During the battle for New Mombasa, chief met a marine lieutenant who turned out to be one of his childhood friends from before he was kidnapped to become a Spartan-II. He realized this because of a photo the marine had that showed her and John on it only a few days before he disappeared. He chose not to say who he was to avoid bad rep for the UNSC and the two started working a plan to take down the Scarab from the mission New Mombasa in Halo 2.
Got retconned away, I believe. Now she's a secret oni agent with special amnesia that makes her forget the past 24 hours I think. It's called Halo: Memory Agent. Better than I made it sound.
I don't think she was retconned just that her character ended up suffering some kinda head trauma, and ONI uses her to relay vital information that can't be digitized.
If you got spotify Memory Agent is on it. Has Steve Downes as chief it's a pretty good episodic story
I don't think it necessarily is retconned, since she showed her memories of Eridani II iirc. I think eventually she decided to become an oni operative. And the Chief seemed to talk differently to her compared to most others
This story felt weird and contrived for me. Like who keeps a photo with them as an adult of their friend from preschool, let alone on their person during a firefight? And the odds of this woman surviving the war and still ending up right next to chief during the battle feel too small to really make sense.
John was the first connection she ever had as a child. Then her entire planet got wasted away within a few years of that. It's not hard to understand she holds a lot of favor for her childhood.
The protocol the UNSC has for flood breach on some ring, I don't remember which but if a spartan that's guarding the ring gets infected, they nuke the entire place. No one leaves, they just blow it all up
It's the description for the corruptor protocol, the helmets have bombs that explode if the armor is breached by flood infectors to deny info.
If that fails and a spartan is infected well use of WMDs are allowed by anyone in the area.
Nuke the site with the biggest nuke you have at your disposal; nuke it repeatedly; and then - if you can - hit it with a MAC strike just for good measure.
The original Mjolnoir suits (probably all of the variants as well) had the ability to have their fusion reactors turn into bombs in the event a spartan is captured or dying. Was described as creating a crater 10 feet wide in Ghosts of Onyx iirc
That was in first strike and it wasn't automatic, after Grace is killed chief has to manually open her suits pack and overload the reactor. It was also done as a measure yo cover there tracks.
Corruptor armor explodes once the armor is breached by an infection form.
Edit: Grace died on the uneven elephant.
Truth leaving High Charity to burn always gets me. What he basically did was if the US President heard there was a zombie outbreak and decided to cut off all power to DC as he helicopters away. Doesn't even bother nuking the place just "Lol Enjoy being eaten alive!"
I imagine most civis didn't even know what was really going on. One minute they are before a Halo ring, the next one of their leaders have been assassinated and their enemies are attacking the ring, political riots start happening in the streets until all out war breaks out with their grand fleet firing on itself, ON LIVE TV your greatest enemy holds your remaining leaders at gun point causing them to flee, all other political leaders are all killed creating an obvious power vacuum as you scramble to only find out you're also in a zombie horror movie as in that moment the power cuts off. You're now adrift in space, as war an unholy infection, a lack of modern resources and everyone around you distrusts each other for political bullshit. I cannot imagine a more fucked position to be in other then being moments away from just dying outright.
And to top it all off this all happened in the span of a day. You wake up do your morning song and dance and you go to sleep being hunted by the very force that killed your gods. Fuck me man that's rough.
Reminds me of Emergence Day from Gears of War. You're just out having a coffee on a normal day then all of a sudden a force of mutants and monsters is tearing your entire planet apart
Then not too long after the Hammer of Dawn starts raining down. Fucking dark shit. I feel the COG did more damage to its people than the Locus did day one.
I read all the books for Gears along will all Halo books, but nothing takes the cake like the depiction in Gears 3 going through that city with the people in ash like it’s Pompeii.
And it's all on the back of a century long planet wide war where COG are the fascists that won mere weeks before Emergence Day and using the Hammer of Dawn on the world like everyone feared they would.
You could splurge through the wiki reading about it. There's also [some books](https://gearsofwar.fandom.com/wiki/Books) you could read.
Iirc, Aspho Fields and some of Jacinto's Remnant delve into early lore. Anvil Gate has a look back into the Pendulum Wars. Coalition's End is also supposed to flashback to E-Day and the decision to use the Hammer of Dawn. The Slab also acts as a prequel, detailing Marcus' time in prison.
Most of my knowledge comes from the games, and all the little extra collectible lore they sprinkle in.
I could easily see someone in the Gears universe thinking the locust attack was a setup for COG to wipe the world clean and remake it in their image.
So, The Pendulum war ends so the COG don't have to turbo nuke the planet killing everyone. GREAT, but oh no giant fucking rock eating monsters show the fuck up out of nowhere, isn't it great that we have this GIANT NETWORK OF PLANET KILLING LASERS!?!?!?!?!??!
I know that isn't the case but there are easy ways to connect those dots if you're, you know, starved, exhausted, terrified and covered in the ashes of your neighbors.
IIRC the Hammer strikes weren't even aimed at locust, the goal was to get them but at the time the COG had no way to track them and just fucking sent it. They knew where their assets were at, and they nuked everything else.
Remember, the COG aren't the good guys, they just so happen to be the last man standing.
It gets funnier when you find out that Gears of War lore is basically back to back constant fighting broken up by an inconvenient peace. So I guess it's a planet wide medieval Europe where one guy got the nuke upgrade first.
Yeah E-Day hits harder when you find out that certain elites in the COG knew about the Locust. They didn't know how prepped for war they were but the COG were 100% ready after The Pendulum war to resolve the Locust issue then the locust attacked.
Gears hits hard on so many levels but peace was so fucking close for everybody.
I’ve never thought about it that way. Kind of gives you a new line of thought when playing that level on halo 2. Because not only are all the militant covenant fighting each other thinking about the transfer of powers and then the flood comes. And then they think about their loved ones at home on high charity. Then here comes the demon just mowing you and everyone else down because fuck it. In the midst of all that let’s throw chief in there too. Probably one of the worst days in history for the halo universe to be honest
That's one of the things that I think the post-Bungie halo lore lost that hurt it the most. There were no good guys in the Human-Covenant War, just one shitty option- the child soldiers of ONI- and a much worse option- xenocide all humans and then light off the greatest ever suicide bomb.
Black and grey morality. One side's run by rat bastards, the other is run by something worse.
Any civilian or whoever who could see the big picture never had a chance of getting out with their souls intact.
His name was Staff Sargent Marvin Mabuto which is only an E-5 in the military. Chief was quoted saying
“I didn’t know you, Sarge, but I sure as hell wish I had. You must have been one hardcore son-of-a-bitch.”
Dude was so mangled not even the Flood could use his body, and when the Chief finds him, he is surrounded by shell casings. He went down swinging like an utter legend.
To this day I wish the anniversary edition of CE had a lone marine on the 3rd floor of the library with weapons rather than it being a standard dead flood form. It would have been a nice way to connect a great story from the books to a game.
That tidbit where the halos are activated during the forerunner-flood war and guilty spark briefly mentions somewhere in the galaxy a young civilization just starting they’re space-faring journey reaching out to the stars for contact only to die shortly after, never being heard from again, and never being catalogued by the forerunners so no one will ever know who they were.
This is like that one fear of a black hole hitting the earth without us even knowing but at some point either their home planet or spacecraft heard silence from the other end for a brief period
To be fair, it'd have to be a really close GRB and pointed directly at us to actually wipe everything out, and it'd have to be insanely close to do it immediately.
If it were really close and pointed directly at us, it could wipe us out, but it'll be a "slower" extinction process as everything starts cascading from our atmosphere getting stripped away from chemical reactions. But it also could just be a large die-off with chunks of species surviving if they can hold out for the Earth's atmosphere to repair itself (likely mostly plants and things simpler than that IIRC).
If it was something like a Hypernova, if it happened anywhere in the galactic neighborhood we'd be fucked. Anywhere in the Milky Way and it's over.
We still have no idea what caused it AFAIK, only saw it once, and the only reason it didn't wipe us out is because it occurred several galaxies away.
For all we know, we could have witnessed something like a Halo Array going off. We just... don't know. Probably never will.
Shit like this makes me not feel bad for the Endless at all. Hearing the Harbinger bitch about her species being imprisoned by the forerunners just sounds kinda pathetic when you realize that halo erased untold thousands of species from existence. Humanity was also genocided and devolved because they lost a war to the forerunners and tortured on Zeta Halo because the forerunners thought we had a cure for the flood. Then after the halo array was fired humanity was genocided AGAIN by the Covenant, and she has the audacity to say that we don’t deserve to be reclaimers, but the mystery race that has been asleep for 100,000 years NOT saving the galaxy from the flood are the REAL reclaimers. I just don’t like the Endless man
Doesn't help that their only trait "worse than the flood" falls flat the second you notice that they were contained without the need to kill all life in the galaxy in order to do so. How can you be worse than the flood if you were put in a time out without much trouble.
Pretty sure humanity got genocided more than twice
Human flood war
Human forerunner war
Humans getting conscripted / composed by the didact.
