(Real World, Planet Tithia, Evil Cult Headquarters, The First Elder's Office)
"Haha—"
The First Elder let out a dry, humorless chuckle as his eyes skimmed over the fresh report laid out before him.
He almost didn't want to believe it at first.
Because believing it would mean accepting that everything he had built, everything he had bled for, had amounted to nothing in the end.
It would mean admitting that seventy-five years of service, sixty years of planning, and an entire generation of effort had unraveled faster than he could contain it.
But denial wasn't going to change the ink etched into the page.
Just like how closing his eyes wasn't going to make the truth fade away.
Seventy-five years.
That was how long he had served the cult, sixty of which had been spent wearing the robe of an elder, a title not gifted by seniority or birthright but earned through blood, through patience and through a meticulous devotion to building something greater than himself.
As through those sixty years, he had endured betrayals from within and sieges from outside, but had never wavered in his mission regardless.
He had survived wars against the righteous faction and elder politics within the council.
He had crushed rebellion with one hand while offering olive branches with the other, navigating the shifting tides of war and diplomacy with equal precision, even going so far as to broker peace with representatives from the righteous faction whenever the cult needed him to play the role of mediator, as he willingly traded away minor concessions and peripheral assets just to buy the cult a few more precious years of uninterrupted growth and preparation.
And yet, despite all that, the crisis before him now felt like the most dangerous trial of his entire existence, not because it was sudden or overwhelming, but because it was built on the very architecture of everything he had constructed with his own two hands.
For the past six decades, he had been nurturing undercover assets, embedding them like rot beneath the skin of the Righteous Alliance, and nobody within the universal government was any wiser.
He had been corrupting hundreds of offices and bloodlines with bribes, secrets, and silent conversions, turning one loyal official after another into tools of the cult, but it was all crumbling now.
Slowly, but surely, he had made an Empire of cult sympathizers embedded within the universal system, however, after the attack on the Sky God Arena, he was unfortunately being forced to watch it all unravel before his own eyes.
Decades of patient sabotage was unwinding in a matter of weeks, as one by one, the agents he had spent years training, bribing, and blackmailing were being exposed and paraded through the streets as proof of a purge long overdue.
It was like watching a spiderweb, one he had spun strand by strand across a lifetime, torn apart in a sudden storm, as the threads snapped in rapid succession, while all he could do was sit back and listen to the wind howl.
[Thirty-two sleeper agents exposed in the last forty-eight hours… six operations compromised… four supply lines cut… and seventeen neutral allies disavowed us publicly]
The report read, as the first elder couldn't help but chuckle at the mirthless humor.
'I knew this would happen,' he thought, his voice dry even in his own mind.
He had warned them. All of them.
Warned the Council that revealing their cards in such a public, catastrophic manner and striking the Sky-God Arena, would not lead to domination, but retaliation.
However, they didn't listen to his advice.
The younger elders who had grown hungry for blood encouraged the violence, and now he was forced to clean-up after them, as he tried to minimize the consequences of that one big attack.
—-------
> Dismantle Cell-13. Burn all the communication devices used in that operation and destroy any evidence that can link that operation to the cult.
> Reinforce security on planets Juxta, Merdith and Rayon, sending the best security machinery and arms to those planets at the earliest.
> Activate Project Hollow Seed, start floating rumors about the next Dragon Candidate being identified and currently being evaluated by the council.
> Recall or eliminate exposed assets before they can be interrogated by the righteous faction and pull out any remaining Transcendent warriors that are working undercover universally.
> Inform all elders to be mandatorily present for an emergency meeting in two days time, here on Tithia.
—--------
The elder wrote, as one by one he rolled up the scrolls and handed them over to his assistants who he knew would hand them over to the relevant parties.
Just exposing and parading some Evil Cult Agents hiding within the system was never going to be enough for the Righteous Alliance, and the first elder understood this better than anyone.
Over his nearly century long experience in dealing with them, any humiliation they faced was always returned by a large scale military retaliation, which meant that sooner or later, a huge border skirmish was likely to breakout in Juxta, Merdith or Rayon, which were they frontier planets sharing a boundary with the Righteous Alliance.
"The question isn't if but when… when are they going to attack us, and how hard will the blow be?" the First Elder muttered, his voice low and frayed, as he folded the report and leaned back in his chair, staring blankly at the flickering lantern above.
Usually, such answers would come from his network— from the agents he had seeded inside the government, whose whispers and fragments always painted the larger picture before the blow ever landed.
But now, that web was broken.
He could no longer rely on the steady stream of warnings he once trusted, because those assets were either dead, compromised, or had simply gone silent, as the Fourth's aggression had upended every measure of control he had so painstakingly maintained for decades.
"The Fourth's recklessness has made everything worse," he sighed, his fingers tightening slightly as he stared at the empty corner of the room. "If it weren't for him… and the Second's bloodthirsty eagerness for war, none of this would have happened so soon, and the cult wouldn't be standing on the edge of collapse."
His voice dropped to a whisper, almost as if afraid the walls themselves would betray him.
"I need to visit Lord Soron…"
He hesitated— because he knew he wasn't supposed to.
Soron had given clear orders to not be disturbed unless it was a matter of absolute, undeniable emergency. But if this wasn't considered an emergency… then what was?
"I must consult him… whether he chooses to see me or not… I must make the journey to Ixtal, and seek him out" the first elder murmured, as he rose from his seat with a heaviness that spoke of age, burden, and resignation all rolled into one.
Because although morale within the cult still held strong, buoyed by the dramatic success of the Sky God Arena strike, that morale was a fragile thing— a blaze that could easily be snuffed out.
If even a single planet was lost.
Or if the Righteous Alliance gained rapid ground through decisive victories.
Then the momentum they had built would vanish overnight, and the cult, for all its glory and divine backing, would begin to fracture from within.
And he could not allow that. Not while he was still the first elder at least, as he just prayed that the God Soron would have a path for him to follow when his own wits were at an end.