Finished my five-thousand word essay! Absolute bastard, that was. Hated every moment of it.
Here's a new idea as a palate cleanser for me.
Forward Unto Dawn
(Inspired by Halo)
Years ago, something happened in the past. Something massive. Something game changing.
A ring appeared within the Sol System. A massive artificial construct in the shape of a halo, sitting at the edge of the solar system, listlessly, inert and inactive. The presence of this ring was covered up by the authorities, which is helped by the general public's perception shift away from space and to the rise of quirks, but faint rumours persist, of a metal man arriving from the ring and working in the shadows, fighting against insurgencies and shattering insurrectionists and terrorist cells all around the world. A hero the complete opposite of All Might. The ultimate soldier.
But then, later, when Izuku Midoriya is just six years old, there is a disaster.
The Musufatu bombing, where a bomb goes off in the middle of Musufatu, detonating a massive explosion that kills not just hundreds, but thousands of innocent people.
Izuku's parents are amongst the casualties.
Izuku is left an orphan, as are several others.
But then, they are approached by several men in military garbs, wearing the badge of not the HPSC, but the World Hero Association, the WHA. These men gather these fresh orphans, and tell them that they have a chance now, an opportunity to avenge the fallen and eventually replace All Might as the newest pillars of society.
They wouldn't be the ultimate heroes. They would be the ultimate soldiers.
But then, the men give the children a choice, to accept the deal and go through deadly, hellish, and even torturous training, and eventually lead lives that, while it wouldn't be happy for them, would lead to them saving countless others when All Might eventually fell, or decline, go into foster care, and try to live the best lives that they could in the wake of this tragedy.
Izuku and all the other orphans accept.
Years later, at the start of canon, All Might begins to hear whispers of armoured figures taking down gangs of villains and terrorist cells across Japan, and ends up passing these rumours along to Nezu, who decides to look into it and finds a hidden report of a team of armoured soldiers taking down a cell of villains buried deep within a mountain of classified information.
Meanwhile, Izuku-Z043, the fireteam leader, Kyoka-Z292, the tracker and scout, Ochako-Z132, the sniper, and Eijiro-Z098, the demolition expert - the four members of Fireteam Verdant, one of a new wave of Spartan-IIIs known as Zeta Company - are being prepped for their first mission. They were supposed to go out and complete an assassination op on a group of villains like the rest of the fireteams, but that had been called off when they discovered that someone at U.A. had tried to hack into their systems and uncover a hidden report about their activities. Their first mission now would be to infiltrate U.A. as its students and uncover the leak, before it compromised national and global security.
So, Izuku, Ochako, Jiro, and Kirishima enter U.A. and take the entrance exam into the school, holding back their strength, training, and augmentations and making a good impression of inexperienced teens. However, it doesn't fool Aizawa, as he can tell that they are holding themselves back and is annoyed at it, thinking that they aren't taking the exam seriously, and Nezu, who suspects that there is something more to them and if there is a connection to the report that he found.
Soon enough, the four Spartan-IIIs enter into 1-A, but are forced to expose and display their advanced strength and skills when Aizawa puts them on blast, demanding that they stop holding back and show their true skills or he will expel them on the spot. The four are rankled by this, but are used to such harsh treatment as per their training and acquiesce. This garners them the attention of the rest of Class 1-A, which puts them off as they would rather their abilities secret, but they put those thoughts aside to mingle with the class and figure out who it was behind the leak.
However, Izuku ends up gaining the unwanted attention of Bakugo, who remembers Izuku and thought he had died in the Musufatu bombing years ago, along with his parents. Izuku, however, doesn't remember Bakugo, and is put off by the strange explosive boy who seems to be harassing him for no reason.
Soon, after a week (the timeline for MHA's canon has been extended here), the battle trials begin, and Izuku and the rest of his team are spread out onto opposite teams due to the teachers observing them always hanging around each other and limiting their interactions with their classmates. During the battle trials, the four disguised Spartan-IIIs end up taking command of each of the groups they are assigned to, and though once again they try to hide it, the rest of the class is impressed by their ability to command a situation and their training, though some of the more observant students are able to tell that they are consciously supressing some of what they have learnt.
