Hey folks, Grubkiller here.
Hope you all had a Merry Christmas and a happy new year. This is the latest chapter here.
Hope you enjoy.
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John-117 awoke to the sound of his charging energy shields signifying that his MJOLNIR's system was back online. He had a splitting headache and a ringing in his ears, but as a Spartan-II, he knew they'd subside soon enough.
He opened his eyes as each element of his heads-up-display flickered on one at a time. He glared through the haze of his unfocused eyes as they adjusted to his new environment.
He was in immediate danger. He was ensnared by a slithering tentacle, and it dragged him along the metal floor of wherever he was. He couldn't say. But it was dragging him further and further, and he started to struggle against the tentacle, but it was quite strong.
Though unable to pick up a weapon and kill the live appendage directly, Cortana had other resources, and rushed to use them. Careful not to drain too much power, the AI diverted some energy away from the MJOLNIR armor, and made use of it to create an electrical discharge. The tentacle gave a soft squeal started to loosen its grip from the electricity, just enough for the Chief to wiggle free, and even crush some parts of the tentacle.
"Sorry about that," Cortana said, as the Spartan stomped the tip of the tentacle, "but I couldn't think of anything else to do."
"You did fine," he replied. Then he saw that the tentacle had retreated into the shadow. "That was close."
He turned his helmet lamp on, and the bright beam of white light illuminated whatever part of the room he was looking at. He soon wish that he hadn't. He looked at the bits of tentacle that he had smashed into a fine paste, and saw the all too familiar brown-green slimy ooze on the floor.
He covered much of the wall and floor.
"Flood!" He exclaimed.
Cortana checked his vitals and noticed a major elevation in his heart rate. The same he got whenever he had nightmares about the parasitic lifeforms.
Now he was stuck God-knows-where, with the Flood nearby, and no weapons or grenades.
"This isn't good," Cortana said.
"Cortana, find us an exit out of here. Now!" He said.
"Already on it. I'm asking it on your HUD."
The marker appeared, and he followed it, moving down dark corridors in unfamiliar territory.
"We need to get back in contact with Miranda and the others." Chief said.
"We're too deep for surface contact. But I've managed to find out where we are. We appear to be underneath the Ring's Library."
"Great." Chief said, remembering his time with Guilty Spark playing hide-and-seek with the Flood all over that Godforsaken building. There didn't appear to be any Flood in the area. So he kept on moving.
But just as he came up on another door, he found that it was blocked off by some kind of Biomass. It looked too thick for him to just punch through.
"Cortana..." Chief started.
"Already on it." She said, and another marker appeared on his HUD.
He followed it, and eventually, after backtracking and following many twists and turns, and being blocked by even more Biomass (some which seemed to appear where he had been before where it wasn't previously), he came up on a massive chamber.
The familiar guttural growls of the Flood echoed throughout the chamber.
It was dark, and several red small red lights appeared on the ceiling high above. There was a massive hole in the middle, and he could see objects falling down from above.
He zoomed in with his visor.
"Are those...?" Cortana asked.
"Yup."
Bodies.
Dozens of them. Elites. Brutes. Jackals. A few Humans.
They were being unceremoniously discarded into the massive pit at the bottom of the chamber. But that wasn't the only things that were being dumped.
Several bodies lay around him. They had weapons laying next to them.
"Nice to know your luck is still holding out." Cortana commented as he searched the bodies and made his morbid weapons detail.
"Not until we get out of this place first." Chief said as he grabbed a bladed grenade launcher from a dead Brute, and a Battle Rifle from a dead Marine, in addition to his dog tags.
It was at that point that he heard a loud scream. A host of Flood poured into the room from where he entered, as if they had been waiting to ambush him, all of whom were clearly determined to kill the heavily armored invader.
He turned to face them, razed his Brute Shot and fired into the horde.
The Arbiter groaned in pain as he came to. He could feel every ache and bruise that covered his body. He looked back up to see how far he had fallen.
Dozens of units. Maybe hundreds. Something must have broken his fall on the way down.
He looked up and was about to curse Tartarus and all of his kin when he heard the signature squelching and and slithering of the Flood.
He looked down, and on the floor several units away from him was a swarm of infection pods gathered in front of him. He immediately reacted and slashed at the pods with one of his wrist-mounted energy daggers. Several pods popped.
He got back up, despite his bruises, and activated his other energy dagger, and prepared to face his fate like a Sangheili should.
But there was something strange about the infector pods' behavior. They weren't attacking. They were retreating instead. Normally the Flood would just throw themselves at anything that looked like a potential meal.
But then, out of the shadows, a dozen tentacles slithered towards him. He kicked, stomped, and slashed at them, but eventually they got a hold over all of his limbs, and he was soon dragged kicking and screaming into the bowels of the Ring.
