Disclaimer: I do not own either Kantai Collection or Halo, nor do I gain any monetary funds from either them or this fanfiction.

Author's Note: Again, co-written by Carlos Andare.

Somewhat surprised at how many people have responded so far to what was originally a plot-bunny, but the idea refuses to die so it looks like you all get to see as much as my muse and I will allow!

Italics - Radio, Ship names, thoughts

Bold - Jarring events

Leviathan panted as the smell of burnt propellant wafted in the air around her, shells that had bounced off her armor plating leaving scrapes on her while her MAC gun was held in her hands in a grip that was both familiar and yet completely alien, her turrets kept searching for more targets. Around her were the shattered and bloody remains of several of the pale-skinned beings that had tried to recruit her. At least, that's what it had sounded like to her...

Looking around at the wreckage, her yellow eyes took in the scenes of carnage wrought both by her and those before her upon the area. Reinforced concrete and rebar were shattered and strewn about along with burnt and rent armor plating. Here and there brass casings littered the ground where defenders had obviously put up resistance, though having not seen any made Leviathan curious as to whether they were UNSC or Insurrection. There was something strange nagging at the back of her mind too, even though her HUD display showed that there was no strange readings in the area, and there wasn't any evidence of plasma burns, so she felt safe in ruling out Covenant...

Making her way through the stone and steel wreckage, Leviathan made her way to some sort of shed or side-bunker, where her radio was picking up an open comm signal. There wasn't anything being actually broadcast, but the static that showed up on it was starting to grate at her. Looking around at shattered and scorched equipment, she found the source of her discomfort, a half-melted radio that was still trying to function. Likely from when the defenders were first attacked. No doubt they'd put out an SOS, but given that noone had shown up, it would seem that it was in vain... Reaching out to the device, Leviathan paused for a moment in indecision, then turned the radio off. Silence echoed both through the air and the radio spectrum then, and the cruiser gave it a moment of verbal silence to wish the departed an easy trip to beyond...

Afterwards though, it was back to work trying to find anything mentioning where she was. Manicani wasn't a listing on anything she had available, not that that was much given the fact that she had enacted Protocol, but there might be something to tell her where on Earth it was... If it really WAS Earth and not some trick made by those... people from before.

Ah, there was something there though! A severed arm, definitely human, lay amongst the debris. Moving over to it, Leviathan examined the limb, noting the pale skin and the tattooed geisha on it. Japanese? Picking it up, she checked to see if there were any ID chips within what was left, but there didn't seem to be any sign of them... The half-burnt papers on the wall had some kanji too, if she was reading it right, so that meant that at least those here had some kind of Asian ancestry. Dangling the arm in her hand and turning it over, Leviathan wondered to herself if it had belonged to a soldier at all. After all, this 'Manicani' could be a military post, but it could perhaps have been a civilian port that was reinforced by military forces. Without anyone alive there'd be no way to tell for sure. Still, looking at the limb, she had to wonder who the man might have been. It certainly looked like he would have been a big guy, as the forearm was nearly the size of her own...

That thought caused the cruiser to pause a moment. Her own? Looking down, sure enough, the dismembered limb looked slightly bigger than her own if she took her armor off... but wouldn't that require pulling off her hull plates? Wait, how would that work? She was supposed to be just over a kilometer long, how the HELL would a human arm even get to be...?

Pain shot through her skull at that, the feeling similar to a power surge going through her bridge's computers as two sets of data tried to match but refused to be compatible. Lifting a hand to her head, the cruiser/woman/neither pulled off the helmet from her head, letting the smoke-filled air of the radio room touch her face while the scents surrounding her burned into her sinuses, clearing away her thoughts for a moment. Blinking away the slight sting from her eyes, Leviathan looked down at the object now in her hands.

Superficially it resembled the helmets used by the 105th Special Operations Unit, the ODST corps, in that it had a titanium shell with a silver-blue polarizing visor that doubled as a HUD. Along the right side of the helmet's crown in white stenciling was her service number, as crisp as though it had just been painted that day. Yet at the same time, it had substantial differences. Around the visor itself were jagged metal teeth, like those of a shark, made of the same titanium shell and giving the whole thing the look of a predator about to devour something. Intimidating to be certain, and to Leviathan herself it felt fitting, yet at the same time she knew she'd never had a patterning like that before... Neither in paint nor in armor sculpture... Where did it come from?

