I think my leg stopped hurting around the time the first rays of dawn began creeping over the horizon and through the trees. I remember thinking how remarkable that was. After all the injuries I had sustained, the suit had put me back together like it was nothing. All those gen-engineered osteoblasts knitting my bones back together.

If only I had known then…

The forest was so peaceful. It wasn't quiet though. It was alive with the sounds of animals, the pattering of feet as small herbivores bounded away, the calls of birds, the running of water in streams, the rustling of branches as the wind passed through.

The trees were tall evergreen firs and filled the air with the smell of pine. They blocked out most of the sky. I was glad for the cover, in case a Covenant air patrol flew overhead, looking for the what was left of the destroyed spirit. So far, I seemed to be in the clear though. Still, it seemed like the only thing that was missing was a soft dusting of snow.

It made me miss the military wilderness training preserve back on Reach. Longhorn Valley and the Bighorn River.

When I was eight years old, Chief Mendez flew us, the Spartan trainees, out on a dropship into the middle of the wilderness and dropped us off one by one, equipped with nothing but our fatigues, boots, a parka, and a scrap bit of a map.

We each had a piece of the greater whole, so our objective was to link up as a unit and combine our pieces into a complete map to navigate the forest and locate a landing zone for extraction. Mendez told us that the last person to make it to the LZ would be left behind.

John was the first one off the ship, while Sam and Kelly went around and passed his message.

"Ody, the river," Kelly said to me. "John said meet downstream where the river empties out."

Eventually it was my turn off the ship. Mendez had the pilot set the ship down and called me to the bay doors.

"086, you're up!" Mendez yelled. I remember pulling my parka tighter around myself as the bay doors opened with a mechanical whir and cold air rushed towards me. Snow was falling gently on the ground, like a winter wonderland. Mendez fixed me with his stern gaze. "Good luck, 086."

I thought for a moment his face actually softened before he added, "Mind the wolves, trainee."

I'm sure he didn't mean actual wolves. There's no way the UEG would import a predator species onto a colony world, especially when it could have dire consequences for the local ecosystem, but the advice was sound. I had no idea what kind of potentially hazardous fauna I could run into in those woods. I would need to keep my wits about me.

I leaped out of the dropship and my child-sized army boots sank into the snow with a satisfying crunch. The bay doors sealed behind me and the dropship was lifting off again, off to another drop point where it would leave another trainee. It was just about the crack of dawn then.

I had seen the river out of a viewport on the dropship and knew that it was due east relative to where I'd been let out. Once I reached it, I would just have to follow it until I ran into the other trainees.

I think I walked for a little more than an hour and I was standing on a shallow incline when I heard a noise like a branch breaking. Like something had stepped on it. I flattened myself against a tree and considered my options.

If whatever caused the noise was dangerous, I would need to react quickly. I couldn't climb any of trees, their trunks were too wide to get my eight-year-old limbs around and the branches were too high to reach.

I could run, but there was no guarantee that I could outrun whatever it was.

I could stand my ground and make noise.

The standard survival tactic when cornered is to spread out your limbs to make yourself seem bigger than you really are and to try and make a lot of noise to scare the animal away.

Turns out I didn't have to decide because before I could do anything, a snowball came soaring through the air and hit me in the face.

I fell back on my butt and sputtered when I heard giggling.

I wiped snow off my face when I saw Kelly standing there, gently tossing a snowball up and down in her right hand. She was dressed the same as I was, fatigues, boots, and parka.

By then her long blue hair had been shaved down to her scalp and the dye had long since gone away, leaving her with close shorn dark brown hair. I was glad she didn't load the snowball with a stone, like I'd seen her do before in training exercises.

I let out a laugh. "Oh, you're on!"

I was gathering my own snowball when she tossed her second one at me. It spattered against my parka, when I started to return fire, but I missed and hit a tree.

"Come and get me, Ody!" She yelled as she took off through the woods.

It was rare to get times like that. Times when we could just act like normal children.

We threw snowballs at each other for maybe ten minutes, me missing all the while. She got me a few more times while both of us laughed, our cheeks and noses red because of the cold.

Eventually I took cover behind a fir tree. I couldn't catch her in a foot race.

I could never catch her, but I could wait for her to come to me.

I could hear her footfalls crunching snow beneath them as she crept towards me.

"Ody," she called out teasingly, "where'd you go?"

I jumped out from behind the tree and lunged, trying to make a grab at her. Her arm was already cocked back with a snowball in hand. I was mid-lunge when it left her hand and hit me square in the forehead but it couldn't stop my momentum.

