A week later.

Of the 196 countries in the world, 194 of them had finished preparing to deal with the final two, Eden and Esparia. Their forces gathered and the first phase of their preparations completed, they began their inexorable march toward the terrorist and dictator that ruled over Eden.

America was sending eight of their twelve carrier groups, and every other country that had a navy was sending their own as well. China, India, France, and the United Kingdom had each sent a carrier group to join the eight American fleets; the only nation missing was Russia, whose only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Flota Sovetskogo Soyuza Kuznetsov, had been damaged by a fire a month before and was currently undergoing repairs.

But even without Russia in the mix, fourteen aircraft carriers with all of their escorts as well as a token from every other non-landlocked country in the world had gathered in the Pacific Ocean and were currently sailing toward what they thought would be a walkover victory against Eden and Esparia.

While the navies were on their way, the countries capable of long-range strikes had delivered their own gifts to the target nations. Hundreds upon hundreds of long-range missiles and ICBMs loaded with conventional warheads flew through the air on their way to targets that satellite surveillance had marked as military infrastructure.

All of that was meant to degrade as much of Eden and Esparias air defense capabilities as possible, softening them up for a swarm of airstrikes. Everyone involved in the attack had agreed to follow American military doctrines, which stressed the importance of achieving and maintaining air superiority before, during, and after a ground invasion, or even naval landing.

Thus, their missiles saturated the sky, all of them headed to the same destination.

The missiles had all been linked into Americas keyhole satellite network, a system of over a hundred American satellites that were jointly operated by the US Air Force and the CIA. It was another unprecedented occurrence, as even though the program had been declassified in 1995, the details, specs, and capabilities of the satellites were still tightly guarded secrets. And just by allowing the other countries to use them had required President Trump to personally declassify certain aspects of them.

As for the legality of that declassification, well, suffice it to say that nobody in the US was going to call him out for it, rendering it moot.

The night before, Eden and Esparia had issued a shelter in place warning, so even though the allied nations had announced the news of their attack in hopes of inciting panic in their target, everything remained calm and peaceful. In fact, the citizens of both targets were engaging in a war of their own, although their specific war was more of the internet war of words variety than them picking up guns and shooting at each other.

The Edenian response had already begun long ago. The entire Reaction Fleet had taken up stations in the 500-kilometer forbidden zone surrounding the island while the submarine battles had still been underway. It had taken three days for the Edenian submarines to take out every hostile vessel in that area, rendering it safe, and had spent the rest of the previous week dozing through routine patrols.

[Assuming direct weapons control for counterfire,] Poseidon announced from the weapons station of every vessel in the Reaction Fleet. Three long beeps rang out after his announcement, and all of the weapons officers folded their hands in their laps and waited.

He then wasted no time in assigning targets for each vessel to take down. Missile boats were the first to fire, their VLS tubes springing open and firing swarms of much smaller, faster missiles designed to seek and destroy part of the incoming barrage. They were called Mk. IV Beehive Swarms, named after the appearance of the warhead itself. Atomic printers gave Arons military forces a unique advantage in missile configurations as well, considering they could print entire missiles from the ground up that were purpose-built to perform a single function.

In the beehives case, once the main missile body was in the air and oriented in a general direction, the entire missile would break up into smaller rockets that would separate and seek their individual targets, leaving the remaining carrier missile body as a command module that would coordinate the swarm rockets to adjust on the fly. Initially designed for use against infantry targets, they had proved equally useful in countermissile operations against saturation attacks like the one currently headed toward Eden.

After the VLS launchers had launched a few waves of beehives, it was time for the next weapon system to take the main stage. After all, the number of missile boats in the fleet was limited, but every vessel had their own air defenses. And when all of them were combined and their fire coordinated, they could lay down quite a devastating anti-air barrage.

The main air defense weapon system used by Poseidonthe navy itself, not the AIwas the Mk. VII Metalstorm Linear Accelerator System (LAS). Since the performance of lasers was unsatisfactory in Earths atmosphere, the researchers in Lab City had gone the opposite direction. And as the Heracles Bow coilguns were excellent, they decided to downscale them and increase the rate of fire by running it off a rotating chain-driven multi-barreled weapon, much like a chain gun.

Thus, the Metalstorm was born. A relatively compact 30mm coilgun capable of firing up to 250,000 rounds per minute through twelve barrels, each vessel in the fleet was armed with two, one fore and one aft of the conning towers. While they didnt have the sheer range of the Heracles Bow batteries, they definitely made up for it in close-ranged firepower and could lay down virtually solid walls of projectiles up to 2 kilometers away with either pinpoint accuracy or saturation and suppressive fire.

Aron also thought they looked pretty cool, too. It must be remembered that despite his apparent maturity, he was still young and the cool factor, while perhaps subconsciously, was an important aspect of his decision-making process when it came to the designs of the weapons and vehicles he equipped his military with.

But the metalstorms and beehives werent the only stars of the defensive countermissile fire. The Heracles Bow batteries also had a multi-target option.

When initially designing the fleet, the Lab City weapons researchers had long taken into consideration the need for flexible weapons systems that could perform a number of roles on the battlefield. Thus, they had designed a number of different ammunition types, ranging from Age of Sailinspired chain and grapeshot to penetrator rounds, and everything in between. The most effective one in this instance, Poseidon decided, would be the Type VII Frangible penetrator flak rounds.

Encased in a discarding sabot shell, the Type VII rounds looked like nails arranged in a neat row, then rolled up with a thin layer of explosive putty like a swiss roll cake. They were designed to fill the air with clouds of supersonic kinetic penetrators, like a very advanced version of a flak round. And much like their predecessors, the venerable flak rounds themselves, they could be set for either proximity detonation or command detonation. Fused detonation was also an option, but it would only be used in the most dire of cases.

Regardless, an 18 diameter round filled with quarter-inch diameter solid tungsten penetrators made for quite the cloud of portable no-fly zone.

As the naval countermissile operations were in progress, Aeolus was also scrambling their ICBM interceptors. After all, they had a much higher flight trajectory than regular long-range surface-to-surface missiles. No less than a hundred Aeolus E/F-14B Icarus hybrid interceptor jets launched from the airstrip on Avalon Island. With a flight ceiling of 90 kilometers, a mere ten kilometers below the Karman Line, they were easily capable of operating at altitudes that would allow them to intercept an ICBM on its normal trajectory and they had the guns to do it with.

They were quickly routed to the ICBMs projected reentry area on an intercept course. Once there, their onboard AIs would take over the guns while the pilots would maintain control of the maneuvering; after all, no matter how trained they were, they wouldnt be nearly as good as an AI at calculating intercept trajectories, and considering the weight limitations, they couldnt possibly carry enough material to produce the number of bullets they would need to fire for a spray-and-pray approach to be successful against missiles moving at nearly orbital velocities.