The Next Chapter (Foehammer/Invite Only)

[nicholas]

All in all, not what one might've expected, and in general just an all around pain in the ass. Using one of his gauntleted hands to hold himself in place, Nicholas reached up with his other hand to secure his iron grip on the rock ledge above him, testing his weight on it first before even considering the idea of letting go with his other hand and moving his feet to pull himself up and over the sharp edge of the rocky cliff. Pausing for a moment upon reaching the top, the soldier glanced back over and down towards the way he came - easily a couple of hundred feet from where he was to the bottom. In short, there was a reason he had decided to wear his MJOLNIR on this little jaunt, and it wasn't simply because he felt uncomfortable, exposed, outside of his "second skin" as many of his brothers and sisters had called it - the Rocky Mountain range in the mid United States wasn't exactly safe, and he wanted to get to the site of the impact fast, which naturally meant risking a mistake here or there along the way. In the mountains like this, such mistakes could easily be your last - he was built tougher than virtually any normal human, but he was still just that.

As it was, though, Nicholas still didn't particularly know why he was even going as far out of his way to reach the site where the meteor had supposedly made landfall - sure, such objects were valuable in this day and age and it would be an easy way to make enough cash to move on to the next city, but it was more than that. He'd only heard about the thing through rumor alone, and normally that wasn't nearly enough to motivate him to act without hard evidence - this time, however, he was acting from the gut, something he rarely did despite what Kurt had taught all of Alpha Company in regards to their instincts. Nicholas was not one to normally take chances unless he could minimize the risks involved, and while he'd done that simply by wearing his MJOLNIR on this trip and taking his BR55 and M6C (which were holstered on his back and right thigh, respectively), there were still plenty of other factors involved that were beyond his control. The US government itself was probably going to get involved if only to retrieve the meteor for their eggheads to look at, and while he doubted that whoever they would send would be any real threat to him, Nicholas was still not ready to trust them, let alone reveal himself to them. Not yet, anyways.

Which all led back to the question, why was he even bothering to try and retrieve whatever it was himself, especially when the potential risks far outweighed what he possibly stood to gain from it? Trusting his instincts was one thing, but making such a bold move wasn't like him, at least not with usable information, and the fact that he himself was aware of the contradiction made him all that much more nervous, another thing that normally didn't happen and just continued to feed into the cycle. It didn't matter anymore at this point, not after having come so far - turning back now would just have put the day or two spent coming out into the wilderness to waste. At the very least he had one advantage over whoever else wanted to claim the meteor for salvage - he could move a night unhindered, a feat that could very well prove fatal to most other people.

Looking up from the cliff edge and back to the sky, the Spartan stood completely still for a moment, starlight reflected in his visor as he guaged his position before checking it against the TACPAD on his wrist and turning around to move into the treeline behind him and away from the cliff. He couldn't exactly explain it, but he was getting close - he could feel it.

[foehammer]

As far as impacts went, Glamdring felt that this one was a 4/10 - she'd been falling faster and hit harder than this before. But, nothing was quite so satisfying as hitting a planet like you had a grudge, at least in her opinion. Even a lovetap like this one was entertaining - the planet made a sort of shrine with a hit like this one, the crater dented inward, with her... blade embedded into a pedastel of searing bedrock, all dust and dirt blasted away. It was cooling now, and the last of the nearby fauna had decided they wanted no part of her presence and left... but there it was.

Then, there was her project. She had to be wielded, after all, she had to be used to be fulfilled in her purpose, to be worth anything... and she'd found a marlin in a pond of goldfish! A... a spartan. She was as giddy as a fangirl when she found the warrior-king. He didn't even match the current dimensional or chronological profile - what a lucky girl she was! Even in their own timeline, a spartan was a rare prospect. She'd guided him so far... gently let him with a voice whispered into his subconscious - he couldn't see or hear her... but an elven woman in red had been hanging on him shoulder for some time now, her presence completely invisible to him.