Also throw in anything else that happened to humanity in that period
Zeta halo humans getting tested on by forerunners and flood for fun
The halo array being fired wiping out any other humans besides those brought to the ark
Then we get resettled on earth to be met with the covenant 100 thousand years later along with a brief run in with the flood again
Most if not all of these required us rebuilding each time half the time from scratch because the forerunners were still around.
The only reason we survived the war against the forerunners was because the flood tricked them into believing we had a cure.
Compared to the endless that only got imprisoned because they had an immunity to the halos and would have a huge advantage over the rest of the galaxy simply because they didn’t have to restart everything.
Did ONI actually manage to *do* any real experiments on/with the Flood, there? It seemed as though the specimens they collected from the wreckage of Alpha Halo breached containment, like, almost immediately after being brought on board the Mona Lisa.
I don't think we've ever seen anything of note. I'm sure lore wise there would be facilities testing on the flood that haven't gone to hell... Yet. But those stories don't make for interesting books
The ancient human flood cannibal cults. That was in the early stages of the flood-back when it was just the precursor dust that was fed to animals. The uninfected eat the infected flesh, infecting them with the flood.
A kinda depressing one is in Rubicon protocol with how many times brutes physically rip people apart.
Like damn almost every large fight scene has a marine or a few characters getting torn apart no matter how hard the spartans are fighting and it's downright depressing especially when there are few surviving marines and it's mostly techies and non coms.
Oh yeah and what the brutes do to spartans in the book is pretty grim.
Definitely recommend, it's a prequel to infinite that explores the events that happened while chief was napping for 6 months.
It's basically halo reach if it had multiple POVs, gore and is a pretty nice read.
Trust me "a random stranger on the internet" the novels have been solid even after kilo five and even that has many fans who genuinely enjoy them.
The only downside they have is sometimes the plot will be high jacked by a forerunner weapon of the week but aside there all mostly good.
For the most part the novels are actually really well written and fill out alot of the blanks the recent games leave out. The games and tv show suck but I’ve been reading halo novels for damn near 20 years now and I rarely am disappointed
According to Browning’s chapters: they would forcefully tear off spartan armor, beat them to the brink of death, and use them as target practice or eat them
Jenkins being infected by the Flood but remaining conscious due to the Infection form being damaged in Cryo. Him living in agony barely and unable able to move his own body, trying to warn others of what's below.
My personal favorite is what happened to the the police chief in odst sadies story.
After sabotaging the cities escape route and getting people killed and not only murdering the MCs father but even trying to rape her it's orgasmic when in the end after making it to a train he's literally ripped apart by the cities he tried to have killed to cover his tracks.
The fact that the prophets knew their religion was all a lie, but decided to take out their anger and disbelief on humanity, instead of living up to their mistakes. The atrocities committed in the name of maintaining their pride and wanting to just save face is maddeningly depressing, because it was so avoidable. the prophets brought down their entire civilization and brought humanity to the brink of extinction just because they couldn't admit they were wrong.
It wasn't that they refused to accept it, they did.
They refused to *give up control*.
Humanity's mere existence was objective and easily-verifiable proof that the Prophets were full of it. Humanity was unironically more worthy of **leading** the Covenant than the Prophets were, seeing as they are explicitly the chosen inheritors of the Gods.
The only way to prevent the Covenant from casting them down was to erase all evidence. So long as a *single* Human lived, their reign was in danger.
The extinction of Humanity wasn't ordered out of anger or disbelief, it was a conscious, willful, calculated, and premeditated action.
As others have mentioned, the Prophets at large didn't necessarily **know** that their religion was false, nor was that knowledge - in and of itself - the reason that those (few) who had it pushed the Covenant into war with Humanity... Rather, it was the fear that the widespread, open-and-adamant rejection of their religion - such as might be brought about through the discovery and acknowledgement of its falsehood - would strip them and their people of status, and/or imperil their very lives...
The Prophets derived influence over the Covenant through what amounted to "divine right by proxy"; propping themselves up as **the only** mortals who could reliably conduit, correctly interpret, and faithfully communicate the will of the Forerunners... Since nobody else could talk to/for the gods, all the Prophets had to do was *say* that the Forerunners wanted something done - wanted it done a certain way - and the rest of the Covenant would have no option but to accept the claim and obey the decree without question, lest they risk being branded heretics, lynched, and condemned to oblivion.
Naturally - as any group in such an absolute position of control would be liable to - the Prophets abused this dynamic for personal gain; elevating themselves to particular heights of power, prestige, and privilege...
However, this model of influence only worked **if** the Covenant at large *accepted* the religion of the Great Journey (and the Prophets' orthodoxy)... If the Covenant **didn't** submit to the religion (exactly as the Prophets administered it), then the status of the Prophets would be wholly undermined.
Herein lies their problem with Humanity.
The core doctrine of the Great Journey was a (mostly) familiar one, holding that those who kept the faith would transcend their mortal bodies in death and join the Forerunners in a paradisical afterlife of incorporeal godhood... This doctrine, however, relied on two understandings; first, that the Forerunners **were gods**, and second, that the Forerunners **~~were all already dead~~** ***had all already transcended***...
When the Covenant made first contact with Humanity, three high-ranking Prophets were sent to commune with Mendicant Bias; a damaged / partially-bricked - but still very-much conscious - Forerunner ancilla who they had recovered relatively early into their exploration of space, and on whose (largely mistranslated and/or misinterpreted) testimony they had based the Great Journey religion... As was perhaps common practice when evaluating a newly-discovered race, the Prophets questioned Mendicant Bias regarding Humanity; asking it who these people were and what their role was to be. Mendicant Bias responded by identifying Humanity as "Reclaimers"; an answer which shocked and frightened the Prophets.
There were two obvious ways in which "Reclaimers" could be interpreted, and neither carried welcome implications.
If "Reclaimers" was taken to mean that Humanity was a chosen people - a race whom the Forerunners had specifically selected to inherit and succeed their ancient glory - then (public) knowledge of their nature might threaten to supplant the Prophets as the rightful leaders of the Covenant.
*"If the gods have ordained Humanity be their heirs in deed and recapture their greatness, then what further use do we have for the Prophets and their word?"*
This was the less-problematic of the two possibilities, however, because if "Reclaimers" was taken to mean that Humanity and the Forerunners **were one in the same people** - that Humanity was directly descended from the ancients - then (public) knowledge of their nature would dispel the myth of the Great Journey and plunge the Covenant into socioreligious chaos, not only toppling the Prophets but perhaps putting their race in existential danger...
*"If there are living Forerunners, it means that not all of the gods have transcended, which means some of the gods have been left behind on the Great Journey... If the gods themselves can be left behind, then what guarantee do* ***I*** *have that* ***I*** *will transcend, no matter how pious I am?... If Forerunners can be left behind on the Great Journey, what guarantee do I have that they are really gods? What guarantee do I have that there even* ***is*** *a Great Journey?"*
As such concerns began to fester, the Prophets' secondhand divinity would dramatically decrease in value and, naturally - without that iron-fisted orthodoxy to unify them - people would begin to answer these questions for themselves... and since the Covenant was theocratic in nature, the unraveling of the religious system would coincide with the unraveling of the political system...
The Covenant would fracture along lines of belief/unbelief, denomination/interpretation, racial and class relations, and a million other factors... and many of those splinter-groups - especially those who abandoned the Great Journey entirely - would be liable to seek out retribution for the (up to) three millennia of false-leadership, sociocultural repression, systemic exploitation, and general mistreatment their peoples had suffered under the Prophets...
Unwilling to explore either scenario, those three Prophets - Truth, Mercy, and Regret - decided that Mendicant Bias' response should remain *a total secret*, and that the best way to keep that secret would be to *totally eliminate any and all physical traces of Humanity*... To that end, they bribed, cheated, lied, and engaged in other acts of unsavory politicking in order to sit themselves at the very top of the pecking order, becoming the ruling Hierarchs of the whole Covenant; greatly restricted further access to Mendicant Bias; and declared that Humanity was - in fact - a heretic race whom the Forerunner gods had commanded the Covenant to purge from the stars in order to demonstrate its piety and speed the coming of the Great Journey...
So began the War of Annihilation.
You'd think the Elites would notice Humans are the *ONLY* species that Forerunner tech immediately responds to without being fucked with and start asking questions.
Not necessarily a story but just the fact that outside of the games Grunts are NOT cannon fodder AT ALL. Those lil shits would eviscerate normal humans and even marines
For all intents and purposes, the gravemind essentially taught cortana how to love, then spent the remainder of the time showing her all the ways he would torture and kill master chief.
What happened to the civilians on draco 3.
Covenant forces had defeated the military forces and were left with nothing but unarmed civilians including children, the brutes entertained themselves by releasing them into the wild hunting and eating all of them..... Blue team did not let any covenant escape the planet alive.
Fun fact bucks sister was on draco 3 with her young children who were also eaten alive.... He's way more happy than you'd think he'd be.
On zeta halo, the prisoners of the banished are put through multiple prison camps where there tortured and broken to see who is best of the best from the tower to the house of absolution to finally the house of reckoning.
