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Another of the hunchbacked creatures dropped from above and slammed into him. The Spartan staggered back, dipped, and hurled the monster back over his shoulder. It crunched into the wall and left a trail of mottled gray-green, viscous fluid as it slid to the floor.
The Master Chief turned to continue on, when his motion sensor flickered red—illuminating a contact right behind him. He spun and was startled to see the crumpled, badly damaged creature struggle to its feet. Its left arm dangled uselessly and brittle bone protruded from its pale, gangrenous flesh.
The thing’s right arm was still functional, however. A twisting column of tentacles burst from the creature’s right wrist and he could hear the bones inside break as they forced its right hand roughly aside.
The tentacle flashed out, cracked like a whip and hurled the Master Chief to the floor. His shields were almost completely drained from the single blow.
He rolled into a crouch and opened fire. The 7.62mm armor-piercing rounds nearly cut the monster in half. He kicked the fallen hostile, put two in its chest.This time, the damn thing should stay dead, he thought.
He moved farther along the hallway. Two Marines lay where they had fallen, proving that at least some of the second squad had managed to get this far, which opened the possibility that more had escaped as well.
The Master Chief checked, discovered that they still wore their dog tags, and took them. He crept through the wide galleries and narrow corridors, past humming machinery and entered a dark, gloomy vault. His motion tracker flashed crimson warnings—he was in Hostile Central.
Another of the misshapen bipedal hostiles shambled by, and he recognized the shape of the creature’s head—the long, angular snout of an Elite faced him. What held his fire was where the head was located.
The alien’s skull was canted at a sickening angle, as if the bones of its neck had been softened or liquefied. It hung limply down the creature’s back, lifeless—like a limb that needed amputation.
It was as if something had rewritten the Elite, reshaped it from the inside out. The Spartan felt an unaccustomed emotion: a trill of fear. An image of helplessness—of screaming at a looming threat, powerless—flashed through his mind, a snapshot of his cryo-addled dreams aboard thePillar of Autumn .
No way is that going to happen to me,he thought.No way .
The beast shuffled by, and moved out of sight.
He took a deep breath, exhaled, then burst from his position and charged for the center of the room. He battered aside the shambling beasts, and crushed a handful of the small spherical creatures beneath his boots. His shotgun boomed and thick, green blood splashed the floor.
He reached his objective: a large lift platform, identical to the one he’d ridden down into this hellhole. He reached for the activation panel, and hoped that he’d find the up button.
One of the hostiles leaped high in the air and landed next to him.
The Chief dropped to one knee, shoved the barrel of the shotgun into the creature’s belly and fired. The beast flipped end over end, and fell back into a clot of the smaller, round hostiles.