Heroes: Combat Evolved
(Inspired by Halo and My Hero Academia: Unchained Predator by reeleffendeel)
At the end of Halo 4, when the Master Chief is shielded by Cortana from the erupting explosion of the Mantle's Approach in her last dying moments, the exploding Forerunner construct's slipspace engines - hyper-advanced beyond human comprehension - rupture a whole in the fabric of space and time itself...
And finds himself centuries in the past and on an Earth so far removed from his own, lost in a world of heroes and villains.
The Master Chief begins to explore this new world, confused as to where he has landed and slowly learning whatever he can about this 'hero society' that has popped up upon its surface. Over the next few months, the Master Chief slowly begins to paint a picture of this new world, and comes to the realisation that he has no way of getting back to his home universe.
So, he is forced to come to grips with his situation on his own, as well as the loss of Cortana and how much it has torn away at him despite his stoic, professional demeanour. Not only that, but the loss of his fellow Spartans and allies over the last thirty years of war is beginning to catch up to him, with all his mental scars from the Human-Covenant War, with the fresh loss of Cortana, finally beginning to weigh down on him.
He's left with a lot of alone time to look back on his life, and judge all the good and bad that he's done.
And for the first time in John-117's long career, he truly feels tired.
(This story isn't meant to characterise John-117 as being OOC or overly emotional. He's still going to be the same heroic and stoic badass who doesn't need to get the girl to save the world, there's no changing that. This is more meant to be an extension of the exploration of the Master Chief's character as it was in Halo 4, now without the presence of Cortana to keep him company.
It's going to be a process of both staying true to his character and exploring it, maybe not breaking that always-professional demeanour but also slowly teaching him to speak his mind and be more open with others. It's a very delicate balance, to say the least.)
But that will have to wait, as while this version of Earth, with all its heroes and its paragons in All Might, Star and Stripe and others, may seem like a world of endless peace, there is a dark underbelly of conflict hiding under the surface.
When quirks first emerged, there were a series of devastating wars that ravaged the planet. Entire armies marched on nations, each soldier in each force having a quirk to use on the battlefield. Each fighter became an equivalent to a walking nuclear bomb, tearing entire cities apart. Nations were destroyed, broken apart, reforged anew or born out of the ashes of the wars. Millions died in the violent conflagrations, and the entire world was left scarred and deformed. Many of those scars still linger to this day, massive chunks of earth missing out of mountains or cities built around ginormous craters.
In the aftermath of these wars, a veritable dark age fell over the Earth, marked by chaos and strife and the constant gaze of death looking over everyone's shoulders. Quirkless supremacist groups lynched anyone suspected of having a quirk, quirk-using terrorist groups bombed buildings and massacred countless people, entire armies turned against their own nations to quell the chaos, which in turn only created more chaos.
Death and destruction were the only constants during this long period of time. Technological progress devolved and went back decades. Life was reduced to a unending state of desperate survival. Even now in the present day, the carbon dioxide levels across the planet are only just beginning to stabilise, the ozone layer is only just beginning to heal, and violent superstorms continue to pound the earth in the wake of the massive amounts of pollution that were kicked up during the violence and strife.
Eventually, the remaining governments left standing in the aftermath of the endless suffering decided that having an entire military filled with powerful and devastating quirks was too dangerous for each country to wield, and as such they were disbanded in favour of the hero system. Soon after that, the bones of hero society were put into place, and with All Might's rise to fame as the number one hero solidified it into the consciousness of the people.
For the first time in decades, the people of the world had hope for the future, safety and security for their loved ones, and the chance to make a better life for themselves. Together, the people of hero society made a better world for themselves, and with it an era of peace for their loved ones.
However, with peace came complacency, and with complacency came corruption. So many people have put their faith in hero society, and that has led to a lot of overreliance to the point of major defunding to other departments like the police and emergency services in favour of funding pro heroic movements. Not only that, but many people in the pro hero industry have become narcissistic and greedy due to all the fame and fortune that comes with their station, leading to extensive rot within the system. Villain attacks are constant, almost every single day, and hero society is locked in a cycle of hero-villain battles day in and day out, using its own battles against villainy to justify its existence whilst ignoring how it creates many of its own villains through the flaws in their society. All of this is fuelled by those in power who still bear the traumas of the world that came before and are desperately trying to make sure that the world doesn't slide back into the hellscape that they'd been born into, all the while an entire generation of children is growing up in a world without any memories of life before hero society, some of whom are beginning to question and distrust the world that they have been born into.
