Master Chief
Kalmiya stiffened at Specter's arrogance. John could recognize her exerted body language as annoyance, mixed with hurt pride. Not at Specter's dismissal of her words, but at Specter's dismissal of the Spartan. She held him in such high regard, especially after they'd learned to work together much better, that John was almost surprised at her juxtaposition between forced politeness and the obvious need to prove the simian wrong.
"May we go?" Kalmiya asked the Host, her voice slightly shriller than usual.
"By all means, little lady..." the Host blinked absently back.
"Master Chief Petty Officer, John-117 was born on Eridanus II," Kalmiya began, an air of blatant defiance to her tone as she glared daggers at Specter---almost as though she'd taken his words as a personal threat. John had to assume that her frustration had been building up since her first conversation with Specter. As her words left her avatar, the scenery around them shifted into space, twinkling stars glittering about them, and a continental planet was before them, with wispy clouds, blue oceans, and green pastoral continents.
"At the age of 6, John was conscripted into the classified ONI ORION Project, Codename: SPARTAN-II."
Again with her words, the scene shifted to show a small child that would have barely come up to Chief's waist being scooped out of his bed by a figure cloaked in black garments, another behind him holding the body of a purely identical child, who was placed where the real John had been. At the mention of "Spartan-II", the scene altered once more to show a circular room, where over 70 children sat on bleachers, listening to a beautiful and striking woman on a stage speak to them. Dr. Catherine Halsey.
"At the age of 14, John, like the other Spartans, received biological augmentations, making him faster, stronger, and smarter than any human."
The next scene depicted a teenage Chief wearing only underwear as he laid upon a gurney, his eyes focused in front of him as a machine began to impale him from all angles with different needles, injecting different mixtures into him. The boy flinched on the gurney, but even as one plunged through the sides of his skull, he didn't so much as blink. As she continued, the scene shifted to show a glimpse of a bonesaw shattering against a Spartan's arm, barely cutting through the skin, but the bone had instead broken the bonesaw. Another shift to display the still young John slamming a simple, educated punch into a much larger, burly man's chest. His sternum collapsed on what looked to be a regular punch, and he went flying back as two other men closed in on John, one getting his skull caved in, and the other his spine severed, all in the blink of an eye.
"Not long after, an enemy arrived. An alliance of alien species, united under a banner of religion, called the Covenant. Then they started to purge."
The scenery shifted into space once more, depicting Eridanus II once again, this time with a Covenant carrier hovering near them, its size alone enough to put Specter's warships to shame. With her third sentence in this scene, Eridanus II began to glow brightly, its surface turned to molten glass, the planet destroyed, left uninhabitable.
John allowed Kalmiya to continue, despite his thoughts of how unnecessary this was. His only true worry here would be if Kalmiya revealed too much about him. He wasn't too interested in his past being used against him. Been there, done that. Wasn't fun.
"For 27 years, Master Chief led his Spartans against the Covenant. But so few Spartans wasn't enough, as world after world after world fell to the might of the Covenant."
A series of three-dimensional images around them depicting dozens of worlds, once vibrant, then turned into burning ash, whizzing by them.
"Until... Chief stumbled on Halo."
Now the scene shifted, displaying the Pillar of Autumn as it drifted toward a ring-shaped object orbiting a gas giant, the Halo's diameter the same as Earth's.
"There, he almost singlehandedly stopped an entire Covenant armada, neutralized an adaptive parasitic lifeform, and with his previous AI, outwitted an ancient artificial construct."
A few flashes of Chief laying waste to Covenant groups, through a wooded area, then a desert canyon, in a snowy tundra, before there was a flash of the Flood, their mangled bodies leaping for him, Chief desperately firing rounds into them, bullets plunging into their flesh, actions that the Flood didn't react to as they closed in... then a glimpse of 343 Guilty Spark, zapped to the ground by Cortana, who appeared on the console of Halo's control center, and finally...
"Halo was a weapon designed to wipe out all sentient life on a galactic scale. So Chief destroyed it."
The next scene was from the cockpit of the longsword Chief had escaped on, the Spartan watching through the viewport as a portion of the Halo ring erupted in a brilliant flash of light, so violently that it flung a part of the ring clear into the other side, further shattering the Halo apart.
"He returned to Earth, where he helped fight back an invasion of Covenant."
The next scene depicted the massive battle taking place over Earth, and showed Chief with a Covenant anti-matter bomb flying through the thick of it, falling down toward the planet, headed right for an incoming Covenant ship.
"That's enough," Chief interrupted Kalmiya as he watched his younger self activate the anti-matter bomb and kick off to let the Covenant ship go up in a flash of light.
"But, we haven't even gotten to me, yet," Kalmiya argued, turning around.
"It's enough," Chief said again, this time more firmly. Kalmiya stared back at him for a moment, before she nodded, pursing her lips.
"And that was only the half of it," she shrugged with a forced smile on her face, her eyes still glaring daggers in Specter's direction. "Genocidal space empires, galaxy-destroying superweapons, none of it could stop the Master Chief. Our mission is to stop people like you," she told Specter this part directly. "And now you have perspective on how inconsequential your accomplishments truly are."
John felt she was being extremely petty, so he raised in his seat. "Enough!" he ordered, simultaneously releasing a ping to Kalmiya to cut out her hologram. Begrudgingly, she obeyed, and Kalmiya vanished. The last thing the Chief needed was for her to get worked up past her core logic, and making their enemies have even more of a reason to try and snuff him out. John was less dismissive of Specter's tale than Kalmiya appeared to be, however. The scale was undoubtedly smaller, sure, but his accomplishments and his power couldn't be underestimated, and that was the last thing he needed his AI companion to be doing.
