Atriox

"I am not Tartarus or some fanatic. I am not Truth. I am not Regret. I am their remedy."

- Atriox to a group of would-be assassins.

Atriox is a powerful Jiralhanae and the warlord that leads the Banished. He originally fought on behalf of the Covenant but was banished after thwarting his own execution. A deadly warrior and brilliant military leader, Atriox inspired many others to join him in exile. He has led his followers for over a decade, during which time he amassed an large amount of ordnance and materiel, especially following the collapse of the Covenant Empire in 2552. By 2558, he had become a symbol for even Jiralhanae not serving with the Banished to rally around. Atriox's full ambitions are unclear, but they are grandiose. His largest play for power came in 2559, when he led a large force to Installation 00 with the intention to use its forges to build Halo rings. After months of occupying the Ark, the Banished were confronted by the and a battle for control of the immense Forerunner construction ensued. In a matter of days, Atriox lost his fleet's flagship and a newly constructed Halo was sent through a portal to the Soell system, placing it beyond his reach.

Covenant service and banishment
"With every victory his legend and his hatred of the Covenant grew. Eventually both were impossible to conceal, and they tried to banish him."

- Isabel recounts Atriox's history.

Atriox was once a member of the Covenant military. During the empire's war against humanity, he honed his tenacity and shrewd strategic planning. The Covenant used Atriox's clan as frontline soldiers against the United Nations Space Command. Groups of 40 would be sent to storm enemy positions, clearing the way for follow-up attacks, but typically all of the attackers would die in the process. Atriox was the first to return as the sole survivor of one such suicide mission — a feat which he repeated after that. As he continued to lose his pack-mates, his resentment toward the Covenant, and the Prophets in particular, grew. Tales of his improbable survival made him legendary in the eyes of many. However, Atriox did not believe in the Great Journey and viewed the genocide of the humans as wanton. His increasingly celebrated reputation was seen as a threat by the Hierarchs. When his hatred and heresy eventually became impossible for him to conceal, and upon returning from yet another suicidal strike against a human position at some point in the 2540s, he was met by a group of Sangheili who had been ordered to execute him. Realizing what was intended, Atriox surrendered his gravity hammer and dropped to his knees, seemingly accepting of his sentence. When an energy sword was thrust toward his face, however, he caught the blade with his right hand, rose to his feet, and killed his would-be executioner. The other Sangheili drew their swords and prepared to attack him together, but at that moment other Jiralhanae who had been watching, including a particularly fearsome Brute known as Decimus, leapt into action. Inspired by Atriox's defiance, they slaughtered the Sangheili. Decimus kneeled before Atriox as other howled in affirmation of their decision to follow him, and from this moment, the group that would come to be called Banished was born. Now being enemies of the Covenant, the Banished were forced to become self-reliant. Atriox's subordinates were mostly Jiralhanae, but there were also Unggoy that had already been assigned to certain Jiralhanae and those who were kidnapped from the Covenant and pressed into servitude. They took to raiding Covenant resources to not only survive, but to continuously build themselves as well. Eventually, the UNSC became a target of these raids as well. In early January 2550, the Banished raided the Carter Guard Armory. Atriox personally killed a group of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers defending it with his bare hands. Helmet cam footage from Sergeant B. Wright, an ODST killed in the raid, provided the Office of Naval Intelligence with its first look at Atriox, who was identified to agents by a captured Unggoy that had been forced to serve him. The attack on the armory was unique because the Covenant typically did not bother to steal UNSC equipment, whereas the Banished emptied the place of gear. That same year, they moved against a Covenant training camp. When the UNSC deployed Marines to this camp in June, they found it depleted of all vehicles and weaponry with no signs of life but for a few dead Sangheili. This evidence, when reviewed months later, offered the first indication to ONI that Atriox was not only raiding, but recruiting as well. By November 2550, Covenant-held locations had been found in similar states seven different times, the most recent of which was a forward outpost meant to be attacked as part of Operation: SLOW DIVE. The ONI agents monitoring Atriox's activities surmised that they might be able to use his guerrilla tactics to their advantage when it came to coordinating their own offensives against the Covenant and even dared to wonder if some sort of agreement could be reached with him.

Seizing an opportunity
"I see you for what you are and what you could be. We can do great things together. Not as master and slaves, but as the warriors you truly are -- free to continue your crusade without the shackles of outdated faith."

- Atriox to Resa 'Azavayl and the rest of his Silent Shadow squad.