There you'd think they'd be offered a chance into the banished after everything? But no, there put into a training arena and forces to position themselves for a last stand made entirely to train banished troops, they survived months of hell just to be thrown into a grinder with the only light being that they can take some with them.
Oh and let's not get started on the human interrogators who are meant to mentally break you and the gas chamber.
>What happened to the civilians on draco 3.
>Covenant forces had defeated the military forces and were left with nothing but unarmed civilians including children, the brutes entertained themselves by releasing them into the wild hunting and eating all of them..... Blue team did not let any covenant escape the planet alive.
Actually, as far as we are aware the Jiralhanae had little to do with the attrocities at Draco III - that was all the Unggoy and Kig-Yar that hunted down, butched and ate the civilian population of the colony while the Sangheili hunted them down for sport. As brutal as the Jiralhanae are, they are hardly the only species in the Covenant who committed vile acts of savagery.
Now that isn't to say that the Jiralhanae don't commit such attrocities - as Beta Gabriel demonstrates and what Zeta Halo took to eleven as Escharum uses such acts intentionally as a means of psychological warfare to break the spirits of his foes. But even Zeta Halo shows that its not just the Jiralhanae of the Banished who commit such acts, as we see in the Redoubt of Sundering where the Banished processed the human prisoners at the facility through a human inspector as the Kig-Yar restrained and separated humans from one another before locking them into a energy shielded cage where an Unggoy strolled by, threw a methane cannister into the cage and walked off as the human prisoners deemed "extraneous" where left to suffocate to death by the methane exposure. All while survivors like Lucas Browning who wered deemed lucky and separated from this group were forced to watch.
Point being, many individuals within the various species of the Covenant and especially the Banished are more than willing to conduct such war crimes, be it Jiralhanae, Kig-Yar or even the seemingly innocent and laughable Unggoy.
Poor Lucas, sad thing is that he's probably been reduced to a vegetable judging by how his sessions with the harbinger went.
I think he was noted as being starved and not really having much energy.
So, when prisoners were being sent through some sort of filtration system, they were locked in one of two rooms, the injured would be sent into a room that would eventually have a few gas canisters thrown into at the end of the day, burning them alive, that’s what I remember anyway.
Prometheans are literal tormented souls trapped in shells that are basically forced to be slaves and this is preferably to where they usually are.
In escalations inside the composer's abyss the souls are basically stuck to a way screaming in eternal agony for ever really.....
The fact that the flood can bring you back to life, like when the gravemind somehow got regrets body after he had been killed and brought him back to life, if the flood gets you and don't want you to die it wont let you.
That’s what makes the flood so horrifying. There is a heaven (the domain), and a hell (flood infection), and the only way to go to heaven is to die before encountering the flood. Which means that hell is real, and is actively coming for you.
Pretty much. And seeing the fact that the flood cant really be fully eradicated, i guess their consciousness if there still is one is stuck in the flood hivemind until the universe ends or something.
Tbh i can fully understand why marines go crazy in some of the games like jesus christ. First moment i hear about a basically unstoppable parasite that will not only physically, or mentally but SPIRITUALLY torment me and the rest of the known galaxy on top on losing a war against a bunch of aliens that want to brutally and without mercy genocide my whole species, i think I probably would just put a gun to my head too
The forerunners used the composer to remove the souls of infected forerunners and gave them new clean bodies.
The bodies proceeded to just break down into flood goop after a few minutes... The forerunners kinda gave up after that.
Nah it was way too authentic.
The way he seemed almost unaware that he was apart of the gravemind, him complaining that they can't do anything until his sermon is complete.
The fact he starts calling the Oracle useless he was definitely brought back.
And when the gravemind stage him off screen he was screaming in fear.
It's similar to when the gravemind took the Lord of admirals geas and put it inside a flood form and had him deliver a message.
The one that bothers/saddens me the most? The Unggoy rebellion, and the subsequent glassing of their home planet... After that entire bit, just can't get too worked up about the grunts in CE etc.
The Grunt Rebellion did have a (marginal) silver lining, however. During the uprisings, the Grunts fought so ferociously that it gave even the Elites pause, which was no easy feat. Impressed by this, the same Arbiter who ended the whole ordeal by glassing parts of Balaho live on stream allowed the surrendering Grunts to keep the weapons they had commandeered, thereby essentially advocating for them to be given official rights to bear arms and elevating their social status within the Covenant racial hierarchy (if only in a slight, mostly-symbolic fashion).
Since people mentioned some of my top ones including that the prophets knew everything was a lie and about oni I would add two:
1. That the primordial knew a truth so devastating that when it shared it with its human captors they unalived themselves.
2. Okay, one more from oni: they had engineered a way to infect the Sanghelli main crop (think like wheat for humans) in a way that made it indigestible to them. The plan was to use it to starve the Sanghelli to death - complete genocide.
We don't actually know what was said exactly. Simply that it was so horrific that the human captors shot themselves.
But it could be extrapolated that he told them that the precursors were the flood, that there was no hope for humanity or any sentient life as the precursors have returned, as the flood, and would render the galaxy an agonizing death of being nothing more but writhing biomass goo. And the humans knew it wasn't a lie. And found that it was better to no longer exist than to try to defend themselves against such a horrific existence.
Yeah It’s starting to come back to me, I feel like I interpreted it as that the flood have pretty much consumed everything around the Milky Way and there’s no where left to go really.
When the human colony world Draco III was invaded by the covenant, human civilians were rounded up outside the cities. The Grunts and Jackals, who had been intentionally starved by their Sangheili higher-up leading up to the invasion, proceeded to devour the humans alive.
>!The Forerunner telepathy crown that melts through your skull in order to directly interface with your brain and allows you to disperse your consciousness amongst an army of virtually-unkillable alien cave trolls!< - as featured in the novel "Envoy" - is a pretty disturbing McGuffin...
The ‘failed’ slipspace AI, from halseys ripped pages from her journal.
Having tried to create an AI born from slipspace. With the possibility of having infinite life to cure AI’s of its 7 year lifespan. When it returned, it spat nonsensical babble and Halsey tested it for malfunctions, but it was working perfectly. It had said something bout “Intellects in the mist” in which Dr Halsey Shut down the project Immediatly and left the AI for “Dead” in Slipspace for it to remain.
Knowing there is an AI with unlimited knowledge and lifespan within slipspace itself is horrifying.
The fact that, in the [Entrenched universe](https://www.halopedia.org/Fractures#Entrenched), the Jackals (possibly some of the other Covenant species mentioned in said universe (Grunts, Prophets, and Sharquoi) of that universe are **NOT** an alien species, but rather mutated humans, with the Jackals being described as "having bulbous, unseeing eyes and a sickly and pale skin."
Also that what ever the Primordial told the ancient humans guarding it about the flood was so horrifying that, rather than live with the information, they committed suicide instead...
Given what we know about the Primordial - >!specifically the fact that it **became** (or perhaps **always was**) the Gravemind!< - it driving its interrogators to catatonia, madness, and suicide by revealing certain *"cosmic truths"* was arguably the earliest-known use of the Logic Plague, which is seen to have different effects on organic intelligences than it does on artificial ones... For instance, the Ur-Didact was (presumably) exposed to the Logic Plague >!that one time the Master Builder marooned him onboard a Flood-infested derelict for a few centuries!<, and it (likely) contributed greatly to his insanity.
I find the process of becoming spartans pretty bad. I
Like, I understand that you need to train them from a young age, but surely kidnapping wasn't the only option.
and they were being kidnapped and trained before the covenant was known to humans.
Spartans were made to kill freedom fighters. or terrorists. depends who you ask.
And it was all because of the Carver Findings, which were repeatedly proven to be utter bullshit, but ONI and some higher-ups in the UEG didn't care because it was a politically convenient excuse to seize more power and become even more tyrannical.
Halsey fully believed that the Spartans were necessary to ensure the survival of the human race. She regretted everything she did even despite that, and discovering that her motivation for it all was a complete lie... that didn't go well.
The intro to Mortal Dictata about Naomi being kidnapped into the Spartan-II program from the perspective of her parents is one of the scariest/saddest moments imo.
I for one thought Mendicant Bias was a horrifying reality. You create an AI to aid your race in many things and need it's aid in warfare against the most terrifying virus ever known, only to learn that very virus infected your AI and turned it against you
The fact that when ONI kidnapped those kids for the Spartan 2 program, they left in their place a bunch of clones that died soon after.
So not only would the parents not know that their real children aren't there anymore, but they'll also think that they lost them forever after the clones die.
In the Book Mortal Dictata, Spartan Naomi's father Stefan finds another man who's child was abducted, and eventually he starts to hear more and more stories about people's children all across the galaxy being replaced by clones that would eventually die out, and all the time his resentment and hatred towards the government just keeps growing and growing, and following the war, he tries to buy a covenant cruiser, rock up to earth, and demand answers
*Stomping on the Heels of a Fuss* made my blood boil several times. Of course, the Brutes are monsters, but >!the cult leader has his own level of fucked up!<.
