DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT OWN HALO

|PROLOGUE|

During its slip to Heian, the computer in the cryo-bay of the UNSC Diligence-class light destroyer, Kronstadt led Sam through a long, cyclical slumber. Per his request, the circuits let Sam enjoy stretches of anabolic rest, bringing him through dream-filled REM as quickly and as infrequently as possible. All of this was accomplished by careful adjustments to the near-freezing atmosphere of Sam's cry-pod and the judicious application of intravenous pharmaceuticals—drugs that both controlled the frequency and duration of cryo-subjects' sleep cycles and influenced the content of their dreams.

But no matter what brand of meds Sam got before being iced, he always dreamed about the exact same thing: his short time in the afterlife.

What happens to your physical body after you die...?

The cryo-computer observed a surge in activity in Sam's brain—an effort to yank himself out of REM—and upped his dosage. Kronstadt had just emerged from slipspace and was vectoring toward its destination. It was time for the computer to initiate Sam's thaw, and it was standard operating procedure to keep subjects dreaming throughout the sequence.

The meds took hold, and Sam sunk deep. And his mind's eye picture show continued to roll...

Sam lay face down, listening to the silence.

He was perfectly alone. Nobody was watching. Nobody else was there. He was not even sure he was there himself.

A long time later, or maybe not time all, it came to him that he must exist, must be more than disembodied thought, because he was lying, definitely lying, on some surface.

Almost as soon as he had reached this conclusion, Sam became conscious that he was naked. Convinced as he was of his total solitude, this did not concern him, but it did intrigue him slightly. He wondered whether, as he could feel, he would be able to see. In opening them, he discovered that he still had eyes.

He lay in a bright mist, though it was not like any mist he had ever experienced before. His surroundings were not hidden by cloudy vapor; rather the cloudy vapor had not yet formed into surroundings. The floor on which he lay seemed to be white, neither warm nor cold, but simply there, a flat, blank something on which to be.

Sam sat up. His body appeared unscathed.

He stood up, looking around. The mist that surrounded him pooled together like an enormous drop of water, and abruptly changed shape. What emerged was the form of a person, clad in a transparent robe with a hood.

But that wasn't quite right.

Sam was staring up at it from the ground, at an angel that should have given him a glimpse underneath the hood—but there was no face. It was an empty space, and the long, dangling sleeves also contained nothing but air.

For the first time, he wished he were clothed.

Barely had the wish formed in his head than clothes appeared a short distance away. He took them and pulled them on: They were soft, clean, and warm. It was amazing how they had appeared, just like that, the moment he had wanted them...

What is going on?

As if it could hear his thoughts, the right arm of the robe suddenly shifted. A white glove peeked out of the sleeve, but once again, there was a stark separation between robe and glove with no flesh to be seen connecting them.

Then the other sleeve rose in turn. The empty white gloves spread apart, and the faceless being opened an invisible mouth—or so it seemed. From all around, a calm deep voice cut the silence.

"You are dead, Samuel."

Eyes darting behind his lids, Sam remembered the words that set him on his path: "Your life on Earth has ended and you are now in the next phase of your existence in the universe."

He struggled to move his doped-up limbs, but the computer increased his dose and kept him down. His dream would not be stopped...

Dead? Sam stared at the robe in disbelief. He was dead. Then did that mean he was in limbo? Where was he going to go? Heaven or...

"This is not the Heaven of Hell you were raised on."

"So, you can read my mind?" Sam nodded. That made sense. If he was in the afterlife, then the "person" in front of him must be some kind of God. "If I'm not in Heaven or Hell...then who was right?"

The robed figure lowered its arms and continued speaking. "The Hindus were a little bit right. Muslim's a little bit. Jews. Christians. Buddhist. Every religion guessed about five percent."

"So where am I?" Sam asked, and he wondered why he was so calm. Shouldn't he be freaking out? He was dead after all?

"At the moment, you are outside the Fields of Asphodel."

Imagine the largest concert crowd you've ever seen, a football field packed with a million faces.