With the demise of the Covenant Empire in 2552, Atriox acquired numerous weapons and soldiers once belonging to its vast military. Atriox's experience fighting against the Covenant gave the Banished a strong advantage over other factions in the post-Covenant War galactic environment. The collapse of the former hegemony also afforded him and his Banished an enormous opportunity to fill new power vacuums and to consolidate weaponry, vehicles, and ships left behind or weakly held. At last, the faction could stop having to run from the Covenant after attacking it with guerrilla tactics.

At some point following the Great Schism, a squad of the Special Operations division, the Silent Shadow, began to mercilessly hunt down and slaughter groups of Jiralhanae and any others found associating with them. Atriox was leading from a captured, Elegy's Lament, at the time. The Silent Shadow, led by Resa 'Azavayl, managed to infiltrate the vessel and catch several Jiralhanae off-guard thanks to the use of active camouflage. An alarm was soon sounded, tipping Atriox off to the assassins' presence on his ship. When the Sangheili finally approached Atriox on the bridge, he was ready. He invited the would-be assassins to show themselves and proceeded to question their motives. Resa had been unaware that his target was Atriox, whom he called "the betrayer". Atriox conceded that he would gladly fight the Silent Shadow if necessary, but he made it clear that it would be in the interests of all involved to join forces. He mocked their short-sightedness and stubborn adherence to old hatreds. Resa was not swayed from his task upon hearing Atriox's words, but the others responded quite differently, driving their energy swords into their leader's back and allowing themselves to be welcomed into the Banished. The most powerful asset he gained was the Enduring Conviction, along with her experienced Sangheili crew and warriors. By May 6, 2553, ONI learned of a recent engagement the carrier had been a prominent part of. Atriox had previously raided an air base formerly belonging to the Covenant but had apparently been captured and taken aboard the ship as a prisoner. Twelve hours later, Enduring Conviction broke formation and severed contact with the rest of the fleet it was attached to. The Conviction was hailed, warned, and then fired upon when her crew ignored orders. The Conviction performed evasive maneuvers, returned fire and escaped. The ONI operatives examining the matter concluded that the manner in which the Conviction escaped her fellow Covenant ships matched a previous encounter the UNSC had with the ship during the war and that this was indicative that Atriox had not taken it over by force. Instead, it seemed to them that his capture was either a ruse from the start on behalf of both parties or that Atriox simply allowed himself to be taken so that he could make a proposal to Let 'Volir, the carrier's shipmaster. Whatever the case, the fact of the matter is that soon after escaping, 'Volir and his crew reluctantly swore fealty to the Banished on neutral territory--an orbital installation. In exchange for their unquestioning loyalty, the Banished would supply the crew and fuel the Enduring Conviction indefinitely. The ONI operatives analyzing the ship's shift of allegiance surmised that Atriox would lay low for a while after securing such a prize, as he would have painted a metaphorical target on himself in doing so.

By the end of 2553, ONI operatives were aware that Lekgolo had begun to be incorporated into the Banished in addition to multitudes of ex-Covenant who simply didn't wish to stop fighting. On at least one occasion following the acquisition of the large boost to his forces that 'Volir brought, the Banished sacked an entire human city. By January 2558, some salvagers knew of Atriox, but only to the extent that he led a group competing for plunder and salvage. By March, however, his trail had run cold as far as the ONI agents keeping track of him were concerned. The last time they had heard of him he had captured a number of Huragok. Following the firing of one of the two agents in question, frequent surveillance of his acts ceased as far as they were concerned. Unknown to them, their conversations about Atriox had been spied on without their knowledge for years by Section Zero, meaning they were not the only ones with knowledge of the Jiralhanae warmaster.

The Ark
"Get everyone you can on that ring. Take it from the humans. Prove you are still worth your price."

- Atriox to Let 'Volir.

Following the subjugation of Earth by the Created in October 2558, the portal linking Installation 00 to Earth shut down without any warning for those stationed on the installation. A month later, the Atriox and the Banished arrived in force aboard the Enduring Conviction. Atriox charged Decimus with leading the massacre of the humans on its surface. In little time, the humans had all been killed and the Ark belonged to the Banished. Atriox had led them there in order to construct a Halo ring, but the ability to do so apparently eluded him. Over the next four months the Banished established mining and resource extracting operations on the Ark and mastered its portal network for quick translocation across it.

