YMMV / Guilty Sparks

• Nightmare Fuel: The normal creation of husks is disturbing enough, the Plague Spreader makes it even more so by making the conversion its main weapon via tentacle impalement, and it only takes seconds to become a husk.
  • When the Flood make their grand entrance, they do it with their usual Nightmare-tastic flair (the author outright says at the end of their introductory chapter that the Flood are why the fic is tagged with "Horror" as one of its genres). Particularly terrifying is Varvok & Zek's experience with them, including learning the hard way that the normal fiction rule regarding zombies doesn't apply to Combat Forms.
    • It's especially scary in their case since unlike Master Chief and Shepard, they're Badass Normal at best.
  • Tali has an entire chapter dedicated to her being stalked through a swamp by dozens of Flood combat forms while fighting off both an infection caused by a suit rupture and horrific visions of her dead loved ones taunting her, courtesy of Flood spores infecting her brain. The entire sequence is bleak, intense, and feels like something straight out of Alien or a zombie flick. And what's worse, is that the experience is just the first in a long Trauma Congaline that Tali will be enduring for the remainder of the series.
  • When the Flood attack the Plague Spreader, it tries to infect them, turning them into husks. It sort of works, but not really- Huskification injects implants and armor into a person's body and subverts the neural system to take control... but the Flood don't use the nervous system. The entire body is one big Flood organism. So all this does is give them armor, making them harder to kill. Whoops.
• The Woobie: Like most Unggoy, Kayap does not have it easy, and is pleasantly surprised by how well Liara treats him. Life still sucks for him as he's dragged into still more firefights and fails to convince his friends to defect to Liara's side, forcing him and his new allies to kill them.
  • It's almost amusing how he steadily gets angrier at how literally every other race in the Covenant seems to be getting upgrades that help them, while the best the Unggoy can get is lies, death, horrible medical experimentation, or some insane combination of the three.