It didn't take long for Sarsykian to identify who had ambushed him. It was Avoin, who began slowly getting to his feet, limping and holding his midsection, a large wound around his left side. The Anti-Materiel rifle chewed through the weaker section of his shields and armor, tearing a good chunk of meat off his side.

Sarsykian began feeling around him. His shields had cracked, and he could feel blood seeping from his chest and midsection, holes in his skinsuit, and a large tear in his right rib cage that had displaced his armor on the right side. Sarsykian propped himself up, sitting in the drop pod seat, and taking to comms;

"G-193 reporting… Injured, but so is the HVT. We exchanged fire… Need evac, drop point Alpha-Uniform One Three Seven. Maddock… Report?"

Maddock spoke. "G-273 reporting. We got Chantara to medical, I'm reinserting with a SPARTAN HAZOP team, two minutes." Sarsykian chuckled. "Make that ASAP, Lieutenant."

Sarsykian groaned. "And hurry the hell up. This hurts."

Sarsykian brought his SRS-99C to his shoulder, aiming at Avoin, who looked straight at him. "Hey, asshole!" Sarsykian shouted. "What's it like out there?"

Avoin reached his good arm up, pulling his helmet off and dropping it to the ground. His face was of pure fear, shaped to the form of someone aghast. Blood dripped from his mouth, his eyes sunken and wide, mouth shivering and quivering. "Th…" He tried to speak, but was suddenly assaulted by a long tentacle wrapping around his chest, and two more from behind him, one on each leg, pulling him horizontally parallel to the ground.

A booming bellow echoed across the courtyard, and two more tentacles wrapped around Avoin's arms, who began screaming, struggling as he was slammed to the ground. Four forms, lengthy and lanky in nature with bulbous chests, glowing pores, and long legs came to view, forms Sarsykian had never identified before. They held him in place as a single infection form skittered up towards Avoin. Avoin struggled, but was no match to the raw strength of the unknown infection forms that had him restrained.

The form reached up, its appendages wrapping around two sets of intestines that had hung out from Avoin's side, pulling itself into the open wound caused by Sarsykian's rifle. The form wormed its way into Avoin's lower abdomen, squeezing in between various yardages of intestine, its tendrils beginning to rip through the interior flesh, causing Avoin to scream in repulsion, jerking his body violently to attempt to shake it out.

The creature ran its tendril deep through his stomach, then reverted back, wrapping around the center portion of Avoin's spine, tapping into his nervous system to immediately begin reforming and mutating his body. Violently, a loud crack echoed through the courtyard, the sound of Avoin's ribs breaking, his lungs and heart popping and forming to allow room for the infection form to squeeze into his chest.

Blood dripped by the pint out of Avoin's open wound, his screams of agony suddenly silenced as the forms' tendril ripped through his throat, back and to the upper vertebrae of his neck, infecting deep into the lower rear sections of his brain.

The unknown forms suddenly unwrapped themselves from Avoin's body. Erratically, Avoin's body flopped like fish out of water, his arms and back cracking in unnatural directions as the infection form began rapidly mutating his body to its preferences. Avoin's neck snapped left, and bulbous flesh bubbles began forming around the right side of his neck, sprouting the infection form's identifying tendrils. Around Avoin's armor, mutated, green-yellow flesh began growing through the body skin. Audibly, Avoin's bones began cracking, blood squirting and erupting from his right arm as it began shaping itself into a massive claw.

Shifting left and right, the arm reformed itself into a long, meaty claw, bone extending out from it in several different directions, sharpening and breaking itself to change appearance, until a solid, bloody bone blade three feet long remained, wrapped in the bloody, rapidly deteriorating flesh.

Exploding out the open abdomen wound came a series of bone fragments and intestine pieces, the wound quickly sealing itself from the familiar green-yellow flesh, and over the power armor of Avoin.

In a matter of seconds, Avoin's body was grotesquely transformed, the head mutated into its own helmet-like transformation from retrieving the helmet he wore and molding it into his fleshy growths. Avoin's left arm exploded out of the armor pieces once holding it in place, transforming into a multi-appendage serrated whip, dragging out on the ground, held together by elastic tendons, various pieces of cartilage and muscle.

