Vertical Umbrage

Vertical Umbrage keyart by William "Pixelflare" Cameron.

Vertical Umbrage (sometimes styled Vertical Umbrage: A Halo Waypoint Chronicle) is a short story written by 343 Industries and released on November 7, 2022, to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the release of Halo 4. The story is set in early 2558 during the Requiem Campaign, concurrently with the Spartan Ops mission Everything Has Gone Wrong. The story follows the SPARTAN-IV soldiers of Fireteam Shadow as they board the Zanar-pattern light cruiser Panom's Canticle - a series of events overheard in the Spartan Ops level but not visualised.

Halopedia maintains an unaltered text archive of the Vertical Umbrage short story, should the original page go offline. The text transcript can be found here. The story was also later released as a free-to-download PDF (available here), and as an audiobook on YouTube narrated by Alex Wakeford (available here).

Summary

Operation: VERTICAL UMBRAGE takes place alongside the Halo 4: Spartan Ops mission “Everything Has Gone Wrong,” during the UNSC’s campaign to drive Jul ‘Mdama’s Covenant faction off Requiem.

Appearances

Characters AI Roland Forerunner Ur-Didact (Mentioned only) Human John-117 (Indirect mention) Horatio Fry Jason Kidman (First appearance) Nina Kovan Jared Miller Sarah Palmer (Mentioned only) Bonita Stone Sangheili Jul 'Mdama (Mentioned only) Ryn 'Alun (First appearance) Species Forerunner (Mentioned only) Human Kig-Yar Sangheili Unggoy Organizations Covenant (Mentioned only) Unified Earth Government United Nations Space Command Spartan Operations SPARTAN-IV program Fireteam Crimson (Mentioned only) Fireteam Shadow Jul 'Mdama's Covenant Silent Blade Locations Requiem The Refuge High Charity (Mentioned only)

Events Battle of Requiem (Mentioned only) Requiem Campaign Battle at The Refuge Operation: VERTICAL UMBRAGE Weapons Energy sword M6 Spartan Laser M6/E Spartan Laser Selene's Lance M9 fragmentation grenade MA5D assault rifle Type-33 needler SRS99-S5 AM sniper rifle Abbey (First appearance) Vehicles D79-TC Pelican Charon-class light frigate UNSC Forward Unto Dawn (Indirect mention) Infinity-class supercarrier UNSC Infinity (Mentioned only) Gloto'kef-pattern Assault Carapace Ru'swum-pattern Phantom Zanar-pattern light cruiser Panom's Canticle Technology and equipment Summit MJOLNIR Powered Assault Armor (GEN2) GOBLIN-class Mjolnir GUNGNIR-class Mjolnir OPERATOR-class Mjolnir Pinch fusion reactor TQ-8 seeker drone Type-3 active camouflage Visual Intelligence System, Reconnaissance Wyrd III optics suite (Indirect mention) Z-90 hardlight shield

Trivia

The Ur-Didact's quote in the story is an alternate version of his awakening originally recorded by the late voice actor David Anthony Pizzuto in the Composing A Universe featurette included in the limited edition of Halo 4: Original Soundtrack.

External links

• Halo 4 - Vertical Umbrage - The official Waypoint post in which the short story was released for free.
• Archive:Vertical Umbrage - Halopedia's own archived backup of the short story.
• Official Vertical Umbrage PDF - The PDF of the short story released on Halo Waypoint (Archived copy).
• Halo: Vertical Umbrage | Audiobook - The audiobook narrated by Alex Wakeford.