Judicators

The Judicators are an uncommon class within the Theocracy’s Templar ranks, distinguished from ordinary papal soldiers by their dual function as Inquisitors and Special Forces. They use skills unavailable to the other Templar branches and operate where religious authority, intelligence work, and armed intervention overlap. Their importance lies not only in what they can fight, but in what they are empowered to investigate, classify, and eliminate when the Theocracy believes its survival is at stake.

Nature and Organization

The Judicators belong to the same wider military-religious structure as the Templars, but they are not simply another frontline formation. Their work resembles that of the Imperial Black Hearts and Black Roses while retaining an explicitly inquisitorial purpose. This combination gives them a distinctive institutional identity: they are investigators of internal threats as well as operatives capable of confronting them directly.

The order is uncommon, and its rarity reinforces its specialized character. The Jester of the High Table had been a Judicator, as had the Green Bishop, Hugo Fritz. These associations show the range of the title within the story. The role can belong to a trained agent tasked with protecting the Theocracy, but it can also be held by a figure whose authority and abilities are later turned toward subversion and mass violence.

Investigations and the Hugo Fritz Crisis

The Judicators’ most consequential recorded investigation concerned Hugo Fritz and his experiments involving souls. Before his death, Cardinal Veltrilli assigned a group of Judicators to investigate Fritz after concerns arose about his experiments and his growing obsession with souls. By the time they discovered what he was truly preparing, the investigation had reached its limit: Fritz’s operation was already too advanced to stop through ordinary intervention.

Fritz responded by activating bombs that destroyed most of the Theocracy’s strategic bastions. The attack eliminated much of the armed forces by converting them into Night Terrors, and the Theocracy lost seventy percent of its total population. The survivors were forced either to submit to Fritz’s Neo-Crusaders or face execution. The catastrophe therefore exposes both the necessity and the failure of the Judicators’ mandate. They were created to identify threats concealed within the state, yet their discovery came too late to prevent the destruction of the institutions they served.

The crisis also leaves the Judicators with a damaged jurisdiction. The infestation became concentrated around city centers and borders, while the loss of the Theocracy’s military infrastructure made organized defense far more difficult. In this setting, the Judicators’ investigative role is inseparable from the wider collapse of public order: they are not merely seeking a criminal, but trying to determine how a trusted religious authority could become the center of an existential disaster.

Lita von Strongarm and External Assistance

Lita von Strongarm was a Judicator-in-training when Cardinal Veltrilli sent her to the Imperium to obtain aid. Her mission explains why she was present at the academy and why her apparent identity concealed a larger diplomatic and military purpose. She had been dispatched not as a conventional student, but as an agent seeking outside assistance for a Theocracy already confronting Fritz’s threat.

Lita’s contact with Lumenese Selfia altered the scope of that mission. Selfia heard her proposal and promised aid, while Lita’s time with her revealed both the true nature of Fritz’s danger and the organization to which he belonged. Lita’s service thus places the Judicators between two forms of action: investigation inside the Theocracy and alliance-building beyond it. Her deception of Jack was presented as a necessary part of that work, and she later apologized for concealing her purpose.

Her conduct also contrasts with the Judicators’ more compromised associations. Lita uses the order’s training to seek rescue and cooperation, while Hugo Fritz’s identity as a former Judicator makes the order’s expertise part of the threat itself. The narrative consequently refuses to treat the title as a guarantee of virtue. The same specialized knowledge that enables an agent to expose forbidden experiments can, in another figure, support the construction of an empire of coercion.

Law, War, and Moral Authority

The Judicators operate in a world where legal authority is repeatedly tested by emergency. Their investigation of Fritz begins with an official assignment from Cardinal Veltrilli, but the resulting catastrophe produces execution, forced submission, transformed soldiers, and the destruction of civilian life. Their institutional purpose therefore raises a central question: whether a body empowered to defend the community can remain bound by the protections that define that community.

That question is echoed elsewhere in the political order. Selfia defends a purge in which three hundred and sixty-nine lives, or possibly more, are being extinguished across the empire, including political opponents, rivals, and dissidents. She argues that violence is justified by the continuity of mankind, while Jack condemns the killing of bystanders and the danger placed upon Ada and their unborn child. The Judicators are not identified as the authors of this purge, but their inquisitorial model belongs to the same moral landscape: institutions repeatedly convert protection into permission to decide whose life may be removed.

The contrast becomes especially sharp when Jack confronts the Green Bishop. Fritz presents the children he has taken in as orphans and outcasts whom he fed, clothed, and gave purpose, insisting that his treatment should be called love and care. Jack answers with a single judgment: "Sickness." The Judicators’ investigation supplies the institutional history behind that confrontation, but the scene reveals the limit of any authority that claims benevolence while treating vulnerable bodies as material for power.

Legacy in a Changed World

The Judicators’ legacy survives the destruction of the Theocracy’s military system, but the world after the Shutdown no longer supports the technological and magical order that once made such forces possible. Airships, mechs, and power generators become inoperable without mana, while hundreds of thousands of resurrected people appear across the world in places as unpredictable as bathrooms, ship engine compartments, water wells, and old military installations. The resulting crisis forces the surviving governments to manage identity, security, and belonging on a global scale.

In that aftermath, the Judicators stand as a reminder of the old world’s attempt to merge law with specialized violence. Their history contains both the failure to prevent Fritz’s catastrophe and Lita’s effort to obtain aid before the collapse became total. They are therefore significant less as a stable moral institution than as a contested instrument: capable of defending a threatened society, yet vulnerable to the same secrecy, hierarchy, and exceptional authority that allow a protector to become an agent of destruction.