Looking at the rest of herself showed some other things both similar and yet alien. Her body was covered in what appeared to be a combination of the Navy's grey officer's uniform, the thin armor plates designed to protect against small arms and shrapnel as well as doubling as a space suit in case of a hull breach. Over top of that however were black plates of armor also reminiscent of ODST battle plate, but only as a basis. Around these plates were small turrets or vectored nozzles, her maneuvering thrusters something told her, that were spaced out along Leviathan's limbs and torso. The turrets dotted her shoulders, forearms, the backs of her hands, her hips and calves, while the thrusters came also from hips and calves, as well as just beneath the shoulder pauldrons. Around her waist was a belt with what looked like grenades, but were on closer inspection instead shrunken versions of her SOIEV units, which made her wonder where her Helljumpers were...

On her back though was another story though. Something intrinsic told her that the apparatus that strapped to her back wasn't a mere backpack, it was the majority of her hull. The mechanism was nearly as big as the rest of her, and held her primary engine block on the back-most portions as well as her main hangars, which sat just above the engines. Along the length of this pack as well as on her bicep plates, chest piece, and thigh plates were small hexagonal hatches that Leviathan knew were the openings to her archer pods, many of which were slowly reloading through... some means... The backs of her legs also had some sort of framework that was strapped on, giving her legs more support to keep the weight of her equipment from crushing her while providing mounting for more thrusters. This device also wrapped around to attach to her torso plating, the logo of the UNSC over her left breast in white paint, the wings of the eagle sweeping proudly with the letters beneath its talons.

Finally, there was the device that she'd had in her hands before, which currently was slung from cabling around her torso to keep it from hitting the ground. Examining that proved to be similarly changed from what she'd known beforehand even though her mind had told her what it was already... It was her MAC gun. The weapon which normally ran along her dorsal and central lengths was now integrated into a single weapon system it would seem, though it retained the double-barrel configuration, to appear as a sort of hand-held autocannon. Leviathan would have chuckled, if not for one other change to it...

The muzzle of the weapon bore a face. Not a human one, but instead a conical, almost shark-like face with narrow eye-slits that allowed her targeting systems to make more precise readings, while the the side flanges looked like they hinged to pull out. The design looked like someone tried to breed a shark and a Sangheli with a missile thrown in for good measure... Scary as hell, but it still made for an odd sight, given how Leviathan couldn't remember if she'd ever had anything like that before...

Shaking her head, the cruiser/woman took in the scene of the broken control room again before sighing. There wasn't anything here she'd be able to use, and given how she'd already destroyed or driven off everyone else she could have interrogated, it meant that she would have to find somewhere or someone else to talk to. For now though, it was probably best if she made herself scarce. Sitting in an unknown base that no doubt belonged to somebody was asking for an incident, and if she was going to be caught up in whatever was going on around here, it was going to be on her terms, not somebody else's!

Returning the helmet to her head, the ship-woman stomped her way out of the building to look about with her radar and other senses. Sensing nothing in the immediate area, she looked upwards to see the blue sky above, the afternoon sun shining down. Leviathan had thought that there'd been a satellite up above, but it didn't seem to be answering to any of her signals, which did not bode well. With a huff of disappointment, the cruiser then did a mental checklist to determine her systems were intact before realizing that there was one more thing she should do...

'All hands check in...'

The simple command brought a wave of information from her body and hull, as several voices perked up within her. Huh... So she wasn't completely alone after all. The voices were similar to children, but they felt like they belonged to her, and they were answering from stations that were normally manned by her old crew, so as long as they weren't damaging her insides or doing anything harmful or disruptive she could look into it later. As it was when she checked her bridge... Nothing. Internally, Leviathan had known it was unlikely that her Admiral had survived. After all, she'd SEEN him die, and laughing as he had done so... But she could hope, no?

Feeling that there was no more use in loitering around an abandoned battlefield, Leviathan locked her legs together and started her engines, the newly reborn cruiser slowly ascending up into the sky on a pillar of fire, her heart hidden behind a steel and titanium visage against the world...