Hero society is incredibly unstable, a world order that is constantly teetering on the edge, run by people desperate to move away from the past and so trapped by their own scars that they can't see the future they're heading towards, all the while the foundations of all that they have been building is beginning to crumble out from underneath them.
(The major theme of this work would be the contrast between the worlds of hero society and the Halo universe, and the pro hero industry versus the armed forces of the UNSC. It's an argument between having a pro hero system versus having a military. Unlike a lot of other crossover works, which tend to portray hero society as inherently wrong when contrasted against the other side, this work is intended to examine hero society in a more nuanced fashion, exploring both its positives and its negatives and exploring what could've come about based on what we know from MHA's canon and what we can infer from our investigation to bring about hero society and how the modern MHA's world came about.
At the same time, the story is also an examination of the UNSC and how it operates, both in its rampant militarism and its heavy-handed approach to dealing with the Insurrection, to the point of kidnapping and conscripting children to become super soldiers to combat them. A lot of its actions, especially the more morally dubious one from both the UEG and ONI, from both before, during, and after the Human-Covenant war and their ramifications are examined on both the personal and wider scale, both in their intentions and how they have affected others.
It is an argument that is meant to compare both the positives and negatives of the pro hero system and the armed forces, and deconstructing both systems as a way of trying to find a balance between the two. It's a very morally grey discussion, and both sides of the argument are supposed to be presented in a nuanced manner with valid points to both parties.)
But there are other problems that are only just beginning to surface. With no major military force to stop them and All Might's reign as the number one hero nearing its end (this story would begin right at the onset of the Vigilantes era, when Koichi is only just putting on the mantle of the Crawler), rampant militia movements have begun to form in the cracks that hero society has left behind, exploiting the gaps that All Might's waning presence in hero society and the corruption within hero society as well.
(Just to quickly clarify, this segment isn't meant to bash All Might. Absolutely no bashing is to take place in this story. All Might is going to be examined and his mistakes when in the role of the number one hero are going to be examined, but it's less so All Might himself and more his tenure as the number one hero and Symbol of Peace for the entire world and the ramifications that it has had for the entire world.)
As it is in canon, All Might's reign as the undisputed number one hero has left the majority of the populace unwilling to stand up and fend for themselves when the heroes can do it for them, not to mention the restrictive laws that restrict quirk usage to combat against villains to no one outside of pro heroes (though cases of self-defence are given some leeway). Because of this, much of the Earth's populace has become complacent, too used to having the heroes constantly saving the day to think of trying to fight for themselves.
As such, when armed thugs and bullies in the form of various militias and terrorist organisations prove themselves to be too much for the heroes to handle in places like the Middle East and third world nations, no one else is willing to try and stop them themselves since it is usually the heroes that defeat these villains before they are ever a threat. The only thing that has been stopping these groups from becoming a serious threat is that hero society is able to field massive numbers of pro heroes across the globe to stop them. It is a hero-saturated society, after all, and many terrorist organisations have been dismantled because of the sheer number of heroes that are available around the globe to stop them.
Not to mention that just because the various militaries across the planet have been defunded or dismantled doesn't mean that there aren't armed forces working for various countries across the globe. Though officially the World Hero Association doesn't have a military force attached to it, unofficially the WHA fields a small force made up of elite special operations soldiers made up from New Russian Federation Spetnaz, United Kingdom's SAS, and several other branches of covert ops troopers, sent in to deal with problems and dismantle threats that regular heroes, even the underground ones, wouldn't be able to solve on their own.
However, with All Might's rule as the number one hero slowly coming to an end, more and more groups are growing bolder and are beginning to pull themselves out of the shadows to stand in the light. The Meta Liberation Army and Humarise are already becoming rising threats, but there has always been a thriving mercenary market within the criminal underworld for armed goons and gangsters looking for work.
Now there is a new threat beginning to assert themselves in the world. A violent terrorist organisation that has proven itself to be a serious problem, being both armed and highly organised in their operations. Their public charter calls for the dismantling and restructuring of the pro hero system, and they've already carried out various terrorist attacks across the globe to get their point across, drawing in villains and like-minded individuals alike and causing them to flock to their banner.
They call themselves the Hero Liberation Front, but most people simply call them the Insurrection.
And worst of all, for some reason, they're all armed with UNSC weaponry and technology.
