The intelligence gathered by Jeanne and her companions was not buried away. Under Talulah's careful selection, pieces of data that ordinary minds could process without breaking were shared with the entire movement, ensuring every fighter understood precisely how vile these high nobles truly were.
Talulah made sure to emphasize that these disclosures represented only the milder, more readable segments of the salvaged records. The truly sickening material, which violated every standard of common decency, would remain under lock and key until the personnel grew mature enough to handle the burden.
Her caution was well-founded. Unleashing such a heavy psychic shock onto green recruits who had only recently joined the vanguard could have unhinged their resolve entirely.
Even the veteran shield-guards who had marched alongside Patriot for decades found themselves so choked with rage after skimming the files that they had to seek out isolated corners of the wilderness, bashing trees with their bare fists just to vent the suffocating fury in their chests.
The ripples of this disclosure extended far beyond the immediate camp. Where were the survivors who had managed to endure the atrocities of the border lords? Most had been discarded like rubbish into the freezing northern drifts, and many had subsequently been rescued by Talulah to march alongside her.
A massive portion of Reunion's current strength was comprised of outcasts who had personally suffered under this very darkness. When these fighters reviewed the records and finally understood the hidden mechanics behind their past miseries, the weeping across the encampment was incredibly bitter.
In that defining hour, whether a fighter carried the Oripathy or not, every individual aligned their sights toward a single, common enemy: the predatory nobles who treated human lives like cattle. The true meaning behind Talulah's long-standing sermons finally clicked in everyone's minds.
Even if they were infected, the proper targets for their vengeance were never the common, uninfected citizens who had merely shunned or slighted them out of ignorance. Their sole, true adversary was the ruling elite who sat atop the social ladder, grinding them into the dirt.
The ideological unity that Talulah had struggled so hard to cultivate was achieved in an instant. For a vanguard preparing to strike out from the tundra, this was spectacular news; these enlightened fighters would easily shape the mindsets of any new recruits who joined their ranks in the future.
A few days later, after the internal fires of the movement had been properly channeled, Talulah finalized the organization of the aristocracy's darkest secrets and solemnly handed the documents over to Jeanne.
They had chosen to accept Kashchey's strategy—or rather, none of them had anticipated that the old snake and the young sovereign would propose such a daring gamble. Exposing a scandal of this magnitude required an extraordinary amount of raw courage from the throne.
For the Emperor, this maneuver was a high-stakes play where failure meant eternal infamy. It was clear that the sovereign was willing to bet his entire legacy on a single throw of the dice.
The Emperor had indeed dispatched envoys to discuss the matter with the Messengers of Laterano, but he had held back the actual physical files, knowing the foreign envoys would never blindly trust an official dispatch from Ursus.
The Messengers' hesitation was entirely justified; the reputation of the empire across the wider face of Terra was something the Emperor understood all too well.
To put it politely, Ursus was viewed as a militaristic superpower with a fierce populace that thrived on conflict. To put it bluntly, the empire was viewed as a rabid hound that loved to sink its teeth into any territory within reach.
Therefore, if they wished for Laterano—a realm viewed by the peoples of Terra as the pinnacle of neutrality—to intervene, they required a guarantor whom the Sankta could trust implicitly to validate the proposal.
That monumental task naturally fell upon Jeanne. If she stepped forward as the intermediary, Laterano wouldn't care whether the rest of Ursus approved or not; they would execute the operation regardless.
"I leave these materials in your custody. I must offer my apologies for entangling your office in a crisis of this nature..."
Jeanne offered a look of genuine regret to the Sankta Messenger standing before her. The envoy, however, appeared completely overwhelmed with emotion; his expression suggested he wasn't merely meeting a holy maiden, but had stumbled upon a divine being in broad daylight.
"This presents no burden whatsoever, Lady Jeanne! Speaking out on behalf of justice and moral truth is a duty every Sankta embraces. To expose a corruption this profound is a righteous endeavor!"
He accepted the package with trembling hands, looking for all the world as though he were embarking on a crusade that was well worth sacrificing his life to complete.
"I have zero desire to see you come to harm over this affair... Oh, never mind, I shall simply accompany you for a time," Jeanne muttered, rubbing her temples as she observed the Messenger's eagerness to achieve martyrdom. She decided it was safest to serve as his personal vanguard.
The Sankta envoy stood frozen, completely stunned by his luck. He felt that if he were to return to Laterano tomorrow, he would discover his ancestral graves practically radiating smoke from the sheer honor of it all.
Had it not been for this crisis, what right would a humble frontier envoy ever possess to have the holy maiden herself safeguard his journey?
