They did not delay.
Before leaving, Lucien placed a Split Body with Dawnbinder.
If anything changed in Dawnbinder’s city, Lucien would know at once.
Only after that did the operation begin.
Everyone moved onto their assigned routes.
Each carried one of Dawnbinder’s crystal droplets.
The mont Lucien’s group crossed into the first hidden line and allowed the droplet to respond, the world changed around them.
The Luminarch paths did not open like doors.
They adjusted perception.
The terrain itself remained present, but it no longer felt arranged in normal distance. A hill that should have taken ten minutes to cross beca sothing they passed in monts. A winding ravine ceased to feel winding at all.
The path did not transport them.
It redefined what counted as "between."
That was the genius of Luminarch work.
They did not rely hide roads. They made roads that the world itself failed to prioritize.
The crystal droplet in each bearer’s hand gave a faint pulse whenever they were aligned correctly. If they drifted from the intended flow, the pulse weakened and the route beca resistant, as if the land itself had lost interest in helping them.
Lucien understood it quickly.
"The path is not just concealed," he said. "It is selective."
Eirene nodded.
"It is being acknowledged."
Without the droplet, a person walking through the sa terrain would see only broken ridges, old stones, dead gullies, or empty stretches of unimportant ground.
With the droplet and the authority within it, those sa spaces beca a hidden circulatory system.
And because the path did not flare with conventional spatial movent, it was far less likely to trip common divination or alert the compromised settlents ahead.
The settlents were spread far apart.
For ordinary forces, coordinating simultaneous strikes across that distance would have been a logistical nightmare.
For the ancient beasts, distance itself was barely worth complaining about.
If they wished, many of them could have crossed the region in brutal straight lines faster than sound, light, or thought had any business allowing.
But that was precisely what they did not do.
Raw speed through open space was visible.
This campaign required absence, not spectacle.
So even the ancient beasts remained within the Luminarch paths, compressing their presence, accepting the hidden roads, and allowing the region to remain ignorant of what was moving beneath it.
Lucien’s own group took a different kind of transport.
This ti, they did not use Void Craft.
Dawnbinder’s hidden paths were too narrow in logic and too selective in contour for a flying vessel to move through them cleanly. Aerial motion risked breaking the route’s concealnt and drawing the eye of anyone watching the terrain incorrectly.
So Lucien built sothing else from his Craft Feature.
A ground-runner.
It resembled a cross between an armored carriage and a ground-skimming beast.
Marie loved it imdiately.
She took the controls, then guided the vehicle into the Luminarch path with such confidence that even Shadow stopped pretending he was not impressed.
With her Absolute Earth Dominance active, every contour ahead was already known to her long before they reached it. Marie had already seen where the earth would allow motion, where the pressure shifted, where hollows lay beneath stone, and where weight would carry best.
By the ti they passed any point, her awareness had already extended miles ahead.
"This one has class," Marie said, one hand on the control arc and the other drumming lightly against the fra. "Void Craft is beautiful, but this... this grips the world."
Lucien chose not to remind her that she said sothing like that about every vehicle she liked.
Shadow sat further back. In his hand was the black cube Lucien had given him earlier.
He had stored his puppets inside it before departure. The ground-runner was fast, but space was still space, and carrying multiple active puppet bodies inside would only waste room.
At first, Shadow had assud the black cube would function like a storage ring.
It did not.
That was what made it absurd.
When he stored his puppets in an ordinary storage ring, the connection to them cut off completely. He had to rebuild the command-thread each ti he withdrew them, which wasted ti and introduced alignnt instability.
Inside the black cube, the link remained.
It was as though the contents were not removed from command-space, only folded into a more compact holding environnt.
He had tested it three tis already.
Every ti, the result had been the sa.
Then Lucien had calmly inford him that living beings could also be placed inside it.
Shadow had stared at the cube for a long ti after that.
Lucien had only added, "It’s goblin technology. I took it from the ones we fought in the Void. It once housed a Void monster."
Shadow had said nothing for a while.
