Although wars had always been unpredictable, and there were always a chance of things going wrongJust ask the Australians, who had managed to lose more than one war against large flightless birdsthe situation between China and Taiwan had gone completely counter to everyones expectations thanks to the overwhelming destruction that Eden had laid upon China. And not only that, it had happened so suddenly that observers didnt even have a chance to figure out what was going on before it, well, went on.

Soon after the barrage ended, a video someone had managed to capture of the thousands of cruise missiles passing over Taiwan appeared online. It didnt stir up much discussion or make any waves at first, but as time went on it began gaining traction. Especially after the thousands of people that witnessed the giant explosions, or the passing ocean wave, reported what they had seen. In particular, one Taiwanese fisherman who had been in his boat attempting to flee the oncoming chaos had recorded the waves passing and the havoc it wrought on the artificial islands near the nine dash line, prompting much discussion of its own.

People argued the videos validity back and forth, with the general consensus being that the videos had to be accurate, since more and more of them were cropping up as people posted them from other areas. One video of cruise missiles became six, then twenty, then hundreds, and eventually thousands of Taiwanese netizens had posted videos of the missiles. On the other side of the Taiwan Strait, behind the Great Firewall of China, the Chinese internet sites, like Tieba and WeChat Moments, had also exploded. QQ Messenger and WeChat were practically on fire with people panicking and wondering what the explosions in Fujian were. And it wasnt limited to just the coastal destruction and accidental terraforming, either; Aeolus had directed airstrikes against all of the missile silos scattered across the entire province as well, some of which were still in progress.

It was rare for the same event to take over both the Chinese internet and the global internet, and everyone around the world was asking the same question: how? How had the missiles and bombers so easily evaded the Chinese air defense systems?

The Chinese bombers and escorts that had launched after the transports were loaded were forced to return to counter the ongoing airstrikes taking out silo after silo on the mainland. But not even the most advanced Chinese fighters could catch even a glimpse of the Edenian bombers carrying out the mission in Fujian. Not that it would matter anyway, as even the most ponderous Edenian aircraft was still leagues ahead of everything the Chinese had in terms of top speed, cruising speed, and operational ceilings.

Coupled with the newly unmapped coastline of Fujian Province, the Chinese air force had also been culled from the conflict with Taiwan, at least for now.

Online, Chinas response to the panic sweeping through their netizens by increasing the strength of the Great Firewall and directing their Internet Security Bureau to work overtime to delete any post that mentioned the recent strikes in Fujian. The crackdown began by throttling the internet speed and adding new terms to the blacklist on Baidu, Sogou, Haosuo, and Shenma, Chinas main search engines for both computer and mobile searching.

Soon after that, though, everything went completely silent on the Chinese internet. All online operations halted, like the entire internet had frozen.

At first, people thought it was the usual censorship, but before long they realized that this was different from the past. Before, no matter how strict the censors were, they were still able to use the internet without any issues, but now they couldnt do anything online at all.

The current freeze was the handiwork of Nova, who had been tasked with evicting China from the global village built by the modern internet. But she didnt stop there; not only had she cut the connection via the underwater fiber optic network, she had also paralyzed the entire Chinese internet with a massive DDoS attack the likes of which was only made possible by use of her quantum servers.

After cutting China off from the global internet, Nova continued digging deeper. It had only taken her seconds to interrupt the internet connection, but she spent about five minutes digging into the personal and professional lives of Chinese politicians and high-ranking party members. Soon, the Chinese internet resumed operations, but Nova was in charge of it. And she didnt waste that power, either. Instead, she compiled a slideshow of blackmail material and pushed it onto every single screen in China, shining a light on their government officials dirty deeds. Infidelity, embezzlement, abuses of power, coverups... the list went on. Every bad thing that every Chinese official had ever done was now being forcefed to every citizen in their country that had a cellphone or computer.

It was hell for them, as no matter how they tried to shut things down, they were met by Novas impenetrable defense.

And she still didnt stop there. The blackmail material was only a warmup, and she soon moved to the government data centers where they stored every bit of data they collected on their own citizens.

Once there, she immediately transferred all of that data, from the video surveillance to telecommunications records, and even down to the biometric data to her own storage. Then she encrypted the local Chinese copy of it all, deleted it from their servers, flooded their storage media with junk binary, and for good measure, she even initiated cascading failures that lit the physical servers themselves on fire. Unless China had an offline backup of everything, they would never see any of that data again. Ever.

Well, they would never see it again unless they managed to steal it from Novas quantum storage servers and decrypt it, that is.

Nova didnt stop at attacking the government, either. She also took over WeChat, QQ, and other commonly used apps that Chinese citizens required for everyday usage, where she copied every message and every payment record ever sent through those services and inserted code into the programs that would send her a copy of everything in the future, as well.

And despite doing everything they possibly could, nobody in China could stop her.