Chapter 586 Okay, so Maybe Some of the Monkeys Are Mine...

Chapter 586 Okay, so Maybe Some of the Monkeys Are Mine...

It took a bit more than six hours to fully quell the chaos, as the empire had been forced to focus most of its forces on angry awakeners at the beginning. The “Hero Academies” had yet to produce a graduating class, after all, which meant that non-awakened ARES members and reaper teams had borne the brunt of the awakeners’ ire. Even those noncitizens that’d taken the empire’s crash course on how to handle their new blessings had proven useless; some of them joined in the protesting, while the rest refused to aid either side.

At the end of the day, they were still in the group that was to be forcibly relocated, so that much, at least, was understandable. Aron could only thank who, or whatever, was watching over humanity for not having all of them join in the chaos and considered their noninterference a blessing. Even one noncitizen awakener going rogue could end up turning into another Hassan Event, and having millions of them doing that at the same time would almost definitely end poorly for humanity at large, much less the fledgling Terran Empire.

But thanks in large part to pappies, and in a much smaller part to headbags, the casualty count among the deployed ARES troopers had been kept relatively low, even in the face of rioting awakeners. Still, the non-awakeners had caused plenty of trouble while the rioting awakeners were being put down and transported to the cubes ahead of schedule. They, at least, would be segregated from the non-awakeners and the nonviolent awakeners and wouldn’t get a chance to interact with anyone else before they woke up on their destination planets.

Needless to say, most of them chose to join the exodus. At least there, they would have a hand in shaping their world and its social structure, unlike Earth. It hit home for some people watching from the sidelines as they realized that most of the citizens’ anger was based in never having had the ability to determine anything for themselves.

Even in the US, which had touted itself as a haven of democracy, the people had only ever been given the illusion of choice. Every election turned into the same thing—it was like voting for cold turds on a paper plate or dried-up boogers on a silver platter. In the end, the people’s voice had never mattered.

Still, the wave of arrests didn’t mean that the protests had ended. Hundreds of millions of people were still protesting around the globe. But they were paying close attention to strictly following the guidelines and laws that not only allowed them to protest, but gave them guidelines on how to do so effectively. Not that they were difficult to follow, really; they pretty much boiled down to “don’t hurt people, don’t break things, don’t demolish buildings, and don’t start fires”. Thus, the imperial police agency was mainly relegated to controlling the crowd to prevent trampling and such, or pulling people out of the mobs when they fainted.

Thus, although the number of protesters may have seemed alarming in a vacuum, the damage caused by them was actually minimal, not to mention mostly accidental.