Elsewhere in the world, peace still had yet to be completely restored.
In Istanbul, one of the LEAs was placing stun cuffs on one of the downed protesters when another one, who had “surrendered” earlier, rose up and swung a metal pipe at its head. But to the protester’s complete surprise, the helmet was completely undamaged while the pipe gave out. After all, when hard comes in contact with impossibly hard, hard loses.
The LEA finished cuffing the prisoner, then stood and turned to face the protester that had swung the pipe at it. The man swung the bent pipe at the LEAs face, only for the disguised robot’s arm to move impossibly fast as it caught the pipe and released a taser charge from its palm. The jolt caused the protester to drop the pipe and the LEA swiftly raised its charge pistol and stunned him point blank, then stun cuffed him and moved on to the next downed protester without a word.
In Novograd, Russia, someone attacked the LEAs with a molotov cocktail only for it to completely ignore the flickering flames on its body and stun its attacker. In Kandahar, an LEA completely ignored a suicide attack by an insurgent driving a van loaded with explosives. In other places, they were also attacked with vehicles, but the vehicles inevitably lost the contest against the walking-tank-like Law Enforcement Auxiliaries.
They had proven themselves immune to improvised explosives, regular explosives, bullets, cars, trucks, and even in one case, a dump truck loaded with close to 14 tons of gravel.
All over the world, wherever the LEAs had been deployed, protesters were gripped with fear in the face of their inexorable advance. Everything they threw at the robots was to absolutely no avail, but the LEAs pinpoint accuracy with their charge pistols and the ease with which they could apply stun cuffs to even struggling prisoners was disheartening, to say the least. On average, one LEA was restraining a protester every ten seconds, and most of that was spent walking from person to person while fending off attacks that would otherwise have caused the captured protesters harm, which would have been a very bad image for the nascent government.
As more and more protesters were downed by stun charges, LEAs were freed up to begin providing first aid to the wounded as they waited for medevac to the nearest medical pods, which, ironically, were in the very cubes those same protesters had been marching toward with the intent to destroy them. The whole process was very regimented; one LEA would triage the wounded with another five moving them into separate groups based on the severity of their injuries. It was a process that had long been perfected by first responders and trauma specialists when working at mass casualty incidents in the field, and it was being put to good use now.
(Ed note: See the comment attached to this paragraph for an explanation on mass casualty incident triage.)
Similar actions were taking place in every city within a reasonable distance of a cube. And given that they were living in the internet age, the process was being broadcast live by thousands, if not dozens of thousands, of accounts. Even people who had used their subsidy to buy AR glasses were getting in on the lookieloo action. Nova and Panoptes not only didn’t block those broadcasts, but they promoted them instead.
The people in the background who had thought that they could overwhelm the newly formed empire by sheer numbers in a worldwide coordinated strike were now finding out just how wrong and delusional they were to ever have thought that.
Their belief that ARES wouldn’t use excessive force had turned out to be correct, but they had never expected that Aron hadn’t been exaggerating in the least when he claimed to have withheld the majority of his tech during the Last War. And what ARES had shown there was already in the realm of fantasy, but seeing it online and experiencing it in person were two different things entirely. An LEA had straight up ignored a round from an FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank weapon that rioters in Miami had looted from the local Army garrison and unleashed it on them. And even more unbelievably, an LEA in Saint Petersburg didn’t just take the hit from a Russian RPG-7 warhead, but it had actually grabbed it from mid-air and pulled the thing apart with its bare hands!
The people behind the protests had fucked around, and now they were finding out.
The masterful suppression of the violent protests took less than ten minutes from beginning to end. And the ARES troopers yeeted into areas that were out of easy reach of a cube took even less time; they simply launched crowd control rockets from their backpack launchers that knocked the protesters unconscious, then cuffed them while they lay snoring on the ground. By the time everything was done, more than three hundred thousand people were arrested and stun cuffed, powerless to do anything but lay there like logs.
The arrested protesters were taken into custody and transported to the nearest cube for processing. Those who had discharged deadly weapons were held without bail pending arraignment, as were the leaders that had instigated the protesters to turn violent. As for those that used stones, knives, bats, and such, they were processed and released on house arrest, also pending arraignment and trial.
The entire booking process took three hours, by which time the world had regained its calm. The cities that had suffered the most violence were still under martial law, while those that hadn’t suffered that much were being very, very careful in their protests to not allow violence to break out lest they join the others in holding cells and house arrest.
Ironically, the protests had actually proven good for Aron, as the milestone of a billion users of VR and AR devices had been brought forward by two days. What he had expected would take a week was now projected to be accomplished in five days.
