[b][i]Intermission Two: Ghosts of Angeles City[/i][/b]

[b][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balibago]Balibago, Angeles City[/url] - 10/18/2022, Philippines, 21:02, UTC+8 [/b]

There was a second surveillance drone taking pictures just a hundred meters ahead to her west; a model small enough to sneak through even Lotus Squadron's heightened vigilance. Cristina would have to bring that down, too. But while doing that, her ears might catch Cornelio's latest grumble as he looked at his Noble Arm's shining surface, "Pro-Chinese insurrectionists in Davao, really? The clans and oligarchs have a lot to answer for..."

As for the third drone the man had mentioned, there was one approaching, eighty meters away, from the southeast, having circled all the way from the Chinese beachhead in the furthest north of the Philippine Archipelago, where they had switched invasion routes after their main thrust in Lingayen had failed. Which should Cristina destroy first, considering that both were feeding information on the terror in Angeles City's neighborhoods to the Chinese?

[b]The Ritz Hotel - 10/18/2022, 21:00 UTC+8[/b]

If anyone had stayed in the hotel, even one single person, they would see the hotel staff watching the news in their free time. The local news was of the 'zombie' outbreak in Balibago and Task Force Obsidian's attempt to cure or quell it with the help of local police and military units. The national news was about the insurrection in the City of Davao, far to the south, started by the loyalists of the Previous President that the Government of National Salvation replaced. These Insurrectionists, drawn from local political clans, oligarchs, and compromised Army and Police units, were actively trying to open the gates to China, blaming a 'US Conspiracy' for the entire war and China's 'special military operation'.

[I]World[/i] News was not much better; crisis everywhere, mass starvation, and turmoil all over the globe thanks to the disruption in the world's supply chains and trade networks. Grain did not arrive in struggling countries that needed bread; it was the same for rice, whose exportation was restricted now that the countries that grew it were at war, while raw materials for electronics and manufactured goods were not getting to where they were needed.

In this desperate time, people turned to whoever would help them, including the Seven Virtues and their adherents; the televisions showed public scenes of Diligence and other 'avatars' of Industria working together with avatars of 'Charity' and 'Patience' to build roads, factories, and infrastructure from almost nothing, with Diligence even consenting to a photo-op where he constructed an entire railway network for the Congo with his Noble Arm. 

Charity's avatars, most of them large, well-built, matronly women, also posted videos showing them growing fruit trees in vacant pieces of land and handing the fruits out to starving children, as well as making it rain in drought-stricken areas and then growing rice, wheat, bananas, turnips, peppers, coconuts, and all sorts of crops in the now-watered land. 

A graph showed their followers' numbers skyrocketing after that, with many joining them in droves, giving up their previous names and ranks to support the Virtues' mysteriously vague objectives.

In the previous week, it was the Paragons of Science that had experienced a surge of support, bestowing Noble Arms on the ideologically driven and the extremely wealthy, and sending out 'envoys' to lobby the US Government to stop isolating itself. This had the opposite effect on their objectives, however, as their arrogance and condescension, mixed with an open elitism, caused support for intervention to [i]decline[/i] and made many people in the US Congress support isolation when they otherwise would not have.

Russia, China, and other countries, including Iran and North Korea, have now openly begun to discuss strengthening the 'Shanghai Cooperation Organization' so that it can ultimately replace The West with 'stronger, more primal values', the nature of which were kept vague.

The world was growing dark...

[@Lewascan2][@Conscripts][@Gerlando][@Creative Chaos][@Nimbus][@QJT][@Amidatelion][@Ryik][@Digmata]