Horizon

Touching my feet on Horizon's rich soil felt incredible for far more than just the low gravity of the small world making me feel like a hulk sized ballerina despite the huge mass of my gear.

I was on an alien world.

As a kid I never once even fantasied about being an astronaut, and now I had my lizard man feet stomping on an inhabitable world lightyears away from earth. I took a few breaths of the planet's dense atmosphere before dawning my helmet. Not even the rush of breathing in such a potent cocktail of life sustaining air would make me forget what I'd done to Garm and Kuril. Helmets are important to continued living.

We had touched down on the outskirts of the colony full of prefab buildings, offline cannons built by the Alliance waiting for commands that would never come from the inhabitants. The collectors advanced tech disabled the power grid before they unleashed their army of chitinous drones to deliver their paralytic stasis inducing toxin on the relatively defenseless humans.

Off in the distance we saw the collector ship, a massive monolith that stretched into the clouds maintaining the collector aesthetic blend of insects and cyborgs by grafting cavernous hives onto an enormous metal superstructure. The scale would intimidate me if I wasn't so busy wondering if I can safely eat collector bug meat. Probably too much tech in them to make the effort worth it.

"Mordin, how certain are you that the countermeasure will work against the seeker swarms?"

"Should be invisible to seeker detection capabilities... in theory." the scarred salarian scientist spoke cheerfully, "Looking forward to seeing if we survive."

My hearing was almost sensitive enough to pick up the sound of everyone's sphincters clenching in terror at Dr. Mordin Solus's cavalier attitude about our safety. I just loaded up my incendiary ammo mutation and activated my defenses. No way to go back now, especially with first contact happening immediately as a small team of collectors approached the drop zone. A quick hosing from my looted M-76 Revenant put them down, their barriers and chitin exoskeletons providing little obstacle to the hundred and twenty high caliber superheated slugs I could fire in just over ten seconds.

Unfortunately for us, this is not a game. The collectors are not a series of hand placed enemies a studio made for us to overcome. The collectors did not exist for us to win against them. The ship we can see in the distance is crewed by tens of thousands of these bug man cyborgs, and they all can fly. I quickly had reason to thank my past self for tacking on extra ammo pouches and hard packs to my armor and weapons.

What should have been a quick jaunt to the colony's bunker turned into a hard slog as squad after squad of collectors flew in to attack us. I sent quick praise to the Lord for the fact that the collectors wings were too delicate to use while firing their weapons and the species had no grenades between them. They also hit the ground hard when shot midair and we rarely gave them time to get up from it. In all I'd say they were absolute ass as a species in combat. Weak weapons, mindless soldiers, and a leader barely capable of taking the field for longer than a few minutes before he burned out whatever body he 'assumed direct control' over. Honestly, Harbingers glowing interference did all of nothing besides give one collector at a time biotic power and a bright and shiny 'kill me' orange aura. Not that I can knock him for the look considering the warm glow of my orange holographic tech armor.

Jack destroyed the contingents of husks they tried to swarm us with a quick shockwave every time. The cyber zombies were as laughably easy to slay in real life as they'd been in the games.

Shepard bypassed the electronic lock on the bunker and the team dove in before she reactivated the blast doors. She then proceeded to have a conversation with one of the most annoying people in the galaxy. Delan the mechanic was right up there with Conrad Verner's bugged ass.

He let us know to calibrate the targeting systems for the Guardian Cannons the Alliance had set up. The fact that he mentioned Ashley Williams instead of Kaiden Alenko threw me for a loop. I didn't really like either of them in the games, but Williams was way more annoying in ME3. Why a fem-Shep would save Williams over Alenko boggles my mind.

Fortunately for Delan the mechanic, we were out the other door and back to fighting hordes of bug men before the sound of his voice drove me to kill him. As I blew a collector in half with a super heated shotgun blast I contemplated the real question of the day: are the collectors man meat or bug meat? As a lizard man, I don't believe the sun would strike me down either way should I get hungry enough to partake in a little mid fight snack.

My body kept autopiloting through the pathetic collector warriors before the bovine moans of the scions brought me back to the present. I hated scions. The fusion husks hit like a rolling Kenworth with their superpowered shockwave attacks and deliver debuffs to add insult to massive injury. It was with savage glee that I managed to close distance with one of the body horror movie monstrosities and introduce its glowing blue ezo sack to point blank shotgun destruction.

"That's what you get!" I shouted as I stabbed it a few times to vent my frustration on one of the few enemy types to kill me in the trilogy without a stupid insta-kill mechanic. I'd probably have significantly more corpse mutilation sessions once things got to ME3. Fucking sync-kills ruining my nova guard fun.

