So, if many of you have read many of my writings on this site, I've very rarely delved into the story that is The Familiar of Zero. It's a series that I have a love-hate relationship with. Love because of the fantasy world and the setting itself, hate because of Louise and the utter limp-dickness of Saito very early on in the series. He gets better as a character, but early on it's kinda annoying. So far in the entirety of this repository, I have only done 2 stories based upon in this series, one being a self-insert that was more humor based, and the other being a more serious one based also on Halo as well.
What did I want to do differently in this one? In neither of those stories do I mention or use Saito as a character. Some stories that I have come across in my time in this IP's fiction on this site is one called "Stupid Devil Dog" by The Real Lee is here (id: 6536396), in which the writer attempts to rewrite Saito in the context of the original story, but make him more proactive and less of a pushover. And with 1k people watching and favoriting it, I can say that people like that idea. That's something that I want to attempt here in this story, a more proactive Saito with investigative skills similar to the Rookie in ODST.
For those of you that are reading this after the Resident Evil 2/Halo crossover, I pretty much copied the beginning of that story but changed it to be more relevant to this specific setting and changed the name of that protagonist to Saito.
Title: The Zero's ODST
Rating: T+ to M depending on things said and things that happen. While I do intend to not have any under 18 relationships explicitly shown, I think the culture shock of pre-Industrial Revolution relationships (that being girls were married off as young as possible to produce as many offspring as possible with older men) would be an interesting thing to showcase for both culture shock and for just showing how society has evolved to our current state and how it could look with interpersonal relationships in 500 years from now.
Summary: An ODST must be prepared for any situation where the mission dramatically changes from one set of parameters to another. Saito can certainly say that he did not expect to be dropped into some Medieval world where a girl at least ten years his junior wishes to both kiss him and for him to become her Familiar (see: slave).
Disclaimer: I own nothing other than my copy of MS Word and my desktop. Halo belongs to 343i, Microsoft, and part of it still with Bungie. The Familiar of Zero belongs to Noboru Yamaguchi and the license holders of the series. I only own this idea. See the foreword for the full disclaimer.
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Prepare to drop.
Three words that all ODSTs hear right before performing the closest thing one can do to descending into hell itself: dropping in a pod from high orbit to slam into the ground and assault enemy forces to either establish a beachhead or to take out high priority targets in hostile territory. For some ODSTs, those words filled them with dread. After all, not everyone makes it every time to the ground in their pods. After all, even with excessive quality checks, manufacturing defects can still exist and heat shields fail. Even with the full technological advancements made by the UNSC in the last hundred years, mistakes happen. For others in the ODSTs, it was all about the adrenaline rush. It was all about going through one of the most thrilling rides of their lives. It was said that there were two types of people in the ODSTs: the elite marines of the UNSC, and those that were crazy enough to do it.
For ODST Corporal Saito Hiraga, the Drop was a gamble. Like a fine game of poker, or Russian roulette. It was all the same at the end. You place your bets and the House gets to decide whether you win or lose. So far, the House had decided that he gets to win. Yet again he'd be loading bullets into the revolver, spinning the cylinder, and pulling the trigger by getting into that pod.
Saito looked over his pod and saw the two weapons inside needed for his mission: an M7S submachine gun and an SRS99 anti-material sniper rifle. Completing his kit was a single M6/SOCOM magnum, the deadly 'friend' of the ODST. The mission profile? Infiltrate an Innie outpost, take out the leader, signal for extraction. Easy. He and his squad would be dropped deep behind enemy lines and would have to move closer. Scuttlebutt was that the Innies were squatting in an alien ruin. No one knew anything else.
He hoisted himself into his pod and secured any weapons or articles that could become hazardous if left unattached or unsecured. All of his weapons were stowed away and was ready to drop. Well, as ready as one could be. The hatch closed and sealed his pod with a pressurizing hiss. The segmented hull cut the bay off and opened below him revealing the planet's surface below. Above his head on a console were four LEDs that were currently unlit. Once his pod moved into position, the LEDs lit up red. There was a beep as the countdown for the pod launch was initiated. As it did, one LED turned off. And so, it did for three more beeps. Finally, there was an extended beep where the LEDs all turned green and his pod accelerated towards the planet.
A rangefinder on a screen displayed the current altitude which was steadily decreasing at a fast rate. Dropping from high orbit was risky business, but the Navy needed to keep their presence relatively discreet. He and his squad adjusted their trajectory to hit the optimal LZ. They reached low orbit and broke through the clouds. His chute automatically popped to slow him down to not be a deathly impact. It was then that Saito noticed the silvery structures that were absolutely alien. Humans didn't build these and it sure wasn't the Covvies either; it was something else. There was some kind of cryptic beauty to the spire that was the center of these structures.
The admiration of these structures didn't last long as the ground forces noticed their approach and started to open fire at the pods incoming towards their position. Rockets and gauss rounds sped past Saito' pod as untrained and poorly calibrated weapons were his only saving grace. He looked at the rangefinder, he was still a thousand feet from the ground. Static started to cause the hairs on his arm and back of his neck to stand on end. There wasn't anything in the pod that would cause that. It was only a shout that came over the battle-net that explained what happened.
"Slipspace ruptures!" was shouted over the radio.
Saito was then suddenly surrounded in pure darkness. He was battered in every which way. To everyone on the battlefield, he was dead, another KIA in a bloody civil war. It would be after a bloody battle resulting in a loss from the Insurrectionist Movement that the structure was a Forerunner structure with a defensive grid of Slipspace generators. Eyebrows that would be raised is that this portal wasn't what people expected it to look like, but it was green. Most dismissed this coloration as a glitch with the cameras in the area that recorded the phenomenon. However, Saito would never know this. Saito? He would be dropping into a different situation altogether.
