(#13) can you critique my fanfiction? 🥑

I’ve got a challenge for you.

I wrote this HALO fanfiction as a fresh-faced high schooler in the fall of 2011.

This is the 100% unedited version. In my next email, I’m going to edit and break down what’s happening in this excerpt.

My question for you: can you find three things that an editor would change?

Send me your thoughts—and happy reading…

Chapter 1: Delta Spartan

Novmeber 27, 2552. Odyssey-10. Operation: TELEPYLOS.

Things had gone horribly wrong.

Delta Company's mission should have been relatively straightforward. The mining platform Odyssey-10, in an asteroid field near the remains of Sigma Octanus IV, had been commandeered by the Covenant. They were using it as a weapons manufacturing base. The UNSC's newfound allies, the Elites, had provided the intelligence to the UNSC, who planned a surprise attack using cloaked Sangheilli starships for Delta's insertion. With three hundred Spartan-IIIs, this should have been a relatively easy success. But it turned out that one little detail had been overlooked.

It just so happened that the Covenant could detect the cloaked ships.

They waited to open fire until the ships had entered the asteroid field, and then proceeded to pound away with their plasma. Out of the thirty ships Delta was using, probably seventeen or eighteen were destroyed in the first few minutes - sixty percent casualties with the mission barely underway. The rest, unable to abort the mission, pushed on and docked at Odyssey-10. There, they fought their way through hordes of Covenant to find the reactors powering the platform. Delta's objective: blow up the reactors to destroy the station.

There were now twelve Spartans left. Twelve of three hundred. The majority had fallen through the sheer amount of plasma grenades lobbed at them, the Brute gangs that overwhelmed lone Spartans, the weapons that took out their armor's shields and rendered them defenseless. Many Spartans, out of ammunition and hope, simply charged the enemy ranks, trying to kill as many as possible with their bare hands before they succumbed to the inevitable.

But they had reached the reactor room. The problem was that none of the survivors had explosives enough to take out even one of the four reactors. Between them, they only had three grenades left.

Chris-D154 lobbed a grenade over the makeshift barrier of empty ammunition crates blocking the reactor room from the Covenant. Four of the approaching Brutes tried to dive for cover, but too late; the blast threw them into the walls, and they fell lifeless. "How many grenades do we have left?" he yelled.

"Two!" said Mika-D033, dropping her empty SMG in frustration. "And we're all running low on ammunition. We've picked up some needlers and plasma pistols, but we can't keep this up for much longer." She grabbed a plasma pistol from a dead Grunt on the ground and resumed shooting. Besides Mika and Chris, there were six other Spartans on the improvised front line.

A hail of Brute spiker rounds found their mark past the barricade. Pat-D269 screamed as the rounds entered his shoulder and chest, some finding gaps in the armor, some just piercing through it. Before he could do anything other than yell, another round of glowing spikes struck his helmet faceplate head on. He collapsed to the ground. No one bothered to check his vitals. Eleven.

"You guys might want to hurry it up in there," Chris said into the radio in his helmet.

In the reactor room, two Spartans stood guard at the door while two other Spartans worked frantically at the main control board.

"I'm trying!" said one of them, Tara-D112, who was frantically pushing buttons on the board. "I need to overload the reactors. Give Lukas and I a few more minutes."

Lukas-D232 looked up from the computer where he was entering commands. "I don't think we'll last that long…"

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