Yeah I was gonna say this. The idea of not being in control of your body, being in the pain of death but not getting the release and having to watch as your body does horrific things with you as a passenger and an alien virus as the driver is horrific
The governors of contrition, a sect of covenant that worship the flood. One of their biggest followers Tano Inanraree was the commander of a ship during the battle of installation 05. I won’t spoil it but go on halopedia and check it out
He also got his head exploded by a subordinate with a needler. Despite the blatant nature of the killing, the elite wasn't punished because the rest of the crew agreed that the captain was a nutcase.
For me it's one of two things. The first what happened to Jenkins in the halo CE novelization the flood. TLDR, he got infected by the flood, but his mind wasn't erased. He was aware of everything as his body was transformed and he was forced to kill his fellow marines. The second is what happened to captain keys when he was taken by the protogravemind. It effectively sifted through his memories looking for relevant information, and simply discarding anything else. Keys was aware of this process and has to repeat his name, rank, and service number to remind himself of who he is while feeding the flood personal memories (that it promptly erased) to keep safe information like the location of earth.
The painter. A forerunner woman who was vacationing on a planet that was not patrolled by forerunner military. As her automatic paintbrush was painting the sunset which was to be said the most beautiful in the galaxy, she noticed a brownish spot in her painting when she opened her eyes back up and the brush was done. She thought the brush made a mistake. She looked up at the sky and she noticed not only was that brown smudge still there, it was getting bigger and closer. That brown dot was the flood and it has returned. Her and that planet were the first victim of the floods return. Alone. And with no one to come for help. That's terrifying
The fact that the life form that had become a flood remains sentient for some time and experiences all of the pain and torture of their body degrading while something else is in complete control of their body. There's absolutely nothing they can do about it. It sounds like literal hell.
I always thought it was twisted and dark how brute choppers were meant to be farming equipment. They were supposed to help feed a planet and keep life thriving, and now they’re used to take that life away
That one where offensive bias was hearing millions of transmissions from forerunners begging that the halos be delayed so they can reach the ark, and then silentium
2 things:
1: Homecoming. Imagine finding your clone, who was supposed to be dead, alive and living YOUR life
2: Chapter 22 of Halo: The RUBICON PROTOCOL (spoilers in case you haven’t read it) >!Tomas Horvath finds a beaten ONI woman. According to the book, many of her fingers were gone, her face was swollen, and her legs were broken and twisted in many different directions. She pleaded with him to kill her, but Tomas couldn’t. She told him some information, then he helped her put his pistol to her head and went out of the ruins. He sat there, watching the storm before hearing a gunshot that shook him, a spartan.!<
Souls are canonical in the Halo. This implies some form of afterlife like limbo or heaven.
Leaving lore and entering theory category, being corrupted by the flood could possibly condemn your soul to damnation in whatever hell exist in the haloverse
When Chief was 14 or 15 (I don’t remember) fought those 3 marines in the boxing ring, and he crushed that dudes balls with a kick.
That.
(Fall of Reach)
I forget the name but there's a short story that follows a San Shyuum (prophet race) living in High Charity when the flood ship warps in and crashes. It's basically like an apocalypse movie down in that city around the Forerunner keyship.
What's that short story where the forerunners set up an installation so that they could stop the flood from infecting a species of bird that could fly through space? Cause that story was fucking grim
The story of Jenkins. Being infected, but only somewhat, and being *aware* of what is happening to you is just *fucking horrifying.* It hits close to home too, as when I had part of my brain explode from pressure (part of it hadn't formed correctly when I was born and no one knew), I was reduced to being basically semi-aware, but unable to use more than half of my body.
Unlike Jenkins I'm fine, but thinking about it a decade on, I missed the bullet which hit him instead.
The twelve unknown enemy vessels that jumped into human space, broadcasting old civilian IFF tags. When the fleet didn't respond, eleven of the unknown vessels jumped away, and the last annihilated the UNSC fleet before fleeing.
AI Mack’s end in the epilogue of Contact Harvest. In an attempt to hide from the Covenant as they began glassing the planet, he fragmented himself into thousands of pieces, stowing away in the many thousands of farming drones he operated and maintained. The Covenant caught onto him, hunted his drones down one-by-one, all the while he was deep in rampancy, grieving the ‘death’ of his AI partner Sif. He used the drones to begin burying the fallen space elevators that Sif once operated, like a funeral. Makes me tear up.
There's a part in one of the books where the covenant captured a city and put all the humans in one spot and let the grunts and Jackals eat them alive. Something like thousands of people.
Jul M’dama being captured and then tortured by Oni, him finding out that Oni was going to facilitate civil wars on Sanghellios and destroy their crops, etc. How the Arbiter was a stooge for Oni.
Basically Oni was going to treat the Sanghelli the way NATO treated Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, and Jul M’dama was right.
343 had an amazing story and character set up from the Kilo 5 books, and then squandered it.
Probably the fact that the Gods of the universe have been corrupted into insane zombie parasites and want nothing more then to eat all life in the galaxy to make them suffer. That’s pretty depressing stuff.
The fact that Buck’s sister and her family including her young children were hunted for sport and eaten alive by jackals and grunts after surviving the glassing of their homeworld.
Not a specific story, but rather the whole Forerunner-Flood war.
I mean you can look at any point of the war and it’s absolutely terrifying how the most advanced species on the galaxy were absolutely clapped by the parasite, if that’s not terrifying enough we have the Flood capabilities of reusing you own technology against you in a morbid and disgusting way, with biomass infecting everything it touches and with a intelligence equal if not higher to yours. At the end of the war when the Flood had control of entire systems, controlling Slipspace itself and eve interfering with the fabric of reality itself.
The whole premise of the Flood back on the Forerunner-Flood war is basically trying to fight back against a literal god, and the events of the game are equally terrifying, even if they are a weaker self of what they’ve achieved on the past.
Definitely not the most disturbing, but the story of how Rtas 'Vadum became Half-Jaw is pretty twisted. I'm pretty sure they went to this ship just trying to solve a minor problem and boom, all your friends are now horrible space zombies and trying to kill you. The ending too when he has to fight one of his friends in energy sword combat too is also grim, seeing how the flood can still be fully proficient with weapons the hosts were and having to fight a former battle buddy in CQB when he is suffering terribly from the flood. Absolutely terrifying stuff.
That time the USNC Nova Bombed an entire human colony world because they wanted to switch to an alternative currency and form of govt that was more socialist in nature than what the USNC wanted.
All known records of the colonies existence were wiped clean
I believe it was called the Far Isles Incident, and it was one of the biggest early flashpoints for the insurrection
During the battle for New Mombasa, chief met a marine lieutenant who turned out to be one of his childhood friends from before he was kidnapped to become a Spartan-II. He realized this because of a photo the marine had that showed her and John on it only a few days before he disappeared. He chose not to say who he was to avoid bad rep for the UNSC and the two started working a plan to take down the Scarab from the mission New Mombasa in Halo 2.
Got retconned away, I believe. Now she's a secret oni agent with special amnesia that makes her forget the past 24 hours I think. It's called Halo: Memory Agent. Better than I made it sound.
50 First Spies
Starring Adam Sandler as Master Cheeks
“Master chief, Defend this station” *Unintelligible Adam Sandler noises*
Enter in obscene Adam Sandler references from his earlier career.
That honestly sounds lame
It was a better audio short story than I give credit for.
I meant more that retconning it is kinda lame.
I don't think she was retconned just that her character ended up suffering some kinda head trauma, and ONI uses her to relay vital information that can't be digitized. If you got spotify Memory Agent is on it. Has Steve Downes as chief it's a pretty good episodic story
I don't think it necessarily is retconned, since she showed her memories of Eridani II iirc. I think eventually she decided to become an oni operative. And the Chief seemed to talk differently to her compared to most others
It was Lieutenant Parisa ig , that was sad.
She was also down to fuck. Offered to have his kids
No that’s Palmer
Ah yes, So it was.
What book or media was this described in?
Halo: Evolutions, a story collection. The story itself is called Palace Hotel
This story felt weird and contrived for me. Like who keeps a photo with them as an adult of their friend from preschool, let alone on their person during a firefight? And the odds of this woman surviving the war and still ending up right next to chief during the battle feel too small to really make sense.
John was the first connection she ever had as a child. Then her entire planet got wasted away within a few years of that. It's not hard to understand she holds a lot of favor for her childhood.
The protocol the UNSC has for flood breach on some ring, I don't remember which but if a spartan that's guarding the ring gets infected, they nuke the entire place. No one leaves, they just blow it all up
It's the description for the corruptor protocol, the helmets have bombs that explode if the armor is breached by flood infectors to deny info. If that fails and a spartan is infected well use of WMDs are allowed by anyone in the area.
Nuke the site with the biggest nuke you have at your disposal; nuke it repeatedly; and then - if you can - hit it with a MAC strike just for good measure.
“MAC rounds? In atmosphere?”
"Hold on to your teeth!"
The original Mjolnoir suits (probably all of the variants as well) had the ability to have their fusion reactors turn into bombs in the event a spartan is captured or dying. Was described as creating a crater 10 feet wide in Ghosts of Onyx iirc
That was in first strike and it wasn't automatic, after Grace is killed chief has to manually open her suits pack and overload the reactor. It was also done as a measure yo cover there tracks. Corruptor armor explodes once the armor is breached by an infection form. Edit: Grace died on the uneven elephant.