We fought our way to the controls for the gun emplacements easily enough, and EDI got to work bringing them online while we fought off the never ending supply of bug men and their Junji Ito inspired pets. The team hunkered down in all the ready made cover the colonists had been kind enough to leave behind for us as we settled into a box formation around the control system. It held with ease right until the collectors backed off and dropped a praetorian on us.

The twisted construct of steel and flesh wasn't trying to stop the guns from going online, instead it doggedly floated towards Commander Shepard as it fired its powerful particle beams at her. This singular focus allowed the rest of us to freely move around it, firing into it until Jacob got too close and the thing dropped out of the air causing a shockwave that dropped the Cerberus operative's shields and staggered him.

"Pull him out!" I shouted at Jack who just barely yanked the fool out of harm's way with her mind before the praetorian released a blast of biotic power that would have left us breathing the man in as a red mist.

The real life team proved far smarter than the AI companions of the games as they all learned to stay far away from the thing. After that it was just a matter of time as the giant cyborg monster didn't have enough intelligence to fight an elite team like ours. Not even the thunderous report of the colony's cannons opening fire on the slow to take off collector vessel caused anyone to break stride as we unleashed a hellstorm of ammo, tech, and biotics on the hapless enemy.

As far as boss fights go, I could only thank God Bioware didn't outsource their big ticket battles to FromSoftware. A slow moving enemy with only two straight forward attacks wasn't going to stop someone who played through the janky glory of Dark Souls 2. I didn't even want to contemplate fighting a thresher maw made by FromSoftware. Or Capcom come to think of it.

A good portion of the team got knocked on their asses when the collector cruiser finally finished powering its engines for take off. The enormous vessel took an even greater amount of lift to rocket itself back into space, and the blast back was felt for miles around.

Didn't stop that jackass Delan from showing up so fast I assumed he teleported.

"No! Don't let them get away!" he cried out in that annoying voice of his.

"There's nothing we can do." the commander politely told him, "They're gone."

"Half the colony is in there!" He screamed, "They took Egan and Sam and… and Lillith. Do something!"

So I raise up my shotgun and shouted, "Say one more fucking word! I dare you!"

Was it cool? Was it calm? Was it collected? Hell no, but the look of fear on the dipshits face was satisfying as he fell over backwards and scurried away from us.

"Stand down, Grunt!" The Commander commanded as Ashley Williams leapt into sight, rifle drawn.

"What?" I asked like I didn't just make a full grown man shit himself, "My first instinct was to shoot him, and with the way that guys stupid voice triggers my blood rage you should all be in awe of my self restraint and stately composure. His continued survival is the first of the miracles needed for my Canonization."

I looked over at the Operations Chief and snorted, "Put the peashooter down or you're gonna have a bad time."

"I see the rumors of the company you keep these days are putting a positive spin on the reality." She snarked while keeping her gun trained on me.

"Oh, you already know who we are working with?" Garrus mused with that distinct turian flanging voice.

"I couldn't believe the reports we were getting, but I guess seeing really is believing." the woman spat, "After everything Cerberus did, how could you possibly be working with them."

"The mountains of dead bug men should mean a hell of a lot more to you than it seems too." I laughed, "Keep pointing that worthless lump of plastic at me and I might be nice enough to let you keep the pieces after I snap it in half."

"Grunt is right, Williams." Shepard intervened, "The collectors are working with the reapers and abducting entire human colonies. As things stand, Cerberus is the only organization that is chasing them down."

"And what if Cerberus is working with them, using the threat of the reapers to make you dance to their tune while they pull off whatever insane experiment they are working on right now?" Williams yelled as she pulled her muzzle away from my direction.

"Damn it, Williams!" Garrus spoke up, "You are so focused on Cerberus, you're ignoring the real threat!"

"To be fair," I interrupted, "Once we finish with the collectors Cerberus will go right back up to the top of the worst people in the galaxy list. Somewhere below the entire batarian species, but definitely top two until the reapers invade. They might even stay in the top two if they try to pull a Saren."

"Thank you, Grunt." snarked the Commander, "Thank you for not helping this situation at all."

"Fine!" I barked, "I'm gonna go crack open a bug man and see if the meat is worth the effort."

Five minutes later I discovered that collectors taste like shit. They couldn't even be competent appetizers, let alone enemies. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.

"Hey." Jack called to me, "The way you made that guy shit himself was hot. Come put a baby in me."

My day is saved.