I plowed into her and locked my arms around her waist and we both went over and tumbled down the hill. We came to a stop when the hill evened out with me on top.

"I win," I said, but she was still smiling. It was a smile with white teeth, a few missing because they had fallen away to make room for permanent adult ones.

I was smiling too as I sucked in breaths of sharp, cold air.

She let out another giggle. "Yes, Ody. You win," she said, right before bringing up one last snow ball and planting it straight into my right cheek. "But victory is never an excuse to let your guard down,"she added in a childish imitation of Chief Mendez's voice. It sounded just like something the man would say.

I rolled off her and onto my back, and we both just laid there for a moment. Panting, and smiling, and laughing.

Acting like normal children.

Us, the Spartans…

We were all we had. It made me a little sick to think that Mendez had said someone would be left behind at the end of that training exercise. It didn't seem right.

Eventually she got up and told me, "Come on, we need to find the others," still smiling as she said it.

It occurred to me as I reminisced, standing there in that evergreen forest on Kursk, that I hadn't seen her smile like that in a long time. Not just a grin, or a gentle smile, but a real expression of happiness. That kind of rare expression which was only saved for the people you're closest too.

The smiles had all disappeared in the last few years.

They had first disappeared when so many of us were killed or crippled by the augmentation surgery. Then the first contact with the Covenant happened, and suddenly planets were being glassed and millions of people were dying and we weren't fighting drill instructors shooting paintball bullets at us anymore.

Mistakes were no longer teaching moments.

Mistakes got people killed.

Mistakes got Sam killed, and they had almost gotten me killed too.

Anyway, where was I?

Right, after the spirit crash.

I was making my way through the woods, when the suit voice, seemingly my now ever-present companion, sounded off.

"Warning, enemy air patrol detected."

It marked a little blip on the topographic map in the corner of my HUD, moving fast. With all the tree cover, I was out of sight, but I had no idea how sensor resistant the suit was against more sophisticated scanning tools.

The suit flickered and my shape faded into nothing. I noticed while invisible, with the suit bending light around me, that I didn't cast a shadow either. I found a gap in the tree cover and watched a phantom soar by overhead. It didn't have an escort.

I would have expected maybe a pair of banshees to provide close support. If they were unconcerned with flying alone, it meant that they were self-assured in their grip on the area.

I checked my waypoint and saw that the settlement the suit had marked for me was still at least a dozen kilometers away, and the phantom was flying in the opposite direction, which didn't bode well. The covies didn't have a problem with indiscriminate fire on civilian targets, so for them to just ignore it…

…well, you get the point.

I needed to get that settlement, fast.

The suit had chimed in that the fibrogenesis process was complete, so I tested my weight on my right leg experimentally. It held, and I didn't feel any pain. I stretched the muscles out and everything seemed to be just fine. Add another tally to the list of miracles the suit seemed to have worked for me.

I broken into a gentle jog, and then a run. I was never exceptionally quick amongst my peers, but in my MJOLNIR, I could still average out a running speed of fifty kilometers over even terrain, easily. The armor's reactive circuits and liquid-metal crystal piezoelectric layer boosting performance.

Let me tell you, it wasn't even comparable.

The suit carried me through the woods like the wind, the artificial muscles amplifying my own. Eventually I hit a clearing and the tree line ended.

What I saw left me perplexed.

The layout of the settlement was about what I had expected. Its size probably would have supported a few hundred people. A small little town on the frontier, a throwback to an older age of human expansion.

The buildings were mostly pre-fabricated structures, they looked like something from a my-first-colonial-settlement starter kit. Probably produced in some inner-colony factory and then shipped out across the galaxy, maybe they were even produced on Earth or Mars.

There were signs of destruction too. Collapsed buildings, burned out vehicles, surfaces pock marked with bullet holes.

No people. A ghost town.

But that was what I had expected.

Here's the perplexing bit. For one, it was all overgrown. Like the whole settlement had been abandoned years ago and nobody ever came back. Farming equipment was rusted, the buildings all discolored with streaks of grime, and vegetation sprouting up through cracks in concrete. I walked through the town cautiously, wrapped in the suit's invisibility.

What happened here? I thought.

I was a little frustrated with my lack of intel on the planet. When we gearing up back on the Night Fox, I hadn't thought we'd be going planetside, and as such I hadn't bothered to brush up the planet's history. I didn't know what to expect from the terrain, population sizes, or where major metropolitan areas would be.

I took a turn through the ghost town and came out to a clearing. Judging by the decrepit machinery, I'm guessing it was a farm field at some point. Only now that nature had reclaimed it, it was coated from end to end in foot tall grass.

