Aron turned and looked around the parking lot. He had thought they were alone, but now he realized that, other than him and the pile of dust that used to be a cult leader, there were others who had witnessed the events.
A short distance away, people who had been loading supplies in their cars and trucks were pointing at him. Thankfully, things had happened so fast that none of them had had time to pull out their phones and start recording before everything was over. And people further away had been too absorbed in their own errands to pay attention to a distant argument.
Only a very small portion of the population was awakened and could actually see anything happening. To everyone else, it just sounded like a normal argument, if they could even hear it at all. And not everyone—especially not the kind of people (read: farmers) that shop at Tractor Supply Co.—were constantly recording everything in hopes of catching a major event that would give them a boost in visibility on the internet.
Aron, however, had scanned and recorded the entire process of Rick’s disintegration. It was, after all, something he would very shortly need to get to the bottom of.
Only after everything was over and done and the imperial police had arrived did he breathe a sigh of relief and rocket off, intent on boarding his personal shuttle and heading back to Avalon Island to supervise the aftermath.
……
“Give me an update on the situation,” he said after he boarded his shuttle and began the journey back to the main Cube.
[There were a number of large bombs discovered, but the imperial police successfully defused them. The cult was in the process of building new ANFO bombs, but they were intercepted in a... rather weird way,] Nova reported.
(Ed note: ANFO bombs are better known as fertilizer bombs. ANFO stands for Ammonium Nitrate/Fuel Oil and was used by Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma Federal Building bombing of 1995, among other incidents. It’s why fertilizer purchases are tracked and regulated by the government. Mythbusters also did quite a few episodes featuring ANFO; it was one of the most common explosives highlighted on the show, from what I recall. Here’s a clip of them making a cement mixer disappear using it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IcHUHRf_S0)
“Weird way?” Aron asked. He was pretty sure they had only targeted the cult’s awakeners, so hearing that something weird happened to non-awakener cultists was a bit unexpected.
[The awakeners were successfully assassinated. 2,493 awakeners were targeted, of which 2,118 were neutralized by long-range sniping. The others were beheaded to ensure the kill. None of them were able to make any waves.
[But other than that, there are a number of people who are disintegrating in the same fashion as the cult leader—who we now know was Rick Ashley, a native of Montana who grew up in a militia compound—and we believe they were the cultists and other followers of the progenitor cult. The first instances of people disintegrating happened moments after you attacked the Fisk building and killed Mr. Ashley.]
“Are they only happening here?” While it did seem to be connected to the cult leader at first glance, correlation is not causation, so Aron had to rule out some environmental factor or planned attack by an unknown cult awakener that had slipped the net.
[No, sir. The phenomenon is occurring all over the world. We’re still getting reports of it happening, and the number is now in the hundreds of thousands and still increasing. There’s a significant number of them that we’ve already identified as linked to the cult and were tracking in Operation Hunting Dog, enough to statistically rule out other possibilities for the disintegrations,] Nova said. She was paying attention to the reports and updating the numbers in real time as they came in.
She waved her hand and a virtual screen appeared with a map of the world on it, littered with dots of different colors. Red dots were confirmed cultists that had disintegrated, yellow dots were for suspected cultists that were also disintegrating, and orange dots were for people unrelated to the cult, but were also disintegrating.
Disturbingly, there were also blue dots here and there that represented imperial citizens that had also died the same way.
[We don’t yet know the mechanics of it, or why exactly it’s happening, but from all the available evidence, it appears that the cult is dying with its leader.]
Aron went silent after hearing Nova’s report as he thought of why something like the disintegration phenomenon was happening. A few minutes before his shuttle reached Avalon Island, he came up with a working theory. “It’ll require further investigation, but I think what happened is likely to be related to Rick taking over another body after I killed him in his office. The death of his followers might be the price he had to pay, or perhaps, given the nature of the disintegrations, his followers are just being drained of enough mana to artificially awaken the new body.”
He recalled the mana vortex that had formed when he caught up to Rick in his new body and became more sure of his theory, but still said, “We’ll look into it after everything’s settled. But for now, I’ll be resting.”
Aron closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat, trying to rebalance his mental state. It was the first time he had personally taken action, and the experience was much different than simply ordering others to kill on his, or the empire’s, behalf. He hadn’t expected that he would be affected at all, but reality had slapped him in the face.
Nova went quiet, but that didn’t mean she stopped working. She was still busy coordinating the cleanup of the various sites where cultists had disintegrated, including the personal effects they had on them when the phenomenon began. She, like Aron, thought that his hypothesis was correct; but also like Aron, she would fully investigate, looking for evidence for and against the hpothesis before coming to a final conclusion.