Now, there was this one, special moment. She could see the spartan with all of her eyes! "You're so close, Spartan..." she whispered into his mind, her proximity giving her voice strength. "So close... So close to the goal..." her voice sleeted its way into his mind with serpentine grace. In the center of the crater, its edge sticking into a sort of earthenware black glass pedestal, maybe a foot tall, was...

A sword, still smoking faintly. Its edge was made of lusterless black metal, about three and a half feet in length to end in a handguard of a silvery metal, the hilt crafted of a kind of... red leather - couldn't have been though, since this was unmistakably the meteor that fell from the sky. It looked... untouched, like earth's gravity and entry into the atmosphere was child's play, like it was capable of... a lot more than that. It didn't look... well, it wasn't the kind of blade to burn or crackle with electricity - it was magical like an old-iron sword was magical; well, made, to endure the ages and just. keep. trucking. And it called to the Spartan, more deadly than any covenant plasma sword of the finest ancient craft.

[nicholas]

Continuing to move through the trees and the inky darkness that strained even his eyes, Nicholas kept moving towards the site of the meteor impact, for the first time feeling at home since making planetfall. This was his home - not any planet or place, but what he was doing. He'd lived and fought on too many worlds and in too many places to view any particular location as such - Harvest, Jericho VII, Reach, New Jeruselum, and half a dozen other colonies in addition to both the Earth he knew and this one. Onyx had been the closest out of all of them, the place he'd been forged into what he was now - it was in those woods, those forests that he'd metamophised from a scared, angry child into the best of the best, and the fact that the dark forests of the Rocky Mountain range came almost spot on to resembling the northern reaches of Onyx's climate only served to further increase the feeling of homecoming that Nicholas now felt.

As he quickly and silently moved, though, there was another feeling that Nicholas couldn't help but notice, and one that he could not shake, and one that kept him glancing at his motion tracker every few seconds. It had only started to plague him once he had cleared the top edge of that last cliff, but ever since then he couldn't shake the feeling that someone was watching him - not a feeling he took lightly or even considered ignoring, not after Alpha Company's final "exams" and certainly not after those few times he had fought Elites using the Covenant's light bending Active Camouflage technology. Slowing his pace for a moment, Nicholas surreptitiously glanced over his shoulder out of the corner of his visor before quickly looking up, his hand having drifted to and now resting on his sidearm as he did so - after seeing nothing, though, Nicholas picked up his pace again, slightly annoyed. There was nothing behind him, he was sure of that - in order to keep up with his pace whatever it was would have shown up on the motion tracker, and there was nothing. That briefly led the Spartan to wonder if he was being watched from above, but that didn't fit either - while the tree canopy only hid him from the naked eye and he could quite possibly be seen on thermals from low flying aircraft, he heard nothing from there either.

In the end, Nicholas decided it didn't matter. While the feeling certainly wasn't coming from any sort of wild animal, there were no people in the woods able to see him, no aircraft and nothing else to logically suggest someone was watching him. Anyone else moving to the site to claim and salvage the find was hours or days away, and he was almost there - he'd reach the site, grab what he could and leave, end of story. Once he was gone the feeling, wherever it was coming from, could go to hell and stay there - he wanted no trouble, at least not this time, and the sooner he was back "home", the better. As he finally reached the site, though, only confusion greeted him.

While everything else was as it should have been - a small, burnt clearing of charcoal and glassed earth, bathed in weak starlight - the object he'd been hoping to claim was nowhere to be found. Instead there was a different object placed where the meteor should have been - in the center of the small crater stood what appeared to be a jet black sword, placed in such a way that suggested anything but an accident, and that made Nicholas that much more nervous as well as convinced that he was not alone. If the blade had landed like that naturally it was one hell of a coincidence, one that should not have happened - the only other logical conclusion to immediately come to mind was that there was someone else there who had swapped it for the meteor, an idea further supported by the fact that the blade showed no signs of burning or impact damage, an impossibility for a fall from such a height.

