Theocracy Alongside Hate Intelligence (1)
After what felt like an eternity of agonizing deliberation, I finally overcame my crippling indecision and settled on the very first event I would tackle.
Having to go through this nonsense two more times after this… what a miserable prospect.
With that thought, I looked up—and there, floating gently before my eyes, was the message I had selected.
Unidentified Ancient Ruins
An exploration team belonging to the Holy Sevelian Empire, while surveying an uncharted region on the galactic fringe, has discovered unidentified ancient ruins on a certain planet.
The exterior, long exposed to the elements, has crumbled under the weight of ages—yet the explorers who ventured inside found the interior preserved to a startling degree.
Upon receiving the report, officials of the Ministry of Colonization immediately prepared to dispatch personnel for excavation and preservation…
Unfortunately, the uncharted territory in question happens to lie right next to another nation’s border.
📍 Option 1: This is a diplomatic matter—we should handle it ourselves! (Linked Event Proceeds)[SELECTED]
📍 Option 2: No need to go looking for trouble.
Ruins excavation? Absolutely non-negotiable.
In this game, digging up ruins was never anything like real-world archaeology. We were talking about mountains of treasure, priceless ancient artifacts, and—best of all—those sweet, sweet research points and integration scores…!
Unless you were spectacularly unlucky, excavating ruins was pure profit for the Empire.
But this particular event came with one glaring problem, exactly as the message spelled out.
Uncharted territory is one thing… but right on the other nation’s border? Seriously?
On the surface it looked like a simple, almost trivial issue. In reality, border friction was the kind of powder keg that could spark a full-scale war if handled wrong.
> [Pause Released]
To vent my frustration, I released the pause and called Riel over to discuss the situation.
The moment she heard me out…
“What even is that? They’re basically telling us to be meat shields, aren’t they?”
She immediately launched into a full-blown rant, looking ready to storm the Ministry of Colonization building and flip every table inside. The sheer volcanic intensity of her irritation was something else—normally I would have reined her in the second I saw it, but…
“…Don’t go too hard on them.”
Honestly, I wanted to swear just as badly as she did. So I simply stood there and let her rage burn itself out.
Once Riel’s spectacular tantrum finally wound down, the two of us cooled off and summoned the staff of the Foreign Executive Ministry for a proper meeting on the matter.
Any normal, rational, common-sense member of the Foreign Executive Ministry would, of course, explode with irritation the moment they heard this proposal.
“Minister, wouldn’t it be better to simply ignore this agenda?”
“Exactly! This is nothing more than a one-sided demand that we sacrifice ourselves!”
The majority of attendees leaned hard hawkish, arguing that since the other side was forcing unilateral sacrifice on us, we should push back just as aggressively.
But a room full of people never consists solely of hawks.
“Still, abandoning the excavation of ancient ruins would be far too regrettable, wouldn’t it?”
“Setting personal feelings aside, if the exploration team’s projected data is accurate, a little border friction is well within acceptable risk.”
The inevitable doves—or at least the cautious moderates—began floating the idea that this might still be worth it. A few third and fourth opinions surfaced as well, but…
Perhaps because I had already locked in my choice, the longer the meeting dragged on, the more the consensus naturally drifted toward intervention.
If the opposition had managed any solid counterarguments, things might have been different. Instead…
“Tch.”
“…No helping it. Reality is what it is.”
They were already paying the full price for answering the doves’ cold, rational fact-checks with pure emotion. Leave them any longer and it would turn into a soul-threshing machine. I had no desire to watch fellow Foreign Executive Ministry personnel tear each other apart, so I stepped in and shut the discussion down.
“All right. I believe I’ve heard enough.”
“Minister…”
“The outcome of this meeting is decided. I will entertain no further opinions.”
Having said that, I also made sure to announce our objective in advance.
“Effective immediately, in accordance with the Ministry of Colonization’s request, we will make every necessary preparation to ensure that the neighboring Jubar Kingdom cannot preemptively claim sovereignty over the uncharted territory.”
“Understood, Minister!”
“Yes, sir!”
A few days after the meeting concluded…
“The diplomatic mission bound for the Jubar Kingdom’s border region has just departed from the spaceport.”
“Is that so? Understood. Good work.”
With the operator’s rather cheerful voice in my ear, I gazed out at the receding rocket exhaust plumes of the mission ships, intending to strike a suitably dramatic pose for a moment—
“What are you doing? Striking some pointless cool pose for no reason?”
“….”
Fact-violence specialist Riel approached, arms loaded with a mountain of work, and I pretended nothing was wrong while casually whistling.
“You remember the meeting we had a few days ago, right?”
“Yeah, well… what about it?”
“Since then, a bunch of people have been grinding their blades—devouring international law and every case-study collection they could find. Now they’ve finally got the perfect chance to show off those skills.”
At that, Riel looked mildly surprised, as if she had completely forgotten.
“Oh, so the ruins excavation mission already left?”
“Yeah. They just took off from the spaceport.”
“Ah, so that’s why you were standing at the window with your hands behind your back, staring out like that?”
I shrugged as if it were nothing.
“Mmm… well, something like that. Is there anything special about it, though?”
In truth I was just filling the silence with whatever came to mind, but…
“Not sure if it counts as special, but I do have something to report.”
“What is it?”
Riel set down the thick bundle of work she had been carrying in both hands, selected one item from the pile, and held it out to me.
“Actually, this is one of the things the departing mission requested.”
“Hmm?”
Nothing about her words immediately clicked, so I frowned and checked the details on my work terminal.
“This is…”
“It only just reached your desk for approval, so those people had to leave without getting it processed.”
Inside the data slate Riel handed me was a request form filed under the name of the mission commander. The request? To deploy a full platoon of the Purge Squad—the armed force we had brought with us when we merged into the Foreign Executive Ministry.
I looked at Riel with pure disbelief.
“Did they seriously think I would approve this?”
“Weeeell… who knooows…”
Even Riel sounded half-convinced it was a joke, which meant the mission commander had almost certainly made the request in complete earnest.
“Just my personal guess, but I think the commander only sees the Purge Squad as a regular special-forces unit.”
“…If you look at it that way, the scale of the request actually makes perfect sense.”
As Riel said, by ordinary special-forces standards, a single platoon was a perfectly reasonable escort for a diplomatic mission and ruins survey. The problem was that the Purge Squad’s combat power was nowhere near “ordinary” special forces.
Setting aside magical powers like psychic abilities, they were quite simply the strongest fighting force a human body could possibly produce. I was about to stamp the request “Absurd” and feed it straight into the shredder—
But then I paused. For this particular operation, some kind of fail-safe against worst-case scenarios might actually be necessary.
“Riel. Hypothetically speaking—if we assume the absolute worst-case scenario that could occur during the ruins excavation…”
“Yeah?”
“How many Purge Squad members do you think we’d need to extract both the information and the material assets we require?”
Riel immediately caught my meaning. A characteristically cocky smile spread across her face.
“Four. No—three would be plenty.”
“Perfect. Then revise the request appropriately… and send them.”