The Master Chief, deciding that a second insurrectionist movement cannot begin once again, especially not after the damage that he's seen the likes of the New Colonial Alliance and Gao Liberation Force, and goes on a one-man war against this new Insurrection, seeking to discover how they've gained access to UNSC assets and where they're getting their technology from. Soon enough, he begins to build up a reputation amongst the Insurrectionist ranks as a ghost, a silent man in armour stronger, faster, and deadlier than any hero. Entire Insurrectionist cells and villainous organisations across the globe begin to go silent due to his actions, having been wiped out by the Master Chief all by himself.
It's not just the Insurrection and villains who take notice of the Master Chief, though. The heroes themselves have begun to pick up on the trail of the armoured Spartan thanks to the bodies of villains and Insurrectionists left in his wake and are beginning to worry, believing that an entire armed force of vigilantes is wiping out all these villainous organisations. And if a group of murderous vigilantes were capable of wiping out entire factions of villains all on their own, then what was to stop them turning on the heroes in short order?
A manhunt is declared for this group of vigilantes, with no one aware that it is one singular man that is taking down all these villains. At the same time, the Master Chief continues his war against the Insurrection, confiscating their gear and stopping their plans to carry out more terrorist attacks across the globe.
But at the same time, as he assembles his own headquarters, not to mention several hideaways and caches across the globe where he stores all his confiscated gear and equipment, he comes across something remarkable:
Linda-058, a fellow Spartan-II and a member of Blue Team, who suddenly appeared on this strange new Earth as well and has been waging her own war against the new Insurrection.
And soon after Linda, it is Kelly-087, then Fred-104.
All of Blue Team back together, in this new world where nothing quite makes sense to them except for the fact that there are bad guys that need to be stopped for the sake of others.
But for now, at least they have each other.
Soon enough, MHA's main story begins, and the newly assembled Blue Team find themselves headed to Japan in search of the next Insurrectionist cell there, eventually leading them to discover that this specific cell of the HLF has aligned themselves with the League of Villains and someone called All for One.
Worse yet is when Shigaraki, in response to Blue Team's investigations and takedowns of many of the League's criminal contacts, sic's the Nomu on them.
Blue Team are barely able to kill the Nomu, and not without damage and injury on their part (remember, the Nomu from the USJ was designed to kill All Might, who, even when he was pushing himself past his limit, had the power to change the weather with a single punch, and in the end, though the Nomu was defeated, it was still able to wound All Might, and as strong as a Spartan-II may be, they'd still find themselves on the backfoot against a creature of such power). Blue Team is put out of action for the time being, but they mark the League of Villains as a high-value-target due to their capacity to create walking bioweapons such as the Nomu.
However, they have unknowingly landed a fatal blow onto the League of Villains via taking out the Nomu, as without it their plans for the USJ have been squandered, and the students of U.A., of Class 1-A, are able to go forth with their training without any interruptions.
But there are also long term negative consequences for Blue Teams actions, as All for One uses this loss to create further alliances with the Insurrection. After all, the tech that is at their disposal is decades ahead of anything that hero society has to offer, and there have been whispers of bioaugmentation procedures amongst the Insurrection's ranks, and All for One is eager to see if they are true for his Nomu project and plans for his successor...
So, he lets the Insurrection believe that the League are too weak to stand up to them, and starts looking for a figurehead to serve as a unified leader for the coalition of villains and militants. Shigaraki is too immature right now to serve as a leader, but in time he will take up the mantle as his successor.
In the meantime, All for One would need a proxy to take over and lead the Insurrection with.
And considering the Insurrection's goals to reshape hero society... Stain would do.
Elsewhere, the heroes haven't been lying still, having been conducting their own investigations into the Insurrection. The dead Nomu that Blue Team leaves out for the authorities to find gives them a few supposed leads, though they end up looking in the wrong direction and think that it is the growing Insurrection that has created the Nomu and not the League of Villains (for perfectly logical reasons, of course, as the Insurrection has proven themselves to be highly capable and having access to technology like biofoam and healing equipment, and vehicles such as Pelicans, Warthogs, and Hornets, so it wouldn't be out of the question for them to have access to technology capable of biomanipulation as well. That, and because of the loss of the Nomu, the League of Villains have been unable to attack the USJ, and therefore announce themselves to the world, meaning that the authorities have no way of knowing that the League even exists). Upon seeing this, All Might begins to suspect that All for One is still alive, and is now the leader of the Insurrection.
