The city was already in motion.
Jacques Duclos emerged from an alleyway where the dawn light had yet to fully reach; he knew exactly where that movement had begun.
Such momentum does not spring from the courage of a single man; it begins when hundreds of hands pull in the same direction.
The railways, the factories, the tenements, the schools.
These were the vital arteries that held the throat of the capital, Lingones.
From every one of these points, hands were reaching out in every direction.
With his cap pulled low, Duclos kept to the shadows of the building walls before stepping briefly onto a main road scarred by the deep ruts of carriage wheels.
From the distance, a long whistle echoed.
It was not a locomotive.
The sound didn't originate from any rail line.
It meant that someone had signaled, exactly as planned.
Immediately, the symphony of the city shifted.
*************************
08:00.
In the industrial 8th District, every workbench was abandoned simultaneously.
The chimneys ceased their exhaling of soot.
Overseers barked orders and screamed threats, but humans are not like machines; they do not simply resume their labor because someone flips a switch.
08:00.
At the railway depots, the great engines sat motionless.
The hands that pulled the levers stopped. The hands that checked the couplings stilled.
Men in stained work clothes stood side by side and bellowed.
"Death to this cursed war!"
That single refrain rolled across the iron tracks like thunder.
08:00.
In the residential blocks, the doors swung wide.
Citizens of every class and station emerged.
Children, noblewomen, the elderly, widows, the youth, and the middle-aged—all clutched flags in their hands.
08:00.
From the university quarter of the 12th District, the students marched forth.
Pamphlets filled their hands, white armbands marked their shoulders, and slogans lived in their mouths.
They did not scatter. They kept their intervals, the front and rear ranks holding their formation with disciplined resolve.
08:00.
The roads surrounding the telegraph offices were choked.
The demonstrators gathered to blockade the streets, seizing control of the access points.
The eyes and ears of the government were effectively severed.
08:00.
Near the radio stations, cleaning staff and technicians abandoned their posts in unison.
The office doors stood open, but the state broadcasts had flatlined.
The airwaves were now occupied only by a low, rhythmic crackle of static.
As if to verify this reality, Duclos pressed his thumb against the battery of the radio in his pocket.
The cold touch of metal met his fingertip.
Joy threatened to swell within him, but he suppressed it, his mind racing through the grim calculus of the coming hours.
From this moment on, they had to ensure that the revolution did not erode its own legitimacy.
If the hunger of one or the rage of another turned this day into an orgy of looting, all would be lost.
The Empire was waiting.
It was waiting for the perfect moment to brand them as mere 'brigands.'
Therefore, Duclos quickened his pace toward the designated rendezvous.
The central grain elevators in the warehouse district.
The garrison had already retreated before the swelling tide of protesters, leaving a massive crowd gathered in their wake.
There was a line.
The masses were there.
There were hollowed, hungry faces among them.
But no hands reached out to snatch or pillage.
Before the doors stood the revolutionary vanguard, distinguished by their white armbands.
They clutched makeshift armaments—wrenches, truncheons, broomsticks, and kitchen knives.
Yet, even before these poorly armed guards, the people maintained their order.
"Families with children to the front!"
"Step back, step back! This line is for the elderly and infirm. Move to that side."
When the belief takes hold that everyone will be fed, humans accept order far more readily than one might expect.
At least, anyone who loathes the sight of their own child starving does.
Duclos watched the scene and offered a shallow nod of approval.
'Compliance' is not established by the empty declarations of a thick legal tome.
The principles of law established by the people can only be upheld when there is a clear imperative to follow them; only then are people capable of keeping the peace.
Then, from the opposite direction, the rhythmic thud of armored boots rang out.
It was the Gendarmerie.
They appeared swiftly, fanning out into several ranks to face the crowd.
They bore clubs, crossbows, and firearms. Behind them trailed a much more ragged force of militias.
Poorly made armbands clung to their sleeves.
Incompetents with nothing but zeal in their eyes.
Royalist militias, vigilante groups, state-sponsored front organizations—the names varied, but their function was singular.
The Gendarmerie commander stepped forward and bellowed:
"Disperse at once, you illegal band of traitors!"
