At four in the morning on August 30, 2552, the situation in the Epsilon Eridani system—or Reach, as it was also known—finally took a sharp turn for the worse. The battle had reached its most difficult and dangerous hour.
At 04:47 Reach standard time, the Fermion outpost on the outskirts of the system suddenly detected intense activity from a large number of slipspace ruptures. Knowing that a new Covenant fleet was about to arrive, the outpost transmitted a final emergency message to UNSC Fleet Command. Then, to keep any valuable intelligence from falling into Covenant hands, it had no choice but to execute the Cole Protocol and self-destruct before the enemy could capture it!
However, the sacrifice of those brave UNSC Navy personnel did nothing to stop the Covenant invasion...
At 05:00, UNSC finally detected a massive Covenant fleet of at least 315 warships. The fleet, now identifiable as the Fleet of Particular Justice, had arrived at the edge of the Epsilon Eridani system and entered it. And the Covenant fleet commander was none other than an old UNSC adversary: the Elite shipmaster of the Sesa 'Refumee clan, Thel 'Vadamee.
The two Covenant fleets that had arrived at Reach earlier had already swept through and badly weakened the system's outer defenses. As a result, the newly arrived Fleet of Particular Justice met no meaningful resistance as it surged straight into the system and headed for Reach, the key to the entire campaign.
The news from the outpost and the detection of the new fleet made an already panicked UNSC fleet—which had performed rather "poorly" in the early stages of the battle for Reach and had nearly lost the planet outright—even more frantic. The situation had gone from bad to worse...
A little over ten minutes later, at 05:17, Admiral Roland