Situation RED

Situation RED is the worldwide activation of the Red-Eye Curse, a coordinated supernatural disaster that transforms the Empire’s inherited red eyes from a sign of purity into evidence of enslavement. The outbreak kills civilians across major population centers, reveals that the curse is commanded through the soul by the Black King, and changes the strategic objective of the surviving leadership from managing a war to attacking the source of an impending mass exodus of souls.

Outbreak Across the World

Situation RED begins amid an attack whose scale is initially unclear. In the Imperial capital, Selfia stands on the balcony of her palace while screams rise from the city below, and the capital’s disorder reaches her even as she is already exhausted by war. Jin and other royal guards warn that the palace itself is unsafe. Selfia responds by demanding an immediate situation update and activating the sanctum’s surveillance network: a dozen floating arms operate around her while multiple screens display thousands of connected cameras. The screens convert the crisis into a simultaneous global image. Everywhere Selfia looks, people are spasming. The same phenomenon appears not only among citizens of the Empire but also in feeds from the Hoshido village and the Corporate Alliance. People are dying, making the event more than a local attack or a military diversion. It is a synchronized assault whose geography cuts across political borders and social divisions. The event is formally identified as Situation RED. On the bridge of SIA “Fuck You, Roland,” Jack stands among what remains of the command staff: Director York, Lieutenant Harper, and Captain Helena are down, while personnel with red eyes have either been confined to the brig or reduced to corpses in the ship’s cold storage. Selfia reports that the phenomenon is worldwide, though not completely universal, and that every major city from the Alliance to the Empire has been affected. The available data indicates that only people with red eyes are suffering the attack.

The Curse Behind Imperial Purity

The first explanation offered is biological warfare. Admiral Skirita asks whether the disaster is a new biological weapon, but Sahaqiel rejects the frame entirely. Appearing before the officers in white-and-gold regal armor, she states that the population was played and identifies the supposed purity of Imperial blood as a curse. Sahaqiel explains that the curse is a spell comparable in scope to the system, but subtler and more sinister. Every person with red eyes bears a mark on the soul, and that mark is commanded by the Black King. The red eye therefore functions as a visible sign of an invisible instrument of control: what the Empire treated as hereditary distinction is also a spiritual vulnerability shared by an entire population. The revelation reverses the meaning of Imperial identity. Purity is no longer protection, legitimacy, or superiority; it is the condition that makes the afflicted population targetable. Selfia immediately recognizes the political cost of the disclosure. She objects that knowledge of an entire cursed population should have been treated as essential information, especially because Sahaqiel has concealed it until the crisis is already underway. Her anger also exposes the limits of the palace’s surveillance regime. Selfia can see thousands of bodies and locations through the screens, yet she did not understand the mark governing those bodies. Visibility has produced information without producing comprehension.

Strategic Reversal

Once the curse is identified, the crisis changes from an emergency of containment into a conflict over its source. Jack looks at the display of the Roland capital and declares that the source of the problem must be attacked: the Black King. Skirita warns that a full assault on a heavily fortified city would be suicide because the forces are already depleted. Jack nevertheless treats the assault as an order, and Selfia supports him. Sahaqiel supplies the reason for that escalation. She says that the Black King’s plans are already underway and that a mass exodus of souls is a prelude to gathering power. The immediate death toll is therefore not the final measure of the disaster. If the source is allowed to continue, the number of dead will become irrelevant because no one will remain to care. Situation RED consequently turns the logic of the war inside out: the military exhaustion that should counsel delay becomes the very condition in which delay permits the enemy to accumulate strength. The reversal also gives the event a personal dimension for Jack. Earlier, his public royal life had been organized through surveillance, paper records, security arrangements, and tightly managed appearances. He had been confined to a luxurious room after his marriage to Selfia and coronation, later moved through the city with a chauffeur and security detail, and made to follow schedules displayed on an Intellipad. Situation RED ruptures that controlled political routine. The same systems that once organized his image of kingship now display spasms, corpses, and panic, forcing him to act against a threat that cannot be managed by ceremony or administration.

Political Violence and Emergency Power

The outbreak occurs against a background in which exceptional measures have already been justified as necessary for humanity’s survival. Selfia previously acknowledged that a purge was taking place throughout the Empire, with three hundred and sixty-nine lives already being extinguished and possibly more to follow. Political opponents, rivals, dissidents, and anyone thought likely to obstruct the New Republic were marked for death. Jack’s response was that the plan had created chaos and killed bystanders and innocents, including people whose deaths could endanger Ada’s pregnancy and his child. That earlier purge gives Situation RED a disturbing political echo. The Empire had treated mass killing as a means of securing order; the Red-Eye Curse reveals a deeper system in which an entire population has been silently prepared for extermination or spiritual extraction. In both cases, authority uses the language of necessity while ordinary people lose the protections associated with citizenship. Jack’s later warning to Theocracy survivors follows the same emergency logic in a different register: evacuate to the Flying City and settle within Imperial territory, because the alternative is death when the demonspawn arrive. Situation RED makes such ultimatums newly unstable, since the institutions claiming to save populations may also be unable to recognize the invisible forces controlling them. The event therefore exposes the danger of confusing protection with power. Selfia’s palace can monitor the Empire, mobilize guards, and issue orders, but it cannot prevent the curse from reaching its subjects. Jack can command an assault, but the order is made under conditions in which the enemy has already penetrated the population. The crisis strips away the reassuring boundary between the state’s protective apparatus and the mechanisms that render bodies expendable.

Aftermath and Larger Threat

The immediate aftermath is a command crisis. The bridge of SIA “Fuck You, Roland” is populated by the remnants of its staff, while red-eyed personnel are segregated as prisoners or dead. Selfia’s reports establish the breadth of the catastrophe, but Sahaqiel’s explanation establishes its meaning. Her authority is reinforced when Selfia calls her a goddess whose vessel is Jack and orders the officers to treat her words as equivalent to the queen’s own. Jack’s decision to strike the Black King follows from that alliance between revelation and command. Selfia gives him permission to do whatever must be done, while Sahaqiel warns that the departing souls are being gathered as power. Situation RED thus ends not with recovery but with mobilization toward the Roland capital. The event’s apparent medical mystery becomes the opening move of a supernatural campaign. Later revelations deepen the danger behind that campaign. Michael intends to awaken Adam, the first Awakened and first hunter, even though Sahaqiel warns that freeing him would kill the angels, doom the world, and destroy everyone caught in his hunt. Michael presents this not as destruction but as repair, claiming that the deaths of Sahaqiel and Jack can serve as the foundation of a newer world. Read against that threat, Situation RED is both an attack and a harvesting operation: the curse produces mass death while the Black King prepares a power structure capable of surviving the deaths of those he sacrifices. As a narrative event, Situation RED is the moment when hidden history becomes visible through synchronized bodily collapse. Its horror moves from the unseen mark on the soul, to the public spectacle of people spasming on surveillance feeds, to the political recognition that the Empire’s defining sign has always contained the possibility of control. The outbreak makes knowledge itself a battlefield and leaves Jack with only one viable answer: pursue the Black King before a worldwide population becomes an instrument for his ascent.