Chapter 33.1: Continental Wide Purge - Death Night
Personal System Calendar: Year 0009, Days 1-28 Month XIII: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6854, 13th month, 1st to 28th Day
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Screams
One fiery night across the entire continent was sufficient for the empire to cleanse its lands of the rot that had been festering under their watch. But it would be a mistake to think the empire had been negligent or ignorant of this corruption. They had deliberately allowed it to grow, meticulously documenting every connection, every transaction, every participant.
The Imperial Intelligence Division had been building comprehensive cases in every major region for years, patiently waiting for a catalyst significant enough to justify public, overwhelming action rather than discrete covert operations. The attack on Fort Aulexus had provided exactly that justification.
This campaign was designed to demonstrate to the public that aggressive security measures were a necessary step toward the paradise the Emperor envisioned for the people. A society where citizens were no longer enslaved by their fellow kind, bullied and abandoned, mocked and unjustly punished. This was an age of reckoning for those who committed systematic evil against the innocent.
All in one night, the operation designated "Purge" was enacted after intelligence agencies compiled the final lists of all major players. It was a coordinated strike executed simultaneously by military forces and civil police across all three subcontinents that are of Imperial control. As soon as midnight struck, they launched the assault while most of the population slept peacefully in their beds.
Even the regional capital of Aethelgard, jewel of the empire and seat of power, harbored these rats. Foreign merchants who had come ostensibly to trade had brought their nefarious enterprises with them. They had hidden deep beneath the radar because they understood how severely their crimes were condemned in the empire's heart. But the Intelligence Division had been watching, recording, and building cases for them, it was so tight like being constricted by a constrictor snake.
Within that single night, the empire's shadows moved with terrifying precision. Its military might was displayed in full force. This was no longer about arrests conducted with judicial restraint. Anyone who showed any signs of aggression toward their captors was killed immediately and without hesitation. None were spared the consequences of resistance.
Soon, explosions and screams could be heard across cities throughout the three subcontinent. It was the largest coordinated operation ever conducted through all imperial agencies working in perfect synchronization.
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Parade of Shame
Specialized wagons designed specifically to contain criminals with magical powers rolled through city streets. Those who had surrendered peacefully were shackled inside these reinforced vehicles. Those who had resisted filled body bags stacked in military transports.
Thousands upon thousands of arrested criminals were marched through the streets in a deliberate parade meant to demonstrate the empire's thorough response. Neighbors were shocked from their sleep by the commotion. Friends and families awakened to discover people they knew being dragged away in chains toward detention facilities where they would await mass judgments.
Those deemed potentially redeemable were separated and sent to forced labor camps in remote mining regions, sentenced to one hundred years of hard work. The more heinous and nefarious individuals were transported directly to public execution sites, where podiums had been hastily constructed for mass beheadings, public shaming, and various forms of capital punishment.
Some masterminds were captured, the proverbial bosses of bosses whose names had appeared on intelligence lists for years. But others had managed to flee, their networks warning them just hours before the purge began.
Their carefully constructed covers were blown completely. Seemingly legitimate businesses were revealed as criminal fronts, their operations exposed to public scrutiny when morning came. This single night's action wasn't the conclusion but merely the beginning, as the empire vowed to root out every trace of the corruption that had festered in their society.
Neighbors began questioning neighbors with newfound suspicion. Who would have thought there were murderers and serial killers walking among them, wolves in sheep's clothing who had seemed like ordinary and mundane citizens?
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The Seven's Revelation
The empire didn't merely arrest criminals. They conducted a comprehensive public education campaign, revealing to citizens exactly who had financed the attack on Fort Aulexus and countless other crimes. The seven shadow syndicates were exposed in meticulous detail, their dual natures laid bare for all to see.
The Zargos Mercantile Guild, so respected in trade circles, was revealed to be Corvus, a vast criminal empire trafficking in slaves, drugs, assassination, and every conceivable vice. The public learned that the "labor solutions" Zargos provided were actually sophisticated slavery disguised by deliberately complex legal contracts.
The Obsidian Sanctum, trusted by royalty and nobles alike to safeguard their wealth, was exposed as Daemon, an organization that enslaved entire bloodlines through cursed debts and blackmail so complete that victims became puppets. The revelation that noble houses had been controlled for generations through financial manipulation shocked aristocratic circles.