The next day, whilst the rest of the class is busy picking a class representative, Izuku and the rest of his fireteam quietly debate amongst themselves how to proceed with the rest of their operation whilst turning down any chance of leadership amongst the class. Soon enough, during lunchtime, Jiro slips away from the group to access U.A.'s restricted servers using a Dumb A.I. program by the name of CAL to break into the online files and purge the offending data of the S-IIIs from the network. She is almost caught by Eraserhead, who was sent down to the servers by Nezu once he realises that his recorded files on the shadow soldiers that he was observing were missing, but she is able to slip out undetected and join the rest of her team before anyone notices that she is gone, leaving CAL in the system for them to use later.
The rest of the school day goes about uneventfully.
A few days later, Aizawa announces to the class that they will be going to the USJ. However, before they get on the buses, Aizawa pulls the four disguised S-IIIs aside and lets them know that he is aware that they are still holding themselves back, and for whatever reason they have, it is unacceptable. He issues them an ultimatum: either they go into the USJ and perform at their best at every test, or they would be expelled immediately.
However, once they get to the USJ, complications arise.
For you see, this time, the League of Villains were not there to greet them right out of the door.
This time, they attack when the students are spread out across the USJ and busy with their various exercises, uncloaking themselves and striking while they and the teachers are distracted.
And it isn't just the regular League of Villain thugs and their Nomu.
It's a Covenant remnant.
A dozen and a half Elite Minors wielding plasma rifles and pulse carbines, accompanied by a group of Special Operations Sangheili armed with energy swords, disengage their cloaking and begin to wreck havoc amongst the students and teachers, all the while a pair of Phantom dropships, guarded by a pair of Banshees, lands outside of the USJ and drops two pairs of Ghosts to lock down the perimeter, alongside a score of Grunts and Jackals armed with plasma pistols and needlers to complete the incursion.
And at the centre of this invasion is Shigaraki, Kurogiri, and their Nomu enters the scene, accompanied by the Elites under their command, a Zealot by the name and title of Shipmaster Mura 'Vagobai, armed with his energy sword and a plasma rifle, and his two attaches, an armourless mystic of the Silent Shadow in command of their Special Operations forces named Sziku 'Ubdomnai, himself armed with an energy sword and a Forerunner weapon known as a Heatwave, and a Field Master in an up-armoured, modified Warrior combat harness called Kreia 'Nadami, their second in command who defected from Jul 'Mdama's ranks once his faction collapsed, and more straightlaced advisor compared to Sziku, and armed with a storm rifle and a plasma caster.
Mura is incensed at having to partake in this attack, especially when he reveals that Sziku's Special Operations Sangheili have been infiltrating U.A.'s grounds for days. As it turns out, this remnant's Spec-Ops Elites had been going in and out of U.A. for days thanks to their active camouflage, stealing the League the information that they needed to plan their attack on the USJ. Mura, as well as Kreia, had wanted to use their Spec-Ops forces to simply break into U.A. and destroy the school from the inside. The simplest and easiest option.
However, their current benefactors, All for One and Shigaraki, had forbade them from doing that. They didn't just want to kill All Might; they wanted to make a statement. They wanted to make it clear to the world who they were and what they were after. It was all pointless theatrics by villains with too much of a flare for the dramatic, and it reminds Mura too much of the Prophets, but he is forced to stomach it. Right now, All for One and the League of Villains were the only thing keeping his damaged Kerel-pattern assault carrier, Song of Redemption, operational, so he has no choice but to relent. Kreia is incensed by this, as it makes no tactical sense, but Sziku merely states that he senses that their gods desire them to go this way, and so go this way they shall.
But elsewhere, the four disguised Spartan-IIIs drop all pretences and attempts to hide themselves and their skills. They stop holding themselves back in the face of this new threat and get to work, killing a Covenant patrol and stealing their weapons, before re-establishing comms between themselves and splitting up to rescue their other classmates and eliminate the Covenant threat.
However, their actions in coldly killing Covenant soldiers and displaying feats and skills that they've never shown before, all without a hint of emotion on their face save for the hints of bloodthirst, serve to frighten the rest of 1-A and make them terrified of them, with even Aizawa regretting telling them to not hold back anymore.
