Halo 4: A Walk Into Hell (Alternate Version)
This is an attempted fix of the original story by a different author. Originally story here.
I'm a normal gamer, but I tend to focus more on shooters
One day, as I was coming home from school, I spotted something hidden in the bushes. I was unsure at first, but upon closer inspection it turned out to be a DVD. Curiosity led me to pick it up and bring it home. It was a little scratched, but not so badly that it wouldn't work. I put it into my Xbox's disc tray, mildly apprehensive. It turned out not to be a DVD at all like I had thought, but a game. Halo 4 to be precise. My first thought was, who would throw out a new game?
I played a little of the campaign to see if it worked, but due to the fact that I already had a copy of Halo 4 combined with the fact that one of my friends desperately wanted the game, I gave it away. 3 days had passed; I received a call from my friend. He said he had beaten the campaign without incident, but there was something strange about Spartan OPS. He told me his copy had an extra episode without a picture preview, and due to the fact that he discovered this late at night, no one was on that he could invite to his game.
We decided to investigate the next evening after school. I got home and excitedly called my friend. I turned on my Xbox and accepted the invite. The console suddenly turned off, as did the house's electricity. Figuring this to be a power surge, I waited and within minutes the power was back up. I turned on my Xbox but could not connect to live, perhaps this was due to the power outage. Confident that it'd be back up within a few minutes as well, I navigated to the Spartan OPS menu and, to my great surprise, I as well had a new mission. the name of the mission was simply "mission.10". Soon enough, however, the little logo flickered at the bottom of the screen, saying My Gamertag and how many friends I had online. I was soon able to connect to my friend again, and I told him about the mission. He agreed it was strange that a mission could seemingly transfer between 2 discs, but we decided to play it anyways.
The usual pre-game cutscene didn't play, and there was no voicework during the first regular part of the mission which seemed to take place in a darker environment than most others; we seemed to be in a cave system, complete with excavation equipment and lights. These were certainly never included in the game, so why someone would add a bunch of new objects and textures didn't seem to make much sense if they weren't even going to do cutscenes and voice. We went through caves killing enemies nonchalantly until I realized that our enemies were unusual...they were Spartans, only they looked more zombified as we continued into the caves. There was an inherent sense of wrongness, killing our allies as grotesque as they were, and as we went even deeper into the caves they became more and more grotesque.
The bodies of Spartans, dismembered Elites and charred pieces of Promethian creatures littered the ground and twisted versions of Spartans hung from the ceiling by hands and knees with elongated limbs, running straight for us and dying under our gunfire. Suddenly our guns disappeared from our screens as one approached us, looking hauntingly familiar. We realized it was my friend's mother, and I could hear him gently whimpering over the Xbox Live microphone as she raised her horrible, shaking and rotten hand to her head holding a Plasma Pistol, overcharged it, grinned directly at his character and blew her own head off. In the corner, a message displayed "... has been killed by The Guardians." We decided to proceed and saw more of these grotesqueries that looked strikingly familiar to people we knew in real life. By this point we had both suggested turning off the game and convinced each other not to do so several times.
By now, the walls were acquiring a faint red glow and started to become cracked like clay. We could hear the sound of a thick liquid bubbling and the deeper we went, we started to see thicker heatwaves coming off the ground and ceiling. All this time, killing hundreds of copies of our families and best friends, being forced to do it simply so we could see what lay at the end of the tunnel. Ammo never seemed to be a concern, as soon as we hit our last clip we'd automatically be given more, but this went on for hours, it was mind numbing. We had made it into a game to see who could kill in-game copies of the other more, and we started to laugh and thoroughly enjoy it.
Not long after we began thoroughly enjoying ourselves we reached a giant cavern filled with lava. looked around before seeing the faint glimmer of active camouflage. I began firing my battle rifle at it, but no matter how many rounds hit, its shields never failed and it's camo remained untouched. It was roughly the shape of a person and it moved without moving; as soon as we got a bead on it, it would teleport across the giant lava filled chasm. eventually I saw it teleport behind my friend and even as I said "NO!" loudly into the microphone, the gun disappeared off of my screen again and left me helpless to watch as this invisible character pulled out my friend's sidearm, made his character hold it, brought his arm up so the gun was under his chin, and fired. As soon as the game let me have my gun back, the Xbox popup came onto my screen again, telling me he had left my party. I was now down here alone, but back in control. I ran for the exit and discovered it had vanished.
Everything was quiet again, but I had no ammo. Nothing happened, and I almost got calm. I say almost, because how can you be calm when you're totally alone, in a place that wasn't even supposed to be in the original game, after your friend's character just did the impossible and shot himself?
Seeing no alternative, I walked over to his body and picked up his pistol. At this point I was too intrigued to turn off the Xbox and so afraid that the thought never even crossed my mind. This enemy popped up again and I took aim, shooting him quickly and putting him down once and for all. He fell in the lava head first and i actually thought about cheering, but decided against it.
To my horror I saw that a body was rising from the lava, untouched except for a bullethole straight to the center of the forehead. the camouflage faded and it smiled. It was my friend, the one I had been playing with, in the same clothing he had been in that day. "Was it a fun game? I suppose you won our little competition". He then suddenly fell back in the lava, screaming in what sounded like a hundred voices at a time. It was deafening, so much so that i threw my headphones off and started shaking hard, in both fear and anger. After the scream died I picked up my controller again, but as soon as i tried to move the screen i heard a massive BANG in the distance and all the power went out again.
When the power came back on, I was relieved. I called my friend and he was fine, and he told me that he was watching what happened from my perspective on his screen despite it saying that he disconnected. Being both equal measures shocked and interested at how such a thing could happen, I turned on my Xbox again with shaky hands only to see a popup saying that my account was banned for something like 3,000 years, with the reason listed why as a string of gibberish with "Soonwait" at the end.
The next day I went to the store and bought a new Xbox live card and started a new account. Going back to Halo 4, the map was no longer there. Having no desire to play the game again, I left it and mostly forgot about it after month. One day I got invited to play Castle Crashers by some friends at school, and that reminded me of my ordeal all that time ago. Deciding that whatever had happened was a terrible malfunction by then, I agreed. When I booted up my Xbox, I saw that I had one message and a few friend requests. I went to the message, which had no subject. I will never forget the words that were in it.
"YOU ENJOYED IT. I'LL SEE YOU SOON."
Credited to Claws402
Originally uploaded on February 16, 2013
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