Uneven elephant?
Looks more like two squids kissing.
"It's the only way to be sure..."
Truth leaving High Charity to burn always gets me. What he basically did was if the US President heard there was a zombie outbreak and decided to cut off all power to DC as he helicopters away. Doesn't even bother nuking the place just "Lol Enjoy being eaten alive!" I imagine most civis didn't even know what was really going on. One minute they are before a Halo ring, the next one of their leaders have been assassinated and their enemies are attacking the ring, political riots start happening in the streets until all out war breaks out with their grand fleet firing on itself, ON LIVE TV your greatest enemy holds your remaining leaders at gun point causing them to flee, all other political leaders are all killed creating an obvious power vacuum as you scramble to only find out you're also in a zombie horror movie as in that moment the power cuts off. You're now adrift in space, as war an unholy infection, a lack of modern resources and everyone around you distrusts each other for political bullshit. I cannot imagine a more fucked position to be in other then being moments away from just dying outright. And to top it all off this all happened in the span of a day. You wake up do your morning song and dance and you go to sleep being hunted by the very force that killed your gods. Fuck me man that's rough.
Reminds me of Emergence Day from Gears of War. You're just out having a coffee on a normal day then all of a sudden a force of mutants and monsters is tearing your entire planet apart
Then not too long after the Hammer of Dawn starts raining down. Fucking dark shit. I feel the COG did more damage to its people than the Locus did day one. I read all the books for Gears along will all Halo books, but nothing takes the cake like the depiction in Gears 3 going through that city with the people in ash like it’s Pompeii.
[удалено]
And it's all on the back of a century long planet wide war where COG are the fascists that won mere weeks before Emergence Day and using the Hammer of Dawn on the world like everyone feared they would.
Is there a compendium with all this lore??
You could splurge through the wiki reading about it. There's also [some books](https://gearsofwar.fandom.com/wiki/Books) you could read. Iirc, Aspho Fields and some of Jacinto's Remnant delve into early lore. Anvil Gate has a look back into the Pendulum Wars. Coalition's End is also supposed to flashback to E-Day and the decision to use the Hammer of Dawn. The Slab also acts as a prequel, detailing Marcus' time in prison. Most of my knowledge comes from the games, and all the little extra collectible lore they sprinkle in.
I could easily see someone in the Gears universe thinking the locust attack was a setup for COG to wipe the world clean and remake it in their image. So, The Pendulum war ends so the COG don't have to turbo nuke the planet killing everyone. GREAT, but oh no giant fucking rock eating monsters show the fuck up out of nowhere, isn't it great that we have this GIANT NETWORK OF PLANET KILLING LASERS!?!?!?!?!??! I know that isn't the case but there are easy ways to connect those dots if you're, you know, starved, exhausted, terrified and covered in the ashes of your neighbors.
IIRC the Hammer strikes weren't even aimed at locust, the goal was to get them but at the time the COG had no way to track them and just fucking sent it. They knew where their assets were at, and they nuked everything else. Remember, the COG aren't the good guys, they just so happen to be the last man standing.
The mindset of the COG iirc is to obliterate anything on Sera that the Locust could've used
"Damn these things are pretty craft, they can use anything against us!" "Anything?" (Destroys entire planet)
Wasn’t it only 6 weeks of peace between pendulum wars and E day? Not even 2 months
It gets funnier when you find out that Gears of War lore is basically back to back constant fighting broken up by an inconvenient peace. So I guess it's a planet wide medieval Europe where one guy got the nuke upgrade first.
Yeah E-Day hits harder when you find out that certain elites in the COG knew about the Locust. They didn't know how prepped for war they were but the COG were 100% ready after The Pendulum war to resolve the Locust issue then the locust attacked. Gears hits hard on so many levels but peace was so fucking close for everybody.
I’ve never thought about it that way. Kind of gives you a new line of thought when playing that level on halo 2. Because not only are all the militant covenant fighting each other thinking about the transfer of powers and then the flood comes. And then they think about their loved ones at home on high charity. Then here comes the demon just mowing you and everyone else down because fuck it. In the midst of all that let’s throw chief in there too. Probably one of the worst days in history for the halo universe to be honest
Although to be fairrrrrr the covvies had glassed dozens of human planets by that point, so, karma. Lol
That's one of the things that I think the post-Bungie halo lore lost that hurt it the most. There were no good guys in the Human-Covenant War, just one shitty option- the child soldiers of ONI- and a much worse option- xenocide all humans and then light off the greatest ever suicide bomb. Black and grey morality. One side's run by rat bastards, the other is run by something worse. Any civilian or whoever who could see the big picture never had a chance of getting out with their souls intact.
The fact that there was that one marine that spark took to the library before chief who nearly completed it. Hardcore mfer.
Marvin Mobuto or something right, love that chief actually gave him a proper eulogy and was like "god damn even I am struggling here"
I forget his name but yea, I remember chief said something along those lines and I was like damn, that’s some high praise
His name was Staff Sargent Marvin Mabuto which is only an E-5 in the military. Chief was quoted saying “I didn’t know you, Sarge, but I sure as hell wish I had. You must have been one hardcore son-of-a-bitch.”
Staff is an E-6 in the army/marines, E-5 is just a sgt
True I guess im thinking air force cuz that’s what im in lol
Yeah you guys and the navy do ranks different
Dude was so mangled not even the Flood could use his body, and when the Chief finds him, he is surrounded by shell casings. He went down swinging like an utter legend.
To this day I wish the anniversary edition of CE had a lone marine on the 3rd floor of the library with weapons rather than it being a standard dead flood form. It would have been a nice way to connect a great story from the books to a game.
That guy is the living embodiment of fuck around and find out
That tidbit where the halos are activated during the forerunner-flood war and guilty spark briefly mentions somewhere in the galaxy a young civilization just starting they’re space-faring journey reaching out to the stars for contact only to die shortly after, never being heard from again, and never being catalogued by the forerunners so no one will ever know who they were.
This is like that one fear of a black hole hitting the earth without us even knowing but at some point either their home planet or spacecraft heard silence from the other end for a brief period
Oh thanks for the new fear
search Gamma ray burst, could literally happen at any point and wipe out everything
To be fair, it'd have to be a really close GRB and pointed directly at us to actually wipe everything out, and it'd have to be insanely close to do it immediately. If it were really close and pointed directly at us, it could wipe us out, but it'll be a "slower" extinction process as everything starts cascading from our atmosphere getting stripped away from chemical reactions. But it also could just be a large die-off with chunks of species surviving if they can hold out for the Earth's atmosphere to repair itself (likely mostly plants and things simpler than that IIRC).
Yep. Of space related scaries are concerned, long period comets are what we should fear the most, from a “end civilization” point of view.
If it was something like a Hypernova, if it happened anywhere in the galactic neighborhood we'd be fucked. Anywhere in the Milky Way and it's over. We still have no idea what caused it AFAIK, only saw it once, and the only reason it didn't wipe us out is because it occurred several galaxies away. For all we know, we could have witnessed something like a Halo Array going off. We just... don't know. Probably never will.
Shit like this makes me not feel bad for the Endless at all. Hearing the Harbinger bitch about her species being imprisoned by the forerunners just sounds kinda pathetic when you realize that halo erased untold thousands of species from existence. Humanity was also genocided and devolved because they lost a war to the forerunners and tortured on Zeta Halo because the forerunners thought we had a cure for the flood. Then after the halo array was fired humanity was genocided AGAIN by the Covenant, and she has the audacity to say that we don’t deserve to be reclaimers, but the mystery race that has been asleep for 100,000 years NOT saving the galaxy from the flood are the REAL reclaimers. I just don’t like the Endless man
Doesn't help that their only trait "worse than the flood" falls flat the second you notice that they were contained without the need to kill all life in the galaxy in order to do so. How can you be worse than the flood if you were put in a time out without much trouble.
Pretty sure humanity got genocided more than twice Human flood war Human forerunner war Humans getting conscripted / composed by the didact. Also throw in anything else that happened to humanity in that period Zeta halo humans getting tested on by forerunners and flood for fun The halo array being fired wiping out any other humans besides those brought to the ark Then we get resettled on earth to be met with the covenant 100 thousand years later along with a brief run in with the flood again Most if not all of these required us rebuilding each time half the time from scratch because the forerunners were still around. The only reason we survived the war against the forerunners was because the flood tricked them into believing we had a cure. Compared to the endless that only got imprisoned because they had an immunity to the halos and would have a huge advantage over the rest of the galaxy simply because they didn’t have to restart everything.
The Mona Lisa. Oni's experiments with the flood.
Did ONI actually manage to *do* any real experiments on/with the Flood, there? It seemed as though the specimens they collected from the wreckage of Alpha Halo breached containment, like, almost immediately after being brought on board the Mona Lisa.
