Fall of Reach
The Fall of Reach, though brief, was of great significance for John. Here, he received the Mjolnir Mark V Powered Assault Armor, which improved his strength and reaction time more effectively than his older Mark IV suit. He was also introduced to and partnered with the AI Cortana, who would become a close friend and ally to him. In the first test of their partnership, the two were put through a practically suicidal test in an attempt by Colonel Ackerson to get rid of John. John refused to cheat the test and was determined to win it by Ackerson's rules. Despite nearly being killed, Cortana and John's teamwork had them pass the test in an early show of the incredible partnership the two would come to develop. After Reach came under attack by a massive Covenant armada, the majority of the Spartans, led by Fred S-104, went to the planet's surface to protect the Orbital Defense Generators which powered the planet's twenty Orbital Defense Platforms. John, with Linda and James-005, were sent to Reach Station Gamma to destroy an unsecured NAV database on board the UNSC Circumference. If the Covenant obtained the database, they would discover the location of every human world, including Earth; the location of Earth by then was still a closely guarded secret. The NAV database was destroyed, but Linda and James were ambushed by Covenant Sangheili; James was lost in space, and Linda was critically wounded. John saved four other Marines on the station, including Staff Sergeant Avery Johnson. The team returned to the UNSC Pillar of Autumn and was placed into cryo-sleep as the ship landed on, then fled Reach and, following the Cole Protocol, jumped into Slipspace with coordinates deduced by Cortana from constellation data retrieved earlier, in hopes of leading the Covenant away from Earth.
Installation 04
Once the ship had arrived safely at Installation 04, the crew realized that the UNSC Halcyon-class light cruiser UNSC Pillar of Autumn had been followed through Slipspace by around a dozen Covenant ships, who ultimately engaged the Autumn and sent several boarding parties to board the ship. Captain Jacob Keyes ordered John to be woken from cryosleep, and tasked him with ensuring the escape of Cortana (who was the ship's AI), while he crash-landed the Pillar of Autumn on the unidentified ring.
John escaped the Pillar of Autumn on a life pod, and rallied Marines to fight against Covenant forces stationed on the ring. Cortana found out that Captain Keyes had been captured and was held prisoner on the CCS-class Truth and Reconciliation, by way of hacking into the Covenant battlenet. John joined the strike team that was sent to rescue Captain Keyes, where he learned that "Halo" was a super weapon. The Captain gave John new orders, to locate the map room that pinpointed the location of Halo's Control Center. When John was finished, he was dropped off in the first of three snowy chasms leading towards the Control Room. During the long trek, he encountered Fire Team Zulu and they assisted him in securing the first and second chasms.
Initially, fighting on Halo was between UNSC and Covenant forces, but after Covenant forces had unwittingly released an ancient parasite, the majority of both forces were infected, and the fighting shifted to combating the new enemy.
Flood infestation of Installation 04
— Cortana
“Yes… activate Halo's defenses, and destroy the Flood, which is why we brought the Index to the Control Center.”
— John-117
John-117 was sent out by Installation 04's Monitor, 343 Guilty Spark, to retrieve the Index, an activation device for the Halo ring that John-117 is led to believe would destroy all Flood forms within a large radius. Upon John's return to Halo's Control Room, Cortana revealed that Halo's true purpose is to destroy all sentient life forms in the galaxy to starve the Flood, not to kill the Flood themselves. John was then forced to disrupt Halo's firing system by disabling Halo's Phase Pulse Generator in order to delay the Monitor's plan.
John soon joined the three-sided combat among the Covenant, the Flood and the Forerunners' Sentinels. Soon after, he tried to rescue Captain Keyes, but was too late. Captain Keyes had been transformed into a Proto-Gravemind Flood form. After infiltrating the Truth and Reconciliation, John managed to retrieve the Captain's neural implants, which he used to activate the Pillar of Autumn's self-destruct sequence. He then proceeded to the hangar of the ship and stole a Banshee. John and Cortana barely made it back to the Autumn with the Banshee only to discover that ship was crawling with both Flood and Covenant alike. After the self-destruct sequence was aborted by 343 Guilty Spark, he proceeded to manually overload the fusion reactors, which would subsequently destroy both the Pillar of Autumn and Installation 04.
After successfully destroying the fusion reactors on the Pillar of Autumn, John-117 used a Warthog to reach the extraction point where Pelican Echo 419 would pick him up. John-117 reached the extraction point, only to witness the Pelican crashing into the Autumn's hull after being shot down by a pair of Banshees. John quickly diverted his escape route towards the ship's hangar bay, which housed a Longsword fighter. Only a handful of UNSC forces survived, including Lieutenant Elias Haverson, Corporal Locklear, Warrant Officer Sheila Polaski, then-Staff Sergeant Avery Johnson, Private First Class Chips Dubbo, and then-Staff Sergeant Marcus Stacker.
