Six had tried his hardest for Reach, failing time and again with both his missions and his team. He thought of them as he prepared for a final battle against the covenant in some construction site littered with bodies; Jorge, a friendly giant from the Spartan 2 program who'd made the team feel more friendly. Kat, a techie with stickie hands for information and a heap of sass that got them all through the day. Jun, vanished along with Doctor Halsey after the evacuation of SWORD base, a sniper of few words that taught him how to be part of a team. Carter, the leader of the whole thing, the man that gave Six hope when he had none. Emile, the last one to go, had been prickly with everyone until the end but was still a source of warmth in his own way.

Each of them gone, none of them buried, and in the short time they'd been a team Six had grown used to them. He was on his own again though, a lone wolf after Carter had told him to leave it behind. Six sighed, thinking of the one person he had left to talk with, a bigger asshole than Emile could have ever hoped to be.

"That's a bit harsh, don't you think?" said the voice in his head, stuck there since Six had come to Reach. "Think of all the times I've saved your life."

"And the many times you've tried to end it. Before you say anything, yes, talking about how great the ass was on the Elite I was trying to kill did almost cost my life." A 'humph' echoed in my head, and I imagined crossed arms and a pout.

"I was just trying to get a smile out of you, Mr. Resting-Bitch-Face. How do you not smile at anything, honestly? You can't tell me it wasn't funny when we found those two dead grunts in a 69 or watched a Brute launch through the air like a ballerina."

"Shut up, Gutrot, I'm trying to get some guns ready." Thankfully, he stayed quiet for a while, and I was allowed some time to ponder the voice in my head, even if he could hear me thinking. He'd locked himself in my mind on accident when I'd found a strange corpse in a cave, (not one of the covenant, and definitely not human) chained into the wall and covered in dust from ancient paper. He was apparently a warrior and a criminal, one so foul that he'd had his name expunged from the dead society's history, and sentenced to spend his afterlife in his own rotting corpse. From the way he'd told me, his crimes were exclusively killing; nearly five million bodies over the course of the eighteen years his government had tried to catch him. He'd been a constant annoyance to Six, all the more so because he used his real name, and never shut up about his deal.

"Speaking of which, Markus," Gutrot said, making the Spartan sigh, "I still need an answer from you before you die, since I'll automatically get full control of your corpse if you don't."

"I'll repeat myself for the hundredth time you sick poltergeist, not until the last possible moment," Markus responded, making Gutrot sigh as well. "You've said yourself you don't know if or how I'll be effected by the change, so for now, can it." The sounds of approaching Covenant ships filled the silence for a moment, but Gutrot had one last thing to say.

"I just… don't want to be alone again…" Markus went silent after that, focusing on the enemy. Dropships poured out Grunts and Jackals, the occasional Elite seen here and there to lead them. Human weapons at the ready, the Spartan charged for his prey, firing a hail of machinegun spray into the bodies of them all, Grunts were helpless, Jackals and Elites dodged, and then the fight began. Markus lost count of the bodies that piled up around him, and blood slowly covered his body, every color but red. His shields were knocked down and brought back up multiple times, and he glowed bright yellow almost constantly.

Slashes and melted metal littered his armor from lucky shots, but he kept fighting, and they kept coming. He fought for hours, long into the night lit by plasma and gunpowder, filled with a rage and will to survive this onslaught. He collapsed when the light had barely begun returning to the surface, breathing with a wheeze from a hole in his chest and staunching a hole in his stomach with a can of biofoam. Corpses took up more of the ground than dirt and piled high enough to reach Markus' hip in some places. Zealots approached, and he stood up with extreme difficulty, slowly bringing a plasma pistol to bear on them, panting.

One of them activated a sword, deflecting his shots as they came until it emptied, and he fell to his knees, tearing off his helmet. The one with the sword kicked his chest, making him fall onto his back. He hacked up a piece of phlem that was half blood, smiling as it landed on the Zealot's chest piece. It growled at him, kneeling down to line up it's blade with his throat.

"Go… right ahead… you bastard…" he said, still grinning at the Elite with the eye that didn't have blood sticking it shut.

"I'm calling this the last possible moment, Markus," Gutrot butted in. "You have to agree to the contract though: your body, we both get half of the control in it, and switch back between the two of us." The sword was raised, and midswing, Markus made his decision with one word.

"Deal."

A shockwave blasted the Elite on top of him to pieces, and the others were thrown back into construction equipment and concrete walls. The spartan groaned as he held his rapidly healing stomach and expanding ribcage, unlocking his armor as quick as his shaking hands could manage, unzipping his skintight suit after that. His body was burning with fever and sweating rivers into the dirt, and he vomited up everything in his stomach, then his stomach itself, and everything else in his torso. The surviving Elites were speechless at the spectacle, wondering what in the name of the Prophets was going on.

Markus managed to think his question to Gutrot: "What the hell is going on?!"

"Something I didn't know would happen, but will likely result in you turning into one of my species if those claws are anything to go off of." He looked at his hands and saw that he was growing claws, wicked and sharp. His body changed even more: skin turned the color of ash, a tail sprouting from his hip, legs breaking and forming a second knee like the Elites, and head reshaping to what could only be described as a dragon, horns and all. His organs filled in his chest cavity, and Markus gasped for breath with new lungs.

Exhausted, he collapsed sideways into the blood of his enemies and a pile of his own organs, falling unconscious immediately. When the horrid sounds of his change stopped, the Zealots peeked from cover, and found a new Markus in the place of the spartan, absent except for shredded armor and a few scraps of bloody tissue. It seemed as though they'd gotten one demon in exchange for another.

Minutes later, the still knocked out Markus was loaded into a Phantom, and sent up to a supercarrier as cargo, waiting to meet the prophets. When they arrived on the ship, he woke up to the sight of being surrounded by the Covenant and tried to move as fast as he could to the nearest weapon. His body remained slack, and Gutrot spoke up in his head.

"Keep still, Markus. They think you killed your spartan body, and plan on taking you to the Prophets. Play your cards right, and you might escape later. For now, you're still asleep to them, and it should remain that way," Gutrot said, forcing the ex-spartan to close his eyes and breathe slowly. "This is your story now: you're a native inhabitant of Reach, unencountered by humanity or the Covenant because of your small population. You were sent to investigate the lights of the ships, and killed the spartan when you were attacked. You know nothing about their war or their religion, but you'll join both when asked. You don't know where your people are. Your name is Draken, my old name before banishment. You're not a spartan, you're not a human, you're not a soldier, you're Draken, a Kligher born on Reach. Repeat it until even you think it's the truth." The first Kligher in centuries did as he was told, adopting the story as his own. While the two minds waited for something to happen, Gutrot told Draken about his kind's abilities.

"You're pretty much the same as when you were a spartan, but better. I'm going to give a few examples of my feats: I once jumped fifty feet straight in the air from a standstill and landed fine. I've lasted a whole month without water, and six months without food, recovering hours after with the right treatment. I once ran across fifty miles of desert at top speed, and still fought three hundred soldiers on the other side right after. My claws could rip metal like paper, you could probably do that to titanium, or even whatever these jokers use for their ships. I once punched a hole through the torso of one of my kind and kicked through a stone wall. Those scales you have don't do much, but they look badass, so, unfortunately, you have to get some armor and cover them up. Quickfire round; you can see in the dark, have twenty times better hearing than a human, about twice for vision, can use your tail like a third hand, and stab things with the blade on it. Oh, one important difference between our species before you freak out about it: your junk's internal now, and you do your business through the same orifice. Any questions?"

"None," Markus said quietly, drifting back into oblivion. "None at all…"