face, was relatively comfortable, and was somehow waterproof.

We might need to look into Remnant's Textile industry, they seem to have a lot of stuff we don't have. Then again, we were hardly shopping for designer clothes back home…

You're not wrong, though let's be honest, it's the weapon tech we're more interested in.

Six shook her head. Now was not the time to worry about that, that could wait untill she found a need for more guns, and it was just guns that she was looking for, not sword/chainsaw/bazooka/assault rifle hybrid things. The Gravity Hammer was an obvious exception, but she'd need a little more practice wielding it without her armour and augmentations before she felt comfortable bringing it into a battle.

Today she'd brought her trusty magnum, a battle rifle, and another UNSC combat knife. She'd taken the chance to emulate Emile's pickiness when it came to the tiny sharp weapons, and went out of her way to grab one of the tougher models used by the Helljumpers.

"It's still weird to think about all of those weapons just sitting under our school." Velvet said, looking at the Spartan as she slung her battle rifle over her shoulder. She couldn't remember the last time she'd actually used a rifle sling, she'd clearly gotten far too used to the magnetic holsters on her armour. It wasn't like there was any room in her backpack anyway, since she'd taken the opportunity to fill it with more ration bars and water, along with a few other survival essentials.

Don't you think we might be overpreparing for a walk in the woods? I mean, not trying to say we're paranoid…

Of course not, paranoia isn't justified, we are.

If you say so… Now, are you gonna answer Velvet, or are you just gonna stand there like a Grunt that just got flashbanged?

Shut up.

"Why? You literally attend a combat school." Six asked from under her new hood, grinning as they took the stairs from the top of the cliffside Beacon was built on down into the Emerald Forest. The stairs and rails were a bit slippery, what with the rain pouring down, but if they were careful, they would be fine.

"Personal weapons and an amory are not the same thing." Yatsuhashi pointed out, suddenly sticking his arm out to catch Coco as she screwed up her step and almost tumbled over.

"Whoa! Thanks Yatsu." Cooc said, grinning as she carefully resumed the trek down, being more careful to plant her feet down carefully to avoid slipping again. "And yeah, it just feels off to have so much weird alien shit in the basement, especially given how you can apparently just request any of it at any time… plus, you trust your life to those alien weapons?"

"When I'm holding them, sure." Six said off-handedly, electing to vault over the rails to get down closer to Coco's level faster. The rain made this slightly precarious, but Six had done more extreme manuversers in worse weather wearing a ton of armour, her reduced weight was in some ways liberating as she jumped down to grin at the shocked look on Coco's face "Why, got more problems with how Spartans do things?"

"Okay, ouch, but I guess I deserved that." Coco admitted, watching nervously as Six walked down the stairs backwards to keep her eyes on the brunette as she walked. "But no, in this case it's just… do you even understand how half those weapons work?"

"If you mean 'Do I know how the technical internals work' then no." Six admitted. For once, she didn't feel any shame, as even the top minds in the UNSC couldn't reverse engineer Covenant weapons, and it wasn't for lack of trying based on the amount of recovered weapons she'd been forced to hand over. "But on the plus side, I do know how to kill stuff with them, and that's normally enough."

"See, our weapons are all custom built, we know them inside and out… it's just weird trusting your life to something, for lack of a better word: Alien." Fox explained.

Six nodded as she turned around and resumed the climb down. Whoever built Beacon must have really liked the view, because it was a long flight of stairs.

"Did no one ever build an elevator for this, or some other way of getting to the ground faster?" Six muttered as her new trainers splashed into a puddle on the stairs as she stopped to look over the railings, looking over the mist-covered forest, the rain hitting her hair as she pulled her hood down.

"Well there's one way, buuut you kinda need an Aura to use it." Coco admitted, grinning as she looked at the confused expression on Six's tilted head. "We have launch pads, they're used in initiation; flings you into the forest."

"It's to test your ability to adjust to being flung around, I suspect it's more common for us then it was for you." Velvet added, helpfully explaining the motivation for such a machine to the still baffled Spartan.

"Oh, no that makes sense?" Six said as she carefully set off back down the stairs, offhandedly running her hand against the wet cliff face. She had plenty of memories of climbing similar rock walls during training, sometimes even with a safety net below her.

Not that we ever needed it.

Some of the others did, sometimes because of us.

That little shit deserved it, shouldn't have made fun of our unicorn.

That's really not the point.

Six shook her head, this was not going to help. She'd done what she'd done, now she just had to live with it. That was why she was out here after all, to help her live with what had happened.

