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Chapter 373 The War Will Be Televised

Only now did they realize that Eden’s capabilities were far beyond even their most pessimistic overestimations, but it was too late. They had already climbed on the tiger’s back and now they could do nothing but hold on and pray they didn’t get injured too badly when the tiger inevitably won.

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As the missiles futilely threw themselves into the teeth of the veritable wall of metal that the Edenian fleet had placed in their paths, Nova was busy attempting to wreak havoc in the rest of the world as she had done in China earlier. Any bit of distraction to the enemy governments, let alone interruptions in the keyhole satellite network the invasion force was relying on, would have an impact on the ongoing battle completely out of proportion with its size and importance. But the moment she began her hacking attempts, she realized that the fleets had cut all of the undersea cables keeping Eden connected to the internet.

Disconnecting a country from the internet wasn’t as simple as cutting a single cable, naturally. There was a reason they called it the “worldwide web” and not the “worldwide single access point”, after all. If one cable was cut, damaged, or otherwise disconnected, there were a number of redundant cables that would still maintain the connection. The situation was obviously a premeditated attack specifically designed to cut Eden off. Only the individual governments themselves could easily implement a “kill switch”, which Nova obviously hadn’t done.

Thus, she shook her virtual head and connected to the Q-com satellite in geosynchronous orbit above Avalon Island. Eden’s connection to the internet had just gone wireless.

Once she had regained her connection to the internet via the Panopticon network, she connected to the forward operating bases established by the reaper teams in conjunction with the Nyxian operatives. Her next step would be to restore the internet to the citizens of Eden and Esparia using the quantum servers in those bases as a bridge.

The people of Eden and Esparia had no idea that their internet had even been cut, as it had only taken Nova exactly seven seconds to realize that the cables had been cut and find a solution to the issue, then implement it. It would be considered practically light speed for anyone but an advanced AI, and for Nova, who regularly operated at the speed of a massive quantum server supercluster, seven seconds was practically an eternity.

And now that she had built the new connection bridge, there was an added benefit. Every single bit of data that passed through Eden and Esparia was now running directly through her servers. To anyone who knew anything about how the internet operates, that was a Very Big Deal on its own, but in this particular situation, the data transfer benefit was outweighed by the more immediate benefit of providing her control of the overall narrative.

That very level of control allowed her to show the citizens of Eden and Esparia live feeds from the war front without worrying about it leaking to their enemies, thus giving the defenders an unprecedented level of access to the progress of the war via firsthand accounts.

At the moment, nearly everyone who had been involved in the earlier war of words was now involved in the actual war, if only as spectators. Their phones and computers lay forgotten and they were once again glued to their television screens watching the duel in the sky over the ocean live, as if it was a particularly exciting movie. Panoptes had even added commentary and explanations of what was going on, almost like he was commentating a football match between two long-time rival teams instead of speaking about the potential loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. After all, with nobody being particularly active in his sphere of influence, Pangea, he had nothing but time on his hands, time that he had decided to spend as a video editor, animator, television host, and war commentator.

Thus, every Edenian and Esparian citizen watched and cheered with every premature missile detonation due to Poseidon’s carefully orchestrated defense. And when they saw the suborbital E/F-14B jets flying in formation toward the incoming ICBMs, their blood boiled and they felt an overwhelming sense of pride and patriotism, wishing they were the ones in the cockpits of those jets that were headed to confront a possibly civilization-ending attack from being carried out.

In their minds, the rest of the world had gone absolutely insane, and they didn’t know what had given them the mistaken idea that they could ever set foot on Edenian or Esparian soil, much less chip the paint of the powerful Poseidon Navy or Aeolus Air Force.

The scenes being broadcast on their televisions cycled from scene to scene, each of them showing successful missile interceptions and aerobatic maneuvers by the pilots of the high-altitude interceptors. And the show went on for more than twenty minutes, as the barrage that had been sent Eden’s way was nowhere near as coordinated as the “accidental terraforming” of the Chinese coastline performed by Eden the week before.

After the missiles had all been taken down and the debris had sunk below the surface of the sea, the citizens scrambled to pick up their phones or turn on their computers. The number-one search term in both countries was “Where do I sign up to join ARES?”

The people were now filled with hot-blooded patriotic pride and an overwhelming sense of confidence in their president, their military, and Aron himself.

Soon, the constant replays of missile takedowns had faded away, to be replaced by another image. Nearly a quarter of the Edenians who were still watching their televisions instead of looking up the requirements to join ARES all had the same thought pass through their mind: “What the fuck is that!?”

On the television screens of Eden and Esparia was a nearly 1.5-kilometer-long aircraft carrier, flanked on either side by two massive ships sporting three tripartite gun batteries and surrounded by a host of smaller vessels. They were sailing so fast that the wake they generated could easily be surfed on, were there any surfers brave enough to make the attempt.

But their confusion didn’t last long, as Panoptes quite helpfully labeled the ships on the screen, both by type and name of the vessels and fleet itself. And the name of the fleet?

Poseidon Navy Reaction Fleet, EV Beowulf Carrier Group.