21 September, 2552 – The Library, Installation 04
Leonidas-151 POV
Teleportation doesn't feel like you'd expect. No tingle. No lightspeed tunnel. No flash of blinding white. Just cold displacement. One blink, and your boots are no longer on stone and dirt—they're echoing across the pristine floors of some ancient machine.
We materialize on a metallic platform that floats in the void of a vast chasm. Light shafts bleed down from unseeable heights. Ancient panels hum beneath our feet, and beams of shimmering blue data arc through the walls like arteries. Everything is sterile, quiet… and wrong.
John takes point. Fred and Kelly flank wide. I hold the rear, because I always do. My helmet HUD adjusts instantly, feeding me the oxygen levels—barely breathable with nasty contaminants—and temperature—frigid. I cycle my jump kit to heating mode, micro-jets venting gentle warmth across the inside of my armor. Even in MJOLNIR, I feel the cold. The kind that doesn't belong in a machine built by gods.
Welcome to the Library.
I don't need to guess. John already told us where we'd be. We got the briefing as fast as we geared up. He'd survived the Flood containment facility—barely—and came back to the FOB looking like he'd fought death itself. He brought a new "friend" with him.
343 Guilty Spark.
The floating lightbulb with a superiority complex and a memory core older than human civilization.
He told us the Flood were loosed. He told us there was a way to stop them. A key. The Index. It could activate the ring and "contain" the parasite. What he didn't say was that this place—the Library—was built like a meat grinder wrapped in arcane architecture. No map. No known floor plan. Just us, the Monitor, and a sea of endless doors.
I don't trust the thing. None of us do. John convinced it to fetch the rest of Blue Team because "efficiency in acquisition of the Index" or whatever line the floating scrap heap used. But the truth is simpler: John knows how dangerous the Flood is, and he's not going to fight this alone. Not if he doesn't have to.
And me? I'd rather have Cortana in my head for this. But she's still plugged into the ring's mainframe, trying to find what this structure really is. So far, nothing. Only that it's called Installation 04.
Now it's just us and the robot.
"Please proceed forward," 343 chimes, hovering ahead of us and tilting side to side with those eerie pulses of blue light from his core. "Time is of the essence. The containment of the Flood is paramount."
"I'm beginning to wonder if it was ever contained at all," I mutter. Kelly snorts.
"Don't give it an excuse to lecture," Fred grumbles.
John doesn't say anything. He moves forward.
We follow.
The corridor ahead is narrow, barely wide enough for us to walk in staggered pairs. Forerunner symbols glow faintly on the wall, flickering like they're barely hanging on to the last shreds of power. I run a passive scan, syncing the glyphs with everything we've scraped from the ring so far. I get a partial translation.
"Watch your corners," I call. "Security subsystems were active in the last structure."
Fred nods, raising his battle rifle.
"Define security," Kelly mutters.
I shake my head. "If it shoots, it qualifies."
The Monitor zips ahead, humming tunelessly to itself like a librarian that finally got some visitors. I watch it as it accesses a terminal—an invisible touch, a flash of symbols—and a door ahead begins to groan open.
I can't help but look at the structure around us.
This is it. This is the answer I've been chasing since the first moment I stepped foot on Reach. The buildings in Zone 67… the strange technology… it all leads back here. The shapes, the symmetry, the material compositions—they match. This wasn't Covenant. It was never Covenant.
This was something else.
The Forerunners.
The word had been tossed out by Guilty Spark like it was nothing. The same way a human might talk about the Romans or the Egyptians. Like they were a civilization long passed. A fact. A fossil.
Only these fossils had left behind ring-shaped planet-killing weapons and technology that could bend gravity, light, and time like wet clay. These weren't just builders.
These were gods.
And they died.
I tighten my grip on my VK78 rifle. Whatever wiped out a civilization like this… we're already facing it. I've seen the Flood. I've seen what they did to Jenkins. To the others. I don't want to become one of them.
John gives the signal, hand up, two fingers extended. We stop. A security door slams shut behind us—locking us in.
"Another segment unlocked," Spark says, voice smooth and cheerful. "Please proceed to the next indexing chamber."
"Define chamber," Fred mutters.
Ammo was getting scarce.
By the time Spark opened the next set of security doors, I was down to my last mag for the MA5B—half spent from the last wave. Fred's DMR clicked dry shortly after. Kelly had already picked up a plasma rifle from a downed Elite combat form. I'd mocked the burn rate of Covenant weapons more times than I could count during training.