"Warning! Threat level increasing!" Cortana exclaimed.
"You think?" Chief asked sarcastically as he raised his Brute Shot.
Several energy bolts slammed into the swarm of flood, and blew several chunks out of the nearest forms. But more kept coming.
He slashed the Brute Shot's underslung bayonet into the nearest combat form and plunged it beep into its chest.
Then a flying wedge comprised of carrier and combat forms stormed the platform, and pushed the human back. He switched to his newly acquired Battle Rifle and they soaked up his bullets as if eager to receive them.
There was no break in the endless wall of Flood attackers. He fired until his weapons were empty, pried energy weapons out of dead fingers, and fired those until they were dry. Finally, more by virtue of stubbornness than anything else, the Master Chief found himself standing all alone, rifle raised and barrel smoking, with no one to shoot at.
Shell casings littered the floor.
But that didn't last long.
Suddenly, even more tentacles than before reached up to ensnare him, and he was soon yanked off of the platform and suspended in the air by the tentacles.
He kept struggling, and Cortana did everything she could to try and shock the tentacles with his armor systems like before, but there were too many of them ensnaring the Spartan.
But just then, something massive appeared out of the pit below them like a massive freight-train of rotten flesh.
When the Master Chief stopped struggling, he found himself in the presence of an enormous kraken of a beast. The centre of its body rose like a snake with vine-like tentacles extending in every direction.
Below that, it split off into many much-larger, train-sized tentacles that disappeared down black corridors in the sides of the dark, gloomy, fog-filled chamber. Every instinct John had as a Spartan, a human and a living being told him to get out as soon as possible.
But that wasn't happening.
"What... is that?" Cortana asked.
Suddenly, a loud rumble vibrated its way up the monster's long neck. Liverish-green air escaped the creature's throat.
John looked up at its head. It wasn't an ordinary head of any kind. There was no visible skull nor orifices for eyes, nostrils or ears. Instead, the massive serpent's 'head' simply split off into four protrusions that John figured to represent a jaw of sorts.
Upon closer observation, he saw that these elongated flaps had rows of jagged teeth lined along the inside. They had the shape and texture of broken bones. In fact, John was almost certain that's what they were.
The monster spoke in reply to Cortana's question.
"I?" it reverberated.
John remembered the ominous voice he'd heard earlier after being hit by the plasma projector above the lake. This monster was undoubtedly the same being that had spoken then.
"I am the monument to all your sins," it spoke slowly and deliberately.
Two tentacles pointing upwards began to pull something down from the chamber's ceiling far above near the star-shaped opening. A humanoid form twisted and turned at the tips of the tentacles, even flipping upside-down at one point before being tossed back into an upright position.
It was an Elite covered in archaic silver Covenant armor. As the monster brought the Elite to the same level as John, the Spartan's target reticle in his heads-up-display turned red, but he ignored it.
The Elite continued to grunt and squirm and kick in a futile attempt to break free.
"Relax," John told the Elite. "I'd rather not piss this thing off."
The Elite's eyes indicated its recognition of the Spartan, mostly showing astonishment with a hint of unbridled rage.
"Demon," The Elite hissed at the Chief.
Its pronunciation, for a Sangheili, was impeccable. John already knew this was no ordinary Elite, but the English was unexpected. It had manipulated its mandibles in a way that the top two touched together while the bottom two joined in similar fashion, forming a jaw more akin to that of humans, not that it looked anything like a human.
But then their current predicament took center stage again.
The tentacled monster huffed several times, expelling a green misty substance with every foul breath before it spoke again. The Chief's suit filters did nothing to mask the rotten smell of a thousand dead bodies.
"This one is machine and nerve and has its mind concluded." The end of its tentacle wrapped around John's visor, obscuring his vision only briefly before unravelling again until his head was free. It still had a firm grasp over his arms and legs.
It continued speaking, this time turning its 'head' towards the Elite who had now stopped struggling.
"This one is but flesh and faith," the creature said as it moved the Elite around like a puppet as if inspecting it for defaults, "and is the more deluded."
"Kill me or release me, parasite," The Elite spat. "But do not waste my time with talk."
"There is much talk, and I have listened through rock and metal and time. Now I shall talk and you shall listen."
The monster seemed to relax a little, bringing John and the Elite closer to its obscene mouth, which expelled more fog with every breath. Upon closer examination, John was horrified by what he saw.
The creature's teeth were made up entirely of shattered skulls from each of it victims, like he suspected. He looked up and saw the combat forms on the platforms busily dragging bodies and tossing them into the brown mass below.