"Those occupying the state warehouses will be treated as insurgents!"
Duclos took a step back, melting into the shadows of the warehouse wall.
If he were revealed here, the entire operation would be compromised.
He watched the confrontation at the warehouse gates in silence.
The vanguard did not yield.
Instead, they braced themselves, standing their ground even more firmly.
A courageous voice rang out from the front:
"Do not point your weapons at your own citizens!"
At that, several of the right-wing militiamen lunged forward, spitting curses like, "Since when is a Red a citizen?"
A club swung through the air.
It struck a student across the shoulder.
The student collapsed with a sickening thud.
When another student tried to help him up, a second club descended.
This time, it caught him full in the face.
Blood sprayed.
That blood was enough to fundamentally alter the atmosphere of the entire street.
Someone screamed:
"Sit down!"
The front rank dropped to the pavement. It was a sit-down strike. To stand was to be scattered by a charge. To sit was to become a wall. That wall served only to highlight the fact that they were unarmed.
The Gendarmerie commander gnashed his teeth and raised his hand.
Crossbows and bows were leveled in unison.
Watching that hand rise, Duclos thought grimly to himself.
As expected, the Empire will shoot.
The bloody suppression of protests is a time-honored tradition of the Imperial court.
The first shot was fired sooner than anticipated.
The whistle of an arrow cut the air.
The atmosphere shattered.
The crowd's breath hitched in a collective gasp of shock.
A second shot followed immediately.
After that, it was a constant volley.
Crossbow bolts screeched across the space.
Arrows rained down.
Men and women collapsed amidst high-pitched screams.
Some dove for cover, while others threw their bodies over the fallen.
The white-armbanded vanguard before the warehouse wavered.
They wavered, but they did not flee.
One man in a white armband dragged the fallen student away.
Another stripped off his own coat to stanch the bleeding.
Their hands shook, but they did not stop.
There were not enough ambulances.
The hospitals were far, and the routes were choked by the police and military blockades.
So, the people brought carts.
They ripped doors off their hinges to use as stretchers.
The student was laid upon one such makeshift litter.
His face was ghostly pale, blood blossoming across the collar of his coat.
And that gruesome sight was carried out into the streets.
The moment he reached the main thoroughfare, the wounded student could no longer be dismissed as a mere statistic.
Through open windows and the gaps of shop doors, the people leaned out.
People peered from the alleyways.
Someone muttered:
"Why the students... what are they doing to them..."
Someone else cried out:
"That... that is our child."
The statement did not even need to be factually true.
Within the human mind, the moment the heart accepts something as truth, it becomes reality.
Madeline Lefebvre, who had fled the initial chaos, saw that stretcher in front of the bakery.
She stood frozen, still clutching her child's hand.
The child blinked, confused about where to look or what was happening.
Madeline tried to shield her child's eyes, but her hands were rigid with shock.
The youthful face on the stretcher was too close.
That face looked just like the smile her husband had given her the last time he left home.
These were not the faces of 'evil communists' or 'Federation spies' depicted in the propaganda posters; these were the painfully ordinary faces of their own youth.
"Mommy... is that man sleeping?"
The child's voice trembled slightly.
Madeline could not find the words to answer.
Instead, she squeezed her child's hand. She squeezed so hard it must have hurt.
And Madeline was not alone.
The baker stood on his threshold.
A man who usually glared at his customers out of suspicion could not tear his eyes away from the sight.
The butcher lowered his cleaver.
The cobbler set down his awl.
A laundrywoman wiped her wet hands on her apron and stepped out into the street.
They didn't understand politics.
They didn't know what a 'revolution' was.
They had no desire to know.
But the phrase "A student's corpse, pierced by arrows, is passing by on a stretcher" was a language everyone understood.
Even if the student was still breathing, they believed him to be a corpse.
That visual language tore open the floodgates of rage that had been built up by years of forced requisitions, conscription, and crippling inflation.
"They starved us with their requisitions."
"They took our men with their conscriptions."
"The price of bread has doubled again."
"And now they're shooting children?"
Someone picked up a pamphlet that had fallen on the ground.
It was stained with blood.
They did not crumple it.
