The Revenant is a lightly armored infantry support vehicle designed to fill the gap between the maneuverability of the Ghost and the brutal firepower of the Wraith. Interestingly, the design for the Revenant originated not from the Covenant’s vast war machine but from the Sangheili private sector. The Revenant was originally produced as a utility vehicle for Sangheili frontiersmen who ventured across the hunting preserves in the Qikost moon’s vast wilderness. However, the line between civilian and military application is vague on Sanghelios, where all vehicles can be pressed into combat use during clan wars or intra-keep squabbles.
Oddly, conversion of the Revenant to military application did not change its open cabin, essentially putting the operator and passenger at risk. Whether this is simply a vestigial attribute of the Revenant’s original design, or another Sangheili effort to display their fearlessness, is unknown. In any case, canny pilots keep the Revenant out of sight, and use the mortar’s indirect fire capability to strike from behind cover.
The military Revenant carries a Class-2 medium plasma mortar behind the operator; a class of weapon generally found only on Covenant weapon emplacements and much larger armored vehicles. The weapon’s rapid rate of fire and relatively short range complements the aggressive combat style of the Revenant’s Sangheili drivers, allowing them to provide devastating close artillery support for both ground troops and rapid-strike Ghost squads, and then redeploy to another engagement without pause.
Despite its popularity, the Revenant could not be produced in enough numbers to satisfy demand, and was rarely encountered by
human forces until the ground campaign on
Reach (or, more accurately, there were no survivors left to report its presence). After the Covenant War, Sangheili warlords were quick to acquire the vehicles by favor or force; thousands of Revenants were used during the civil war period, and proved adept at shattering Sangheili lives, homes, and fortresses.