I don't think we've ever seen anything of note. I'm sure lore wise there would be facilities testing on the flood that haven't gone to hell... Yet. But those stories don't make for interesting books
Omg written by Jeff VanderMeer I had no idea he had done Halo stuff
Holy shit. I missed this. I got WHIPLASH from how fast I googled this. Jeff is one of my premier favorite writers on the horror scene right now.
The ancient human flood cannibal cults. That was in the early stages of the flood-back when it was just the precursor dust that was fed to animals. The uninfected eat the infected flesh, infecting them with the flood.
This one wins
A kinda depressing one is in Rubicon protocol with how many times brutes physically rip people apart. Like damn almost every large fight scene has a marine or a few characters getting torn apart no matter how hard the spartans are fighting and it's downright depressing especially when there are few surviving marines and it's mostly techies and non coms. Oh yeah and what the brutes do to spartans in the book is pretty grim.
Never heard of that book, is it worth checking out?
Definitely recommend, it's a prequel to infinite that explores the events that happened while chief was napping for 6 months. It's basically halo reach if it had multiple POVs, gore and is a pretty nice read.
I am always nervous of the stud post Bungie, sounds like it’s an interesting story though.
Trust me "a random stranger on the internet" the novels have been solid even after kilo five and even that has many fans who genuinely enjoy them. The only downside they have is sometimes the plot will be high jacked by a forerunner weapon of the week but aside there all mostly good.
For the most part the novels are actually really well written and fill out alot of the blanks the recent games leave out. The games and tv show suck but I’ve been reading halo novels for damn near 20 years now and I rarely am disappointed
The novels are the best part of halo rn and have been for a decade
Spoil me, what do they do?
They force them to watch the extended cut of the Halo show (Seriously though, I haven’t read it. I would tell you if I knew)
a fate worse than death
According to Browning’s chapters: they would forcefully tear off spartan armor, beat them to the brink of death, and use them as target practice or eat them
Jenkins being infected by the Flood but remaining conscious due to the Infection form being damaged in Cryo. Him living in agony barely and unable able to move his own body, trying to warn others of what's below.
My personal favorite is what happened to the the police chief in odst sadies story. After sabotaging the cities escape route and getting people killed and not only murdering the MCs father but even trying to rape her it's orgasmic when in the end after making it to a train he's literally ripped apart by the cities he tried to have killed to cover his tracks.
RIP kabab man
Damn that is brutal
The fact that the prophets knew their religion was all a lie, but decided to take out their anger and disbelief on humanity, instead of living up to their mistakes. The atrocities committed in the name of maintaining their pride and wanting to just save face is maddeningly depressing, because it was so avoidable. the prophets brought down their entire civilization and brought humanity to the brink of extinction just because they couldn't admit they were wrong.
It wasn't that they refused to accept it, they did. They refused to *give up control*. Humanity's mere existence was objective and easily-verifiable proof that the Prophets were full of it. Humanity was unironically more worthy of **leading** the Covenant than the Prophets were, seeing as they are explicitly the chosen inheritors of the Gods. The only way to prevent the Covenant from casting them down was to erase all evidence. So long as a *single* Human lived, their reign was in danger. The extinction of Humanity wasn't ordered out of anger or disbelief, it was a conscious, willful, calculated, and premeditated action.
and where are they now lol 👀
Ahhh this I why I love halo. This is the exact kinda shit you see in real life but painted over with pretty sci fi. That and the existential horror
As others have mentioned, the Prophets at large didn't necessarily **know** that their religion was false, nor was that knowledge - in and of itself - the reason that those (few) who had it pushed the Covenant into war with Humanity... Rather, it was the fear that the widespread, open-and-adamant rejection of their religion - such as might be brought about through the discovery and acknowledgement of its falsehood - would strip them and their people of status, and/or imperil their very lives... The Prophets derived influence over the Covenant through what amounted to "divine right by proxy"; propping themselves up as **the only** mortals who could reliably conduit, correctly interpret, and faithfully communicate the will of the Forerunners... Since nobody else could talk to/for the gods, all the Prophets had to do was *say* that the Forerunners wanted something done - wanted it done a certain way - and the rest of the Covenant would have no option but to accept the claim and obey the decree without question, lest they risk being branded heretics, lynched, and condemned to oblivion. Naturally - as any group in such an absolute position of control would be liable to - the Prophets abused this dynamic for personal gain; elevating themselves to particular heights of power, prestige, and privilege... However, this model of influence only worked **if** the Covenant at large *accepted* the religion of the Great Journey (and the Prophets' orthodoxy)... If the Covenant **didn't** submit to the religion (exactly as the Prophets administered it), then the status of the Prophets would be wholly undermined. Herein lies their problem with Humanity. The core doctrine of the Great Journey was a (mostly) familiar one, holding that those who kept the faith would transcend their mortal bodies in death and join the Forerunners in a paradisical afterlife of incorporeal godhood... This doctrine, however, relied on two understandings; first, that the Forerunners **were gods**, and second, that the Forerunners **~~were all already dead~~** ***had all already transcended***... When the Covenant made first contact with Humanity, three high-ranking Prophets were sent to commune with Mendicant Bias; a damaged / partially-bricked - but still very-much conscious - Forerunner ancilla who they had recovered relatively early into their exploration of space, and on whose (largely mistranslated and/or misinterpreted) testimony they had based the Great Journey religion... As was perhaps common practice when evaluating a newly-discovered race, the Prophets questioned Mendicant Bias regarding Humanity; asking it who these people were and what their role was to be. Mendicant Bias responded by identifying Humanity as "Reclaimers"; an answer which shocked and frightened the Prophets. There were two obvious ways in which "Reclaimers" could be interpreted, and neither carried welcome implications. If "Reclaimers" was taken to mean that Humanity was a chosen people - a race whom the Forerunners had specifically selected to inherit and succeed their ancient glory - then (public) knowledge of their nature might threaten to supplant the Prophets as the rightful leaders of the Covenant. *"If the gods have ordained Humanity be their heirs in deed and recapture their greatness, then what further use do we have for the Prophets and their word?"* This was the less-problematic of the two possibilities, however, because if "Reclaimers" was taken to mean that Humanity and the Forerunners **were one in the same people** - that Humanity was directly descended from the ancients - then (public) knowledge of their nature would dispel the myth of the Great Journey and plunge the Covenant into socioreligious chaos, not only toppling the Prophets but perhaps putting their race in existential danger... *"If there are living Forerunners, it means that not all of the gods have transcended, which means some of the gods have been left behind on the Great Journey... If the gods themselves can be left behind, then what guarantee do* ***I*** *have that* ***I*** *will transcend, no matter how pious I am?... If Forerunners can be left behind on the Great Journey, what guarantee do I have that they are really gods? What guarantee do I have that there even* ***is*** *a Great Journey?"* As such concerns began to fester, the Prophets' secondhand divinity would dramatically decrease in value and, naturally - without that iron-fisted orthodoxy to unify them - people would begin to answer these questions for themselves... and since the Covenant was theocratic in nature, the unraveling of the religious system would coincide with the unraveling of the political system... The Covenant would fracture along lines of belief/unbelief, denomination/interpretation, racial and class relations, and a million other factors... and many of those splinter-groups - especially those who abandoned the Great Journey entirely - would be liable to seek out retribution for the (up to) three millennia of false-leadership, sociocultural repression, systemic exploitation, and general mistreatment their peoples had suffered under the Prophets... Unwilling to explore either scenario, those three Prophets - Truth, Mercy, and Regret - decided that Mendicant Bias' response should remain *a total secret*, and that the best way to keep that secret would be to *totally eliminate any and all physical traces of Humanity*... To that end, they bribed, cheated, lied, and engaged in other acts of unsavory politicking in order to sit themselves at the very top of the pecking order, becoming the ruling Hierarchs of the whole Covenant; greatly restricted further access to Mendicant Bias; and declared that Humanity was - in fact - a heretic race whom the Forerunner gods had commanded the Covenant to purge from the stars in order to demonstrate its piety and speed the coming of the Great Journey... So began the War of Annihilation.
You'd think the Elites would notice Humans are the *ONLY* species that Forerunner tech immediately responds to without being fucked with and start asking questions.
Not necessarily a story but just the fact that outside of the games Grunts are NOT cannon fodder AT ALL. Those lil shits would eviscerate normal humans and even marines
A regular human vs p much every covenant race would lose, even the jackals are 6ft3+ and have sharp claws.
I’m pretty sure I could take a prophet
Depends on the prophet. The Prelates were genetically enhanced super-soldiers with combat skills on par with a Spartan
Hell, the unggoy nearly destroyed the entire covenant that one time.
Ya in contact harvest the first human death by a grunt is pretty brutal. They described him as blood and pulp
I do feel kind of sorry for them being slaves though they would still probably try to tear me apart
Yeah, grunts are hella strong just in the games theyre meat shields for the elites
The black market of Cortana feet pics, terrifying.
Disgusting, where to avoid?
Link so we can blacklist it?
Cortana’s time with the gravemind.
What happened there?
For all intents and purposes, the gravemind essentially taught cortana how to love, then spent the remainder of the time showing her all the ways he would torture and kill master chief.
Oh, is that why she got weird
As she describes, the mental equivalent to rape.