Eventually they reached the bottom of the stairs, standing on the entrance to the Emerald Forest. There was a stone path, but most of it was smashed up, or so covered in dirt and grass that it quickly disappeared under the canopy.

"So what are you looking for?" Coco asked, looking at Six as her eyes looked around.

"It's hard to explain, just, stuff like this." Six said, running over to an especially large and gnarled tree. Truly a huge thing standing defiantly in the forest. Six grinned, freeing her knife and crouching down, driving the weapon into the tree's bark. The rain pounding down from the leaves above as she worked, Team CFVY keeping an eye on the treelines, occasionally a gunshot was heard. It took every ounce of control Six had to not turn around and open fire on the Grimm. This was more important, and they could handle it, they were good at this.

Six worked for about half an hour on the tree, standing up and stepping back, looking at the message she'd carved into the old tree's trunk

'Noble 5, Jorge-052 Gave everything for his home.'

"Okay, we need to move again." Six said, forcing a smile onto her face as she turned around, pretending she didn't see Coco, Velvet and Yatsuhashi's eyes linger on what she'd made in the tree, and what she was going to spend the rest of the day making.

It was hard to leave Jorge's tribute, but she had to. He wasn't the only member of Noble Team to fall on Reach, and she wasn't leaving any of them. In some ways she was happy about the rain, it gave her an excuse as to why her face was wet.


That was how Noble Six continued for the rest of the day, slowly exploring the forest looking for various landmarks that felt right to remember Noble team on. She thought back to her days in the UNSC, while it wasn't a common occurrence for her, she had been to memorial services. They'd visited several statues and tributes to the Spartan IIs who washed out or had been killed in action. They were always grand and ornate, and officially were made to remind people of the heroes out there protecting the universe, after all, Spartans never died, so why would they need memorials?

Unofficially, of course, that's exactly what they were. Kurt and the Instructors had never shied away from telling them the hard truth, that in all likelihood they would die horribly on a mission where their survival was not expected. Even with the added explanation, however, Six had never felt like the grand statues really meant anything.

It wasn't that the fallen Spartans weren't heroes or didn't deserve them, they did undeniably. It was that they painted them as something more than they were. They were Spartans, good soldiers, no matter their deeds, they didn't deserve more than anyone else who'd fallen in the UNSC. Also, she'd always felt they served their fallen brothers and sisters better by getting on with their job, rather than attending ceremonies and celebrations. And while Six now understood why the tributes existed… it didn't feel right for Noble team, it felt too… distant. No one on this world even knew who they were, and they never would.

Sure they needed to be remembered, but they were her comrades, comrades she owed a great deal to, but not mythical bastions. The only difference between her and them was that, with the exception of Jun (she hoped,) she somehow wasn't dead yet. So she didn't craft giant statues of marble, she didn't write grand inspiring poems or quotes, she wrote what she knew, what they'd meant to her where she felt they fit.

This was why a tree with one of its main branches snapped off now had 'Noble 2, Kat-B320 Nothing but bad luck could stop her.' carved into one of its surviving branches.

It was why a lone tree growing in the middle of a tight rocky grotto that was nearly impossible to see had 'Noble 3, Jun-A266 Never seen, never missed. I hope you keep going strong for us.' dug into its bark.

Another tree had the message 'Noble 1, Carter-A259 Thank you Sir, for everything. I won't waste what you gave me.' It had been hard to get to on account of the fact it was growing out the side of a cliff face that Six had free soloed before Team CFVY could yell not to.

It was why a large rock that vaguely remembered a skull had had 'Noble 4, Emile-A239 Hardest Bastard I ever knew, bested by no one; even his killer.' smashed into its back with an increasingly blunt looking knife with the aid of a fist sized rock.

That had been all Six had meant to do when she came out that day, it was all she wanted to do if she was honest. She'd tried to keep her emotions under control at all times, letting her actions speak louder than words. But with each letter it was easier and easier to let tears flow down her face. Oddly, she felt better, even if it had screwed up her aim more than she'd like.

Still, it was as Six was about to say she was done, about to free CFVY from their guard job and allow them to get out of the downpour, she remembered something.

She hadn't known them, Six stopped trying to get to know her Spartan companions during training after a while. But there had been other Spartans on Reach that day, other soldiers who had fallen. She or Noble team might not have completed their mission if they hadn't been doing their jobs. So, she walked up to one last tree and left a final message on it before she went back home, her tears openly flowing down her face harder than the surrounding rain.

'To everyone on Reach who gave their lives; Thank you, you'll be remembered.'