John-117/Late War: Difference between revisions

With only one second left in his countdown, three [[ODST armor|armored]] [[ODST]]s entered the tent with rifles leveled.<ref name="HTFOR27"/> John leapt into action, grabbing the weapon from the first to fire at him and dislocating the man's shoulder in the process. John spun the weapon and cracked the soldier's ribs with its butt before lashing out likewise at one of the others. The second ODST's head snapped back, signaling to John that he had fractured his vertebrae and certainly given him a concussion at the very least. The last ODST managed to get some shots off, but they only ricocheted off the Chief's energy shield. A moment later John slammed the man's own rifle down into his leg, causing a jagged spike of bone to burst through his fatigues, and finished him off with a blow to the head. He moved to collect their ammunition and a [[combat knife]] while Cortana informed him of seven more outside, as indicated by his [[motion tracker]]. She openly wondered why he had taken care not to kill the three men, which he defended by stating that the threats had been neutralized regardless. In order to catch the seven outside by surprise, he pulled down the pole in the center of the tent holding it up. As it collapsed around him, he slashed a hole through the fabric and rushed out, wielding the pole as a weapon. Three men went down from a single swipe at their legs and another crumpled when John hurled it at his chest like a javelin. Before the man was hit, however, he had primed a grenade. Not willing to let the soldier die, John rushed to kick it away. The remaining marines started landing shots that drained his shield. He dealt with one by strike at his sternum with an open palm, fired rounds from the MA5B into another's knees, and concluded by simply punching the last man's helmet. Cortana let John know that he had finished off the ten adversaries in just twenty-two seconds, though he had technically began forty milliseconds earlier than he'd been permitted to. John scooped up a bandolier of [[M9 fragmentation grenade|grenade]]s and ran toward the nearby barracks in order to slip under the buildings and crawl to where the obstacle course began. Right before he was about to run across the ten acres of jagged gravel that it started with, Cortana alerted him to an infrared signal she decoded and realized was an activation signal for a [[Lotus anti-tank mine|Lotus mine]]. She suggested that if he could pinpoint just one that she may be able to estimate the locations of others based on the standard randomization procedure used by UNSC engineers. It only took the toss of one grenade to reveal where two mines had been, and from that Cortana devised a constructed a minefield in John's [[HUD]] that she was was confident was at least 93% accurate. Thanking her for saving his life, he began to carefully pick his way around where the mines were predicted to be. Once he had made it to the other side of the gravel field safely, Cortana discovered something else: scrambled radio frequencies on the [[Wikipedia:D band (waveguide)|D band]] that indicated encrypted orders from the reservation to [[Fairchild Field|Fairchild Airfield]]. While she investigated further, the Chief came to what was known as the razor field and found himself the target of emplaced [[AIE-486H machine gun|30mm chaingun]]s. He fired at the lines powering the servos for one of the guns and used it to disable those adjacent to it. Others fell prey to his grenades. John had raced right through the last bit of steel wire that gave the razor field its name when Cortana's voice returned to let him know she had accessed a satellite through SATCOM and that he had an [[AV-19 SkyHawk]] bearing down on him. Not wasting any time, he sprinted to the [[Pillars of Loki]] and began leaping across them.<ref name="HTFOR27"/>

===The Fall of Reach===