DT 2022: Janitor's Bloody Works

A long time ago and even now, stories both glorified war and described it as a endless hell that a few living escaped to find peace. Sometimes between the two receptions for war, survivors recognized a joy for combat and the long nightmare of being away from it. Because war was bloody, but it was simple. A long life by comparison could be harder than facing death itself.
Understanding for war spun between forgetfulness and new-found awareness in an endless cycle. The line between peace and war blurred once again as humanity expanded from one world to hundreds across its new galactic dominion. History repeated itself, and those who faced it either ran or chased it. This is a tale of the latter.
To understand war meant embracing both its complexity and simplicity. Accepting war and peace as two sides to the same concept. To love and hate it and embrace it as gospel. To never abandon the battlefield because there was nothing else anywhere.
From one pacified battlefield to the next, without end and the hollowing of the human body and mind for one love of a bloody mess. A lot of humans abandoned their empathy in the face of war to survive, but rarely gave it willingly. For most, it was beat out of them. Those that do give it willingly, there was a special place in eternal Hell for them as a special kind of evil. A sin they recognize.
They embrace the fire, shed their humanity, and become shepherds of Death.
What remained to live for if all you know was war? And what better visage to become than a Spartan, the so-called demon made for nothing more than to kill?
What kind of creature would become something so horrendous that even war cultures like the Sangheili would balk at their sight?
One born to the Insurrection. One overlooked in the endless faces of the Covenant War orphans who had the fire to become broken Spartan-IIIs tossed into a meat grinder. One who knew their place and traded second-hand citizenship and painful peace for the hell of the battlefield, laughing through it all. One who joined the UNSC Army knowing they were the first to meet the enemy and die with an energy sword through their chest rather than suffocating on hard vacuum in the helplessness of outer space. One who loved glassed fields more than a warrior mother too scared to go home to her alien responsibilities of a home life.
A monster who survived the Covenant War and demanded the next battle anyway after living through twenty-seven years of nonstop battle. One who always spoke in a dried-out, thirsty voice demanding at the front of the line “send me.”
Someone who embraced the dehumanizing Spartan reality of becoming a living weapon. Taken apart, shredded, stitched back together. The worst part was waiting to recover, and the addictive want for spilt blood. Was such insanity impossible? Could such an individual exist?
It doesn’t matter.
Such a person could exist, and that was enough.
An orange crystalline visor crafted into the shame reminiscent of a human skull—WARMASTER. A mismatched Mjolnir helmet atop a Rakshasa armor frame colored in maroon-red drenched in the wretched smell of iron from buckets of spilled blood. This wasn’t their only visage, and neither the first nor last.
Once an Army Ranger. Once a Spartan-IV. Now something even more. A force of nature. A killer.
There was a time for running and a time for hiding. A time to set a trap and a time to rush into battle.
Such strategy and reality faded away into a blank line of noise. A gurgle that hissed into a blinding scream that required no external armor speakers to hear. A whistle popped into a howl to meet the human’s challenge and other alien voices joined in.
Six Jiralhanae led by their giant pack-master armed with an energy-bladed, gravitonic war javelin. The Spartan received his answer and laughed like a crazed fiend with only a Brute plasma rifle and nanite-sharpened machete to meet the wall of weapons and force surrounding his place in the ablaze field of alien grain. He stood in the fire as his yellow-tinted energy shields flared, barely holding back the heat.
The Brutes did not care that the fire licked at their skin, causing it to crack and blacken ever slowly. They were past the point of a blood rage, blind to only the song of battle matching their single opponent. They couldn’t feel the fire but where the Spartan didn’t know his reason for being here other than to kill, the Jiralhanae had their own, entirely justified reason.
The armored human monster burned their fields, butchered their offspring. A new violence brought on their kind only months after the witch Cortana destroyed their homeworld. They were an endangered species, but the Spartan did not seem to care for their plight. It didn’t matter if he was an agent of a ridiculously vengeful humanity in a death spiral or a reaper of the self-righteous Created.
A monster had come to their shores after the deep pain and suffering trying to rebuild from nothing. He would die here, the Jiralhanae warriors thought.
They thought wrong.
The Brutes charged. The Spartan charged, laughing the entire way. Jiralhanae embraced a culture of killing for sport. The Spartan adopted an existence of murder.
He had no allies, no teammates. Just the purpose of death-dealing. Naval Intelligence appended him with the codename of a janitor, and they were less-than-subtle broadcasting the name.
Despite his proper noun, the Spartan cared little for its meaning. He was quite the opposite of what ONI called him. He was someone who went into cryosleep and came out to finish the next task, finding a sickly excitement in the cycle of violence.
Who was this executioner? Were they even human?
It didn’t matter among the fire and flames. It didn’t matter when he twisted the gravity spear from the pack master’s arms and pushed the sharpened end forged from a portable and repurposed gravity emitter into the nearest warrior’s chest and impaled him upon the ground. The unfortunate Brute growled out in more frustration than pain but had little time to register his doom. A single press of a button propelled the Spartan skyward atop the polearm like a witch’s broomstick. The impaled warrior’s body exploded into a brilliant flash of onyx blood, flattened completely by the sudden and immense pressure of seventy Earth masses.
The battle raged as the Spartan danced among his prey as they stumbled between red bolts of plasma, an impossibly sharpened blade, and the titanic force of weaponized gravity.
Blood boiled beneath a setting sun. The Spartan continued, pursuing the next lives to take.
Category:Short stories
Category:The Weekly