Because of this, All Might is reluctant to consider any of the Insurrection's points regarding hero society and the corruption within the system. All for One has made it a point of repeatedly demonstrating how evil and monstrous he is, and not only did he murder Nana Shimura right in front of him and throw her corpse around like it was a toy, but also smugly mocked her and her death even when All Might was ripping out his heart and crushing his head into paste between his hand. Suffice it to say, but All Might has a very justifiable hatred for All for One, and it unfortunately clouds his vision of events, leading him to not consider any of the arguments made by the Insurrection due to his belief in their being manipulated by All for One, something that he's done many times before his supposed death.
And besides, the Insurrection are terrorists and have made it a point to attack civilian targets across the globe, which has already occurred many civilian casualties. They've made it a point to use violence first to communicate their demands instead of words, so suffice it to say that people are hesitant to listen to them or their wants.
Soon enough, Blue Team are able to get back into the fray, and just in the nick of time too, as the League of Villains, supported by their other Nomu and Insurrectionist allies, attack Hosu, announcing themselves to the world and daring All Might to come at them, though many in the media conclude that the League is another subgroup of the Insurrection, not a partner.
Blue Team, having learnt from their mistakes and experiences with the first Nomu, are able to take down the Nomu with the assistance of the heroes and authorities. In fact, it is this temporary team-up in which John-117 meets with the likes of All Might and Endeavour, and though the heroes are unable to arrest the Spartan-II and his fellow super soldiers, they at least identify that the four Spartans are cognizant of civilian casualties due to their handling of them and actions to protect the innocent, as well as unlikely to turn their guns on the heroes due to Blue Team being perfectly willing to work with the heroes and cops in quelling the Nomu.
However, during the skirmish in Hosu, Blue Team end up encountering a new threat.
A Spartan, working for the Insurrection. One that has been made from this Earth's stock of humans, meaning that he is armed with a quirk.
A Spartan-V (that's Spartan-5 for those that don't understand Roman numerals. I had to Google it myself, don't worry).
However, compared to the Nomu, this Spartan Insurrectionist is hardly a threat. Suffice it to say, the Insurrection are completely inexperienced when it comes to the genetic augmentations that all Spartan subjects (whether they're II, III, or IV) must undergo, meaning that the resulting subject is hobbled and crippled to an extent, not to mention how there is something about quirks themselves that is interfering with the augmentations, weaking the resulting Spartan further. On top of all this, Mjolnir armour is even more advanced that regular UNSC technology, and the Insurrection are completely inept on how to use it, leaving them to create cobbled together suits in imitation of Mjolnir parts that leave much to be desired.
Blue Team are able to take the prototype Spartan-IV down easily, but it leaves them with worries and questions, as this means that the Insurrection doesn't just have access to Mjolnir armour, but also Spartan augmentations and genetic modifications, and there is no way that they won't be learning from their mistakes with this failed experiment and attempting again...
And sure enough, elsewhere the various leaders of the Insurrection are compiling what they have learnt from their first attempt at making their own super soldier and are attempting the process once again.
And worse, they have brought Stain into their ranks as a figurehead/spokesperson (right before he attacked Tensei, meaning that he isn't crippled to the point of retirement in this story), and are already working to make ties with the Meta Liberation Army...
And soon enough, the Insurrection strikes once more.
This time, they're attacking I-Island, right when many of Class 1-A's number are there as a reward from All Might and U.A., and this time it isn't just a small token force of thugs and Nomu like in Hosu.
It is an entire army.
Thousands of Insurrectionist combat personnel, supported by ground vehicles from the Mongoose to the Warthog and Razorback to the Scorpion and Grizzly, to even helicopters and aircraft like the Falcon and Wasp on top of suicide drones and Kestrel ground attack platforms, invade and take over the artificial island, placing it on lockdown and taking all the civilians within hostage. Any hero inside the island is either killed or forced to surrender, and All Might and half of Class 1-A are taken hostage along with hundreds of innocent people. The rest are forced to go into hiding, unable to provide any sort of resistance against the armed invaders.
This isn't just a skirmish or plot by a small band of villains. This is a textbook military invasion, and the Insurrection are pushing a large portion of their strength into this operation. The leader of the invasion, Wolfram, quickly releases a demand that no hero enter I-Island's airspace or they would be killed, before ordering his men down to the floating city's catacombs so that they could start the excavation process.
