Global Red-Eye Curse Activation

Global Red-Eye Curse Activation, known in the immediate crisis as Situation RED, is a worldwide supernatural attack that overturns the political meaning of the Empire’s red-eyed population. What had been presented as the purity of Imperial blood is revealed to be a curse inscribed on the soul, controlled by the Black King. The activation causes victims to spasm and die across the Empire, Hoshido, and the Corporate Alliance, while its scale turns a regional war into a fight against an enemy capable of draining lives and harvesting souls on a global scale.

Outbreak and Immediate Crisis

Global Red-Eye Curse Activation begins amid an already unstable war. In the Imperial capital, Selfia stands on her palace balcony while screams rise from the city, initially interpreting the disturbance as another emergency obstructing her military efforts. When Jin and the royal guards report an attack, Selfia enters her sanctum and activates the network of screens connected to thousands of cameras. The surveillance system does not reveal a localized assault. Everywhere she looks, people are spasming, and the same phenomenon appears in feeds from the Empire, the Hoshido village, and the Corporate Alliance.

The first visible consequence is death. Citizens are not merely frightened, injured, or incapacitated; people are dying throughout the connected territories. Selfia responds by issuing orders, but the command structure is immediately strained by the fact that the event is both simultaneous and geographically dispersed. The crisis therefore attacks more than bodies. It overwhelms the systems of observation, communication, and authority that the Imperial government relies upon to understand and manage danger.

The outbreak is then presented aboard the SIA “Go to Hell, Roland,” where Jack stands with what remains of the command staff. Director York, Lieutenant Harper, and Captain Helena are already down, while personnel with red eyes have been confined to the brig or reduced to corpses in the ship’s cold storage. Selfia’s hologram reports that the phenomenon is worldwide, though not completely universal: every major city appears to have been affected, from the Corporate Alliance to Imperial territory, and the available data indicates that only people with red eyes are vulnerable. The distinction gives the attack a horrifying selectivity. It is not random catastrophe but a mass execution organized around an inherited physical sign.

The Curse Revealed

The decisive revelation comes when Sahaqiel appears before the officers in regal white-and-gold armor. Her explanation changes the meaning of an entire population. The red eyes associated with Imperial blood purity are not proof of an exalted lineage; they are the outward sign of a spiritual mark. Every red-eyed person bears a command placed on the soul by the one known as the Black King.

Sahaqiel describes the curse as a spell comparable in scope to the system but subtler and more sinister. That comparison makes the attack more than a biological weapon or conventional military device. The curse operates through identity itself, turning a trait celebrated by the state into a channel of remote control. The very feature used to define Imperial belonging has also made its bearers legible to the enemy. The crisis thus exposes a political contradiction: a claimed sign of purity has functioned as a hidden mechanism of vulnerability.

Selfia reacts with anger that Sahaqiel withheld such consequential knowledge. Her objection is practical as well as personal: knowing that an entire population is cursed would have been essential information for any government planning a war. Sahaqiel’s secrecy intensifies the danger because the revelation arrives only after the activation has begun, when military personnel are already dead, locked away, or unable to trust the people around them. The event’s recognition scene is therefore inseparable from institutional failure. The truth is discovered at the moment when it can no longer prevent the first wave of suffering.

Jack’s Countermeasure

Jack refuses to treat the activation as an isolated disaster. He identifies the Black King as the source of the problem and calls for an attack on the Roland capital. Admiral Skirita objects that the available forces are already depleted and that assaulting a heavily fortified city would amount to suicide. Jack nonetheless gives the order, because the curse has demonstrated that passive defense cannot protect either the population or the command structure.

Sahaqiel supports Jack’s judgment while acknowledging that the Black King’s intentions remain only partly understood. She interprets the mass deaths as an exodus of souls and warns that such a movement is a prelude to gathering power. Her warning changes the stakes again. If the dead are being used to build the enemy’s strength, then the casualty count is not the full measure of the danger; every death may enlarge the threat that will produce further deaths. Without intervention, she argues, the eventual scale of destruction could become so complete that no survivors would remain to care about the number lost.

Selfia finally authorizes Jack to do whatever is necessary and directs Skirita to act. The decision joins the Imperial command to Jack’s more direct response, but it does not restore the old order. The fleet has already been damaged, the attack has crossed borders, and the enemy has demonstrated an ability to strike through the bodies of the state’s own citizens. Military action becomes an attempt to reach the source before the curse’s victims are converted into a larger reservoir of power.

Political and Thematic Consequences

Global Red-Eye Curse Activation reverses the meaning of protection in the Imperial world. Earlier, Selfia had justified extraordinary violence as necessary for the survival of mankind, including a purge in which three hundred and sixty-nine lives were being extinguished across the Empire, with political opponents, rivals, and dissidents among the targets. Jack condemned that logic when it endangered bystanders and placed his unborn child at risk. Situation RED reveals a different but related form of emergency power: a population marked as politically pure can be destroyed without conventional judgment because the mark itself identifies them as targets.

The event also exposes the weakness of surveillance as a guarantee of safety. Selfia’s sanctum can display thousands of cameras and connect crises across distant territories, yet the screens initially offer only images of bodies convulsing and dying. Information arrives everywhere at once but does not arrive early enough to provide protection. The state can see the disaster in extraordinary detail while remaining unable to stop its first consequences.

The attack’s final significance lies in its fusion of revelation and escalation. It begins as unexplained urban chaos, becomes a global medical and military emergency, and ends as evidence of a supernatural campaign against the soul. The red eye shifts from emblem to sentence: what the Empire treated as proof of legitimacy becomes the sign by which the Black King reaches his victims. Jack’s decision to strike the source and Sahaqiel’s warning about harvested souls establish Situation RED as the opening movement of a much larger conflict, one in which political borders, inherited identity, and the boundary between death and weaponry have all become unstable.