Journey to Earth and Operation: FIRST STRIKE
After the destruction of Alpha Halo, Cortana and John-117 fled through space in the Longsword they had escaped in. He discovered three cryotubes floating nearby, one containing Linda-058, and retrieved them. Soon after, the Covenant's flagship Ascendant Justice came into the system along with a few cruisers, some of which had possibly escaped Halo's destruction and called the flagship to Threshold. A nearby Pelican dropship, which had docked on an asteroid floating among Halo's debris field,fired at the cruiser to distract it. After a successful escape from the Covenant battle group, John linked the two vessels and brought its passengers aboard the Longsword. The crew of the Pelican then helped John in capturing the Ascendant Justice; the human survivors then traveled to Reach to look for surviving Spartans. John eventually located some of his fellow Spartan-IIs on Reach, along with Vice Admiral Danforth Whitcomb and Dr. Catherine Halsey. They returned to the ship and linked it with the UNSC frigate UNSC Gettysburg. They began to travel toward Earth and soon discovered a base belonging to the Eridanus Rebels, led by Governor Jacob Jiles.
After receiving some repairs, Dr Catherine Halsey surreptitiously leaves with Kelly-087 to an unknown location aboard Governor Jacob Jiles personal ship, at the time docked with the UNSC Gettysburg/Ascendant Justice. The remaining UNSC forces were forced to abandon the rebels in the face of a Covenant assault, and made their way toward the Covenant refit-and-repair station, Unyielding Hierophant, where an enormous fleet was poised to invade Earth. Just before the slipspace jump, Corporal Locklear inadvertently commits suicide while distorting the Forerunner Crystal, recovered by Dr Halsey from underneath the ruins of CASTLE base. Halsey gave it to the Corporal shortly before her departure, intending him to destroy it rather than let it fall into the hands of the Covenant.
John faced a dilemma regarding the combat data on the Flood which Dr. Halsey had given him: providing the standard data set to Lieutenant Haverson would protect Sergeant Johnson from possible experimentation by ONI. However, providing him the complete data, which contained reference to Sergeant Johnson's escape from the Flood due to his Boren's Syndrome, would result in Johnson's death.
John and the few remaining Spartan-IIs: Linda-058, Grace-093, William-043, and Fred-104, focused on finding a way to stop the Covenant from reaching Earth, the location of which had been discovered. They decided to destroy the Unyielding Hierophant. The Spartan-IIs infiltrated the station; after spending eleven hours on board, they arrived at a temple, where a copy of Cortana warned them of the Jiralhanae guards stationed at the temple. Linda took a sniping position, and the other four Spartans entered the temple. They were ambushed by Jiralhanae, and John was nearly killed, but the team managed to kill their attackers. Grace, however, was killed by three Jiralhanae Shot rounds. John activated the fail-safe on her armor, denying her compromise by the Covenant.
The team sabotaged the generators in the Unyielding Hierophant; as they escaped through a side door, the fail-safe on Grace's armor activated, disintegrating a Covenant lance. John, Fred, and Will were quickly spotted by three Banshees, but their Sangheili pilots were killed by Linda's sniper fire. The Banshees were then captured by the Spartans. John doubled back to retrieve Linda, who killed four more Banshee pilots who were attempting to kill John. They then escaped by destroying a glass atrium, and arrived back at the UNSC Gettysburg.
Vice Admiral Whitcomb and Lieutenant Haverson piloted the Ascendant Justice straight toward the Unyielding Hierophant. Whitcomb discussed the battles of the Alamo and Thermopylae with John, then prepared to fight the Covenant off while the Unyielding Hierophant's fusion reactor detonated. Each of the 500 Covenant ships maneuvered next to the Ascendant Justice. The Admiral and the Lieutenant were killed when the fusion reactor exploded, annihilating 486 ships of the Covenant fleet, leaving only around a dozen intact; these ships later joined the Prophet of Truth's rebuilt fleet in the attack on Earth. John left after witnessing Whitcomb's and Haverson's sacrifice, and arrived at Earth with the last members of his team, Linda, Will, and Fred, as well as Johnson and Cortana.
Check the first part of the Master Chief Career here ->>
https://halofam.blogspot.com/2019/10/john-117-master-chief-beginnings.html
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