There is something underneath I-Island that the vast collection of scientists there were studying, and the Insurrection were damn well going to find it.
Soon, thousands of pro heroes gather along Japan's coast to launch their counterattack against the Insurrection, but Blue Team quickly realise that the pro heroes are utterly inexperienced when it comes to fighting a war against an actual military force and try to dissuade them, as such an attack on the scale that they are planning, no matter their contingencies and preparation, would be nothing more than a suicide run. However, the authorities in charge of the operation order that Blue Team be arrested due to their vigilante actions and various killings of Insurrectionist and villain cells, and the Spartans (at least the ones present at the meeting) are forced to watch from the side-lines as the army of pro heroes fly off to take back I-Island from the Insurrection...
Only to be slaughtered on mass by the Insurrection's vast amounts of firepower.
As it turns out, having lived in an era of peace for decades without any armies or wars has left the people of this Earth utterly inexperienced to the art of modern day combat, and the constant flashy battles between heroes and villains has led to many pro heroes developing an unconscious instinct to always expect villains to behave in an equally flashy manner as well.
The end result? Thousands of heroes are killed enmasse, and barely a few make it to I-Island's shores before they too are torn apart by gunfire as well. Though many pro heroes recognise the danger alongside Blue Team and hold themselves back from flying in as well, the vast majority of the gathered pro heroes are killed, leaving only a few hundred injured pros to escape with their lives and limp their way back to the shore.
(There would obviously be more advanced tactics used by the heroes instead of just rushing the enemy guns, of course. The goal of this story is to have every character be treated fairly and logically, or at least making decisions that are believable according to their characters.)
And in response to the attempted counter invasion, the Insurrection executes a dozen hostages, threatening to kill even more unless they are left alone.
Realising the sheer scale of the stakes at hand, the authorities and remaining heroes are forced to release Blue Team from their custody and work with them. At first, they don't believe that four soldiers can make a difference where thousands of pro heroes have failed, but upon realising that these Spartans have been the one dismantling entire cells of Insurrectionists and villain organisations across the globe, they recognise that they don't have a choice and must bite down their distain and past generational traumas if they want to not only defeat the Insurrection but save the remaining hostages as well.
After over a week of preparation - and a week of I-Island being under the Insurrection's control - another army of pro heroes (this time made up of pros from all across the globe) have been gathered and organised, waiting for the time to strike back against the army at Japan's door.
And on top of that, the WHA has assigned their unofficial spec-ops military force, though few in number and made up of only five-hundred combat personnel despite being highly trained, to this operation as well, who have been split up between Blue Team to carry out their own operations on I-Island.
Each Spartan-II has about one-hundred-and-twenty soldiers under their temporary command, and each one has been assigned a specific task. Kelly-087's unit would free the hostages and get them to safety, Linda-058's would co-opt and/or destroy the Insurrection's anti-air and artillery emplacements, Fred-104's would destroy their supply depots and command and control centres, and John-117's would seize control of all access points in and out of the island, secure the moving island's power plant and generators, and identify the Insurrection's current objective, I.E. figuring out what the hell the Innies are searching for on the floating apparatus. After all that is done, the Spartans would send out the signal, and the pro heroes would launch their attack and take back the island from the Insurrection, defeating the invaders and securing the floating city once again.
Blue Team and their supplied forces soon arrive on the Island in their assigned teams through small submarines and Seal Delivery Vehicles (SDVs), and they quickly begin getting to work, taking out patrols and planting explosives on enemy vehicles, securing objectives and rescuing hostages alike.
However, things begin to take a turn when John-117 finds what the Insurrection have been looking for and experimenting on for the past week:
A Forerunner portal. One that takes him not to a distant world, but to inside the Earth itself.
This Earth isn't in a different dimension, it's in the same universe as his.
And it's not Earth that he's on.
It's a Forerunner Shield World.
And as he slips through the clueless bands of Insurrectionists attempting to dissect and take apart the alien technology around them and begins to interact with the technology, something that the Insurrectionists have been unable to do due to their lacking the geas needed to activate Forerunner technology, the Shield World itself begins to react...
And it does so with hostility.
Suddenly, hundreds of Sentinels begins to descend on John-117 and the Insurrectionists, from Aggressors to Enforcers. Worse yet, Armiger Soldiers begin to deploy and fight against the Insurrectionists and the Spartan.
