The Sovereign Imperium was bleeding to death, and the Ministry of Whispers had spent the last decade staring at the wrong wounds.
For ten years, Director Lyss Myrvalis had deployed her Ghost operatives to hunt Korthane spies, intercept weapon shipments, and assassinate Cult Splinter priests. She had treated the geopolitical conflict like a traditional intelligence war, trying to stop the Arbiter's insurgency by striking at its kinetic outputs.
Sera Myrvalis, the new Director of Whispers, recognized the fundamental flaw in that logic. Diplomacy was information warfare, and information warfare was not fought with daggers. It was fought with mathematics.
If you wanted to stop a hundred thousand Korthane weapons from crossing the border, you didn't track the steel. You tracked the gold that paid for the steel.