John could see the shapes of mangled limbs, torsos and most abominably, faces sticking out from beneath the creature's biomass. They were melded into it almost seamlessly. Many of the faces had frozen expressions of pain and terror. They were Human, Elite, Grunt and Jackals and many more.
John tasted bile in his mouth as he attempted to block out the faces and look at the monster in its entirety again.
The creature, this... Gravemind, pulled a tentacle out from one of the tunnels in the wall to reveal a metal orb glowing red in its grip. The thin end of the tentacle looped through the various holes in the clearly dented and damaged Forerunner Monitor.
The Gravemind lifted the spherical AI before John and the silver-clad Elite.
John froze for a second. If the Flood had power over a Monitor of Halo, what did it mean for everyone on the ringworld? John thought back to 343 Guilty Spark.
That Monitor had maintained full control of Halo's Sentinels and its teleportation grid. Who knew what other powers a Monitor might possess?
"Greetings," chirped the orb. "I am Twenty-Four-Oh-One Penitent Tangent. I am the Monitor of Installation Zero-Five."
The monster lifted another tentacle beside Penitent Tangent. This tentacle also had something at the end of it, but unlike John, the Elite or the Monitor, this being was embedded into the tentacle itself. A half-infected Covenant Prophet stuck out from the top of the tentacle with its head, neck and torso free to move but its legs melted into the tentacle's thickness.
The Prophet's skin was half turned, and it had a milky-brown glaze over its iris and pupil. John also noticed a wound in the side of its face that appeared to be sealed with tiny Flood sacks. The Prophet looked deathly ill.
"And... I am the Prophet of Regret," the Prophet strained, struggling to speak through his excruciating pain. "Councilor most High... Hierarch of the Covenant!
Regret's speech sounded forced. The Prophet was clearly in pain. John felt an itch in his throat just by listening to the glass shattering strain in the Prophet's cold voice. The Spartan was then distracted by a red light now glowing brighter than ever from Penitent Tangent.
He turned towards the light to see the Monitor's big, round eye staring directly at him.
"A Reclaimer? Here? At last!" The Monitor said with excitement, as it floated towards the Chief as far as the ensnaring tentacles would allow. "We have much to do. This facility must be activated if we are to control this outbreak!"
"Stay where you are!" Regret screeched. "Nothing can be done until my sermon is complete!"
"Not true," replied Tangent. "This installation has a successful utilization record of one point two trillion simulated and one actual. It is ready to fire on demand."
The Monitor sounded proud about the last statement. This was his Halo installation after all.
Regret shook his head and exhaled deeply.
"Of all the objects our lords left behind," began the Prophet, looking at the Elite in the tentacle closest to him. "There are none so worthless as these oracles. They know nothing of the Great Journey!"
"And you know nothing about containment," retorted Penitent Tangent, getting up in Regret's face. "You have demonstrated complete disregard for even the most basic protocols."
The Gravemind lifted the Monitor-held tentacle higher. "This one's containment," said the creature, pausing to let out a growl of disgust, before lowering the Monitor and then raising the Regret-tentacle. "And this one's Great Journey are the same."
The Gravemind lowered the Monitor and Prophet into the darkness. Regret shrieked long and loudly as he disappeared from sight until his voice eventually faded.
Another long vibration ran up the snakelike body of the Gravemind before it emitted a low growl and continued to talk.
He turned to the Elite, who had stopped struggling completely, somewhat curious.
"Your Prophets have promised you freedom from a doomed existence, but you will find no salvation on this ring. Those who built this place knew what they wrought. Do not mistake their intent or all will perish as they did before."
John decided it was his turn to chime in.
He didn't trust the Gravemind. It was very clearly an enemy, even more dangerous than the Covenant, but in these circumstances, they desired the same outcome. Throughout the conversation, John had been working to figure out why the Gravemind was keeping them here and why it hadn't killed them yet.
They shared a common goal. The Gravemind knew it.
John and Cortana knew it, but this Elite was still blind to the truth. John spoke to the silver-clad Elite.
"This thing is right," said the Chief. "Halo is a weapon. Your Prophets are making a big mistake."
"Your ignorance already destroyed one of the Sacred Rings, Demon," Thel fumed. "It shall not harm another!"
"If you will not listen to the truth then I will show it to you," announced the Gravemind. "There is still time to stop the key from turning, but first it must be found. You will search one likely spot," Gravemind said, indicating the Chief, "and you will search another." He said, indicating the Elite. "Fate had us meet as foes, but this ring will make us brothers."
With a shimmer, Rings of golden light rose up around John and the Elite's bodies until almost all the light blocked his view of the Gravemind and the Library. John took one last look at the monster's distressing faces as the world around him became pure white.
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Well folks, that was the chapter Gravemind.
Hope you enjoyed.