"By the way, I recall that the personnel previously assigned to monitor the Ursus frontier were Mostima and her companions, correct? Why was the assignment shifted so suddenly?" Jeanne inquired.
She realized she hadn't received tidings from that specific trio for a considerable duration. Had some emergency forced the Laterano authorities to reassign them?
"Ah, those three! Word from the capital indicates that a high-ranking official within the Apostolic Knights recalled them to headquarters for a specialized assignment. Beyond that, the details remain confidential."
Jeanne nodded slowly at his reply. While the recall wasn't entirely surprising, she couldn't help but wonder what sort of crisis had prompted the knights to summon a trio that usually enjoyed a semi-autonomous status on the frontier.
It couldn't be a sudden shift in the stability of Kazdel, could it? If that's the case, did my previous actions inadvertently complicate their schedule?
A few days after Jeanne and the Messenger initiated their journey, a massive trove of evidence detailing the horrific crimes of the high nobles detonated across every major mobile city in Ursus. The resulting social upheaval was a tidal wave unmatched since the passing of the late Emperor.
Because the disclosures explicitly named five Great Dukes, a vast network of mid-tier aristocrats, and several prominent ministers within the courts, the scandal effectively paralyzed half of the warmongering faction that had been giving the Emperor such immense headaches.
The citizenry of Ursus was utterly horrified. Was the nation they inhabited truly fit for living beings? Even Kazdel, rumored to be a land of ceaseless chaos, surely couldn't match the depravity outlined in these reports.
The graphic nature of the logs left the majority of the population unable to touch their rations for days. Parents frantically tried to shield the files from their children, terrified the dark revelations would leave permanent psychological scars.
The aristocracy was caught entirely off guard by this sudden strike. They had never anticipated that one of their own military hounds would deliver such a lethal bite to its masters from beyond the grave—and certainly not in collusion with Laterano!
The nobles immediately attempted to control the narrative, trying to redirect the public's fury away from their own crimes and toward a fabricated foreign threat. They claimed the Sankta Messengers were interfering in domestic politics to fracture the empire.
They knew the populace would curse them, but they were prepared to scream 'FAKE NEWS!' until the uneducated masses fell back into compliance; after all, the common folk could always be misled if one applied the proper pressure.
If executed correctly, they might even stir up anti-Laterano sentiment to prepare the nation for war, despite knowing their current military readiness offered zero guarantees of overcoming that miraculous city.
Yet, just as the various noble houses were shouting themselves hoarse condemning the Messengers and trying to rally other factions to protest the disclosure, a completely unexpected voice emerged from the palace.
Emperor Fyodor addressed the entire populace of Ursus directly. He openly announced that it was he who had requested the neutral state of Laterano to dispatch their Messengers, explicitly ordering them to reveal the single greatest scandal to plague the nation since its founding!
He declared an immediate season of investigation and tribunals. Every single aristocrat whose name appeared alongside evidence of violating imperial law would be pursued without mercy; nothing awaited them but swift judgment and public execution by the noose.
Finally, the young sovereign offered a deep apology for the reality that such a horror had reached its peak during his reign, stating that the sheer scale of the corruption proved how inadequate his own governance had been.
Staring directly into the recording lenses with immense sorrow, the Emperor bowed low to his people. He bent his frame so deeply that his imperial crown slipped from his brow and clattered onto the floor, yet he ignored it entirely, remaining frozen in that posture of humility for nearly five minutes.
"Today is a day that brings deep shame upon the name of Ursus. It stands as a testament to just how powerless I, Emperor Fyodor, have been..."
The populace boiled with emotion as they listened to their ruler's address. This was a true sovereign! He was simply surrounded by a swarm of vile parasites who had made his governance an impossible struggle.
Had they not been simple, unarmed laborers, these citizens likely would have downed two bottles of vodka, seized whatever hunting tools they possessed, and marched straight toward Deity Grypherburg to cleanse the court on behalf of the crown.
The high nobles watched the broadcast with absolute dread. This wasn't a confession of guilt from the throne; it was a maneuver that pinned the aristocracy to an eternal pillar of shame, ensuring no amount of political maneuvering could ever wash away their crimes.
As the dust began to settle from the initial storm, the Emperor emerged with a massive surge of loyalty from the common folk. The Messengers of Laterano secured a magnificent victory for global justice and moral truth.
Meanwhile, Reunion secured the precious time it needed to expand and unify its forces under a single ideology.
Virtually every faction had achieved a massive victory; the only entities who lost were the corrupt nobles, who currently felt as though the world itself was conspiring against them, leaving them to contemplate the ruins of their lives in utter bewilderment.