Little wild flowers peaked up above the green blades and added vibrant yellows and reds. Spaced throughout the field, each equidistant from each other by a few feet, were little jagged blocks of gray stone. Each large enough to ensure they would not be shifted by the elements, or erode for a long time.

They were roughly hewn, but their arrangement belied their purpose.

Headstones.

I realized I had stumbled into a grave yard.

Judging by the state of the growth, it had to have been years since they were placed. Maybe even decades. I tried to wrap my head around it.

Had the people in the settlement all killed each other in some feud? A feud with another settlement?

If so, who took the time and effort to bury all of them instead of just torching the bodies, or piling them all into a mass grave, or just leaving them for the wildlife and the elements.

It couldn't have been the Covenant that killed them. Humanity had only been at war with the aliens for eight years, and if they had found Kursk that long ago, then the planet would have been a molten ball of glass by now.

Something else had to have killed these people. I thought.

I turned my way back towards the settlement, looking for anything useful. I had lost the weapons I had taken from the Covenant on the moon in the spirit crash, but it looked like the settlement had already been picked clean.

I found a broad range radio in one of the buildings, but the damn thing was waterlogged and ruined beyond any hope of repair.

I came across plenty of personal belongings that had long since rotted too.

Ruined family pictures, moldy stuffed children's toys, a rusted old baby cradle with one of those spinning mobiles above it. Only now the mobile had broken off and was left discarded on a filthy rug.

Any signage that was still legible used Cyrillic script. Makes sense since the planet was settled by Russian descendants.

It was as I was exiting one of the prefab homes that I noticed something. On the ground, in dirt that had been made soft maybe by a recent rain, were boot prints. Someone else had come through the settlement before me, and recently too. I knelt to the ground.

Looking at them, they were maybe a woman's size seven or eight and the spacing suggested she had been running. If something was chasing her, I didn't know. I didn't see any other tracks. I'm guessing the suit caught my line of thinking because it highlighted the tracks on my HUD and showed me that they led back into the woods.

Maybe a scavenger, or some backwoods survivalist.

Maybe if I could find her, she could tell me where I was and where I could find a place to contact my unit from.

I followed the way the suit showed me, even if it seemed like the trail went dead a few times, it always seemed to know the right direction to go in order to find it again. I must have walked for an hour, and keep in mind how big my strides are at seven feet tall.

Eventually the suit picked up a new sound, I don't think I would have heard it at the length of distance it would have had to have travelled with just my human ears.

Gunshots, automatic fire.

Not controlled bursts like a disciplined rifleman would use.

I picked up the pace. I pulled two-minute miles until I came out of the woods and into what must have used to have been a farm. Just like the settlement before, it was abandoned. Only now there was a Covenant ground patrol trying to get their way into a sealed prefab building that must have used to been a barn.

I'm guessing my mystery woman had gone there to hide and had gotten herself cornered.

I flickered into invisibility and approached unnoticed.

A standard Covenant ground patrol, just like I must have seen hundreds of times before. A single blue-armored elite minor barking orders at a few jackals and maybe a dozen grunts. It looked like the elite was trying to get the grunts to work together to pry open the barn doors.

The Covenant may have always had a technological edge, but outside of the elites, they lacked the discipline of a human military unit.

Jackals were opportunistic and more akin to raiders than soldiers, attracted to precious things like magpies.

The grunts were slothful, cowardly little runts. They were only effective in combat when they had an elite or brute to command them, but I didn't want to discount them too much.

A grunt may not be much of a threat to a Spartan, all wrapped in a powered exoskeleton and strong enough to shatter concrete with our fists, but grunts were strong.

They have a physique that reminds me of gorillas. Low to the ground with big arms. A grunt could easily pull a normal human apart if it really wanted to.

I hadn't seen any brutes or hunters on Kursk yet, but the brutes were always too blood thirsty for real discipline. Hunters, on the other hand, always listened to the elites. But they only ever fought in pairs, not in larger in units, and they definitely didn't have any respect for the unggoy and kigyar.

The barn was surrounded by an overgrowth of tall grass. I could use that to my advantage. It could be used to hide so I wouldn't have to tax the suit's invisibility so much.

I grabbed a jackal and twisted its neck around and pulled it down into the brush when nobody else was looking. I looted a needler from its corpse.

I repeated the maneuver another three times before the elite turned around and noticed that all the jackals under its command were gone. Its eyes went wide and yelled something to the grunts who turned their attention away from battering on the barn doors and began to fan out to search for me, still unseen.

I appraised the available cover. There was a rusted-out hull of a vehicle, maybe what used to be a tractor, about thirty feet away. When a few of the grunts finally got close enough that the grass could no longer hide me, I made my move.