Having stopped at the edge of the clearing where the darkness would hide him in his jet black MJOLNIR, Nicholas silently and slowly drew the sidearm his right hand had been resting on, releasing the safety as he glanced around the clearing and then once again upwards just in case - still nothing. Brining his matte black sidearm up into a two handed grip, Nicholas slowly and cautiously entered the clearing, keeping the pistol lined up with where he was looking as he slowly stalked towards the blade to examine it. Not at all the most logical course of action, and one that Mendez would have screamed his ears off for attempting, but Mendez wasn't there, and if he couldn't leave with what he had come to claim he would at least leave with something.

Continuing to sweep the clearing with the pistol, Nicholas quickly glanced over the ground around the blade, and satisfied that it wasn't mined or in some other way surrounded by or linked to traps, turned to approach it backwards, switching his pistol to a left handed grip as he swept the weapon back over the way he had come and reached back to grab the sword's handle with his gauntlented right hand.

[foehammer]

His hand locked upon the hilt, the moment he touched the blade - the muscles moved of their own volition, and a kind of... warmth encircled his hand, is if he wasn't wearing the armor at all but like... someone was touching his bare hand. Suddenly, as if it had always been there, there was light - not... bright light, but light just the same. The warmth had a definite shape - a soft hand, wrapped around his very gently on the hilt of the sword, but the grip... was immovable, irresistable for all its delicate gentleness.

The Lady in Red smiled, and caressed his hand gently. She was an elfmaiden by the look of her, but her eyes were pools of absolute black - no, more than that. They were a view into the void, gazing into them like starting into space through clear glass. She wore red... like the blade he grasped, was being held to grasp. She felt... unearthly, but it was suddenly crystal-clear who exactly had been watching him invisibly. He hadn't even been able to pick up her motion before that moment... but now, now she was more real than the black glass cooling beneath his feet.

Her voice came like a tidal wave smashing little villages on the coast, cascading into his mind and washing away everything but this moment - past, present and future melted away in the single moment of clarity, and all there was... was the two of them, her holding his hand.

"What is thy desire...?" she cooed, in the softest, gentlest tone... but it held the weight of ages, spoke beyond words directly into meaning. Suddenly, Nicholas knew a lot about this blade - she'd been the meteor, no doubt about that, and she was offering him a chance... a fighting chance... to make his own damn goals a reality. If he was strong, he could make it so. Her smile was gentle... but there was something... needful about her gaze, something hungry in her feeling. There would be a price, and he would pay it up front. Nothing good... was ever earned for free.

[nicholas]

The moment Nicholas closed his hand around the hilt of the sword was the exact moment things went to hell - at least in Nicholas's mind. The instant his gloved handgripped the handle he suddenly found himself unable to move, unable to simply yank the blade from the cracked, blackened glass beneath his feet as he should have been, and it was the closest he ever came to panicking since Harvest all those years ago. It was almost a physical impossibility that something that small should have been able to hold him in place, regardless of what it was made of - even with his own strength he was easily capable of flipping and lifting small cars, and with the force multipliers in the MJOLNIR armor he was wearing he was able to literally punch through even the strongest armor plating on any tank - hell, he was able to lift the damn tanks while encased in the armor. That an object wouldn't be pulled loose of the rock or be broken by the strain was almost inconceivable, nearly as inconceivable as the fact that he could not move the hand attached to the blade.

As the adrenaline began to trickle into his system and the rest of the world seemed to fade away slightly as the super soldier focused on the place where his hand was attached he noticed something else, just as quickly as he had noticed the fact that he was more or less trapped in place - there was a hand there, and what was more disturbing than anything else was the fact that he could feel that hand as clearly as he would have been able to without the armor. The warmth that came from it, warmth that probably would have been soothing or calming under normal circumstances, was completely unnatural to Nicholas - he felt safe, seperated from the outside world while inside of his armor, protected from anything that might have cared to try and hurt or kill him, and that warmth violated everything he knew and held to be true about that perception. What was more was the fact that the person the hand was attached to should not have been there - Nicholas had made damn sure he hadn't been followed, had been keeping tabs on the entire world around him up to the moment that his hand had become deadlocked around that sword, betraying his will in the process. The only thing that stopped the Spartan from bringing his sidearm around and attempting to threaten her into releasing him - if it was in fact her hand that was imprisoning him, as impossible as it seemed - was the fact that she looked human, something that made Nicholas hesitate. Unlike the Spartan IIs, the IIIs had been trained for one purpose, and one purpose only - to protect the human race from the Covenant, and it had been with great trepidation that he'd begun hunting the worst that this world's society had to offer, although that had been eased by the fact that many of his targets appeared plenty inhuman. It was only after that observation that Nicholas noticed her ears - not so human after all, then, but still close enough that he had to debate with himself whether or not to threaten her into releasing him and whether or not the course of action would be wise if it was indeed her mere hand preventing him from moving when she spoke, and what she said stopped his train of thought cold.

