Cyberpunk: Spartan Walker

September 7, 2552 in the military calendar

Reach, underground at the castle base.

Fred followed the traces of strange symbols on the stone wall to his left until they twisted into a spiral mosaic.

The curls in the pattern became smaller and smaller, and finally disappeared. The symbols are part of the rock, made of shimmering mica in a granite matrix. They were a series of squares, triangles, bars, and dots, similar to the symbols he had seen of the Covenant forces—but at the same time the symbols seemed simpler and clearer.

As Fred stared at them intently, the symbols seemed blurred, beginning at the edges and fading from his vision.

He blinked, and the symbol reappeared—holy shit.

For the past five days, their main task has been to track down this long string of breadcrumb-shaped symbols. Dr. Halsey and the Spartans have explored various caves, hoping to find two things: a way out, and what Dr. Halsey calls the most significant discovery of this millennium. Yet she refuses to speculate on what the discovery might be.

I'm a scientist, she told them, not a prophet.

Fred could have been content with finding a vent that connected to the ground—but he realized that these symbols were also important. They were important because the Covenant forces considered them important. This makes whatever Dr. Halsey is searching for worth the effort to find, if only to keep it out of the hands of the enemy.

The Covenant troops above their heads have been digging non-stop, but the speed and methods have changed - there are no explosions anymore, just slight scraping sounds. They are using equipment to slowly but surely dig the entire building. The mountains move.

With each passing hour, the sounds become clearer and closer. Fred turned on the sound filter to filter out the noise and avoid distractions.

Five days. But it doesn't look that long. They work, rest, sleep, and wait. Dr. Halsey taught them to play word games such as 20 Questions and Simple Password.

20 Questions requires two people: a questioner and an answerer. First, the respondent thinks of a famous person, but does not name it. The questioner then starts asking questions, but the questions cannot directly relate to the answers. In order to guess the celebrity the questioner is thinking of, the questioner has to ask various questions repeatedly, but if there are more than 20 and the questioner still fails to guess, then he loses.

Simple password is a little more difficult. In this game, a mysterious message is encrypted with a password, and the clues provided to find the password are given directly. That is a simple shift correspondence. To find this After establishing a relationship, the problem will be solved.

They all played so well that she soon stopped playing with them. She wouldn't do it if Dr. Halsey was asked to admit defeat gracefully, just as John had when he was a child.

In addition to Dr. Halsey, what attracted their attention more was Jun, a Spartan warrior of unknown origin.

Jun is a very nice person, surprisingly talkative. Kelly always likes to chat with him, and from time to time she will make insinuations about his life experience. At this time, everyone would pretend not to care and listen to their conversation with open ears, but Jun was very wary of these contents, and whenever Kelly mentioned him, he would laugh and lead the topic elsewhere.

Kelly's one-liner skills are really bad. Every time Jun starts laughing, she laughs too, and then the two of them just keep laughing, making the conversation completely impossible to carry on.

In the end, everyone saw that he was unwilling to talk about these contents, so no one asked these questions for the next two days.

The same was true for Dr. Halsey, but Fred had a vague feeling that she seemed to know something, which was why she didn't ask.

Time gradually passed in chaos. It was dark here, and there were no time references like the sun, moon, or stars, but so what time it was, they had become meaningless.

He paused to stretch his Achilles tendon. It had recently been stitched up by Dr. Halsey and is now mostly back to normal, except for some stiffness. He was running injured earlier and almost tore his Achilles tendon.

Dr. Halsey has treated them all. She even quickly cloned a new lung for Kelly and successfully transplanted it. In her small medical kit, the doctor has a handheld MRI machine, a sterilizing magnetic field generator, and even a shoebox-sized cloning box for organ cloning.

The Doctor also installed parts of the new Mjolnir into their current armor. She explained that these upgraded parts are still in the field trial stage and their performance is not guaranteed, but she considers the current needs and there are good reasons to take the risk of using these new equipment.

Kelly's neurosensory circuits have been improved, causing her muscle contraction response speed to skyrocket; Winn's shield system has been added with a new linear accelerator, effectively doubling its power;

Isaac was fitted with a new image-enhancement computer; Will was given a superior tracking system that, when installed on a heads-up display, improved his accuracy in tracking objects within a kilometer.

Daisy got a motion detector upgrade device, which will make them more capable if they encounter the invisible elite warriors from before; Jun got a... well, he didn't get anything, because Dr. Halsey's parts It was used up on them, which caused Junhao to complain.

Fred flexed his bare right arm. Dr. Halsey is installing upgrade parts on him. Fred felt very insecure without the arm brace.

The Master Chief had told him not to rely on armor or weapons - but to rely on his own mind so he could better protect himself.

He wondered what was happening to the blue team—John, Linda, and James. Also, what about the other members of his own team? Did anyone survive on the generator side?

He didn't want to think about them—but he couldn't help it. Maybe it was because the surroundings were shrouded in darkness and the psychological pressure continued to increase.

What if they die here? Not dying in battle, but just dying here. In a way, that's not so bad. Fred had come face to face with death a dozen times, within arm's reach, staring into its face until it blinked and then turned away.

But the situation now is different from before. He didn't want to die because he didn't know if there were any Spartans fighting outside, and what if these Spartans still needed him.