After all, they'll need Marcus’s help if they’re to have any hope of rescuing Kait's mother from the hive. JD makes a tough call: they'll go after his dad first. Naturally, a lot of large monsters appear at inconvenient moments along the way, and Marcus, too, is snatched up by the Swarm, carried away in the belly of an armored beast. After a superb sequence in which our new generation of younger soldiers is reunited with the estranged Marcus – and a stop at the gravesite of JD's mother, Anya – the elder Fenix agrees to come along on the quest to save Reyna and put an end to the Swarm. But the biggest conflict in Gears of War 4 involves JD's father and Kait's mother, and the disparate fates that await them. There's of course a lot of shooting and mayhem and bringing power generators back online over the course of the game's plot. "Maybe even hundreds.") Kait offers a solid explanation: "All this time, the Locust weren’t dead. ("There were dozens of them," says Marcus.
So how did the Locust survive the war? After their defeat, many of them were sealed away in a number of subterranean burial sites. When the Swarm first strikes, both Oscar and Reyna are abducted. They abduct human beings, such as the villagers Kait grew up with, and place them inside organic "pods" to be mutated and made a part of the hive, a.k.a.
Now consisting of a multitude of new forms, many of them truly alien, the Locust have become a hive with a shared consciousness. The reality, it turns out, is far worse: the Locust Horde that nearly wiped out humanity decades earlier is back, and they’ve evolved. After getting caught stealing a COG fabricator to aid the Outsiders' village, Kait, JD, Del, and Kait’s uncle, Oscar (Jimmy Smits), are also accused of "taking" COG citizens who have gone missing in recent months. JD and his best friend, Del Walker (Eugene Byrd), defected from the COG six months prior to the start of the game following a botched mission. JD Fenix (Liam McIntyre), son of original Gears heroes Marcus Fenix (John DiMaggio) and Anya Stroud (Nan McNamara), is found living in the small Outsider village led by Kait’s mother, Reyna (Justina Machado).