The Purge Behind the Invasion
Barely a day after the full-scale invasion began, roughly three thousand players found themselves either adrift and homeless — or forced to surrender to the invading Humanity forces, watching their fleets and resources get requisitioned out from under them.
And yet, even in that dire situation, the main force of the Xenobia Empire never came to their aid the way the Pirate Union once had.
It was only natural, really. Unlike the so-called Southern Campaign — the war between the Pirate Union and the Earth Federation — Humanity's objective this time was never to weaken the Earth Federation's overall strength.
They never baited the Earth Federation's main force into committing. They didn't even touch the Earth Federation's faction expeditionary detachments stationed at their own bases. Instead, they conducted the entire invasion using strictly their own forces.
And because of that, the Xenobia Empire's high command dismissed the whole affair as nothing more than a squabble between lowly commanders — a kids' fight that the empire itself had no business intervening in.
So the players caught in the invasion route received not a single helping hand from their so-called homeland. The southern territories of Xenobia, home to nothing more than a handful of mid-tier clans totaling maybe two or three thousand members, were crushed mercilessly under an overwhelming force of over a million ships.
The mid-tier clans, at least, held Level 4 or higher bases and managed to dig in around their strongholds, scraping together some kind of defensive line. Everyone else — the smaller clans and solo players — either got pushed out of their territories or folded and surrendered, just as described above.
But for those Xenobia-aligned players being swept away by the sudden large-scale invasion, a ray of light arrived before long.
No — two rays of light.
Because the Xenobia players had kept resisting no matter how badly they were getting stomped, Humanity's invasion force had taken considerable losses of its own. And once the Justice Clan and the Loki Clan — that purebred I-Love-Trolling-So-Much-It-Makes-Me-Happy clan — finally grasped the situation, they moved fast.
Justice's main fleet appeared out of nowhere in northern Xenobia, while Loki's raiding fleets showed up in the southeast — the old Southern Campaign theater, from Humanity's perspective — and both started pressing the attack.
Faced with that, Humanity halted the invasion of Xenobia territory entirely. Aside from a few zones already locked down by their subordinate clans, they pulled back from every other sector and returned to Earth Federation space.
...Or so someone claimed in a gallery post, at any rate.
Reading it, I found myself nodding along without even thinking.
"Looks like Humanity overextended and faceplanted."
"Is that so?"
"Yeah. Not sure about the full details, but their invasion force didn't consolidate territory and advance methodically — they just charged in way too fast."
And beyond that, the timing could not have been worse for them. Dealing with Justice alone would have been a serious headache. Add Loki on top of that?
Sure, Humanity was the number-one clan. But Loki's pure player count had climbed past forty thousand by now — roughly eighty percent of Humanity's strength — and Justice was a mega-clan of over thirty thousand in its own right. Both of them also had their own webs of subordinate and affiliate clans, same as Humanity.
So Humanity must have decided they couldn't win, treated the entire invasion force as a sunk cost, and bailed in a hurry.
...Probably?
The problem was, thinking about it that simply felt off.
"It's suspicious."
"Yeah. Extremely suspicious."
Humanity was not the kind of clan that just mindlessly steamrolled into things — and yet that was exactly how this had played out. And Antares, their clan leader, was not the kind of man who handled anything half-assed. Jessica and I both knew that, which made the whole situation reek of something fishy.
But being suspicious didn't magically give us a way to monitor events in real time from a place this absurdly far away. After bouncing a few theories around based on what we'd seen in the gallery, we decided it wasn't something we needed to worry about right now.
So we shelved the whole matter for the time being and turned our attention to more pressing concerns.
"Mnyaaaaah...♡"
"Mmm."
"Ahahaha..."
Namely: why Smeragi — who had gone off to put on a cat cosplay outfit — now had nine tails instead of two. And why Griyanaar and Pashtura, trailing along behind her, were wearing such extremely complicated expressions.
And while Icarus was busy pondering that particular brand of nonsense...
Inside the base of the Level 8 stronghold Andromeda Galaxy — currently serving as Humanity Clan's headquarters — a very different conversation was underway.
"Damn, most of the guys on the purge list are already messaging us begging for fleet reconstruction support ASAP."
"Reconstruction, huh."
"What's the call, Antares?"
Just as Icarus had suspected, the inner circle of officers was making it painfully obvious that Humanity's real objective had never been simple territorial conquest.
And that objective was this:
After the previous Loki Clan spy hunt, the internal schemers and double-dealers had gone dark or gone into hiding, making them nearly impossible to root out. And even when you did catch a fresh batch, there was always the risk that Loki would just slip more spies in among the new recruits.
So they had pretended to stop hunting spies. Instead, they quietly gathered intelligence, identified every spy and traitor on the roster, then deliberately assigned those players as the bulk of the invasion force for the Xenobia expedition — and threw them into mindless frontal assaults to burn through their combat strength.
Of course, staffing the force with traitors alone would have risked an outright mutiny. So they mixed in about thirty percent regular clan members...
And for the crowning touch, they put a half-loyal, anti-Antares officer in command — someone already slated for expulsion over competence and character issues, a guy who'd only made officer rank through seniority and connections. They stoked his ambition and hunger for glory, ensuring that when things went south, the blame would never stick to Antares or the leadership.
The Empire's Three-Way Stratagem. (3)
In short, Humanity's goal from the very beginning had been to thin out the combat power of every high-risk traitor, then purge them wholesale along with the officer they'd already been itching to get rid of.
First, goad the hardworking-but-incompetent officer into launching reckless all-out charges that torched the force's strength. Then, once the weakened traitors and spies reached out to their real masters in Loki for help — and Loki started moving to intervene — quietly leak just enough intel to Justice to pull them in at the same time.
The result:
"Help!!!"
"Lmao they're pushing from above and below, nothing we can do lol"
With that convenient justification in hand, they finished grinding the purge-list members' fleets into scrap and issued a leisurely retreat order.
The purge, of course, only applied to the people on the list. Regular clan members and the loyalist subordinate clans got to quietly pocket the spoils of the invasion.
But that alone wasn't the end of Antares and the leadership's thrilling spy-extermination grand operation.
Naturally, the "failure" of this invasion was a responsibility that the Humanity officer who ran the operation would have to bear.
The officer in question — who had already racked up a mountain of bad karma in ordinary times — was subjected to a full public gang-execution in the official chat and unceremoniously booted from the clan.
As for the rest of the purge-list members, whose fleets had been gutted by the reckless offensive...
While the purge of the officer who'd led the reckless offensive lulled the targets into thinking Humanity was trying to appease them, a separate new chat room issued the real orders: unrestricted plunder against every name on the purge list whose combat power had just been annihilated.