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Chapter 760: Chapter 760 - Lucien’s Response

Lucien gathered more evidence.

The Shadow Spies supplied the locations and hidden routes they had uncovered, while Kael’s people reconstructed the financial trails connecting the suspicious transactions. Elias traced personnel movements, transport schedules, and changes in command assignments that had never appeared in official records.

Clara handled the more delicate parts of the investigation.

Her Divine Sense was especially useful.

Even then, Lucien refused to treat Divine Sense’s judgment as an effortless division between good and evil.

They still relied on evidence.

The investigation had to distinguish between the people who had actively maintained the slave networks and those who had merely existed inside the same factions.

Some had knowingly profited from the system or enforced it for years. Others had opposed it internally, been coerced into cooperation, or genuinely known nothing about what their leaders were hiding.

The people who had already begun exploring cooperation with the Black Mass were treated as a separate problem entirely.

Those distinctions mattered.

Lucien was furious, but anger did not excuse carelessness.

•••

By the time the investigation was complete, the shape of the problem had become impossible to dismiss.

Several factions had indeed hidden slave populations throughout their conquered worlds, far from the scrutiny of the five continents. Within those factions, smaller groups of senior figures had already begun discussing whether cooperation with the enemy might become useful if the pressure increased.

A few individuals had gone even further and sent exploratory signals into the void.

Fortunately, none of those attempts had yet become a formal agreement.

Lucien intended to make sure they never did.

He looked over the gathered reports before turning toward Vorren.

"Any better?"

Vorren gave him the kind of look a man might give someone asking whether standing inside a burning building had become comfortable.

"No."

Lucien nodded.

"Good."

Vorren stared at him.

Lucien paused before correcting himself.

"Useful."

Judging from Vorren’s expression, that clarification did not improve matters much.

•••

The factions never realized when the investigation stopped being an investigation and became an operation.

Lucien deliberately avoided sending declarations in advance. Warning them would only give their leaders time to destroy records, relocate captives, or flee through hidden routes.

Instead, Lootwell moved first.

The Shadow Spies already positioned inside the conquered worlds became the reference points for the deployment. Their locations gave Lucien precisely what he needed to use the Covenant of Pathless Sovereignty.

Space folded around the deployment teams.

When Lootwell’s forces emerged, they did not appear at ceremonial gates or public teleportation hubs where the factions could prepare for them.

They appeared inside the conquered worlds themselves, close to the slave districts, the hidden prisons, and the command centers responsible for maintaining the restraint formations.

By the time the first faction understood that something had happened, much of its control network had already gone dark.

•••

Across the labor districts, enchanted collars stopped responding.

The formation towers controlling movement restrictions were seized before their operators could initiate emergency commands, while private guards found themselves surrounded by forces they had never seen arrive.

Lootwell’s healers followed closely behind the first wave, accompanied by administrators carrying identity records, emergency supplies, and evacuation plans.

Clara moved through several of the camps as well.

Her Divine Light exposed traces of corruption hidden beneath ordinary formations and eventually revealed storage areas containing Black Mass-tainted materials.

That discovery darkened Lucien’s expression further.

Someone inside the faction had already begun experimenting with them.

The attempts had not succeeded yet, but that detail offered very little comfort.

The important part was that they had tried.

•••

The faction leadership reacted only after Lootwell had already taken control of several critical locations.

Some surrendered when they realized how thoroughly they had been compromised. Others attempted to destroy their records or escape through private gateways, while a smaller number chose to fight.

Those decisions made the next stage considerably simpler.

Lucien had no patience left for ceremonial negotiations.

Those who surrendered were restrained and investigated. Anyone attempting to destroy evidence was stopped before they could erase what had been uncovered, while those who attacked the rescue teams discovered exactly why Lootwell had become the dominant power of the five continents.

The battles that followed were brief, though not because the factions themselves were weak.

Several had existed for thousands of years and still possessed Eternals, ancient formations, hidden treasures, and enough accumulated wealth to intimidate lesser powers.

Their mistake had been more fundamental.

They had watched Lootwell rise for years and convinced themselves that remaining quiet was enough to preserve their position.

Somewhere along the way, they had mistaken silence for strength.

•••

The first Eternal attempted to seal the conquered world’s boundary before more Lootwell forces could enter.

Astraea destroyed the formation before the seal could complete.

Another tried to escape through a hidden spatial route, only for the passage to collapse when a Lunarian interference array activated around it.

The ugliest attempt came from an elder who threatened the restraint network connected to several thousand slaves.

He never finished issuing the command.

Clara’s light reached the formation core before the activation could spread, and the collars went dead across the district.

The elder survived only a few breaths longer.

Lucien did not consider those breaths particularly valuable.

•••

The operation expanded from there.

One conquered world was secured, then another, followed by several more once the evidence had been verified.

Lootwell did not target every faction that carried an ugly history.

Lucien was careful about that.

Only those whose current crimes could actually be proven were subjected to the operation, and that distinction became important almost immediately.

Several factions with notorious pasts voluntarily opened their records the moment they realized what Lootwell was investigating. Some invited inspectors before anyone even asked.