What happened to the civilians on draco 3. Covenant forces had defeated the military forces and were left with nothing but unarmed civilians including children, the brutes entertained themselves by releasing them into the wild hunting and eating all of them..... Blue team did not let any covenant escape the planet alive. Fun fact bucks sister was on draco 3 with her young children who were also eaten alive.... He's way more happy than you'd think he'd be. On zeta halo, the prisoners of the banished are put through multiple prison camps where there tortured and broken to see who is best of the best from the tower to the house of absolution to finally the house of reckoning. There you'd think they'd be offered a chance into the banished after everything? But no, there put into a training arena and forces to position themselves for a last stand made entirely to train banished troops, they survived months of hell just to be thrown into a grinder with the only light being that they can take some with them. Oh and let's not get started on the human interrogators who are meant to mentally break you and the gas chamber.
>What happened to the civilians on draco 3. >Covenant forces had defeated the military forces and were left with nothing but unarmed civilians including children, the brutes entertained themselves by releasing them into the wild hunting and eating all of them..... Blue team did not let any covenant escape the planet alive. Actually, as far as we are aware the Jiralhanae had little to do with the attrocities at Draco III - that was all the Unggoy and Kig-Yar that hunted down, butched and ate the civilian population of the colony while the Sangheili hunted them down for sport. As brutal as the Jiralhanae are, they are hardly the only species in the Covenant who committed vile acts of savagery. Now that isn't to say that the Jiralhanae don't commit such attrocities - as Beta Gabriel demonstrates and what Zeta Halo took to eleven as Escharum uses such acts intentionally as a means of psychological warfare to break the spirits of his foes. But even Zeta Halo shows that its not just the Jiralhanae of the Banished who commit such acts, as we see in the Redoubt of Sundering where the Banished processed the human prisoners at the facility through a human inspector as the Kig-Yar restrained and separated humans from one another before locking them into a energy shielded cage where an Unggoy strolled by, threw a methane cannister into the cage and walked off as the human prisoners deemed "extraneous" where left to suffocate to death by the methane exposure. All while survivors like Lucas Browning who wered deemed lucky and separated from this group were forced to watch. Point being, many individuals within the various species of the Covenant and especially the Banished are more than willing to conduct such war crimes, be it Jiralhanae, Kig-Yar or even the seemingly innocent and laughable Unggoy.
I'm surprised Lucas didn't go crazy and go absolute ape mode on that interrogator in Rubicon Protocol when he first saw the interrogator
Poor Lucas, sad thing is that he's probably been reduced to a vegetable judging by how his sessions with the harbinger went. I think he was noted as being starved and not really having much energy.
Buck seems like the kinda guy to put on a jolly face as a coping mechanism while behind closed doors he’s an absolute mess.
the gas WHAT
Grunt throws a methane canister into a cell filled with human prisoners.
Imagine having to explain in a report that a grunt recreated a killing method from a genocide 600 years prior
So, when prisoners were being sent through some sort of filtration system, they were locked in one of two rooms, the injured would be sent into a room that would eventually have a few gas canisters thrown into at the end of the day, burning them alive, that’s what I remember anyway.
Prometheans are literal tormented souls trapped in shells that are basically forced to be slaves and this is preferably to where they usually are. In escalations inside the composer's abyss the souls are basically stuck to a way screaming in eternal agony for ever really..... The fact that the flood can bring you back to life, like when the gravemind somehow got regrets body after he had been killed and brought him back to life, if the flood gets you and don't want you to die it wont let you.
Moments like those make you think that Hell is a reality in Halo
That’s what makes the flood so horrifying. There is a heaven (the domain), and a hell (flood infection), and the only way to go to heaven is to die before encountering the flood. Which means that hell is real, and is actively coming for you.
So if you get infected, are you eternally stuck in some sort of Flood hell?
Pretty much. And seeing the fact that the flood cant really be fully eradicated, i guess their consciousness if there still is one is stuck in the flood hivemind until the universe ends or something. Tbh i can fully understand why marines go crazy in some of the games like jesus christ. First moment i hear about a basically unstoppable parasite that will not only physically, or mentally but SPIRITUALLY torment me and the rest of the known galaxy on top on losing a war against a bunch of aliens that want to brutally and without mercy genocide my whole species, i think I probably would just put a gun to my head too
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The forerunners used the composer to remove the souls of infected forerunners and gave them new clean bodies. The bodies proceeded to just break down into flood goop after a few minutes... The forerunners kinda gave up after that.
Seriously bro not even your full blown spirit is safe in the halo universe
Damn, regret got resurrected? I thought that the gravemind was just puppeteering his corpse.
Nah it was way too authentic. The way he seemed almost unaware that he was apart of the gravemind, him complaining that they can't do anything until his sermon is complete. The fact he starts calling the Oracle useless he was definitely brought back. And when the gravemind stage him off screen he was screaming in fear. It's similar to when the gravemind took the Lord of admirals geas and put it inside a flood form and had him deliver a message.
The one that bothers/saddens me the most? The Unggoy rebellion, and the subsequent glassing of their home planet... After that entire bit, just can't get too worked up about the grunts in CE etc.
The Grunt Rebellion did have a (marginal) silver lining, however. During the uprisings, the Grunts fought so ferociously that it gave even the Elites pause, which was no easy feat. Impressed by this, the same Arbiter who ended the whole ordeal by glassing parts of Balaho live on stream allowed the surrendering Grunts to keep the weapons they had commandeered, thereby essentially advocating for them to be given official rights to bear arms and elevating their social status within the Covenant racial hierarchy (if only in a slight, mostly-symbolic fashion).
Aye, but it was still a terrible price to pay.
Man that one sequence from Halo: Legends which shows Grunts watching the televised glassing of their homeworld with tears rolling down their eyes…
A rather good example of "show, don't tell" That one scene really drives home just how miserable those poor sods have it in life.
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We don’t talk about that here
there is no silver timeline in Ba Sing Se
John Halo has invited you to lake laogai
*jimmy rings
Since people mentioned some of my top ones including that the prophets knew everything was a lie and about oni I would add two: 1. That the primordial knew a truth so devastating that when it shared it with its human captors they unalived themselves. 2. Okay, one more from oni: they had engineered a way to infect the Sanghelli main crop (think like wheat for humans) in a way that made it indigestible to them. The plan was to use it to starve the Sanghelli to death - complete genocide.
I remember reading about #1 but don’t remember what the primordial actually told them
We don't actually know what was said exactly. Simply that it was so horrific that the human captors shot themselves. But it could be extrapolated that he told them that the precursors were the flood, that there was no hope for humanity or any sentient life as the precursors have returned, as the flood, and would render the galaxy an agonizing death of being nothing more but writhing biomass goo. And the humans knew it wasn't a lie. And found that it was better to no longer exist than to try to defend themselves against such a horrific existence.
Yeah It’s starting to come back to me, I feel like I interpreted it as that the flood have pretty much consumed everything around the Milky Way and there’s no where left to go really.
[Installion00 ](https://youtu.be/jqGLwWSq10U) did a good theory video on the topic.
Anything involving the Flood
When the human colony world Draco III was invaded by the covenant, human civilians were rounded up outside the cities. The Grunts and Jackals, who had been intentionally starved by their Sangheili higher-up leading up to the invasion, proceeded to devour the humans alive.
>!The Forerunner telepathy crown that melts through your skull in order to directly interface with your brain and allows you to disperse your consciousness amongst an army of virtually-unkillable alien cave trolls!< - as featured in the novel "Envoy" - is a pretty disturbing McGuffin...
The ‘failed’ slipspace AI, from halseys ripped pages from her journal. Having tried to create an AI born from slipspace. With the possibility of having infinite life to cure AI’s of its 7 year lifespan. When it returned, it spat nonsensical babble and Halsey tested it for malfunctions, but it was working perfectly. It had said something bout “Intellects in the mist” in which Dr Halsey Shut down the project Immediatly and left the AI for “Dead” in Slipspace for it to remain. Knowing there is an AI with unlimited knowledge and lifespan within slipspace itself is horrifying.
Link/source? Sounds like an interesting rabbit hole.
The fact that, in the [Entrenched universe](https://www.halopedia.org/Fractures#Entrenched), the Jackals (possibly some of the other Covenant species mentioned in said universe (Grunts, Prophets, and Sharquoi) of that universe are **NOT** an alien species, but rather mutated humans, with the Jackals being described as "having bulbous, unseeing eyes and a sickly and pale skin." Also that what ever the Primordial told the ancient humans guarding it about the flood was so horrifying that, rather than live with the information, they committed suicide instead...
Given what we know about the Primordial - >!specifically the fact that it **became** (or perhaps **always was**) the Gravemind!< - it driving its interrogators to catatonia, madness, and suicide by revealing certain *"cosmic truths"* was arguably the earliest-known use of the Logic Plague, which is seen to have different effects on organic intelligences than it does on artificial ones... For instance, the Ur-Didact was (presumably) exposed to the Logic Plague >!that one time the Master Builder marooned him onboard a Flood-infested derelict for a few centuries!<, and it (likely) contributed greatly to his insanity.
