Offensive Bias

"The metarch looms over us, a servant greater than its masters, and, I hope, untainted. Soon we will know."

- The IsoDidact musing on Offensive Bias just before the Battle of the greater Ark

08-145 Offensive Bias is a metarch-class Forerunner artificial intelligence. One of the few Contender-class ancillas, it was created to counter the rampant AI Mendicant Bias. It commanded the last of the Forerunners' defenses at the greater Ark and at the final battle of the Forerunners. While seemingly less creative and independent than Mendicant Bias, Offensive Bias was still capable of coordinating inconceivable numbers of ships, sentinels, personnel, as well as an original Halo and the systems of the greater Ark simultaneously. More importantly, Offensive Bias was designed to be far more methodically lethal than Mendicant Bias.

Fall of the Forerunners
In the twilight hours of the Forerunner-Flood war, Offensive Bias was given charge of the last of the uninfected Forerunner ships and fleets. Shortly thereafter, Offensive Bias apparently took command of the defense of the greater Ark, the last large refuge of the Forerunners and many of their client species. It appears that the Forerunners accepted that only Offensive Bias was capable of matching Mendicant Bias's moves, as it were. As such, it was Offensive Bias who fired Omega Halo, by command of the Master Builder and then attempted to defend it against Mendicant Bias's Flood-crewed fleet, supported by star roads and other Precursor artifacts. It failed terribly, which may have fed into Mendicant Bias's disdain towards it, having previously referred to Offensive as an "inferior metarch". Such an attitude however, would only play into Offensive Bias's strategy.

Despite the devastating losses at the greater Ark, Offensive Bias was able to extricate a small number of warships from the destruction and make it to the lesser Ark. Before initializing the Halo's firing sequence with the IsoDidact, Offensive Bias announced that Flood forces were approaching the portal that led to the lesser Ark; simultaneously, Mendicant Bias sent a coded message to Offensive stating that it would give no quarter and would destroy the Ark. Mendicant offered Offensive a chance to join it and survive; Offensive rejected the offer and informed the IsoDidact of it, to reassure him that it was still free from the logic plague. Sharing all of its processes with the Ark's command Citadel, Offensive Bias then assisted the IsoDidact in preparing the Ark and Halo Array. Once the IsoDidact gave the order and the Array started to prime, Offensive Bias's attention shifted as it took the final Forerunner fleets to the Maginot Line to confront Mendicant Bias and prevent it from gaining access to the lesser Ark, its sole objective to buy time.



Firing of the Array
Even though Mendicant Bias's fleet outnumbered Offensive Bias's by 436.6:1, Offensive Bias was designed specifically to effectively counter and exploit Mendicant's rampant actions. During the battle, Offensive Bias played for time, allowing Mendicant Bias's rage to cause him to act irrationally and take its time in destroying Offensive Bias's fleet. After about eight hours of combat, the Array was fired which, aside from killing all sentient life in the galaxy, disabled the majority of Mendicant's fleet which was crewed by the Flood and out of its direct control. After the Halos fired, the advantage turned towards Offensive Bias: it had planned for the Halo effect, while Mendicant Bias had not, and nearly all its vessels could be commanded by it directly, including ones previously captured by the Flood. Within two minutes, Mendicant Bias was outsmarted and defeated by Offensive Bias, who utilized the now-crewless ships with a ruthless, unconventional efficiency, revealing its capability for methodical lethality. Mendicant Bias's fleet was annihilated and the rogue ancilla itself captured and separated into its constituent minds, its primary core delivered to the lesser Ark by Offensive Bias.

Offensve Bias was thereafter tasked with watching over Mendicant Bias' burial site on the Ark until such a time he was later recalled to fend off a new galactic threat.

Zeta Halo
Around one century (77 years, in 97,368 BCE) after the firing of the Halo Array, and the subsequently mysterious survival of the Xalanyn after the event, the Grand Edict assigned Offensive Bias to Installation 07 alongside 117649 Despondent Pyre to guard the Xalanyn's prison.

Terminal logs
What follows is a logged transcript of events that occurred during and amidst the battle, as logged by Offensive Bias itself.

Production notes
Offensive Bias was first visually-depicted in the Halo Encyclopedia (2022 edition), in an illustration created by artist Levi Hoffmeier - more well-known as the artist for the fanwork Halo: A Fistful of Arrows. In the book, Offensive Bias is canonised as using the visual appearance of the Guardian Sentinel enemies trialled and cut from Halo 3 - with the Guardian hologram on the multiplayer map Epitaph directly called out as Offensive Bias.

While designing the illustration for the book, Hoffmeier played with the idea that a standard Contender-class AI shell may be able to dock with a Guardian Sentinel's eye socket, allowing the two designs to coexist alongside one another. In this depiction, Offensive Bias' core shell would be similar to those of Mendicant Bias and Invariant Bias, simply housed in a Guardian Sentinel for combat operations. When mocking-up the image, he additionally did a scale image using the Halo 3 Ark skybox to depict the size of Offensive Bias and how he may be scaled if encountered up-close, using the aforementioned Contender shell in the eye (albeit flipped upside down).

Trivia

 * In Halo 4, Offensive Bias' sigil appears on the "Refractive" weapon skin for the Z-130 Suppressor, alongside the sigils of the Didact and Librarian.
 * In Halo 5 Infection games, if Exuberant Witness is selected as one's multiplayer announcer, she will declare the player as "Offensive Bias" if they earn a Zombicide medal.

List of appearances

 * Halo 3
 * Terminals
 * Halo 4
 * Halo: Silentium
 * Halo 5: Guardians
 * Halo Mythos: A Guide to the Story of Halo
 * Halo Infinite