Now imagine a field a million times that big, packed with people, and imagine the electricity has gone out, and there is no noise, no light, no beach ball bouncing around over the crowd. Something tragic has happened backstage. Whispering masses of people are just milling around in the shadows, waiting for the concert that will never start.

If you can picture that, you have a pretty good idea of what the Fields of Asphodel looked like. The black grass had been trampled by eons of dead feet. A warm, moist wind blew like the breath of a swamp. Black trees—grew in clumps here and there.

The cavern ceiling was so high above it might've been a bank of storm clouds, except for the stalactites, which glowed faint gray and looked wickedly pointed. Sam tried not to imagine they'd fall on him at any moment, but dotted around the fields were several that had fallen and impaled themselves in the black grass.

I guess the dead don't have to worry about little hazards like being speared by stalactites the size of booster rockets. Sam thought and he couldn't help but look for familiar faces among the spirits of Asphodel, but the dead were hard to look at. Their faces shimmered. They all looked slightly angry or confused. They would come up and speak, but their voices sounded like background chatter, white noise. Once they realized he couldn't understand them, they frowned and moved away.

The dead weren't scary. They were just sad.

"Is this where I'm going to spend my eternity?"

"That is a possibility, but not the only one." The robed figure said, and it shifted to the side. "There are two others. The Fields of Punishment."

To the left, spirits flanked by security ghouls were marched down a rocky path toward the Fields of Punishment, which glowed and smoked in the distance, a vast, cracked wasteland with rivers of lava and miles of barbed wire separating the different torture areas. Even from far away, Sam could see people being chased by massive dogs, burned at the stake, and forced to run naked through the barbed wire. And he saw worse tortures too—things he didn't want to describe.

"Or Elysium."

To the right, was a small valley surrounded by walls—a gated community, which seemed to be the only happy part of the afterlife. Beyond the security gate were neighborhoods of beautiful houses from every time period in history. Roman villas and medieval castles and Victorian mansions. Silver and gold flowers bloomed on the lawns. The grass rippled in rainbow colors. He could hear laughter and smell barbecue cooking.

In the middle of the valley was a glistering blue lake, with three small islands like a tropical vacation resort.

Sam stared at the island in awe. "That's the kind of place I want to spend eternity."

"The Isles of the Blest," the empty robe explained. "You cannot enter there yet. Only those who have chosen to be reborn three times, and three times achieved Elysium are allowed entrance."

"Reborn?"

"If you choose to be judged and are judged to have achieved Elysium you will be given the choice to enter Elysium or be reborn and try to achieve Elysium again. If you are judged and are judged to be placed in the Fields of Asphodel or the Fields of Punishment you will not be given the choice to be reborn."

Sam thought about how few people there were in Elysium, how tiny it was compared to the Fields of Asphodel or even the Fields of Punishment.

Did he really want to risk it?

He hadn't lived a very long life, and he hadn't done anything he thought would get him into Elysium.

"I would like to be reborn."

Sam blinked and suddenly there were two slot machines in front of him. The kind that you would find at a casino.

One machine was labeled: WORLD.

The other was labeled: POWER.

"If you roll a WORLD where there is any sort of powers, you will then be given the choice to roll for a power."

Sam stepped up to the first machine and grabbed the silver handle. He pulled down and watched as millions...or probably billions of words rolled like credits down the screen before landing on the world he'd spend his next life in.

HALO

"What the fuck!" Sam gasped. Halo was a cool series of games, but he didn't want to live in a universe like that. "Can I reroll?"

"No."

"C'mon, billions of people die in Halo. Entire planets are glassed! This isn't fair!"

"What is it you humans say...ah, yes. Life isn't fair."

Sam glared at the deity. "Yeah, 'life' isn't fair. I'm dead."

"And you are in the after...life." the robed figure paused. "Would you like a power?"

"Goddamn right I do," Sam answered and he stepped up to the second machine. Halo was a brutal universe. If he was going to live there, he wanted some kind of edge.

Like before, he pulled the handle down and watched as the screen flashed.