His helmet and golden visor this time fully looking up from his trapped appendage and up at the creature's face in a cautionary manner and once again glad that at the very least his helmet remained between whoever and whatever she was and his head, the first answer to her question that crossed his mind was "Let me go", only for him to momentarily pause as a new wealth of knowledge flooded into his mind - what the sword was, who she was, and what she was asking, not merely what the words meant. It didn't seem possible, and it ran in complete contradiction to everything he knew about how reality worked - an object such as her couldn't exist, didn't exist, and again the Spartan toyed with the idea of attempting to threaten her into releasing him before another, more primal essence in his mind silenced the thought, instead urging him to simply answer the question.

A question, that was, however, not so easily answered. What did he in fact want? He had no need for personal possessions, no grand, individualistic cause to fight for. As far as he was concerned at the moment, most of that reality's governments could burn and continue to throttle each other's throats for all he cared - they were not the organization he had more or less pledged his loyalty and life to, not the group that had given him the chance to kill, burn, stab and cut the monsters that had destroyed his home, his friends, his family, the life that had originally been intended for him and millions if not billions of others. It was as he thought about that, though, that Nicholas did realize that there was something he wanted - it was what he had done upon arriving in this reality, what he'd done since planetfall. It wasn't self preservation that was driving him - had it been that he could very easily had left many of those survivors aboard that corpse infested vessel to their own fates while he made his way off the ship, and he could just as easily had fallen in with the groups he now hunted on this planet. From the very start it had always amounted to one thing, the thing he had been made for.

"To protect."

[foehammer]

Foehammer watched him. The Maiden in Red kept her beatific smile firmly in place. She couldn't actually read his mind... that was actually incredibly difficult, but she could see the little silver threads of his thought processes dance and weave through the cloud of his human thoughts, and she knew she'd found a real one, with a certainty that had only seldom come to her. This was a wielder she wouldn't forget, one who would not let her down.

Her eyes glittered with a bit of mirth as she watched his reactions carefully, bypassing the visor entirely. He might as well have not been wearing one - even if she couldn't read his mind, couldn't see his face, something of a person imprints upon their armor, she knew better than most, and his... she could see the angry boy, the strong man, the courageous warrior and the guardian of humanity all in one bundle. He answered her, and she was impressed. Her expression hardened a little, her smile fading a little, but it wasn't anger. It was determination.

"Spartan A291, Nicholas, Guardian of the Humanseed... brave warrior, thou art known to me - I have heard thy name whispered by the Valiant Dead. Thou art worthy..." she spoke, her voice cutting like a knife with its sharpness, exalting him.

"... and thou shalt be tested by The Lady." she said. Just like that, the world around him went white. The sword levitated - the pedestal was gone now, the mountain melted away in the white. She released his grip then, and merged into the blade itself like she'd always been a part of it - she was, he knew that - and winds buffeted him as the blade, black as the night, took the texture her eyes had - a black portal into the stars, containing everything and anything within them. The wind was textureless - more an expression of force, touching every inch of his armor, feeling over every single weapon in his posession, every clip, every grenade... everything, and he could briefly feel them as part of his body. Briefly, his armor was a part of him, inescapably entwined with him, but then... it was his shell again, his armor. The blade expanded, and over took him. He was standing on open, black space... but it quickly took definition... black faded to stones, faded to a jungle environment, something... alien, something old. He wasn't in Kansas anymore.

Almost immediately, he was under fire - assault rifle fire pummeled his position, and a grenade bounced off the opposite wall just behind him. She really hadn't been kidding, had she?

