Falchion

The Falchion was a Forerunner Warrior-Servant commander and one of the nine commanders trained during the Ur-Didact's thousand-year exile. Although he worked with the Builders for nine hundred years, he maintained his inward loyalty to the Warrior-Servants and the Didact, unlike many other Warriors.

Battle for the 78th Thema
The Falchion was one of the commanders who led the defense of the Orion complex during the Forerunner-Flood war. In the endgame of the conflict, after most of the remaining Forerunners had been evacuated to safety at the greater Ark, he commanded an element of the Forerunner forces in one of the last major engagements against the Flood. With four themas at risk of being completely overrun, the Falchion was placed in command of the first clench of the Forerunner defensive line; the clench encompassed forces within nineteen systems formerly linked by star roads. His forces included twelve Fortress-class vessels, their mobility limited due to space-time debt, acting as apex control stations for 700,000 Harrier-class vessels. Meanwhile, the Flood's forces consisted of over 100,000 captured vessels, with the most powerful ones being 400 dreadnoughts. The Flood first breached the Falchion's clench at the 78th Thema, a pre-stellar nebula home to numerous stony and icy planets and asteroids. The first Flood ships were caught off-guard by the Falchion's forces; using Precursor neural physics transmission for transit, they materialized slowly, making them temporarily vulnerable to the Forerunners' immediate response.

The Falchion ordered the Harriers to launch a series of precision strikes using local asteroids launched via gravity slings straight into the emergence fields of the Flood vessels; by refraining from using directed energy weapons or projectiles, the Forerunner ships could remain concealed for longer. The attacks destroyed half of the arriving vessels, while the other half scattered across a few thousand kilometers in order to evade the barrage of asteroids. The Falchion then dispatched a multi-pronged force of Harriers to deal with the remaining ships. Engaging the Flood-controlled ships openly with their beam weapons, the harriers quickly destroyed a third of the enemy fleet.

By this point, the Flood's forces had been neutralized, with some of the remaining ships intact but in no condition to fight back. These were examined by the Falchion's ancillas, which then sent their designators to sentinels deployed from an apex fortress. The sentinels were sent to board the Flood vessels and swiftly reprogram all Flood-corrupted control ancillas; however, although they had supposedly been proofed against the Gravemind's AI corruption, the machines were quickly subverted by the Flood. This left the Falchion with no other choice than to destroy the infected ships one by one.

Trivia
A falchion is a type of single-edged sword of European origin.

List of appearances

 * Halo: Silentium