Avoin's infected body stood erect, opening an incredibly wide mouth of serrated, bloody, and jagged teeth, and released a reverberating scream that sent the blood within the experienced Spartan-III observing cold. Pulling his rifle to his shoulder, he whispered into his microphone within his helmet; "Codename Corrupter, I say again… C-Corrupter." Shuddering, he placed his finger on the trigger. The shield systems on Avoin's now horridly infected body began recharging. It was online. A Spartan was now infected by the flood. It was up to him to take it out, now.

Avoin exhaled sharply, and aimed at Avoin's malformed head. Almost instantly, the creature snapped its attention to Sarsykian as it accessed Avoin's memory. The last thing he saw being Sarsykian. Firing, the .50 Caliber round ripped the whole right arm off Avoin's mangled body. Almost immediately, however, one of the strange, glowing forms flung its tentacle into the pod, wrapping around Sarsykian's midsection and flinging him from the pod.

Getting to his feet, the newly formed Corrupter-Class flood lurched forward, using the whip to fling the rifle from Sarsykian's hands, rapidly growing a new arm to fit the needs of it, a long spike. Sarsykian ripped his knife from its sheathe, lurching forward in a sudden assault, pulling his M6G off his waist, dumping the magazine at the Corrupter's chest.

Almost immediately, an unseen brute form leaped from an unseen angle, cracking Sarsykian in the side with a mock gravity hammer, flinging him to the wall. Sliding to the ground, Sarsykian pulled his MA5B off his back, firing wildly into the crowd of flood that began surrounding him.

One of the odd, bulbous glowing forms used its tentacle, wrapping around Sarsykians arms, and with a single yank, dislocated both of them, simultaneously pulling him into the center of the group. The assorted forms backed away from Sarsykian as he lay there, his arms disabled from the odd creature. Sarsykian looked about madly, breathing heavy as a large infection form stood over him, its left arm grotesquely oversized in contrast to the rest of its body, a second, wide-brimmed jaw covered this arm, spurting small tendrils and massive, bony teeth.

Raising it up, it brought it down on Sarsykian's legs, breaking them both from the sheer force. Screaming in agony, Sarsykian rolled off to his side, utilizing his neural link to his armor to move himself. His bones and flesh cracked and popped, creating immense pain as Sarsykian attempted to stand up.

He never got to his feet.

The changed Avoin walked forward, bringing back the spike, and ran it in an upward diagonal direction directly under the metal armor protecting Sarsykian's rib cage, piercing into his chest cavity and ripping a wide hole, crushing lungs and his liver in the process. Flinging Sarsykian off to the side, his body flopped chest-up.

Sarsykian's mouth foamed with blood, and his new wound seethed with it. He couldn't breathe, couldn't walk, and was on the brink of death. However, before blood could fill his helmet entirely, a small, skittering infection form crawled over his helmet, inserting itself into the wound in his chest, tearing through the bone and flesh within, wrapping its prongs around his internal organs, infecting them rapidly.

Almost immediately, Sarsykian's nervous system was tapped, and he began the same excruciating process Avoin underwent, his body convulsing and seizing with every bone snapped, every muscle ripped, and every blood vessel torn. Blood, both red and green slowly pooled around the transforming Spartan-III. His mutations grew him different, however. His body did not form over his armor, and instead, the cavity sealed itself with pink, flabby flesh with the spores peering out of it ever so slightly. The form rapidly mutated his muscular structure, thickening his bones and skin.

In minutes, Sarsykian's transformed body stood erect, silent as it stared into the sky.

The only features to identify him as flood came from the patch of pink over the wound the form grew into, the rest was completely hidden from view to the naked eye.

It's neck snapped, glaring directly at the other Corrupter form. The two stared at each other for some time, all while the flood awaited command from their new proto-graveminds. Unlike typical ones, however, these were fully combat capable, and ready to kill and infect whatever came.