Soon enough, the team realise that whilst their short-range communications are working, their long-range comms aren't, so they look to find whatever is blocking them. However, without their armour they are vulnerable, even with their augmentations, so they resolve to prioritise evacuating the students and teachers, as well as re-establishing long-range communications with U.A. and HIGHCOM. So, Izuku tasks Ochako to go find the jammer and neutralise it, whilst he, Jiro, and Kirishima, go and hijack one of the two Phantoms up in the air.
So, the group split up, much to the protests of the other students and teachers. Izuku, Kirishima, and Jiro make their way through the USJ, with several other students and the two teachers in tow, whilst Ochako slips off on her own to find the signal jammer. Soon enough, the three Spartan-IIIs sneak through the Covenant patrols and make their way outside, finding the two Phantoms flying overhead supported by their Banshee escorts, as well as the four Ghosts that were running patrols around the USJ's perimeter.
However, a Covenant patrol would happen upon the students and teachers and force Izuku to double back to defend them, leaving Jiro and Kirishima on their own to hijack a Phantom. So, Jiro would begin by clearing a path on the ground for Kirishima to make his move by leaping onto one of the Ghosts on the ground and slitting the throat of its Sangheili operator with a hidden combat knife, hijacking it and using it to destroy the three other Ghosts in the field before turning its guns on the Covenant's air support above.
Then, as a Banshee swooped down to try and take her out, Kirishima leapt onto the craft and hijacked it himself, taking out the other Banshee in the air with its weapons and then ramming it into one of the Phantoms, destroying it before jumping off the wrecked craft while it was still falling and onto the other Phantom, slipping inside and killing all its occupants. Then, with the assistance of Jiro in her Ghost, Kirishima then pilots the captured Phantom through the glass roof of the USJ and begins spraying covering fire for the Spartan-IIIs and the students and teachers down onto all the Covenant forces below.
This gets Mura's attention, and he overrides Shigaraki's orders and tells Kreia to call for support.
Meanwhile, Ochako gets the jump on a Kig-Yar sniper, snapping his neck and taking its stalker rifle from him. Then, through the scope of her newly acquired rifle, she spots the source of the jamming, that being a villain by the name of Tesla, who was using his quirk to interfere with the school's long-range communications and alarms. He's expecting a fight, a classic fight of heroes vs villains in close quarters, and he's preparing himself for it.
Ochako shoots him in the head from a long distance, killing him instantly and ending the jamming. Then, she contacts HIGHCOM, informing them of the situation and telling them to initiate local Winter Contingency protocols.
Back with the others, Izuku has just finished putting a blade through the throat of another Unggoy, before he and the people under his protection are set upon by a newly-deployed threat that not even Izuku can stand up against.
A pair of Hunters.
Izuku and the others are forced to retreat, unable to stand up against the pair of Hunters, and Kirishima is forced to abandon his hijacked Phantom after another pair of Banshees arrive at the USJ and shoot the stolen craft down. The Hunters, meanwhile, spot Ochako when she tries to snipe them and attack her, forcing her to abandon her position to regroup with the others, whilst Jiro's Ghost is destroyed by Sziku and his Spec-Ops Elites and she is sent packing back to the others as well.
But then, just as all hope seems lost and the Covenant are about to fall onto their position and slaughter them all, reinforcements finally arrive.
A Longsword emerges from out of the air and launches missiles at the Banshees, knocking them out of the air, just as a trio of Pelicans arrive and hot-drop their passengers into the combat zone.
That cargo being several fireteams of Spartan-IIIs, the newly finished Zeta Company, decked out in Semi-Powered Infiltration armour and wielding battle rifles, assault rifles, DMRs, commandos, and the like, all led by one Kevin-A282, one of the last surviving original Spartan-IIIs, and a pair of Spartan-IVs, survivors of the Infinity and the few Spartan-IVs still alive and active on the field.
