Chapter 308 — Interesting Guests
Slipspace flowed beyond the viewports, blue light twisting endlessly through the darkness as the captured Covenant vessel carried its passengers steadily toward its destination.
Cascade.
An outer colony. A place none of them had ever expected to visit, let alone be personally redirected to by the highest levels of ONI command.
Inside one of the ship's briefing compartments, several Spartans sat around a holographic display. Fred. Kelly. Linda. Will. Sergeant Johnson at the end of the table, Cortana's hologram flickering quietly beside him. Master Chief stood a short distance away, silent as always, arms crossed, watching the conversation unfold without joining it.
Kelly was the first to break the silence.
"Anyone else find this strange?"
Fred looked up from the display. "Which part?"
Kelly gestured toward the navigation readout still counting down their approach. "The part where Admiral Parangosky personally redirects us to some outer colony."
That drew several looks around the table, because she had a point worth taking seriously. Parangosky did not personally involve herself in redirecting critical assets without a reason, and especially not now, not after everything that had already happened. Reach had fallen. Installation 04 was still a raw memory for everyone who'd been there. The Ascendant Justice operation had cost them more than any of them liked to think about.
And Earth had been their actual destination, not to deliver good news, either. The intelligence they carried confirmed something far more serious: the Covenant now had Earth's exact coordinates, almost certainly pulled from records recovered somewhere along the way during the chaos of the last several months. It wasn't a question of whether an invasion fleet would eventually follow that information.
Only when.
Delivering that warning to Fleet Command in person, before the Covenant could act on what they now knew, was supposed to be the entire point of this run. And yet, with Earth still days out, they were being sent to Cascade instead.
Will folded his arms. "Maybe they need reinforcements."
Kelly shook her head. "If that was all, Fleet Command could have handled it without Parangosky getting personally involved."
Fred nodded slowly, working through the logic himself. "Parangosky getting involved means ONI is interested." He paused. "Very interested."
That narrowed the possibilities considerably, and not in a reassuring direction.
"We're carrying word that the Covenant has Earth's location," Will said. "That's not something you just sit on."
"No," Kelly agreed. "It isn't."
Which meant, by simple logic, that whatever was waiting for them at Cascade had to matter enough to justify risking that delay in the first place.
Johnson leaned back in his seat, arms behind his head. "Which usually means one of two things."
Nobody spoke, waiting for him to finish the thought.
"Either something valuable is there," Johnson said. "Or something weird is there."
Fred snorted. "With our luck?" He didn't even have to finish the sentence. "The weird option."
A few of the Spartans around the table looked like they genuinely agreed with him. The room settled back into a thoughtful quiet for a moment. Then Kelly's attention shifted toward Cortana's hologram.
"You know something," she said. It wasn't phrased as a question.
Cortana's expression remained carefully, deliberately innocent, which only made everyone at the table more suspicious of her, not less.
Johnson pointed directly at the hologram. "See? That's the face."
"The 'I know something and I'm enjoying not telling you' face," he added, for anyone who might have missed his point.
Cortana's smile widened just slightly. "I know a few things."
Fred sighed. "Such as?"
A holographic file bloomed to life above the table, and several names scrolled into view one after another. Tony Stark. Diana. Tanya. Naruto Uzumaki. Saeko Busujima. Mindy McCready.
And finally, at the bottom of the list, Gaius.
The room went quiet.
"Who the hell are these people?" Johnson asked.
Cortana enlarged the final profile in response. The image that filled the display showed a giant clad in golden armor, and the scale comparison alone was enough to make several Spartans pause mid-thought.
Will frowned at the image. "That's a person?"
"Technically," Cortana replied.
That answer did not make anyone feel better.
Kelly studied the image a moment longer. "How tall is he?"
"Approximately more than three meters," Cortana said. She paused, letting the number settle before adding, "A little over ten feet. Nearly eleven."
For the first time since the meeting had started, even Master Chief looked at the display a fraction longer than his usual silent glance would have allowed.
Johnson sat upright fully. "Hold on." He looked around the table as if checking whether anyone else found this as absurd as he did. "You're telling me ONI redirected us halfway across human space because of a giant golden super-soldier?"
Cortana's smile only widened further. "Not exactly."
She brought up another file. Then another. Then several more in quick successio, destroyed Covenant vessels, tactical battle reports, ONI threat assessments, raw sensor recordings still tagged with timestamps and classification markers.
Johnson's expression slowly shifted from disbelief into something closer to genuine unease. "What am I looking at?"
"The reason Admiral Parangosky personally redirected us to Cascade," Cortana said simply.
Silence spread through the compartment as everyone worked through the files themselves. Fred studied them carefully. Kelly did the same. Linda said nothing at all, but her eyes moved across every line of data with the same unhurried, deliberate precision she used lining up a shot through a scope. Will kept reading. Even Chief remained fixed on the display longer than the situation strictly required of him.
Finally, Johnson spoke again. "Well." He looked around the room one last time. "I officially vote for the weird option."
Nobody disagreed with him.
