Last spark from the ashes

Hughes can extract information aplenty here. Guardians clearly face enemies who vastly outnumber them, apparently by combining extensive intel and resource-gathering with strategically chosen strike missions to eliminate key targets: disrupting command chains, supply networks, denying attempts to seize key assets. At least, when they aren’t seeking ‘sources of increased Darkness activity’ or delving into ‘Darkness-intense zones’. Whatever the objective, on a long mission enemy casualty estimates can stack up to hundreds per Guardian.

Despite the formidable opposition, there are few mentions of Guardians gathering in groups of more than three or six. Though Fireteam leaders are named there’s little visible regard for hierarchy in the field. Even missions assigned by Vanguard Commanders back in the Tower are often phrased as requests.

It’s possible too to get a sense of the combat tactics favored. Blaze seems to favor shock and awe, aggressively testing her enemies’ defenses and charging in to hit their ranks at the densest point. Only where that proves ineffective does she resort to more tactical methods. Needless to say, her solo missions have a particular number of references to ‘Guardian impaled’ or ‘Guardian disintegrated’ or ‘Guardian incapacitated by tripmine detonation’. And immediately after: ‘Following Ghost resurrection…’



Blaze, meanwhile, is quiet for the first hour or so, once she finally gets to sleep. It’s only once she hits the dreaming phase that her pulse accelerates and her breathing quickens. And then the dream passes, and another hour goes by before it returns, and then again…

She has a vague sense of being surprised to be here. She can’t remember why. It seems inevitable now: here is where she was born; here she must return. No remaking by alien gods or meddlers can change that.

Once again it is evening as she comes down onto the field. The sun slants low over the mountains, making black silhouettes of the tower and the silent army before it. This doesn’t matter. She does not remember what is in the tower but she knows those who wait. She breaks into a run as she comes to meet them. There are others at her side, or distant, fighting their own foes for the same goal. (There are others, more distant, who walk ahead untroubled. She cannot heed them.)

They are all there, of course. Those of the Tower and those of the Nexus mixed in with the faces of long-forgotten names. She faces Hirune bare-handed; afterward, tries to take her gun before Jesse and Ulysses-10 tag-team her. Bare-handed suits her, but she takes a gun anyway and moves on. And there are Holliday and Steve, Banshee-44 and Verity and Harrowheart and ah, yes, Samus…

She’s slept four hours, or perhaps close to six. By then her heart is pounding, her breathing shallow. There are slight twitches in her fingers, the restless jerks and gasps that betray intense dreaming. The Ghost takes note: these phases seem to be getting longer. It drifts closer, fluttering anxiously, but doesn’t dare get too close. Exo psychology plus human biology is an unknown quantity.