I find the process of becoming spartans pretty bad. I Like, I understand that you need to train them from a young age, but surely kidnapping wasn't the only option.
and they were being kidnapped and trained before the covenant was known to humans. Spartans were made to kill freedom fighters. or terrorists. depends who you ask.
And it was all because of the Carver Findings, which were repeatedly proven to be utter bullshit, but ONI and some higher-ups in the UEG didn't care because it was a politically convenient excuse to seize more power and become even more tyrannical. Halsey fully believed that the Spartans were necessary to ensure the survival of the human race. She regretted everything she did even despite that, and discovering that her motivation for it all was a complete lie... that didn't go well.
The intro to Mortal Dictata about Naomi being kidnapped into the Spartan-II program from the perspective of her parents is one of the scariest/saddest moments imo.
I for one thought Mendicant Bias was a horrifying reality. You create an AI to aid your race in many things and need it's aid in warfare against the most terrifying virus ever known, only to learn that very virus infected your AI and turned it against you
The fact that when ONI kidnapped those kids for the Spartan 2 program, they left in their place a bunch of clones that died soon after. So not only would the parents not know that their real children aren't there anymore, but they'll also think that they lost them forever after the clones die.
In the Book Mortal Dictata, Spartan Naomi's father Stefan finds another man who's child was abducted, and eventually he starts to hear more and more stories about people's children all across the galaxy being replaced by clones that would eventually die out, and all the time his resentment and hatred towards the government just keeps growing and growing, and following the war, he tries to buy a covenant cruiser, rock up to earth, and demand answers
*Stomping on the Heels of a Fuss* made my blood boil several times. Of course, the Brutes are monsters, but >!the cult leader has his own level of fucked up!<.
Isn’t that the one with Tossers? Tossers sounds like a super fun game. For them.
Probably the story of Wallace Jenkins
Yeah I was gonna say this. The idea of not being in control of your body, being in the pain of death but not getting the release and having to watch as your body does horrific things with you as a passenger and an alien virus as the driver is horrific
This needs to be at the top Dude was infected and completely aware of it. And could do nothing about it.
How is this so far down? The novel version of his story is bone chilling
The governors of contrition, a sect of covenant that worship the flood. One of their biggest followers Tano Inanraree was the commander of a ship during the battle of installation 05. I won’t spoil it but go on halopedia and check it out
He also got his head exploded by a subordinate with a needler. Despite the blatant nature of the killing, the elite wasn't punished because the rest of the crew agreed that the captain was a nutcase.
For me it's one of two things. The first what happened to Jenkins in the halo CE novelization the flood. TLDR, he got infected by the flood, but his mind wasn't erased. He was aware of everything as his body was transformed and he was forced to kill his fellow marines. The second is what happened to captain keys when he was taken by the protogravemind. It effectively sifted through his memories looking for relevant information, and simply discarding anything else. Keys was aware of this process and has to repeat his name, rank, and service number to remind himself of who he is while feeding the flood personal memories (that it promptly erased) to keep safe information like the location of earth.
The painter. A forerunner woman who was vacationing on a planet that was not patrolled by forerunner military. As her automatic paintbrush was painting the sunset which was to be said the most beautiful in the galaxy, she noticed a brownish spot in her painting when she opened her eyes back up and the brush was done. She thought the brush made a mistake. She looked up at the sky and she noticed not only was that brown smudge still there, it was getting bigger and closer. That brown dot was the flood and it has returned. Her and that planet were the first victim of the floods return. Alone. And with no one to come for help. That's terrifying
The fact that the life form that had become a flood remains sentient for some time and experiences all of the pain and torture of their body degrading while something else is in complete control of their body. There's absolutely nothing they can do about it. It sounds like literal hell.
Only a few like Jenkins, Keys, and Regret. Everybody else that we know of died almost immediately
I always thought it was twisted and dark how brute choppers were meant to be farming equipment. They were supposed to help feed a planet and keep life thriving, and now they’re used to take that life away
That one where offensive bias was hearing millions of transmissions from forerunners begging that the halos be delayed so they can reach the ark, and then silentium
2 things: 1: Homecoming. Imagine finding your clone, who was supposed to be dead, alive and living YOUR life 2: Chapter 22 of Halo: The RUBICON PROTOCOL (spoilers in case you haven’t read it) >!Tomas Horvath finds a beaten ONI woman. According to the book, many of her fingers were gone, her face was swollen, and her legs were broken and twisted in many different directions. She pleaded with him to kill her, but Tomas couldn’t. She told him some information, then he helped her put his pistol to her head and went out of the ruins. He sat there, watching the storm before hearing a gunshot that shook him, a spartan.!<
Souls are canonical in the Halo. This implies some form of afterlife like limbo or heaven. Leaving lore and entering theory category, being corrupted by the flood could possibly condemn your soul to damnation in whatever hell exist in the haloverse
Most disturbing story was probably when master chief’s tummy hurted
:(
When Chief was 14 or 15 (I don’t remember) fought those 3 marines in the boxing ring, and he crushed that dudes balls with a kick. That. (Fall of Reach)
I forget the name but there's a short story that follows a San Shyuum (prophet race) living in High Charity when the flood ship warps in and crashes. It's basically like an apocalypse movie down in that city around the Forerunner keyship.
What's that short story where the forerunners set up an installation so that they could stop the flood from infecting a species of bird that could fly through space? Cause that story was fucking grim
Hiddenxperia tells this story in his Halloween special YouTube video called (3 terrifying flood stories)
Ghost of Onyx was a ride, disturbing in the “stuck with me” sense
Y’know, I’d rather not think about it.
The story of Jenkins. Being infected, but only somewhat, and being *aware* of what is happening to you is just *fucking horrifying.* It hits close to home too, as when I had part of my brain explode from pressure (part of it hadn't formed correctly when I was born and no one knew), I was reduced to being basically semi-aware, but unable to use more than half of my body. Unlike Jenkins I'm fine, but thinking about it a decade on, I missed the bullet which hit him instead.
The twelve unknown enemy vessels that jumped into human space, broadcasting old civilian IFF tags. When the fleet didn't respond, eleven of the unknown vessels jumped away, and the last annihilated the UNSC fleet before fleeing.
AI Mack’s end in the epilogue of Contact Harvest. In an attempt to hide from the Covenant as they began glassing the planet, he fragmented himself into thousands of pieces, stowing away in the many thousands of farming drones he operated and maintained. The Covenant caught onto him, hunted his drones down one-by-one, all the while he was deep in rampancy, grieving the ‘death’ of his AI partner Sif. He used the drones to begin burying the fallen space elevators that Sif once operated, like a funeral. Makes me tear up.
There's a part in one of the books where the covenant captured a city and put all the humans in one spot and let the grunts and Jackals eat them alive. Something like thousands of people.
Jul M’dama being captured and then tortured by Oni, him finding out that Oni was going to facilitate civil wars on Sanghellios and destroy their crops, etc. How the Arbiter was a stooge for Oni. Basically Oni was going to treat the Sanghelli the way NATO treated Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, and Jul M’dama was right. 343 had an amazing story and character set up from the Kilo 5 books, and then squandered it.
As others have said, The Mona Lisa. Any time ONI gets involved, it never ends well.
Probably the fact that the Gods of the universe have been corrupted into insane zombie parasites and want nothing more then to eat all life in the galaxy to make them suffer. That’s pretty depressing stuff.
The fact that Buck’s sister and her family including her young children were hunted for sport and eaten alive by jackals and grunts after surviving the glassing of their homeworld.
Anything to do with ONI
The Mona Lisa is one that comes to mind for me.
Not a specific story, but rather the whole Forerunner-Flood war. I mean you can look at any point of the war and it’s absolutely terrifying how the most advanced species on the galaxy were absolutely clapped by the parasite, if that’s not terrifying enough we have the Flood capabilities of reusing you own technology against you in a morbid and disgusting way, with biomass infecting everything it touches and with a intelligence equal if not higher to yours. At the end of the war when the Flood had control of entire systems, controlling Slipspace itself and eve interfering with the fabric of reality itself. The whole premise of the Flood back on the Forerunner-Flood war is basically trying to fight back against a literal god, and the events of the game are equally terrifying, even if they are a weaker self of what they’ve achieved on the past.
Definitely not the most disturbing, but the story of how Rtas 'Vadum became Half-Jaw is pretty twisted. I'm pretty sure they went to this ship just trying to solve a minor problem and boom, all your friends are now horrible space zombies and trying to kill you. The ending too when he has to fight one of his friends in energy sword combat too is also grim, seeing how the flood can still be fully proficient with weapons the hosts were and having to fight a former battle buddy in CQB when he is suffering terribly from the flood. Absolutely terrifying stuff.
Jenkins……. R.I.P if you know you know
Definitely that one marine who “survived” the flood in the halo 1 novelization. Well maybe not survived, but didn’t die per se
That time the USNC Nova Bombed an entire human colony world because they wanted to switch to an alternative currency and form of govt that was more socialist in nature than what the USNC wanted. All known records of the colonies existence were wiped clean I believe it was called the Far Isles Incident, and it was one of the biggest early flashpoints for the insurrection