They smoothed it out.
The blood-soaked characters became even clearer.
At that moment, the right-wing militia charged toward the crowd.
"You damn Reds!"
The clubs were raised once more.
But before those clubs could descend, the crowd, for the first time, did not fall back.
Someone reached out and caught a club. With their bare hand.
The palm was sliced open. Blood flowed.
At the sight of that blood, the person next to them snatched up an industrial pipe.
No one had ordered them to do it.
It was simply there.
The tools that had sustained their lives in the factories and homes were now being wielded in the streets.
A militiaman stumbled back.
A Gendarme stepped forward, leveling his crossbow once more.
In that instant, a man lunged from the crowd and twisted the Gendarme's arm.
The crossbow clattered to the pavement. The ringing of metal on stone echoed through the street.
That sound rippled to every corner of the city.
"The crossbow fell!"
"Seize the weapons!"
Someone scooped the weapon up from the ground.
It was clumsy.
Their hands were shaking.
The person who now held the crossbow by pure chance was more aware of that than anyone.
And so, they shoved the barrel forward and screamed:
"Stop shooting!"
The mere fact that a civilian now held a functional weapon caused the Gendarme's resolve to flicker.
That single hesitation created a second civilian archer. Then a third.
It was no longer production; it was expropriation.
In a short span of time, across a short stretch of road.
The tide had turned.
The strike had been a cessation.
The protest had been a demand.
But with every demand denied, the hour had come.
It was the hour of armed insurrection.
Taking up arms gives the Empire an excuse.
It is a logic we have heard far too often, is it not?
'They were the ones who took up arms first; thus, they are rioters, and we are the forces of order.'
In that case, only one thing was necessary.
Since the conflict had already begun, the armament of the people could not be left to 'chance.'
Duclos summoned a nearby courier and spoke in a low, urgent tone.
"Distribute the armaments to the vanguard."
"Protect the food warehouses at all costs. If anyone loots, we catch them ourselves."
"Save the wounded. Get them to the hospitals."
"The telegraph office, the radio stations, the central station. Do not lose sight of our objectives."
The courier nodded and sprinted away.
In the meantime, the city's roar grew louder.
Distant gunfire echoed.
It was coming from the 8th District.
In front of the factories, the Gendarmerie tried to push the masses back, but the masses would not be moved.
In the 12th District, the students had widened their blockades across the roads.
A telegraph clerk leaned out of a window and waved a white cloth. A signal.
Then, a voice cried out:
"To the barricades!"
That phrase needed no explanation.
Carriages were overturned.
Timber was dragged into the streets.
Iron railings were uprooted.
Stones were piled high.
Mounds of firewood blocked the path.
Crowds pushed together to stack every available obstacle.
The roads were severed.
The space for the Gendarmerie's horses to charge dwindled.
The line of sight for the crossbows to aim was obstructed.
The citizens of the city were raising walls to defend themselves.
Right now, Lingones was paralyzed with fear, yet more awake than ever before.
Suddenly, the radio let out a brief signal. A frantic voice broke through the static.
"Comrade General Secretary! It's the hospital quarter. A student's corpse... it's passed through three districts, and the citizens... the citizens have rallied. They're marching on the police station—"
Duclos's eyes narrowed.
"The police station?"
Before the sentence could finish, another voice overlapped.
"We've seized a large cache of weapons near the central station! We need field control!"
"The right-wing militias are joining the fray! More Gendarmerie are arriving!"
The reports came pouring in all at once.
The Emperor's city was disintegrating.
Duclos set his jaw firmly.
If they faltered now, the countless sacrifices made for this day would be for nothing.
That would be exactly the outcome the Empire desired.
He reached a swift conclusion.
"From this point on, district leaders are to exercise their own judgment on-site. However: No looting. Protect civilians. Prioritize the wounded. These three directives are absolute."
Finally, he added in a low murmur:
"The citizens have chosen our side today. We must not betray that trust. Everything for the revolution."
Duclos pulled his cap back down and stepped out into the street.
From the distance, the cry of "To the Barricades!" rose once more.
It was the moment all of Lingones was being sealed off by the hands of its own people.