A few moments later, the ship's systems announced their approach.
"Slipspace transition ending."
The blue light beyond the viewports began to fade, real space bleeding back into view around them. Cascade waited for them on the other side.
And for the first time since receiving the orders that had pulled them off their original course, every person aboard found themselves genuinely, unavoidably curious about exactly what was waiting for them once they arrived.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Cascade,
Gaius was not wearing his armor.
Instead, he stood on one of the colony's training grounds dressed in plain, ordinary clothing, looking almost unremarkable if not for his sheer size. Across from him stood Naruto, who by contrast looked considerably worse for wear, bruises darkening along one arm, dust ground into his clothes, several fresh cuts still bleeding faintly, and more than a few dried bloodstains from earlier in the session.
Training Haki was never a pleasant experience. Training it under Gaius made that significantly worse.
Without warning, Gaius stepped forward, closing the distance between them almost instantly. His fist shot toward Naruto's torso, coated in Armament Haki, not at full strength, not even remotely close to it, but still carrying more than enough force to matter.
Every instinct in Naruto's body screamed at him to dodge.
Instead, he planted his feet, crossed his arms in front of him, and tried once again to manifest Armament Haki of his own.
Nothing happened.
Gaius noticed immediately, a fraction of a second before the punch would have landed at full intended force, and pulled it back further still. Even reduced, the impact still landed like a cannonball colliding with a wall.
Boom.
Naruto was launched backward, the ground cracking visibly beneath him as he bounced and skidded across the training grounds before finally rolling to a stop. For a moment he simply knelt there on one knee, catching his breath. Then blood dripped from the corner of his mouth. He wiped it away with the back of his hand, and despite everything, a grin spread across his face.
"Again!"
Gaius looked at him quietly for a moment before responding.
Naruto's physical condition was already more than sufficient for this stage of training. His willpower, if anything, was more than sufficient as well, that had never been the issue. The real obstacle was control. Unlike Gaius himself, Naruto wasn't someone who could simply hear a concept explained once and immediately understand how to apply it. He needed to feel it. He needed repetition, failure, and the accumulated weight of enough attempts that his body eventually understood what his mind alone could not.
Gaius stepped forward again.
This time Naruto moved first, rushing in with a punch, then a kick, then another punch in quick succession. Gaius met all of it with total calm. Despite his enormous frame, every one of his movements remained precise, a slight shift of his weight, a small adjustment of his footing, a turn of the shoulder just wide enough to let each strike pass harmlessly by. Naruto missed every single one.
Then Gaius countered. A single punch.
Boom.
Naruto was sent flying again.
Several meters away, the others watched the exchange unfold. Mindy winced visibly at the sound of the impact. "I don't want to train with Gaius," she said, with complete sincerity.
Saeko laughed softly beside her. "If Gaius hit you with the same force he's using on Naruto, you would likely spend weeks recovering."
"Exactly," Mindy said immediately, nodding along as though that had settled the matter entirely.
Diana, meanwhile, kept her eyes locked on the sparring match with far more focus than casual observation required. "He's matching Naruto's speed," she said.
The others glanced toward her.
"Gaius is intentionally limiting himself," she continued. "Look carefully. Naruto can follow his movements, he's not being outpaced. But he still can't touch him."
Mindy watched more closely after that, and a moment later she realized Diana was right. Gaius wasn't overwhelming Naruto through raw superior speed at all. He was simply better. Far better, in every measurable sense that actually mattered in a fight.
Tanya, seated slightly apart from the others, quietly sipped her tea and, as always, offered no comment of her own.
Across the field, Naruto was sent flying once more by another calculated strike. But this time, mid-flight, he shouted.
"YES!"
The sound made everyone look up at once. Gaius stopped moving instantly. He had felt it the moment his fist connected, something faint, unstable, barely there at all, but undeniably present.
Armament Haki.
Naruto pushed himself back up to his feet, blood still clinging to the corner of his mouth, grinning wider than he had all day. "I did it!"
Gaius gave a small, approving nod. "It seems you have finally awakened it."
Naruto clenched both fists, excitement radiating off him in waves. "Yes!"
For a brief moment, he genuinely believed the hardest part of this was finally over.
Instead, Gaius stepped forward again.
Naruto felt something shift immediately. "Wait."
Gaius looked at him, entirely unbothered. "Now you must learn how to use it."
Naruto blinked. "Huh?"
The next instant, Gaius moved, faster now, stronger now, not by a large margin, but by just enough to matter.
Naruto's eyes went wide. "Oh no—"
Boom.
His newly awakened Armament Haki flickered into existence just before the impact landed, absorbing part of the force behind the strike. Only part. The rest was more than enough to send him flying once again across the training ground, tumbling end over end through the dust.
As he sailed through the air, one single thought dominated everything else in his mind.
Somehow, awakening Haki had only made the training worse.
~~~
Enjoying the story?
Want more chapters, bonus content, and a chance to help this world continue growing?
Join me on Patreon:
patreon.com/ZanderLee
Every bit of support helps me keep writing and releasing chapter