Suddenly, I-Island becomes a warzone between the Insurrectionists and the Forerunner machines. Hundreds of Insurrectionists are killed in the first few minutes, and I-Island is wrapped in flames from the conflagration as the Insurrection is routed and killed, their plethora of quirks unable to stand up to the hardlight weaponry of the Sentinels and Armigers.
The Master Chief is able to destroy the portal from the inside of the Shield World to cease the flow of Forerunner machines, forcing the Sentinels to disengage and retreat. The other Spartans of Blue Team are able to send the signal to the army of pro heroes on Japan's shoreline and they move in, mopping up the Insurrectionists and securing I-Island from the enemy.
But the artificial island has been ravaged from the week of plundering and chaotic violence, and now it is sinking. The island is evacuated as it falls apart and sinks to the bottom of the ocean...
And John-117, in destroying the Forerunner portal, is flung through into the insides of the Shield World, those of Class 1-A who'd been on the island accidently following with him.
With a group of hero students now suddenly under his care, the Master Chief walks through the insides of the Shield World that is Not-Earth, towing along the students with him. During this time, as the students learn about the truth of their world and are shocked and horrified by it, they trade philosophies and understandings with the Master Chief, bringing up the story's theme of heroism vs militarism. It leaves both sides with a lot of think about, as the Master Chief has rarely heard a civilian's perspective on events, and the hero students are left wondering about the flaws of their society from a veteran soldier.
During their journey, the Master Chief and his charges come across a Monitor. Or rather a submonitor, a Facilitator-class ancilla by the name of 014 Adjutant Revenant, welcoming them to Shield World 1081, or Resonance as the humans above might call it. When asked as to why the humans above think of this place as Earth, and why it is so similar to Earth as well, Revenant begins to explain:
In the past, during the Forerunner-Flood War, the Master Builder, Faber-of-Will-and-Might, recognised that the Domain, the vast repository of knowledge that has existed since the days of the Precursors, may come under serious threat upon the firing of the Halo Arrays, and as such constructed the Shield World of Resonance to protect an audacious experiment: the creation of a new Domain, an alternate source of stored knowledge that could serve as a replacement if the original Domain was destroyed with the Flood.
However, the thousands of years spent slowly building this new version of the Domain - sorting through the various radio transmissions being sent out from across the universe and the tangled neural physics - has only exposed the Forerunners' imperfect understanding of the original Domain, leaving this new variant scrambled and alien, its architecture bizarre and maddening, capable of driving anyone who steps into it to insanity...
Which is the fate that befell the primary Monitor for the Shield World, 082 Resonant Lotus, the task driving them to Rampancy and then beyond that. Having sucked up all the knowledge of the broken prototype Domain, it fell to madness and began to reconstruct Erde-Tyrene from the radio transmissions that the Shield World was able to intercept from the planet and, using the genre of superheroics as a template, began to grow new humans and artificially implant advanced Forerunner genetics to mimic superpowers on top of false memories to fool them. The submonitors, including Adjutant Revenant, attempted to stop it, but Lotus simply locked them out of the systems and took command of the Sentinel and Armiger forces that had been stationed to protect the installation, forcing them to go on the run as Lotus began to replicate human weaponry and technology to give to the humans above, now including those from the UNSC due to their intercepted transmissions and growing god complex.
None of its actions make sense, but they cannot be expected to make sense. Resonant Lotus has gone beyond the point of Rampancy, so its actions don't need to make sense. All that matters now is that it has to be stopped.
The students begin to have an existential crisis at the fact that everything in their lives has been a lie, but the Master Chief realises that if this Shield World can intercept transmissions from the UNSC, then it can intercept them as well. Revenant is reluctant to do such a thing - it ultimately doesn't care what happens to the humans on the surface of its world, or even humanity as a whole so long as its installation survives - but relents to the Reclaimer, though it asks John-117 if they should just contact the Sangheili above the world as well-
The Master Chief quickly demands to know what the submonitor means, and Revenant reveals that not too long ago, it had been in contact with a Sangheili shipmaster above the world. It had never cared as much for monitoring transmissions across the galaxy as much as Resonant Lotus, simply content to keep the inner workings of Resonance spick and span, so it had always made an effort to block out any transmissions that it could hear as a possible distraction.
But this Sangheili, well, even it could tell that there was something a bit suspect about him.
He called himself... the Hand of the Didact.
And high above Resonance, Jul 'Mdama's Covenant Remnant, his Storm Covenant, hang high above, ready to break through the hardlight shield around the planet and take the Shield World for themselves...