Saito was surrounded by green light emanating from the viewport. The pod was rattling around and he felt like he was in a blender or tornado. Eventually, the hue went away and he saw open sky. The altimeter showed the optimal height to eject the chute and the software built into the pod ejected it. He saw the altimeter's drop slow down significantly. The good news was that he wasn't going to end up a pancake on the pavement or jungle floor.
Meanwhile, Saito was falling and a few minutes previously. A girl named Louise had just chanted the spell needed to summon a familiar, a creature or being that was capable of a symbiotic relationship with its master. But to Louise's lament and to Zerbst's delight, she had failed to summon a familiar. She was now even further shamed than she had been previously. Which, of course, led to her being viciously mocked by everyone.
"The Zero can't even summon a familiar, how pathetic!" one girl jeered.
"What was that about the La Valliere family being superior?" another boy also called out. "I can't hear you over the lack of a familiar!"
The insults just kept coming and coming. But Tabitha, who had been keeping silent on this commonplace bout of bullying, had heard whistling in the air. She turned to look to the sky and saw a black dot, and it was rapidly approaching based on the fact it kept getting larger by the second.
Before she could say anything, another student spoke up, his finger pointed to the sky. "Hey, what is that?" he asked. There was a low hum as it came into view. It was some kind of black container with what looked like glass of all things. It hit the ground with a thunderous roar and thud as the dirt and grass of the courtyard flew into the air.
As for Saito? His day wasn't getting any worse considering that he had finally made touchdown, or landfall depending on personal terminology. He certainly wasn't dead because he still had a headache from whatever godforsaken rapids of an air current he just went through. The dust was still settling and he chose this moment to activate the explosive bolts on the hatch. A hiss of compressed air escaped from the sealed pod, which was the only warning before the hatch blew off sending it a good fifty feet away. He drew his M7 and swept the area in front of him. Still not seeing anything, he activated VISR and it started to reveal the terrain.
There was a structure, maybe brick in origin. He stepped cautiously out of the crater that his pod had created and stepped just beyond the dust cloud. The microphone in his helmet was picking up a lot of coughing, and it was sounding like juveniles and not adults. He flipped through the settings on his VISR and confirmed that all around him were a bunch of teens dressed in what could only be described as 'cosplay attire'. He hadn't seen anything like this since the time his father had arrested a bunch of drunk LARPers from a college fraternity. Taking another glance at the castle he had the following thought: 'This is a lot of work just to LARP.'
"Faire halte!" a girl's voice called behind him. He turned to see a pink haired girl standing a few yards away; far enough to not be a threat. "Donc, vous êtes enfin venu, mon familier," she seemed relieved to say.
Saito was no stupid man, no ODST was since they had to go through extensive training and drills as well as knowing their weapons part by part in the case of replacing a defective part in a malfunctioning weapon with either a temporary fix or salvaging another damaged weapon to use his own. He also wasn't some illiterate jarhead. Before he joined the war effort near the end of the Human-Covenant War, he had been a college student in a city whose languages were considered the 'Romantic' languages. You know the ones, French, Spanish, etc. However, the one city that he grew up in did have a larger than normal (for the world's settlement history) Japanese heritage population. Point being, he had been exposed to several languages during both his childhood and young adult life; one that he was extremely rusty with was French.
From what he could tell, based upon Latin base words and context alone, she was ordering him to stop and something about a 'familiar'. The dialect was extremely odd. Saito just raised an eyebrow at this. He reached for his radio on his helmet and started a transmission. Normally, he wouldn't disobey a radio silence order, but this entire mission had gone to shit and needed guidance from a higher-up. The AO had changed as he wasn't knee deep in jungle flora and was in some sort of castle courtyard. "1-5 to Overlord, please respond," he prompted. There was only radio silence. "Hiraga to UNSC Saratoga, please respond," he asked again. Yet again, there was absolute radio silence. There wasn't even the oddly comforting sound of radio static because that meant at least someone was listening. "Hello, anyone out there?" he said into the void. Unfortunately for him, the void wasn't the one who responded.
"Stupide familier! Pourquoi n'obéis-tu pas à mes ordres!" the pink haired girl shouted. That definitely sounded like frustration and an insult with the underlaid threat of violence. Saito prepared for a fight, but hoped that the threat of violence would be enough to keep anyone from doing anything; he hefted his M7 SMG but kept it at parade rest.
There were a few of the kids that caught on really quick because one girl stepped forward and placed a hand on her shoulder. Saito caught the name 'Louise' being muttered.
"Listen, kids, let's not do anything rash that will get someone hurt," was what he meant to say. What came out was a butchered version of French that would have been called Engrish if it was from any other language to English. While drunk.
[This was around the time that I completely lost what I wanted to do to end this.]
To be continued…?
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Sorry that I kind of fell apart there at the end guys. Normally I try and finish these off in a satisfactory fashion, but this time I just couldn't find anything in my brain that would work in a way that was really satisfactory without completely scrapping this. I just had a lot of things on my mind during the last quarter of writing this and just slammed into a brick wall, so it ended sort of suddenly; so, if it is a bit more underwhelming, that's the reason.
I do have a lot of ideas that I really want to explore and that's basically the Rookie from ODST is Saito in all but name. You know, a warrior that has the heart and skills of a detective. I sort of also had this idea for later in the anime's original run at the inn where he plays the sax, specifically the chords from the ODST album. I really want to do a murder mystery, that would be fun, especially the investigation part of it.
But let me know about what you guys think about the idea in and of itself. Think it has merit? You know where to leave the feedback.