As it turns out, the ring at the edge of the Sol System is actually the damaged Installation 07, or Zeta Halo, which had somehow travelled through dimensions when it activated its emergency slipspace jump, and arrived in this universe. During that time, many of the UNSC survivors on the ring had fled from the heavy Banished presence and made their way to the new Earth, where they had regrouped and made an alliance with the leading governments on Earth, becoming a shadow organisation within the World Hero Association called the Outer Regions Security Force, or ORSF, preparing themselves for the inevitable threat of the Banished and to hopefully one day return to the broken ring and take it back from Atriox's army of Brutes.
However, when they began the process of testing the S-IV augmentation process on local volunteers, they found that the local humans, at least the local adults, were somehow genetically incompatible with Spartan augmentations. For some reason, the quirks in the average adult were mucking up their genetic codes and making them unable to survive the Spartan augmentation surgeries without suffering from crippling injuries and disabilities.
But children were compatible, since their quirks were still developing and hadn't yet scrambled their genetic codes... but the process would end up weakening their resulting quirks or even completely nullifying them.
However, considering the threat of the Banished and all the other villainous factions that were beginning to rise up despite All Might's presence as the number one hero, the ONI section within the ORSF, as well as the various HPSC institutions across the globe, considered it a moral price worth paying, and they reinstated the Spartan-III program, stealing away children from orphanages across the world and beginning the process of turning them into an army to keep the world safe and take back the Halo ring.
Back in the present, Zeta Company and their handlers make quick work of the Covenant forces occupying the USJ, and exfil the teachers, students, and Izuku's Spartan-IIIs, but not before Izuku takes on the Hunter pair and, despite lacking his armour, finally manages to kill them, whilst Kevin-A282 and his Spartan-IV subordinates terminate the League's Nomu. The USJ is evacuated of any non-combatants and allies, and the League's leadership, including their Covenant allies, are forced to retreat.
At their hideout, Mura is enraged at their loss, and regals to Shigaraki what a tactically inept leader he is. They had every possible advantage and could've destroyed an actually critical target like the HPSC or one of the big hero agencies with their forces, but instead Shigaraki decided to spend their efforts targeting a place of education of all things. Now he has lost dozens of his warriors to the Demons and their allies, warriors that he could not easily replace, all because Shigaraki wanted to engage in theatrics in order to satisfy his own ego and need for recognition. Shigaraki is angered by their insolence, and even more so when Mura and Kreia suggest breaking off their alliance and simply going their own way. All for One contacts them and states that they will be compensated for their losses, but makes it clear to them that it is him and the League that is keeping his ship and his crew alive, but Mura simply retorts that All for One's attempts to intimidate him are lacking, though he is forced to concede the point to him.
His crew will continue to support the League of Villains... for now.
But next time they are conducting an operation, they are doing things his way.
Meanwhile, 1-A and their teachers are pulled out of the USJ as All Might and the heroes finally arrive, finally meeting the shadow soldiers of Japan and spotting the dozens of alien corpses scattered across the grounds. All Might and the teachers are immediately hostile to the armoured soldiers, but the soldiers don't really care, taking off in their Pelicans once more and preparing to leave. Izuku and his fireteam attempt to go with them, but the teachers hold them back, intent on making them answer for what happened back in the USJ. This leads to a tense standoff between the heroes and the Spartans, but is thankfully averted when a pair of agents from the HPSC arrive and order Izuku and his fireteam to be released from custody, allowing the four to join the rest of the Spartans and depart, leaving the rest of 1-A in deep confusion and shock over what happened.
In the aftermath of the USJ, the students of 1-A are all alive, but severely wounded from plasma burns and needler rounds and traumatised over almost being killed and watching their classmates kill others. Nezu is soon approached by an agent of the ORSF and those same HPSC from before, as well as Izuku and his fireteam finally in their SPI armour, telling him to cease his investigation into their operations, as the events of the USJ have forced them to speed up their timetable.
With Covenant forces active on Earth as well as the Banished, then that means that the Banished may have figured out how to use the ring to move between dimensions. That means that, for the war that is to come, they are all going to need allies.
It's time for U.A. to be brought into the circle.
And elsewhere, in the shadows, an armour figure battles against the Banished legacy of the old Covenant. A mythical figure, a walking legend all on his own.
The Master Chief himself.
Sorry if this idea isn't as good as the other ones. I'm still suffering from burnout from my essay.