[nicholas]

As soon as Nicholas spoke he wondered if he had answered her wrong - following his words was a subtle shift in the woman's expression, one which Nicholas initially took for anger before recognizing it as the same look that he and every one of his siblings had learned to wear themselves on Onyx - it was determination, plain and simple. A thought, and idea, had crossed her mind, and as far as she was concerned the world would damn itself before someone told her otherwise or tried to stop her, and with that she spoke again, reciting things she couldn't possibly know - who and what he was, something that no one up to that point had learned beyond the mere superficial aspect of his given name. Mixed in with that, though, were words he didn't recognize, names he didn't know and had a feeling that he wouldn't for a long, long time - why he felt that way, though, was something he couldn't comprehend, not when his first order of business was to get the hell out of there. After she said her piece was when things began moving forwards again.

Having been subtle pulling his hand in an unconscious effort to attempt to free himself during the entire exchange, Nicholas's hand came free from the blade as it began to rise from the ground of its own volition, the arm flying off of it for a mere fraction of a second before the Spartan regained control of his limb and spun in place, bringing the pistol around and back in a two handed grip, aiming at the woman only to suddenly lose his target as she seemed to meld with the sword. Confused but just as determined to get concrete answers out of her as she was to carry through with whatever idea or plan had occured to her, Nicholas briefly swept the pistol back and forth as his surroundings faded into white and he was suddenly pulled towards the sword much as one would be towards a hull breach aboard a ship - a moment later he was standing on his own two feet again, a curious sensation having passed through him for a second before disappearing. Wherever he was now, though, it wasn't where he had been a moment ago.

Rather than being surrounded by inky darkness and soft starlight, it was blazingly bright out - high noon from the looks of it, and his visor quickly compensated for the sudden glare. The vegetation and surrounding climate was not the mix of connifers and deciduous trees he'd passed climbing the rough terrain, but rather tropical - much more like Onyx, and he would have sworn it was that world or at least somewhere near Earth's equator had it not been for the arching structure in the sky that rose up ahead of and behind him, and on top of that the architecture of the surrounding stone ruins - the style did not match any of the civilizations that had lived in such areas on Earth, and he knew of nothing like this on Onyx nor on any of the other worlds he'd been to. This was new territory.

Suddenly, a sound - little more than the lightest of clicks, but enough to put Nicholas immediately on edge, and as he consulted his motion tracker he saw the source of the sound in the same instant that gunfire ripped towards him from his left. Whipping his pistol up in a one handed grip pointed towards the source of the gunfire, Nicholas's training kicked in as he heard the another click from behind him, but one that was very, very different than the previous one - this sound was one he was quite familiar with, the sound of an M9 fragmentation grenade bouncing off of a hard surface. Without any thought Nicholas sidestepped down the stone ramp he was on before throwing himself backwards, by dumb luck colliding with a short barrier that he shoulder rolled over even as his shield continued to take hits, flaring a brighter and brighter yellow before the wall came between him, the gunfire and the grenade's explosion. Not wasting even a fraction of a second, Nicholas holstered his sidearm as he roughly landed in the soft tropical soil and drew his BR55 with his right hand and pulled a fiber optic cable out of one of his chest pouches with his left hand.

In the precious few fractions of a second he'd had to glance over towards the source of the gunfire he swore he had glimpsed a familiar shape, as impossible as it was - at this point, though, he was quite willing to temporarily suspend his notion of disbelief if it meant survival. He had recognized the sound of the gunfire as that of an M5 series rifle, but he didn't know the exact model, and he needed to know if he was right about what he thought he had seen. Edging the tip of the cable over the edge of the barrier he was using for cover, Nicholas used the smart link to look at where the attack had come from, hoping to catch sight of his attacker - less than two or three seconds had passed since they had tried to attack him, and in addition to hopefully catching sight of whoever it was before they had time to move it would give his shields, already depleted to one third strength, time to recharge.

