The New York Times bestselling origin story from the Master Chief—part of the expanded universe predicated on the award-winning video game series Halo!

The twenty-sixth century. Humanity has extended beyond Earth’s program to hundreds of planets that colonists now call home. But the United Globe Government and the United Nations Space Command is certainly struggling to regulate this vast empire. After exhausting all strategies to maintain seething colonial insurrections from exploding right into a full-blown about HALO: Nov Reach interplanetary civil battle, the UNSC has one last hope. At the Office of Naval Cleverness, Dr. Catherine Halsey has been hard at work on a top-secret plan that could provide an end towards the conflict…and it starts with seventy-five kids, among them a six-year-old boy called John. And Halsey could under no circumstances reckon that this child will eventually end up being the final hope against an even greater peril engulfing the galaxy—the inexorable confrontation using a theocratic armed service alliance of alien races known as the Covenant.

This is the electrifying origin story of Spartan John-117—the Get better at Main—and of his legendary, unstoppable heroism in leading the resistance against humanity’s possible extinction.