In May 2559, the, a retrofitted that had been missing for 28 years, arrived at the Ark after being pulled through a portal by an unknown entity. The Banished's presence went unknown to the ship, which dispatched a reconnaissance team and a trio of Spartans to investigate a distress signal coming from the Henry Lamb Research Outpost. Anticipating the arrival of the Spartans at the outpost, Atriox and a number of other Jiralhanae hid inside it and waited. After the three humans retrieved the artificial intelligence and source of the distress beacon, Isabel, Atriox sprung the trap. He managed to surprise them by lunging from the shadows to grab Alice-130 and lift her into the air. The others immediately reacted by engaging Atriox with short bursts of gunfire, but the massive Jiralhanae responded in turn by battering them with his powered gauntlet and gravity mace. All three were easily kept at bay by Atriox, who outmatched them in strength and durability. Douglas-042 and Jerome-092 both managed to get in close and stab and slash him with combat knives, respectively, but Atriox did not even react to the wounds. After tossing Alice and Jerome away he used brute force to clamp down on Douglas' Mjolnir armor with his powered gauntlet, rendering him incapacitated. From there, he slammed him with Chainbreaker, the gravity mace, sending him flying and knocking his helmet off. As Alice and Jerome cautiously recovered Douglas, now unable to even stand and teetering on the edge of consciousness, Atriox mocked the Spartans and the legends that had sprung up around them among the Covenant. Alice and Jerome dragged Douglas away while Atriox just laughed. After they had gone, he ordered the Jiralhanae in the outpost with him to hunt them down and to find out where they had come from.

Personality and traits
"Vengeance is petty. Vengeance has no reward."

- Atriox responding to Resa 'Azavayl's animosity towards his species.

Cunning and brilliant, Atriox is a deadly warrior and a skilled military commander leading the vast army of the Banished. He is highly ambitious, seemingly holding power for its own sake as his supreme value and motivation. Atriox is a versatile soldier, collecting and repurposing former Covenant military weapons, vehicles, and other equipment to allow the Banished to gain strength against other factions.

Harboring a hatred of the Covenant and its remnants, Atriox seems to follow a philosophy of utter, amoral pragmatism, focusing solely on gathering power for himself and the Banished as a whole and ignoring whatever he cannot leverage as a useful asset. He is apathetic to the brutality and suffering that prevail in the Banished's ranks as long as he gains results, and has no attachment to faith, actively lauding it as outdated and needless. Likewise, he does not care for the Sangheili-Jiralhanae feud and views the Sangheili as warriors with potential usefulness to him; he is also fluent in basic Sangheili. His open minded philosophy was also demonstrated by his interactions with the UNSC crew of the Spirit of Fire. During the fight at the Henry Lamb Research Outpost, Atriox intentionally let Red Team escape with his forces in pursuit, both as a show of power and to discover where the Spartans came from. After encountering the Spartans of Red Team, it amused him when he confirmed that they were indeed only humans beneath their armor. He subsequently mocked them by calling them "little demons". Later, on Installation 04C, he offered Captain Cutter and the Spirit of Fire another chance to walk away, and was impressed by Cutter's refusal to do so.

Equipment
Atriox wears signature, unique black and white combat armor of partially United Nations Space Command origin made from various pieces, including an ODST chestplate. He dons an augmented power gauntlet which artificially enhances his strength to a significant degree. The gauntlet also affords him the use of a protesthetic thumb on his left hand, as he lost his after stopping a strike from an energy sword. He wields a customized energy mace called Chainbreaker, which he created from parts of a Type-2 gravity hammer.

Behind the scenes

 * Atriox serves as the primary antagonist of Halo Wars 2, with Dan Ayoub of 343 Industries desiring to tell a deep story with the character in the game's cinematics. First being introduced in the announcement teaser for Halo Wars 2 as an unidentified Jiralhanae leader, Atriox's name and nature were expanded upon at the 2016 Electronic Entertainment Expo, where it was also revealed that Atriox would serve as one of the game's six playable leader characters at launch.
 * Following the pseudo-Latin theme of most Jiralhanae names, Atriox likely comes from the Latin atrox ("furious", "savage"), the root of the English atrocious and atrocity. Notably, Atriox features neither the -us nor the -um suffixes present in the names of most mature Jiralhanae.
 * As part of the War of Wits marketing campaign, specifically The Sale in which he is depicted as a used car salesman, Atriox was given a fake bio on the website of the real-life car dealership Camacho Auto Sales. According to his profile, Though new to sales, Atriox has over a decade of management experience as leader of The Banished. Like his favorite weapon, an energy mace known as "Chainbreaker," Atriox is fond to claim his deals are "off the chain."
 * Atriox is voiced by actor John DiMaggio. DiMaggio previously voiced the generic Brute chieftains in Halo 3 and Halo 3: ODST.

List of appearances

 * Know Your Enemy
 * Halo: Tales from Slipspace
 * Hunting Party
 * Halo: Smoke and Shadow
 * War of Wits: The Sale
 * War of Wits: The Armrest
 * Halo Wars 2