Blue Square is Nicholas's location

[foehammer]

The Lady took off at a dead run, her arm holding the rifle extended and visor facing forward as she tracked the male spartan's movement, finger bursting on the trigger in his general direction, less to hit him, more to put supression fire on his position as she moved. She was fast - a sprinter, maybe, but she was literally a blur of movement as the walkway flew under her boots, the edge rushing up to meet her feet, sending her sailing through the air at the wall.

A hand planted there and her body reacted, losting no momentum as, with a sound like a machine gun, she ran across the wall, using momentum to delay gravity itself with blinding speed, landing her behind the three boulders just as her clip ran out. Thought wasnt the right word for what happened - spartans were trained to react, not think, so she simply reached behind her, produced another grenade, beginning to cook it even as she reloaded. The time this took was well known to The Lady, so the moment she finished, she tossed the grenade at him, timed so it would pop midair in his vacinity, less as an attack, more as a distraction, spraying smoke, dust, and shrapnel through the air as she spun around, and in bursts, rained hell upon him with her assault rifle. She was aiming for his face, as near as she could see through the dust.

[foehammer]

(Its not awesome, but I finished my last post. Yer up, sparto!)

[nicholas]

Shit.

As the figure moved towards the central structure at a speed that was impossibly fast even given that he had managed to confirm them as another Spartan clad in MJOLNIR, Nicholas pulled his fiber optic back as she unleashed staggered bursts of what was clearly suppressive fire towards his position - no reason to risk losing such a valuable tool so early in what was, willingly or not, and engagement, and even without it he could see where she was going right before she pulled off what would normally have been a physically impossible maneuver. No thought was required - even as Nicholas stowed away the recon tool in one of the many pockets attached to the front of his armor the Spartan III launched himself into an instinctive shoulder roll to dodge any further gunfire the moment she came into view, clearing just ahead of the rifle rounds and grenade blast as he rolled into the protective embrace of several boulders scattered between him and where his attacker had landed, at least judging by his motion tracker.

Not wasting any time coming out of the roll, Nicholas moved to keep his back up against one of the rocks, thankful that a tool he normally took for granted would probably be one of the few things standing between him and that rifle - while the motion tracker was far from perfect, with speed like that it would be invaluable. As his shields began to recharge, Nicholas used that second and a half to think - with his system now flooded with adrenaline it was more than enough time. Fact 1 - he didn't know where he was, but that could wait for later. Fact 2 - he was under attack, and as far as he could tell the other person was most likely UNSC personell, as apart from the fact that no one else had the knowledge or resources to build a MJOLNIR suit, only Spartan IIs and IIIs had the physical and mental augmentations to harness the armor safely, and the idea of any of them defecting to the now nonexistant Insurrectionists was absurd to begin with. The bottom line and the final fact that decided the matter in Nicholas's mind, though, was that they, whoever they were, had failed to identify themselves before opening fire, and their intentions were more than clear - Lieutenant Ambrose and Mendez had been quite clear as to how such situations were to be handled back during boot, and it was that logic which Nicholas fell back on now.

The question, though, was of how to deal with that threat. Right off Nicholas knew full well he couldn't win in an open engagement, at least not in the traditional sense. Any gunfight would end in disaster - while his slowed perception of the world around him, especially in his current state, would make tracking her and managing to hit the target a relatively simple if albeit mildly difficult matter in comparison to his usual targets, their speed would ensure that she could close the distance between them in the blink of an eye, putting him in optimal range of that rifle. Besides that, he had no idea which generation of MJOLNIR they were using. If it was Mark V, taking them down would be relatively easy - it would only be a matter of wearing them down, chipping away at their armor and stamina until they were incapable of being a real threat. If they had Mark VI or a hybrid suit like he did, however, things would be quite a bit more complicated - the automatic biofoam injectors would keep them fighting until they literally died on the spot, and above all Nicholas wanted answers which would be best obtained by taking whoever it was alive - whether or not they had to be in one piece, though, was an entirely different matter, and as Nicholas finished his line of thought the half a second needed for his shields to repair themselves from their partially damaged state had passed.

