Halo RTS

Chapter 3

Her mouth tasted of copper, and nobody was nearby. Ann felt fear for the first time since she logged into this game, there was no sign of Jace or Wesley. She called out; "Guys? You there?" There was no response, other than a wet slithering that started up. It was quiet, then suddenly the sound surrounded her. She quickly stood up and aimed her gun.

Her motion sensor was going haywire, the contacts were surrounding her, the area was covered in little flood infectors, which started to scurry over to her, moving to kill her, she fired her weapon as fast as she could, but the DMR only had ten rounds. She fired until she ran out of ammo and then started to run away, she had no weapon to fight with. She ran and ran until she was out of breath. Seeing light at the end of the cave she felt her fear disappear.

This was not going to kill her. Bursting out of the cave she saw that the land down the mountain side was covered in the nightmarish Flood. 

"Well if not now, then when?" She asked herself, quoting Jace. Turning and priming a grenade, and threw the fragmentation device up the mountain, which exploded. A loud rumbling started as the snow fell off the higher parts of the mountain, building into a wall off pure force,  an avalanche.

Turning back to the snow of the mountain and charging towards the forces arrayed below her. She saw a large boulder sized snow ball flyby and jumped, tucking into a ball. The wave of snow descended and swept her, and the flood army, away.

~~~~~

Getting up and shaking his head to clear it, Raynor looked around. He could see no sign of the people he had been with and could discern no trace of where they went. Suddenly a grenade flew up to him which, in his surprise, he caught.

"OH HELL!" He yelled. Dropping the explosive and running to the Pelican. He got five feet away from the grenade before it exploded, which caused the snow above him to come crashing off the cliff. He felt panic rise in his chest as thousands of pounds of snow fell from the cliff the Pelican crashed into tumbled down to him. The wall smashed into him and threw him off the cliff he was on, where he fell fifty, sixty, seventy feet to a bone crunching impact that drained all his shields. 

"Overload the gel padding!" Ray cried.

"Right!" I hit the button a second before the force crashed into me. I felt no impact from the snow, but the overloading of the gel felt like a thousand knives stabbing into my body. I passed out from the pain.

~~~~~

Ann saw the blue blur blown down the mountain with her, it was odd cause the shape looked like her brother. But it couldn't be him, he was gone. She ran over to the spot to see if the person was at least okay and saw that a it was her brother, but he wasn't moving. She hurried over to him and, shaking him, yelled "Wake up! Come on, come on!"

~~~~~

To be honest I thought that the shaking was another avalanche. I opened my eyes and struggled to move. I asked ray to disable the overload, and suddenly I could move again. The pain was gone too, so that made it all so much better.

"Hurry we need to move, before the Flood is upon us!" Said the other spartan, who was Pink, and had a sword!

"Right!" I said as I stood "I'm okay! Lets do this!" I pulled my shotgun off my back and racked the slide.

~~~~~

She couldn't tell if this person was her brother for certain, but they seemed ready to fight, which was good. They were going to have to. She could hear the Flood climbing the hill and see the jumping up to them.

"Get ready!" She told the Blue guy.

"Oh hell yes, time to rock them!" He replied. When he said time it sounded like he said it with a B. 

She pulled he sword out and readied it. It was going to be a long day.

~~~~~

The first Flood to make it up the hill was blasted by his scatter gun, which tore the monster into bits.

"Yeah! First blood!" I called out, my adrenaline overwhelming my fear. Aiming in as another guy jumped up a blast of a chain-gun riddled the ex-marine with holes. I fired again and again till I realized that the Kyle and the rest were all here now, with the Warthog, blasting through the Flood lines, racing up towards us. The Warthog hit a boulder and flipped, throwing the people onto the ground, they landed only a few feet from us thankfully. Caleb, Kyle, Keltie and Jamie were all there.

They stood, unhurt and started shooting too, all of them pouring fire into the enemies lines. I fired again and again, buckshot tearing through the Nightmares approaching us. But nothing we did could have stopped them, and they were among us. The Pink spartan ran into the Flood and started to swing her sword, slicing them apart. Kyle reloaded his rocket and blasted a Combat Form from the air while it jumped, and I ran out of ammo on my scatter blaster. I dropped it and reached for my handgun. "Here!" Ray said into my ears, in time with a pair of weapons appearing in my hands. Both were the awesomely overpowered Mauler handguns "They're from that boss!" Ray informed me.

I started to blast shots off in all directions, hits landing on me from above, beside and behind, never able to keep up with the massive slaughter going on, more people came and joined the fight.

"Jace! You're alive!"

"Aww hell ya, I'm alive, not going to be taken down by Freaks."

"Ann? Jace?" I said, ecstatically.

"Hey it's Raynor!" Called out a pale marine, who I recognized as Wesley. 

Now with eight of us hurling the wrath of players at the Flood they began to falter, falling dead faster than they could climb the mountain. Then the last one fell to the ground and we all paused, looking at each other. We were all splattered with gore, green blood, chunks of flesh and our own blood.

I sat down and started to laugh, it was the kind of laugh that was the release of tension and the laugh into the face of death. Everyone looked at me like I was crazy, which I was for all they knew, especially considering what had just happened. Then everybody started to laugh as well, Keltie sat back to back with me. I reached up and pulled my helmet off, turned around and kissed her. I was happy to be alive.