I wasn't laughing now.
"Dead ahead—hall's packed," she said, nodding toward the far corridor. Her visor glinted orange from the dim glow of parasitic cysts pulsing across the ceiling.
"I count at least twenty," Fred added, already holding a plasma pistol in his off-hand, scavenged from a twisted Jackal husk. "Maybe more past the bend."
"Plasma weapons," John said. "They burn clean. Burn deep."
He wasn't wrong. The MA5B shredded Flood tissue, but it didn't stop the infection. I'd seen two drop, only for their twitching corpses to reanimate and lunge again minutes later. Plasma? A direct hit could incinerate a combat form from the inside out—boiling the infection sac before it had a chance to stabilize.
When you couldn't count on death being permanent, you had to make it violent.
I dropped to one knee beside a collapsed Sangheili form, its torso opened like a cracked melon. A plasma rifle lay beside it. Still glowing. Still warm. I picked it up, gripped the odd curvature of the alien weapon with both hands, and exhaled.
"You sure about this?" Fred asked me.
"No. But I've got one mag left, and I'm not dying to something that still twitches after being cut in half."
We moved.
The corridor narrowed ahead. Organic vines stretched like veins along the floor, some still pulsing. Cortana might've said something clever about biological integration. Instead, we had Spark ahead, humming like this was a casual Sunday stroll through his necrotic museum.
"The Flood is virulent," the Monitor said. "But it is not insurmountable. We shall contain it. Together."
"I'm starting to feel like your definition of 'together' doesn't include firing a weapon," Fred muttered.
Kelly rolled a plasma grenade between her fingers. "Ready?"
"Go."
The explosion was muffled by the damp organic growth that coated everything. But the results weren't. When we advanced, the blast had carved a trench through at least eight forms, torsos flayed open and fused to the floor. It stank like cooking rot and melted rubber.
Then the rest came.
I fired first. Plasma bolts hissed through the air, streaking into a charging form. It burned through its abdomen, lighting the growth inside like napalm. The combat form jerked mid-step, its body twisting in the wrong direction as the infection sac ruptured.
Fred's plasma pistol sang with overcharge, the bolt lancing into another before detonating into blue flame. The parasite inside screamed—no words, just raw static—but it dropped.
Another leaped from a wall vent—John caught it mid-air with the butt of his rifle, spun, and crushed it beneath his boot before firing into the vent behind it. The smell was starting to make my stomach turn, even through the helmet.
"Push!" I barked.
We sprinted down the corridor. Every corner turned into a kill box. Jump kits hissed, boosting us over chokepoints where the floor had rotted away. The Flood came from walls, ceilings, through cracks in the floor—wherever organic matter could squirm, it poured through like sewage under pressure.
I missed the clean lines of a Covenant engagement. Missed plasma bolts and predictability. The Flood didn't fight like soldiers. They fought like fire.
Every step forward was a fight for ground that we couldn't trust to hold.
John's voice crackled in the squad channel. "Door ahead. Fred, breach."
Fred lobbed a plasma grenade toward the sealed Forerunner door. It detonated in a spray of molten blue, scorching the metal and shorting the panel.
Guilty Spark reappeared. "Ah! That door was not scheduled to be opened yet."
"It is now," I growled, pulling the panel free and jamming the override into place. The door hissed open, and we dove through, sealing it behind us with a fresh grenade tossed into the hall as a goodbye gift.
The silence was oppressive.
We were inside a circular chamber. Runes pulsed dimly across the walls. A glowing column of light ran through the center—some kind of data conduit or control nexus. For a moment, I could hear my breath again.
I sat, hard, against the wall.
Fred knelt beside me, his shoulder armor cracked and steaming. "That was too close."
John was already scanning the far door. "More'll be back soon."
I checked my rifle—burned out. Battery gone. I dropped it and scavenged another from a collapsed Sangheili still fused to the floor by congealed organic growth. No power on that one either. Eventually I found one that glowed with weak light. One bar.
"Running dry," I said.
"Same," Kelly replied, crouching beside a ruined turret base. She was breathing hard. "We're bleeding gear. Can't sustain this forever."
"Then we won't," John said. "We'll finish it before it finishes us."
Spartan optimism. Some called it delusion. I called it hope. Stubborn, defiant hope wrapped in titanium and fused into our neural lace.
