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My friend once asked me about the Halo storyline. I couldn't finish it naturally so here it is. (its not the whole thing. Just the rough timeline and major events. And its not copy and paste from some halo website so it may have some problems) Enjoy:D

100,000 years before the 21st Century, a race of beings called the Forerunners rule the galaxy. Their technology unmatched and unrivalled by any other races at that time. However, even the most powerful race cannot survive indefinitely. In their far-sighted conquest of the universe, the Forerunners discovered the Flood on a distant planet on the edge of the galaxy. The Forerunners made the mistake of treating the Flood as a disease instead of a threat. Instead of declaring war on the Flood, they quarantined it. The attempt to quarantine it was a failure and the Flood, as an intelligent virus, infected thousands of Forerunner worlds. The Forerunners affected were transformed into hideous and mutated ''flood bodies''.

The Forerunners, as a last resort, created the Halo Array: seven Halos. Halos are rings that are 10,000 km in diameter and when activated, kills of all sentient, intelligent life in a 25,000 light-year radius. Before activating, the Forerunners created humanity from the Forerunner gene pool. They put humans inside this special ship called the Ark. The Ark will protect from the inhabitants inside it , from the Halo rings.

Finally, the Forerunners sacrificed themselves by firing the Halo rings.In a single day, a galaxy spanning race died out. Without the Forerunners, which they consider food, the Flood starved itself out and nearly went extinct. Now the only Flood left is contained on the Halo rings....

21st century

Humanity's travel into the stars was made possible by a special spacecraft engine called a "slipspace" engine. If i'm not wrong, this engine warps spacetime and allows the ship to travel faster than light.

Year 2100- Year 2400 saw humans expand across 500 planets all over the Milky Way galaxy. However, the divided humanity causes many wars to erupt, including the rainforest wars in South America to full space wars like the Jovian Campaign between Earth and the Jupiter moons. The UNSC ( United Nations Space Command) is created to stop humanity being so fractured and divided and quickly becomes a supergovernment of humanity.

The Covenant, a faction of multiple alien races, first contacted humanity around the Year 2525. The leader of the Covenant, also known as the Prophets realised that the human race was the direct descendant of the mysterious, long-extinct alien race called the Forerunners.

The Covenant are following this religion called the Great Journey, in which they believe that Forerunners are ''Gods". They believe that at the end of the Great Journey, they will ascend to the heavens and be with the Forerunners. The key to unlock the gateway to the heavens is through the enigmatic Halo rings. They believe that the rings, once activated, will cleanse their beings and transcend to be with the Forerunners.

The Covenant Armada StarFleet was winning even at the start of the Human-Covenant War. Covenants use have superior technology in terms of warfare and vastly outnumber the human race. The Covenant are composed of 7 different sentient races. The religious leaders are the Prophets while the main guardians of the Prophets are a race called Elites ( a.k.a Sangheli in the Covenant language)

World by world, humanity failed and fell. Billions of human lives on over 400 planets were lost. The Covenant easily destroyed the human space defences with their superior starships and then annihilated the ground cities by space-to-ground plasma bombardment. The result is entire cities destroyed without a single Covenant life lost.

As a last resort, the humans created the SPARTAN project to create supersoldiers enhanced with greater strength, endurance and reflexes. They were armed with only the best weopons and trained for half a lifetime. Many did not survive the extreme training. Ok, lets skip this part.

Events of Halo1. I won't spoil the game by telling you the story but I'll start with the events just before Halo 1.

After Reach( the most militarised planet in the UNSC) fell prey to the ruthless Covenant, a human ship with Captain Keyes and Spartan 117 ( which you will play as of course) followed a Covenant cruiser along an unknown slipspace trajectory, landing the human spacecraft in orbit around a gas giant planet called Threshold. To the human's' surprise, an incredible ring 10,000 km in diameter was found orbiting the gas giant. This is where the game starts.