Jorge sent a glance at Blonde, casually shuffling Etilka with one hand, using the motion to disguise his other hand going to the magnum at his hip. Quick glances, invisible through his polarized visor: four potential targets. Ones without helmets first, then…

He forced himself to relax, taking a breath in and out. These weren't enemies, and he'd just assisted them in combat. They had no reason to attack him- reason to be suspicious? Sure. But reasons for hostility? Definitely not. He would have to approach this carefully, but he'd prided himself as the most diplomatic and approachable of Noble. Now was the time to demonstrate those skills again.

The spartan released the handle of the weapon, though reluctantly, and raised his hand in a gesture of goodwill. "Aha, pochekay…" Paduk, who'd been watching with narrowed eyes from the back and fingering his snub-nosed pistol, brought his eyebrows together in surprise at those words. "I'm no threat to you."

"Oh, yeah?" Blonde stated, half-turning to Paduk, keeping the bulky supersoldier in his peripheral vision. "He one of 'yours', Paduk?"

The surprise had faded to thoughtfulness, but Paduk shook his head just a little. "Definitely not. Would think I'd remember something that big that isn't a Locust."

"Yeah, and he don't look like a Locust to me!" Jorge sent a look through his helmet at the boisterous larger man, who seemed to be intrigued more than anything, studying Jorge and his armour with clear interest.

Paduk grimaced, seeming to be resisting the urge to roll his eyes. "Yes, I can see that."

"Locust or not, can we get out of here anytime soon? I feel like a sitting duck." Helmet's expression was impossible to make out through the piece of equipment Jorge had named him for, but he got the sense that the soldier was impatient.

"Yeah, yeah- just gimme a damn second!" Blonde said in an exasperated tone, turning fully back to Jorge and, with very little subtlety, raising his rifle a little. "Kinda feel like you should be answering the questions anyway. I appreciate the help and all, but… eh, you understand. World gone to shit and all, can't be too careful about who you trust. So… who are you?"

Jorge spent a moment considering his answer before speaking. "A… traveler, I guess. Passing through and scavenging. Thought you could use the support, so I provided it."

Blonde raised an eyebrow. "Hell of a kit for a scavenger."

Jorge shrugged noncommittedly. "World's gone to shit, after all."

He laughed. "Well, I guess I can't argue with that reasoning…" he stuck out his hand. "Baird."

The spartan took the hand in his larger, armoured one. "Jorge."

"Nice to meet you, Jorge." He began pointing to the other three soldiers in the room. "The over-enthusiastic bastard's Cole, the sour white-haired one is Paduk, and the lone guy with a helmet is Clayton."

Jorge nodded to each of them in turn, flicking his gaze back to Paduk as the man let out an impatient huff.

"As much as I hate to admit it, I agree with Clayton- this is not a place we should stay for long. The Locust may have seen us slip in here, and they might come hunting for us. Disagree or not, but I don't want to be caught in this dead-end room if that happens."

Baird wavered on the point, seeming unsure. With the sidelong looks he kept giving him, Jorge could most likely guess what that uncertainty was about. Eventually, however, he sighed and gave in, hefting his rifle and turning and walking towards the car that blocked off the other half of the space. Halfway there, he stopped and turned back to Jorge, fixing him with a threatening gaze.

"You wanna help? That's fine. We could always use another gun. But stab us in the back, and I'll shoot you myself."

He nodded his helmeted head in acknowledgement, allowing himself to feel a flicker of satisfaction at a desirable outcome. After a moment, he shook it off, raising Etilka with both hands and following behind.

Unfortunately, he found their progress impeded by the wreck of a vehicle, which had come down with some rubble from the ceiling and blocked their progress. Baird considered the mess for a moment before speaking, glancing off to the side where Jorge noticed a hydraulic lift propping up the entire mess.

"Alright, should be a button or something that-"

Gently as the giant could, Jorge pushed Baird out of the way… then proceeded to kick the car hard enough to send it slamming against the wall, the rubble collapsing in its wake, leaving the way clear enough for them to make their way through. Baird blinked for a moment, then grinned and raised his rifle.

"That'll work."

Cole took care of the door, kicking it open, and all five of them stepped out of the building and into a dense fog.

"HAVE I MENTIONED HOW MUCH I HATE THIS DAMN CITY!?"

Jorge chuckled to himself at that, pausing behind an outcropping of brick just long enough for a locust to exhaust the magazine of its weapon, allowing him to sweep around the corner and shred it with a magnum round to its head. It turned out that the explosive magnum rounds worked just as well against the tough skin of the grubs as it did against the Covenant. Mighty convenient, Jorge thought.

