User:Flameslash/The Second Battle of Reach (FAT)

The Second Battle of Reach was a major battle in the Great War, and the third largest, behind The Harvest Campaign and The Battle of Earth (FAT). The result was a Covenant victory, although both sides took very heavy losses.

First Naval Battle
The Second Battle of Reach began with a huge Covenant fleet arriving and engaging the fleet mustered by the UNSC after The First Battle of Reach (FAT). The Covenant initially gained the upper hand but were quickly pushed back once the Orbital Defence Platforms joined the fight.

Initial Ground Skirmishes
The Covenant sent in landing craft 4 hours after losing the first naval battle. Almost 4000 landing craft were sent in initially, slipping past the UNSC fleet while Seraphs and Space Banshees provided a distraction. However, they were detected once they entered atmosphere. The UNSC scrambled fighters and sent them to take out the landing craft. Roughly 900 landing craft were destroyed in the ensuing dogfights, and the UNSC fighters took very few losses to the weak defences of the landing craft. The landing craft were also scattered, and landed across the majority of the Viery subcontinent.

For a brief period after landing the Covenant were scattered and disorganized. However, Fleet Master Asco 'Alfatee landed and rallied the troops, ordering them to all gather at his location. Over the two hours it took for all of the Covenant to reach their destination, there was hundreds of small skirmishes between Covenant hordes and UNSC companies sent out to hunt them. There was mixed results in these battles, with some crushing defeats and glorious victories on both sides. The most significant of these battles was when five landing craft's worth of Covenant forces headed through the same pass, and the UNSC sent a battalion to stop them. The Covenant were defeated, but the battalion of UNSC was almost destroyed.

During the night the UNSC sent out scouting parties, most composed of SPARTAN-IIIs and highly trained ODST scout-snipers, to sneak through the hastily erected Covenant defences. The UNSC took minimal losses and several Covenant positions were lost. Eventually, a pair of SPARTAN-IIIs discovered a large Covenant staging ground in an area UNSC satellites didn't cover. All of the scouting parties were recalled, and the UNSC began planning a huge assault on the staging ground, and the Cloaking Spires (which the UNSC didn't recognize) within.

Assault on the Spires
The UNSC's satellites detected the Covenant's Cloaking Spires and gathered together almost 200,000,000 people, and launched a huge vehicular assault on said spires. They took heavy losses but with support from the UNSC Scythe of Kronos and the UNSC To Be Or Not To Be, they managed to destroy the Cloaking Spires. However, the destruction of the spires revealed 3 Covenant Supercarriers. The two UNSC Frigates were quickly destroyed and the Suppercarriers deployed forces to attack three major population centers in New Egypt.

Battles in 'New Egypt'
After the Supercarriers were revealed, they lost no time in sending forces to attack three major population centers in the area nicknamed 'New Egypt'.

The Battle of MACE Base
After the Covenant destroyed most of resistance in the three cities, they headed for MACE Base, a UNSC military center containing the locations of the Orbital Defence Platform Reactors, which powered the only thing stopping the Covenant glassing Reach. All of the survivors from the six SPARTAN-III teams and the 24th, 187th, 219th and 443rd Marine division were all called to defend the base, bringing 70,000 men and women within 10 square miles of the base, where numerous outposts, trenches, and walls had been set up by engineers under orders from the Office of Naval Intelligence a day before. The Covenant rallied almost a million soldiers and charged without strategy. The UNSC managed to beat them back, but took 78% casualties. The Covenant's surviving 20,000 soldiers fell back and joined up with three and a half million newly arrived reinforcements.

Before the Covenant could launch another assault, the 11th, 17th, 44th, 102nd and 243rd Marine divisions and 27 divsion-less battalions, 79,000 men and women in total, flanked them and killed the majority before they counterattacked. The Marines in the defence network charged and aided their reinforcements, and the Covenant forces were crushed in a pincer movement. However, the Covenant was not beaten. They launched a huge aerial attack with roughly two thousand banshees, seraphs and vampires, looping around, striking at different times from different heights, with thousands crashing into their allies and slamming into the Marines below.

The UNSC Air Force responded within two hours, withdrawing almost all of their aircraft within 350 miles and launching a joint mission with the Army Air Arm. Rumour has it that the sun had been blotted out with aircraft, and the ground was covered with hills of wreckage before the Covenant broke off and fled, nearly half their number having fallen from the sky. However, a dozen cities fell without air support due to this, and all but 20,000 Marines, barely a Division, were killed. SPARTAN-II Red Team arrived and the forces pulled back to MACE base's outer runways and roads, using the hundreds of wrecks in the area to their advantage to hold the area. Dante-057 and Vinh-030 were killed and almost all of the Marines fell before HIGHCOM ordered a retreat.

The survivors fled into the tunnels beneath MACE Base and used them to bypass the Covenant who surrounded them, and escaped into the mountains east of MACE Base.