I lunged out and smashed the first one's skull in with a single punch before it could even bring its weapon up. I ran and fired at the same time.

Doing so would usually be inaccurate, but the aim was compensated for by the slight tracking property of the Subanese crystal needles. I dropped two more grunts before I reached the tractor. By now the rest of the aliens were returning fire at me.

The suit HUD marked them all out for me. I cloaked and slipped away when the elite rounded around my corner and brought his weapon to bare and what he thought was just thin air, the confusion evident in his eyes. I ran, decloaked, pummeled a grunt to death or twisted its head around, before cloaking again and repeating.

It was all so fast that the elite gave up on trying to control the coherency of its unit as the grunts began panicking. Its underlings were all dead when it took cover behind the tractor which I had abandoned moments before.

The suit voice chimed in, as monotone as ever.

"Kick heavy objects to kill enemies without expending ammunition."

I brought my leg up, the same leg that been mangled just hours before, and kicked hard. The rusted hulk of the tractor shifted and collapsed over the elite, crushing its legs and pinning it to the ground. It let out an anguished cry. The elite was in too much pain to fire its plasma rifle at me.

"Crush the vermin."

I paused.

The suit, in its bizarre half high female and half deep mechanical voice, sounded angry. It was the most emotion I'd heard out of it since I had woken up in it. Moreso, I mulled over its choice of words.

Vermin.

The way the suit said it was the same way the covies referred to us humans. It hated them.

Before I had any more time to process, the elite got himself under enough control to bring his plasma rifle up towards me. I kicked the weapon out of his hand, probably breaking his fingers in the process.

But instead of bringing my foot back down to the dirt, I brought it down on the elite's helmet. It caved in. I could describe what the force of the blow did to its head too, but I think you get the picture.

I stood there for a moment.

It was needlessly violent. I could have killed that elite more efficiently, but I hadn't.

I hadn't been trained like that.

Yeah, of course I hated the aliens, but never enough to engage in pointless, inefficient cruelty.

It was the suit. It wanted me to make the elite feel helpless in the face of death, just like I had felt back on the CCS when I couldn't even bring myself to stand.

Great, a psychotic unknown AI in my head while I'm stuck inside of some magic armor that I can't find a way to take off. Just, great.

"Open the barn door." The suit said, all anger having vanished from its voice and now returned to its usual monotone state.

I crossed towards the door. It was thick and heavy. I gave a gentle knock, rapping on it slightly with my knuckles. With my inability to speak, it was the best I could do to provide a sign that I wasn't hostile. I waited, hoping for a response but none came.

She could be wounded, I thought.

I gave an experimental tug on the door but there was no give. It was being held shut but something on the inside, and held onto its frame by what looked like some sturdy hinges.

The suit's order changed.

"Force open the barn door."

I found a solid grip and planted my feet, digging my heels into the ground. I felt the suit's artificial muscles tense just as my own did as I pulled with my whole body. The hinges gave a whine of protest but instead of breaking, they just came intact right off the frame.

I hefted the door and tossed it away.

And was met with an assault rifle pointed at me.

"Threat detected."

Gee, I think I detected that too.

The woman holding it was maybe five and a half feet tall, clad in forest green camouflage, with black army boots, what looked like a weather proof coat that had seen better days, and shoulder length blonde hair that was tied back in a ponytail. Maybe in her mid-twenties. She had soft features and looked exhausted, with dark bags below her eyes.

They were blue and were wide open in shock.

Fear.

Before I had time to put my hands up in a silent gesture of 'I'm not going to hurt you', she squeezed the rifle's trigger.

The loud sound of rifle cartridges being fired rang out. The suit lowered the audio to protect my hearing. At the same time, the suit's outer surface shifted into armored scales just like it had during my plummet into the lake.

The bullets flattened themselves harmlessly against my chest and bounced off. I barely even felt the impacts, like someone was just gently tapping me with their finger.

The automatic got off sixteen rounds in the two seconds it took me to close the distance between us and wrench it out of her grip with just one hand, sending her tumbling over onto the barn floor. She scampered back on her hands and knees away from me into a corner and just stared, chest heaving.

She was in shock, I could tell. Her limbs were shaking. Typical bodily response as someone comes down from the adrenaline rush of chemicals to the brain when they're in fight-or-flight mode.

I realized how I must have looked.

This seven-foot-tall man, looking like a flayed giant, with blue dots for eyes, still coated in alien blood from my previous skirmish, and having just torn the barn door clean away.

Yeah, I must have been terrifying. She was probably just as afraid of me as she was of the aliens.