Chapter 489 The First Supervillain
The world was still in the recovery phase after the economic and financial crash. Thanks to an immense amount of stimulus and other aid payments on behalf of the government, companies had been hiring people in droves, driving down the global unemployment rate by quite a lot.
However, due to the disparity in education among the population of some former countries-either as a result of devastating wars or just plain bad leadership-some areas were still suffering. The economic growth seemed to have passed them by; after all, if they don't know a program exists to help them, how can they be helped? Thus, they were only surviving on life support thanks to the Coeus Foundation donating funds and building free clinics and schools and such. But recovery in the worst areas would still remain slow until their education levels caught up to the global standard. And that, unfortunately, was a problem that only time could solve.
Among those areas still in the grip of an economic downturn was the former country of North Korea. They had the highest unemployment rate and lowest educational standards as a result of the Kim dynasty purposefully keeping them uneducated and heavily reliant on their leadership. And due to the generational brainwashing that had been implemented throughout their country, Aron had to take some extreme measures to prevent them from following the Kims into the grave, or perhaps worse-acting out and taking up what arms they could still find to fight a war against the world. N0v3lTr0ve served as the original host for this chapter's release on N0v3l-B1n.
Thus, that area had the highest concentration of cubes per capita in the entire world. They were required in order to retrain the former DPRK armed forces. Once those had been settled into their long-term pods, the next group to be treated were the very old, the very young, and the very ill. The empire wasn't just providing healing of the body, but also healing the minds of the people and clearing the fog that the Kim regime had purposefully put them into, clearing their minds and restoring their critical thinking skills while not implanting any further operant conditioning triggers.
Once the first pass had been completed, recovery was deemed to be well on its way and the former soldiers of the DPRK were given a choice: join ARES, retire with a lump sum payment in END to kickstart their new civilian life, or join the imperial police agency. Those former soldiers who had committed crimes, though, were referred to the imperial judiciary for prosecution of their crimes. And with no flimsy statute of limitations law in the imperial legal code, even crimes committed decades before were added to the judges' dockets for trial and sentencing.
"All of it."
The bank teller queried the Akashic Record for the man's ID, then brought up his account in her AR glasses to facilitate his withdrawal. He only had 15 END in his account, so she opened the drawer and counted out two bills, then slid them across the counter toward the young man.
"Here's your 15 END, is there anything else I can-AAAAAAAAAAGH!" she screamed, suddenly in excruciating pain as the young man grabbed her wrist in his now-flaming hand.
She continued screaming herself hoarse and struggling to escape the man's grip as smoke rose from her arm together with the sickly-sweet stench of roasting human flesh.
"Bring me the manager!" the man shouted as he held the teller's arm pinned to the top of the bank desk. Then he dragged her kicking and screaming over the top and around to the location of the bank vault.
The bank's security guard had immediately reported the situation, but as it involved the use of a superpower, he'd been told to stand down and continue observing while a specialized unit was dispatched to deal with the problem. The rest of the people in the bank were similarly unable to act, as the man had switched his grip from her arm to her neck, threatening to cook her to death the moment anyone attempted anything heroic.
This bank robbery would go down in the history books as the first incident in which an individual used their superpower for evil, and it had only been a few short hours after awakeners had left the cubes, their awakenings completed.