"Let's move," I said, rising. My armor's synthetic muscles groaned. My joints ached. The last three hours had been a war of attrition we couldn't afford to lose.
We regrouped at the next door. The last of the security sectors, Spark had said.
As the next wave closed in, I looked around at my team. Coated in gore, plasma-burned armor, cracked visors. We were exhausted.
But we were Spartans.
The door opened.
And we kept moving.
I don't know how long we'd been moving.
Maybe hours. Maybe days. The Flood had turned time into a series of blood-slick corridors and burning flesh. I'd lost count of how many times I'd swapped weapons—each transition an act of desperation, not choice. Every trigger pull was survival.
And now we were here.
The final security door unsealed with a loud hiss, vapor bleeding from its edges like steam off a corpse. We entered a chamber far larger than any before—circular and cavernous, easily a hundred meters across. My HUD adjusted to the eerie ambient glow almost instantly. A pit sat dead-center in the chamber, shaped like a gear or a flower of interlocking teeth. It stretched downward so far that even with enhanced Spartan optics, I couldn't make out the bottom. It didn't feel like just a hole.
It felt like a throat.
And something down there was breathing.
The air was warm. Too warm. And it hummed—softly, almost below auditory threshold. The walls pulsed with faint yellow light, veins of energy snaking through them in patterns that made my eyes ache. Floating above the center of the pit was a single construct. Roughly the size of a large book, shaped like an intricate prism, suspended in midair and slowly rotating in place. Its light pulsed like a heartbeat. The Index.
There it was.
"Reclaimers," 343 Guilty Spark chimed behind us, his voice tinged with anticipation. "We are close. The Index is nearly within reach. A retrieval platform will rise momentarily."
"Not waiting," John said flatly.
The Monitor beeped in confusion. "I must caution—!"
But he was already moving.
John hooked his MA5 to his magplate, launched forward, and jumped onto the inner rim of the pit. The floor there was barely a meter wide, ringed with ancient Forerunner text and venting light from some inner core far below. A few seconds of calculation, then he bolted forward into a sprint. No hesitation.
He wasn't aiming for the platform.
Kelly saw it first. "He's gonna grab it manually—!"
Fred started to step forward, but I stopped him. "No. Let him."
John had always known the right moment to act. This was one of them.
He activated his jumpkit—boosting forward and launching off the narrow lip of the gear-shaped floor. Midair, he spun, twisted, and landed feet-first on a protruding Forerunner support beam that jutted partway into the pit like a spine. From there, he ran. Full sprint. No second guesses.
That's when the tether line launched from his forearm gauntlet.
Custom mod. Something he and Cortana had tinkered with back on Reach during his last armor refit. A grapple reel, tungsten-carbon thread, magnetic clamp head.
The line hissed as it shot forward—latching onto a floating node beneath the Index. The line jerked taut and John swung upward, momentum curling him in a wide arc. The glow of the pit below washed across his armor like a dying sun.
He released the grapple at the peak of his arc, his jumpkit blasting at full power. For a split second, he was flying.
Then he snatched the Index out of the air.
The chamber pulsed once. A low tone—like a lock disengaging—reverberated through the room.
Guilty Spark floated closer, his voice modulating in panic. "Reclaimer, that is not the prescribed retrieval protocol!"
John landed hard, slid across the platform's rising base, and rose to his feet with the Index secured in his left hand.
"No time for protocol," he said.
I couldn't help but smile.
Spark beeped red, stammered, and finally settled. "Well. Efficient if nothing else. Shall we proceed to the Control Room?"
Fred stepped up beside me. "Not gonna lie… that was badass."
Kelly gave a low whistle. "Showoff."
John walked back toward us, the Index now glowing brighter with every step he took. As he stepped back onto the platform with us, the glow in the pit began to fade. The eerie hum stopped. Silence returned.
"I've got it," he said. "Let's finish this."
Behind him, the central platform began to lower. Guilty Spark rotated twice in place, visibly excited again now that his precious artifact had been retrieved.
"Excellent! Now, we may make haste to the installation's Control Room and initiate the containment protocol. The Flood shall be neutralized shortly."
I looked down at the Index in John's hand. Something about it made my skin crawl, even under layers of alloy and sensor mesh. Too perfect. Too still.
Something was off.
But we didn't have the luxury of gut feelings anymore. Humanity was on its knees, Reach was gone, and the Flood were loose.
If the Index was the key to stopping it, then fine.
Let's turn the damn key.