Breaking away from the wall and turning around the corner with purpose and what seemed to be an almost supernatural quickness in an of itself, Nicholas used his left hand to stow his rifle away before lowering it to the softcase on his left thigh, his right hand moving up to draw the knife from its sheath on his chestplate in a single smooth motion as Nicholas moved into the formation of boulders, keeping a watchful eye on his motion tracker at all times. With any luck the boulders would do their job, removing him from any mid to long range lines of sight and forcing his assailant to face him at close range - at the very least he should have the edge there, one of his sole advantages, and it was one he planned on exploiting to its full extent.

[foehammer]

The Lady grinned.

She did not have a means to actually smile since beneath the armor she was just a thing, both a wave and a particle, an elemental aspect of war, but the whole being that was The Lady was pleased with the find of this Spartan, and, her heart racing, She lowered her rifle and started to run. The first couple steps were normal as the Spartan took refuge in the stones, but she quickly accelerated, soon leaving a cloud of dust as she ran at the wall.

One boot, then the other met stonework wall, and as if up was just another direction, she left the ground behind, hopping the gap between ramp and awning, thrust her legs as hard as she could, and somersaulted backward out into space. Foehammer was giving her immense leeway here, and The Lady exalted in the chance to use even a small piece of her potential.

She was the shieldmaiden, She was the bounty hunter, She was the warrior-goddess, and She was the french girl who picked up a rifle to defend her home. She was all of these and countless others, and right then as she vaulted through the air, she was at home. Her boots planted on the closest stone, and as she moved, she shouldered her rifle to produce the Mauler.

She understood well the hate this manifestation of her felt for the weapon, but this warrior had been a practical sort even before becoming one with The Lady, and as she pulled the Knife and bounded from stone to stone, she exhilerated in the thrill of the hunt, of the fight, and the joy of having the advantage. She trained her weapon down on the spartan when he stalked into view below her.

"!!!!" She'd tried to speak but all that came out was a nonverbal cry of excitement, and only after she'd pulled the trigger, spraying the Mauler's shells -two of them - at him, she accelerated again, blurring.

[nicholas]

Dammit, this thing was fast. Certainly not human, and quick enough that it's speed certainly surpassed that of even another Spartan - the weight of it's footsteps did not match the weight of its armor, nor did the effect that gravity had on the thing. All of that and half a dozen other things screamed at Nicholas that this was not one of his own - it was not a II, another Alpha, or even a Beta, and everything that made Nicholas uneasy was just one less reason to hesitate and one more reason to put it down hard enough that it would no longer be a threat either now or in the immediate future. As Nicholas followed its movements through the use of his motion tracker he saw which approach she took, and the moment that she landed atop the rock he was already prepared and facing her - the Jiralhanae weapon she wielded was the last thing Nicholas needed to convince himself that restraint would not be in fact required, and the rational, thinking part of his mind receded to a small, detached corner of his brain as his lifetime of training, instinct and the wrath of the three hundred brothers and sisters burned and buried came to the front and the world around him began to slow down. Whatever this thing was, it was a mockery of their memory from his point of view, and it would be purged.

Before the thing could raise its weapon to the ready Nicholas was already reacting, moving as it was still in the process of landing atop the rock as the hand that had been in his softcase whipped out, slinging a M9 fragmentation grenade that he had begun cooking seconds earlier straight for his attacker's center of mass. Fast as it might have been, if it wanted to pull off a clear shot it would need at least a brief moment to line it up, and as Nicholas threw the grenade he rolled to the side to ensure that she would need to keep tracking him - with any luck the thing would take a face full of fragmentation packed explosives to the face as the grenade detonated less than half a second after Nicholas threw it.

In either case, the explosion created a brief smokescreen that Nicholas immediately took advantage of, moving out of his roll to place one of the boulders that formed his perimeter between himself and his attacker. Swapping the knife he had drawn to his left hand, Nicholas's right hand dipped down and drew his sidearm, flicking the safety off and with a single thought he engaged his suit's camouflage, fading almost completely from view save for the slightest of distortions, much like that of the air over a hot surface on a summer day. He was done playing games and didn't particularly enjoy being shot at - whatever was going on, it ended now.