The prestigious Silver-Tongue Oratory, where nobility sent their children for education in rhetoric and law, was unmasked as Siren, an indoctrination center that deliberately planted seeds of doubt and sedition in the next generation of imperial leadership. Parents who had paid fortunes for their children's education learned they had been funding their own empire's subversion.
The Gilded Compass Trading Company, essential for maritime commerce and navigation, was shown to be Ouroboros, survivors of the fallen Arkanus empire who deliberately created economic chaos through manipulated charts and engineered shipping disasters. Merchants realized that years of mysterious losses and bankruptcies had been systematic sabotage.
The Iron-Root LaborUnion, ostensibly protecting workers' rights, was revealed as Manticore, operating the largest forced-labor network on the three subcontinents through legal loopholes that made slavery appear legitimate. The families of "convicted workers" learned their relatives hadn't been rehabilitated but enslaved.
The beloved Velvet Alms Foundation, praised for their charitable work among the poor, was exposed as Nightshade, a Fresco League remnant using orphanages and healing houses to smuggle weapons, poisons, and rebel spies. Citizens who had donated to the Foundation discovered their charity had funded assassination and espionage.
The Eternal Archive, respected for preserving history, was unmasked as Chimera, intellectual rebels who didn't merely oppose the empire but sought to erase its very legitimacy from historical record. Scholars learned that documents they had trusted were part of an information warfare campaign.
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Public Display
The empire didn't simply announce these revelations. They displayed the evidence publicly in forums, market squares, and through official proclamations read in every village, town, city and every manner of settlement. Documents were posted showing financial transactions, intercepted communications, testimony from captured operatives.
The leaders of Fresco's Revenge, the rebel group who had perpetrated the attack on Fort Aulexus, were paraded alongside syndicate members to demonstrate the complete network of conspiracy. Citizens could see exactly how foreign criminal organizations had financed domestic terrorism.
The animosity of the people could be heard in roars of anger that echoed through city streets. The criminals being marched to judgment realized with horror that they wouldn't be heard, that no legal defense would save them. They understood how Elmisians had been treated by the Fresco League of Kingdoms after the fall of the old Arkanus empire, the brutal oppression that had preceded the current order.
Their deaths were assured. Only those involved in relatively minor roles within these organizations, those who could demonstrate they had been misled or coerced, were spared execution and instead sentenced to the mines. But the higher-ranking members and those who had actively enacted evil or profited knowingly from suffering, were killed methodically through individual or mass executions.
As the condemned were transported to execution sites, people lined the streets to boo, throw rocks, hurl refuse, and scream their hatred. The public's rage was palpable, their ancestral blood boiling at what these criminals had supported by financing murderers and slavers.
Even those who had protested the death warrants before, who had questioned the empire's harsh justice, found themselves unable to speak in defense of the condemned. They had seen the evidence. They had learned the scope of the conspiracy. The people had spoken through their collective fury, and that fury demanded blood.
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The Reckoning Continues
This scene would repeat itself daily until the end of the year. Each morning brought new arrests as intelligence agents followed leads provided by captured operatives. Each afternoon brought trials that were mere formalities, the verdicts predetermined by evidence already compiled. Each evening brought executions that the public attended in massive numbers, watching justice enacted in real-time.
The empire had unleashed a whirlwind, and it would not be contained or satisfied until every thread of the conspiracy had been pulled, every participant identified, every safe house discovered, every cache of weapons and contraband seized.
This was the empire at its most ruthlessly efficient, demonstrating why it had become the dominant power across three subcontinents. Not through mere military might, though they possessed that in abundance, but through comprehensive systems of intelligence, coordination, and the absolute will to see justice done regardless of cost or consequence.
The night of fire had been just the beginning. The cleansing would continue through winter and into spring, a systematic purging that would reshape the criminal underworld completely.
Those who survived would learn the lesson the empire intended: you could oppose the state through legal means, through cultural resistance, through philosophical debate. But the moment you resorted to violence, the moment you harmed imperial citizens or attacked imperial infrastructure, you had forfeited any right to mercy.
The seven syndicates had made a catastrophic miscalculation. They had believed their power, their artifacts, their centuries of accumulated influence would protect them from imperial wrath.
They had been wrong. And the price of that error would be measured in executions that continued long after the snow began to fall, staining the white ground red with the blood of those who had thought themselves beyond justice's reach.