One elderly faction leader personally delivered records covering three years of internal reform, apparently terrified that their past’ reputation would be enough to condemn everyone who came after them.

Vorren eventually visited the territory.

He felt nothing unusual.

Lucien left the faction alone.

The old leader nearly cried from relief.

That story spread faster than news of some of the arrests, which helped make Lootwell’s position clear.

The operation was not punishment for history.

It was punishment for what people were still choosing to do.

•••

The conquered worlds themselves proved more difficult to repair.

Some populations had lived under slavery for generations, to the point that freedom sounded less believable than another form of deception.

In one mining settlement, a human worker stared at the broken collar in his hands for several minutes before finally asking the Lootwell administrator standing beside him who owned him now.

The administrator hesitated only because the question seemed to hurt.

"No one."

The miner continued staring at him.

He did not understand yet.

Others did.

Some laughed until they could no longer stand. Others cried openly, while a few simply sat where they were because they had spent so long expecting punishment that they did not know what to do when none came.

Lootwell did not force them to leave the conquered worlds.

Some wanted passage back to the five continents. Others had been born there and considered those worlds their only homes.

Several communities demanded control of the settlements and mines they had spent generations maintaining for someone else.

Lucien saw no reason to refuse them.

The factions that had owned those places no longer needed them.

The people who had built their lives there did.

So Lootwell began transferring local control where it was practical and established temporary administrations where it was not.

Lucien understood that the hardest part would not be breaking the collars.

Declaring people free could be done in a moment.

Repairing societies that had been shaped by generations of captivity would take far longer.

For that, he gave his administrators the time they needed.

•••

The people responsible for creating those societies received far less patience.

Kael moved first against their financial foundations, freezing assets and tracing the wealth accumulated through the slave networks.

Elias dismantled the remaining command structures and removed the people capable of reorganizing resistance, while Lootwell seized the private gateways linking the factions to their conquered worlds.

The Shadow Spies continued collecting records before anyone could hide or destroy them.

Lucien insisted that the investigation distinguish genuine opposition from convenient excuses. People who had actually resisted the slave networks were treated differently from those who suddenly claimed disapproval once Lootwell arrived.

Those who had begun negotiating with the Black Mass faced even harsher scrutiny.

Lucien had no intention of allowing anyone willing to trade the safety of the Thousand Races for personal survival to remain in a position where they could try again.

Some were imprisoned.

Others lost every position, resource, and privilege they had accumulated.

A smaller number had crossed far enough that keeping them alive no longer served any useful purpose.

Lootwell had always distinguished between mistakes and deliberate rot.

This was not a mistake.

•••

Vorren accompanied several of the final operations.

Lucien noticed the change before Vorren mentioned it himself.

After the leadership of the third faction had been removed, Vorren stood outside the administrative complex and remained there for several moments.

He was still pale, but the tension in his face had eased.

Lucien watched him carefully.

"Better?"

Vorren frowned as though testing the feeling.

"A little."

That was enough to make Lucien pay attention.

The same thing happened again after another hidden slave network was dismantled and several elders involved in attempted Black Mass contact were captured.

Vorren’s unease decreased.

The vast pressure he sensed beyond the continents remained, but part of the discomfort layered over it had faded.

That gave Lucien the answer he needed.

These factions had not been the source of the larger danger.

They had been part of the conditions that made it worse.

They were weak points inside the Thousand Races, exactly the kind of cracks an intelligent enemy could exploit when the real pressure arrived.

Removing them did not erase the threat outside.

It simply made the civilization facing that threat harder to break from within.

•••

That realization changed how Lucien viewed the repeated attacks on conquered worlds.

He had already considered pressure, reconnaissance, and division as possible objectives.

Those explanations still fit.

Now another possibility joined them.

By striking scattered faction territories, the Black Mass was forcing every power to reveal how it behaved under stress.

Some factions immediately asked for help.

Others cooperated.

Some concealed their losses, resisted outside inspection, and protected secrets that mattered more to them than the survival of their own people.

Those were precisely the kinds of factions that could become useful to an enemy.

The Black Mass did not necessarily need to know beforehand who would betray the Thousand Races.

It only needed to keep applying pressure until the weakest loyalties exposed themselves.

Lucien’s expression cooled as he understood the possibility.

It was clever.

He was beginning to resent how often the enemy forced him to acknowledge that.

•••

The final faction was stopped before its leaders managed to complete the betrayal they were considering.

Its ruler had prepared a message offering access to a rival conquered world in exchange for temporary protection from the Black Mass.

The message never left the territory.

A Shadow Spy intercepted it before transmission, and Lootwell moved less than an hour later.

By sunset, the slave camps had been opened.

By nightfall, the old command structure had effectively ceased to function.

By the following morning, a Voidwatch installation team was already preparing the conquered world’s defenses.

Lucien found that part particularly satisfying.

If the enemy intended to turn these worlds into pressure points, Lootwell would remove the pressure while eliminating the people willing to exploit it.

There was no reason to solve those problems separately when they could be handled together.

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