C'mon, give me something good! Sam crossed his fingers. He was hoping to get the powers of Superman or even a watered-down version like Homelander. With powers like that, he'd the Covenant wouldn't be able to touch him.

And if he couldn't get either of those, then anything that would make him even slightly impervious to plasma would also work.

BENJAMIN POINTDEXTER.

Shit. Sam stared at the name. That wasn't what he was hoping for.

"Good luck."

"Wait!"

Sam woke and gasped, drawing in a mouthful of the freezing vapor that filled his cryo-tube. Quickly, the computer initiated an emergency purge. Somehow, despite more than three times the recommended amount of sleep-inducers, he had overridden the final stages of the thaw.

The computer noted the anomaly, carefully withdrew Sam's IV and catheter, and opened the tube's curved, clear plastic lid.

Sam rolled onto an elbow, leaned over the edge of his tube, and coughed—a series of violent, wet heaves until a long string of clear fluid flowed from his open mouth. He tasted his lips and almost gagged. The cryo inhalant was specifically designed to be regurgitated and swallowed, replacing the nutrients lost in deep sleep. No matter how they changed the formula, though, it always tasted like lime-flavored mucus.

As he caught his breath, he heard the slap of bare feet on the bay's rubberized floor. A moment later a small, square towel appeared in his down-turned field of view.

"I got it," Sam spat. "Back off."

"Zero to jerk in less than five." A man's voice, not much older than Sam. "I've met grunts who are faster. But that's pretty good."

Sam looked up. Like him, the man was naked. Gray hair was just starting to burr from his recently shaved head and the man's chin was long and wide.

"Berger. Private First Class."

All of which meant Berger was marine—not navy. But he seemed friendly enough. Sam snatched the towel and wiped his clean-shaven face and chin. "Westergaard. Lieutenant."

"Army?"

"Navy."

Berger's grin widened. "Well, at least I don't have to salute you."

Sam swung his legs out of the cryo-pod and let his feet settle onto the floor. His head felt swollen—ready to burst. He breathed deep and tried to speed the sensation's passage.

Berger nodded toward a bulkhead door at the other end of the bay. "C'mon, lockers are this way. Don't know what kind of dreams you had. But mine didn't involve sitting around and staring at another guy's balls."

Sam stayed sitting on the edge of his cryo-tube. Across the bay, he could see Heian out of a porthole large enough to fit a bus through sideways. What are the odds? he wondered staring at the distant alien world.

Heian was the site of an important Covenant logistics base from which supplies were delivered to the rest of the planets in the system, as well as the entire sector. The UNSC's Office of Naval Intelligence had discovered that a Covenant Prophet was on the planet and that his death would compromise Covenant logistics operations in the sector, giving the UNSC a strategic advantage.

Sam had been more than a little shocked when ONI tagged him for Operation: GREY VEIL. He was the spotter in the sniper-spotter team being sent to assassinate the Prophet.

"Yo, Westergaard?" Berger shouted. He was dressed now and carrying a duffel over his shoulder. "You just gonna sit around naked all day?"

Sam stood up and walked around his cryo-pod careful not to step in the bronchial surfactant he spit out. He opened the drawer on the side of his pod that held his clothes and slid them on.

A long sleeve shirt. Pants. And boots.

Everything was all black except for the red and yellow ODST crest emblazoned on the chest of his shirt.

"Y-y-you're a Helljumper!" Berger stuttered, staring at the emblem in awe.

How did I get here?

Sam walked past Berger toward the lockers where BDU was waiting for him.

A little over two decades ago he was just a punk-ass kid, terrified of still being on Harvest when the Covenant came knocking.

Now I'm assassinating Prophets?

Halo Self-Insert! I posted this story before but took it down because I wanted to do a rewrite!

It will be mentioned next chapter, but if you know who Sam Westergaard is, leave a review!

No cheating by looking it up!

I don't have a lot of time to write and would like to write a story people will read so chapter 3 will be posted if the story hits 20 Favs and Follows.

Thanks for reading!