As they'd fought their way across the city, the Gears seeming to have attracted every hostile element in the city, Jorge had managed to pick up quite a few things about this world and its people. Those that were left, in any case. For example, he had learned that the human soldiers he was accompanying were known as Gears, soldiers in the employ of the Coalition of Ordered Governments. Not much was left of said organization, but they still called themselves Gears, still wore the armour and still fought Locust, though these days it was more about survival than duty. Reach hadn't been that desperately bad when Jorge left, and if he had his say, it wouldn't ever reach that point.

Now, they were just a couple of blocks from Paduk's home base. Jorge found himself interested in what sort of people Paduk led, but he kept quiet for the sake of not straining the tentative trust that he'd built with the four over the past few hours of treking and fighting. Surreptitiously, he'd gathered a few caches of weapons and equipment in their wake and called down Ian in a Banshee to pick up and take out what he could, which Ian had gladly done. Apparently, with DOT attempting to infiltrate the main server and the engineer back on the Ardent Prayer running repairs and diagnostics, the ODST had had little to do but sit on his hands and was just glad for a useful task.

A bullet pinged off of his shield, causing him to snap out of his ruminations and shake his head as if to shake the thoughts out of them. Time for thinking later- now, he needed to concentrate on the fight at hand.

He observed from behind some cover as Baird made some quick gestures. Cole and Clayton darted off, each to a side into open buildings, while Paduk and Baird moved up the middle, firing, tossing grenades, yelling and generally making a lot of noise. Flanking maneuver, Jorge supposed. Well, if they wanted loud, he could do loud.

Stepping out from behind cover and placing Etilka's shielded barrel down on a waist high wall, which he noted that this city seemed to have quite a bit of for whatever reason, he took quick aim at the nest of Locust defenders down the way and let rip a long burst. The grubs ducked their heads behind their cover, some of them uttering cries of pain as the fifty caliber rounds of the weapon penetrated straight through whatever they were hiding behind, shortly followed by them.

Jorge glanced down at the ammunition box on the side of the weapon, grimacing, and reduced the length of the bursts. While he had done a relatively decent job of scrounging compatible ammunition, Etilka still burned through it at a rapid pace, nearly as fast as the weapons that the Gears carried. A grub poked its head above the barricade, then fell back as the spartan planted another magnum round in its eye socket, the thing's head exploding like an overripe watermelon all over the nearby grubs. This seemed to finally break their will as their line broke, grubs fleeing from the approaching Gears and spartan while blind-firing behind them, making for the safety of a line of turrets that had been set up in a second defensive line. Clever, and would have been quite effective in delaying the small force, buuut…

The Locust froze and stared in horror as they realized that the turrets that had been meant for their defense were not, in fact, manned by the gunners that had been left behind with them.

"'Sup." Said Cole. Clayton merely glowered, though it was just Jorge's best guess at his facial expression- again, the helmet got in the way.

Slowly, the grubs turned back, looking at them. Then they glanced at the turrets, then back. A rock and a hard place, Jorge thought with amusement, as all five of them opened fire on the shattered remnants of the grubs. The creatures went down like grain before a scythe, and he felt a mixture of satisfaction at the defeat of an enemy, combined with a strange nostalgia for the skill of Covenant Elites. This was far too easy in comparison.

Baird, grinning widely, threw a thumbs up to Cole and Clayton, who hopped down to street level, though not before disabling both turrets permanently.

"Alright, Paduk… your people are ahead, right?"

"Not much farther. Come on."

Baird seemed to chew on something for a moment before speaking again.

"Hey… are you and your people… Stranded?"

Paduk looked back, an eyebrow cocked and something between amusement and weariness in his expression. "Something like that."

Baird grimaced. Apparently, this wasn't the answer he'd wanted, but before he could speak further Cole interrupted.

"Hey, think we're here!"

Jorge looked ahead, noting the gate as well as a number of subtle slots for the barrels of weapons here and there in the wall surrounding it. Paduk strode up to the thing without hesitation, gripping the rail at the bottom of the metal gate and grunting as he lifted it over his head. The other three had no problem walking right on through, though Jorge had to duck his head as he passed under it. The moment he was through, Paduk stepped in and let it drop back to the ground with a muted crash, pausing to listen to it echo. Jorge watched as concern dawned in his expression as the man looked around, murmuring to himself.

