Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

An enormous shadow was cast over the entire city as the EV Brunhild passed over it. The shadow didnt linger long before moving, and in fact, never stopped. Then, shortly after it passed, a screaming whistle grew louder and louder as four angular teardrop-shaped objects came crashing down in Aterro de Flamengo, a park that bordered the citys waterfront and several of its storied favelas. An enormous cloud of sand and dust was raised by the impacts, making it impossible to see the objects hidden within, had there been anyone on the beach to witness the impacts.

The hiss of pneumatic pistons triggering was followed shortly by a single resounding thud and a brief breeze that blew the dust cloud in swirling circles. Soon, the dust cleared, revealing four yeet pods, their hatches lowered into ramps and ten ARES troopers standing in neat formations in front of each. With each squad of troopers was a Mk. IX Cerberus Mulebot loaded with bulky boxes filled with gear.

Without a word, the troopers moved out as the yeet pods spontaneously caught fire and melted into slag.

Soon, the distinctive whines and thuds of capacitors charging and discharging enveloped the formerly bustling metropolis of Rio de Janeiro, accompanied by screams, explosions, the whistling scream of indirect fire weapons, and the creaks and groans of crumbling buildings.

The chaos lasted an hour, then 40 ARES troopers and three Cerberus Mulebots marched back to the beach. The only sign that they had even been in combat was the blood dripping from their armor, and one trooper had a slight limp. He had been caught by the collapse of a skyscraper and twisted his ankle pulling it out from the debris. All that remained was to set up a perimeter and guard the extraction point for the troops dropped all over South America, who would soon join them as their missions were completed.

......

Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa.

General Mabuto Nzagi was starting his day as normal, waking up in a bed filled with naked women. He sat up on the edge of the bed and picked up the mirror on his nightstand, then cut a line of high-quality cocaine from the loose powder on it using the business card of an American businessmanin other words, a CIA-backed arms dealerand snorted it with a rolled up US hundred dollar bill.

He slapped the naked ass of the girl closest to him in the pile of flesh that lay atop his bed, a sign of the previous nights debauchery, but she didnt respond. He slapped it again, still to no response. Then he leaned over and shouted in her ear, Wake up!

Three of the seven girls laying naked on the bed grumbled and sat up, but the other four remained silent and still.

General Nzagi frowned and looked closer at the girl whose ass he had slapped. She could be considered a pretty flower, at least for a twelve-year-old prepubescent girl from an impoverished area of the DRC, but her eyes were open and glassy and her neck was discolored with bruises shaped like his own hands. Her chest was unmoving, neither rising nor falling with her breathing, and her nose and mouth were stained with white powder residue. She was obviously dead and had been for a while.

He looked over the other four unmoving girls on his bed and noticed they were in much the same condition, then at the three who had responded to his earlier shout. They had scrambled out of bed and were crouched in the corner, huddled together and shivering in fear and from the cold air blowing directly on them from the air conditioner vent on the wall by their ankles.

The general lit a cigarette, then stood and draped a bathrobe over himself. Clean this up, he ordered, then headed to his bathroom to shower.

He turned on loud music while he was showering, so he failed to hear the screams and was caught completely unaware by the pulse munition that blew through his wall, then his head, and finally the wall on the other side like they didnt exist.

One of the warlords plaguing the Democratic Republic of the Congo had just been eliminated and he didnt even know he had been invaded.

......

Around the world, similar situations were taking place. ARES suffered relatively few losses in their initial assault, and only two complete defeats.

Both of those defeats came at the hands of Pakistan and India, where two of the nuclear weapons had escaped the bombardment of the rods from god completely by chance. The Pakistani and Indian leadership had been completely unaware that ISIS had stolen them in preparation for an attack on the US. Then, when ARES had dropped on the cities ISIS was currently smuggling the warheads through, the terrorist cells behind the thefts had detonated them there once they realized their plans would be impossible to successfully bring to fruition.

Thus, Islamabad and Delhi paid the price for the nuclear warheads detonated in Faisalabad and Bhopal.

While ship-to-ship combat mostly didnt involve explosive rounds, save for widowmakers, ship-to-ground combat was different. Without having to worry about through-and-through penetration, like they did when firing on oceangoing ships or airplanes, the researchers in Lab City had developed a specialized round for the Hugin class carriers.

Designed as a proof of concept for Arons space warfare doctrine, which would favor modular construction and multirole ships, the enormous carriers also had their own complement of special ammunition types. Their eventual targets would be much sturdier than anything found on Earth, after all, thus the birth of the Type XIX HEI round, which would fly safed until it detected a significant mass within a certain range, then it would arm itself on a hair trigger and explode on impact with that mass. It was judged to be wholly unnecessary for any of the naval munitions fired from thirty- or sixteen-inch guns, thus it was only printed for the enormous ninety-six-inch Titans Wrath cannons that the Hugin class carriers were armed with.

Faisalabad had been home to between 750,000 and a million residents, but most of it had been wiped out in nuclear fire. Due to its size and relative importance to the area, ARES had an entire thousand troops deployed to it and all of them had been lost in the blast. The EV Arngrim had returned after detecting the nuclear detonation and removed what was left of the city from the map via sustained bombardment under its Titans Wrath cannons. Then she proceeded to Islamabad, where she removed that city from the map in a similar fashion. After all, with no news of the thefts anywhere, none of Arons AIs knew that it wasnt the countries leaders that decided to detonate the warheads.

Events in Bhopal and Delhi proceeded in much the same fashion as the EV Ragnar Lodbrok visited them.

What had once been two thriving national capitals had been reduced to a series of smoking craters, the ground in some places baked into glass by the heat of the sustained bombardment of Type XIX High Explosive Impact rounds.