Then he looked at the black cube again and thought, not for the first ti, that while he had spent these years painfully trying to keep one regional branch alive, Lucien had apparently been busy fighting absurdities and stealing their impossible tools.
He sighed.
The disparity had beco difficult to resent.
•••
Hours later, Lucien’s group reached their assigned destination.
They halted a mile away, outside the final outer flow of the Luminarch path, where terrain and concealnt still favored them.
Lucien stepped out first and surveyed the distance.
The target was quiet.
Too quiet.
He sent a ssage through the Concord Pact connection.
Each assigned beast acknowledged in turn.
One by one, they confird they had reached their respective stations.
Lucien waited.
He would not start early.
That was the sort of mistake that ruined coordinated cleansing operations.
More ti passed.
Then the last reply ca.
All eleven ancient beasts were in place.
Now the whole region was a drawn bow.
Lucien stored the ground-runner back into his inventory and turned to the others.
Eirene. Lilith. Marie. Shadow.
Shadow released his puppets from the black cube.
Then Lucien called out the rest.
Morveth. Aerolith. Kaia. Sylra. Marina. Seren and the Liberators who had insisted on joining this campaign.
Then Lucien spoke through the connection again.
His voice entered the Concord links like a blade sliding into place.
[Brothers. Sisters. On my count.]
A pause.
[One.]
The hidden routes grew quieter.
[Two.]
Across the region, the ancient beasts tightened.
[Three.]
Then everything moved.
The enemy did not have ti to react.
Before the local rulers even understood they were under attack, the barriers were torn open. In others, they were quietly bypassed and inverted from within so no one could leave before the purge began.
The settlents erupted into shock.
The civilians did not know what was happening.
The Exchange enforcers barely had more ti than they did.
The Exchange’s people had beco arrogant. Once they ruled a place openly enough, they stopped disguising themselves as carefully. They wore their authority like law.
That made the first phase easier.
But Lucien had not trusted appearances alone.
Each strike group had been given the sa instruction.
Do not assu every enemy wears the uniform. Do not assu every uniform is enemy. Control first. Verify second. Purge third.
That kept them from making stupid mistakes.
Ancient beasts helped where instinct was enough. Most of them could sll corrupted dependence, chemical residue, and habitual malice better than any mortal investigator. Others sensed command authority more directly through aura, law-pressure, or behavioral pattern.
Civilians were not imdiately "liberated" into chaos.
They were subdued safely first.
This part was critical.
If a settlent had already been living under hidden rule for years, then the mont that rule cracked, panic would follow. Innocents would run. Compromised people would hide among the frightened. Local collaborators might try to burn records or stab a healer in confusion.
So Lucien’s forces treated the settlents the way a surgeon treated a wounded limb.
Cut only what must be cut.
The result was brutal—
But controlled.
Void Sovereigns were present in so locations too.
That did not surprise Lucien.
What surprised the Void Sovereigns was the speed at which they lost initiative.
At one settlent, Grave simply appeared in front of the local commander and crushed the floor beneath him with such concentrated Burden that the Void-Walker’s knees shattered before his law could properly rise.
At another, Astraea’s storm veiled the sky so completely that the enemy’s signal lights died without ever reaching height.
Noctryn moved through one transit site so quietly that the guards only understood they had been attacked when the command room was already full of bodies.
Lucien’s own settlent was no different.
The purge began the mont his team entered.
The first enemy officers were pinned before they could speak. Known record keepers were restrained alive. Drug vaults were seized. Local collaborators were separated from civilians by force, not accusation.
That was important.
If Lucien simply arrived and let "the people" point fingers in the confusion, he would inherit a massacre and call it justice.
He refused that.
So every target followed the sa operational order.
Seize communications. Control civilians. Identify enforcers. Capture records.
Then eliminate resistance.
That left fewer loopholes, fewer future lies, and fewer convenient claims that the Exchange had only been maintaining order until outsiders arrived and brought chaos.
No.
Lucien ant to cut out the rot cleanly enough that even frightened survivors would understand who had done what to them.
And across Sareth, at the exact sa hidden hour—
The first true cleansing began.
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