"There should have been a guard here…"

The spartan turned and took in the area. Indeed, it seemed atypically abandoned for what was supposed to be what was essentially a small town. Glancing among the shacks and buildings, he noted the signs of recent habitation. Very recent. Food left out, spilled onto the ground. Huge crates of supplies left to sit. Things knocked over, generators sputtered into lifelessness with no fuel to sustain them. Cautiously, he lifted Etilka's barrel from where he'd allowed it to fall. This place made his instincts tingle almost as much as the run up to Visigrad.

The five of them spread out, almost instinctively falling into a defensive formation, weapons at the ready and pointing at everything that so much as moved. Paduk seemed bewildered, almost desperate in his attempts to find anything or anyone that might tell him what happened as he poked his way through the mess and almost kicked in the doors of shacks and buildings. Empty building after empty building, and Paduk was growing more and more concerned the more he saw. For all the evidence that people lived here, there were no bodies in the slightest, alive or dead. At least if he encountered a corpse, that would tell him SOMETHING, but there was nothing. Nothing but the wind whistling in-between vacant buildings, stirring the detritus that was present in every corner of this city into rustling waves that broke around their boots.

"Paduk… are you sure-?"

"Quiet!" Paduk's hand shot up, his head moving left and right, eyes scanning the thin murk that still covered everything. "I hear something…"

So did Jorge. His helmet's audio receptors picked up shuffling, something moving through the debris that definitely wasn't the wind. The disturbance created a tiny amount of noise that would have normally blended nigh perfectly with the sound of the garbage, but the difference was slight enough that the MJOLNIR suit's combat systems differentiated and amplified the sound. A brief blip of red appearing on his motion tracker only confirmed his suspicion.

"Recommend weapons at the ready," he said in a low voice. "Hostiles in the area."

The Gears and Paduk glanced back at him, then back out into the mist, on even higher alert than they had been a moment previously. The trip through the camp would have been nerve wracking for anyone, but Jorge found himself impressed by the Gears. Despite their casual approach to banter and interaction, they were now the picture of professionalism. He could appreciate that.

A slight creak echoed through the air. Not wood shifting or straining, not steel moving slightly in the breeze, but hinges that had been badly oiled. Given the nature of the environment, Jorge figured that that had been on purpose: he had no doubt that every one of these doors would utter an awful creaking noise whenever it moved. An effective alarm. The squad of five instantly had their weapons trained towards the source of the noise, eyes scanning for anything that might be a threat.

"What do you think?" muttered Clayton.

Baird shrugged. "Not much more we can do than move forward. Let's go."

Another thing that Jorge had noticed. Baird made command decisions, often selecting an option for the team to follow, and the others automatically turned to him when it came to making these sorts of calls. However, Baird had no marking of an officer about him or his armour… had he been demoted before the end of the Locust Wars, before the Hammer of Dawn strikes? Jorge tucked that little guess away for later consideration.

The door that had made the noise was a thick, heavy metal one set in the wall of one of the larger buildings. It was slightly opened, and for a moment Jorge considered that it might have been the wind causing it to creak, but the scuff marks in the garbage below it as well as the small pile that had been obviously recently disturbed served to prove that particular theory wrong. That, and…

Cole grimaced as he approached the doors and rubbed some of the glowing liquid left on the frame and ground off with his armoured fingers, rubbing the fluid between them before showing it to the other three. Clayton and Baird cursed, but Paduk's face simply fell for a moment before going back to its usual impassive self. Jorge would have missed the expression entirely, had he not happened to be looking at the soldier's face the moment the reaction appeared.

"Lambent." The word fell from Baird's lips like a curse itself, and Jorge found himself wondering what he meant. They'd run into a couple of creatures along the way that had glowed like this, and the Tickers had had small tanks of fluid that resembled this, but…

Jorge examined the door, the frame and the handle. None showed the distinctive scratching that he'd noted in places that lambent Wretches had been living. Really, however, that only served to make him more cautious. Clearly, they were dealing with something new here, something that none of the soldiers recognized. And that made Jorge wary.

Clayton stepped forward to pull the door open, Baird standing by with a rifle and scanning the interior. With Baird covering them, Cole and Paduk moved into the room as quietly as they could, which was an impressive amount for such heavy-set soldiers. Jorge followed behind them, Baird turning to cover the outside as Clayton stepped in before following him, then sealing the door behind them and turning to the rest of them and the interior of the building itself. The walls were a dark grey, almost black, the atmosphere dank and murky, their armour and flashlights being the only light in the place besides an ominous trail of fluid glowing a sickly yellow, leading deeper in.

Clayton made a displeased sound. "Why, oh why, did this place HAVE to be a haunted house?"

The others spared an amused glance at him before levelling their weapons and doing the only thing they could: follow the trail.