Sunac is a frontier world whose narrative importance lies in the way Cato’s distant campaign becomes immediate, local, and catastrophic there. Although Sunac is not initially included in Cato’s annexation campaign, its proximity to invaded worlds allows refugees, weapons, rumors, and System quests to carry the conflict across its portal network. It later becomes one of the worlds targeted for Cato’s leaflet campaign, and finally one of the planets condemned by the System in retaliation. Sunac therefore functions as both a political audience and a victim: a place where competing powers attempt to shape public understanding before the world itself is erased.

A Frontier World Under Threat

Sunac is close enough to Cato’s early invasion to hear about the destruction from those fleeing other worlds and from reports of the orbital weapons he has been forced to use. Even before Cato’s forces directly target it, the world lives under the pressure of a conflict whose scale exceeds ordinary local knowledge. The System’s portal network normally serves as a reminder that each inhabited world belongs to a much larger structure; Cato’s invasion turns that reminder into an immediate danger.

The atmosphere in Sunac’s city is described as saturated with fear. The terror is not based only on rumor: the reports include the disappearance of many worlds at once and claims that Cato has killed a god. Priests and Paladins suppress the latter claims, but Raine knows that they are true and that Cato’s patron has killed two gods. The population’s fear thus rests on a mixture of incomplete information, official denial, and genuine awareness that the conflict has reached a scale at which ordinary defenses may be irrelevant.

The System formalizes this anxiety through the Crusade quest. A System announcement identifies Cato as an invader and directs people toward the Frontier, listing Sunac among the worlds that may be in danger. The quest does not merely describe the war; it organizes movement, attention, and military response, turning Sunac’s inhabitants into participants in a System-managed emergency. Lower-rank citizens, especially those confined to their birth worlds, encounter the larger political crisis through this quest and through the portal links that expose them to offworld forces.

Cato’s Propaganda and the World’s Audience

Sunac becomes one of the worlds selected for Cato’s propaganda operation. The campaign is designed for populations living under the System’s material restrictions, and Raine and Leese consider food abundance the most effective initial appeal. System-provided food and drink offer little variety, particularly to Copper- and Silver-Rank citizens, while the sisters’ culinary experimentation can provide a tangible contrast with System-managed scarcity. On Sunac, as on other frontier worlds, the lower ranks form the overwhelming majority, whereas Golds number in the thousands, Platinums in the scores, and higher ranks may exist only as single digits.

The choice of Sunac therefore reflects a strategic distinction between elite and ordinary audiences. Cato does not assume that high-rankers can be persuaded by the same means as the majority, and Raine and Leese recognize that the elites possess more power but are fewer in number. The propaganda campaign seeks to give lower-rank citizens a concrete reason to doubt the System’s claim that its restrictions are necessary, using everyday nourishment rather than abstract political theory.

Communication itself is a major obstacle. When Cato reconnects with Raine and Leese, his voice reaches them through communication lizards worn on their heads. He explains that obtaining reliable communications without alerting the System is difficult and that he does not yet possess worldwide communications. The limitation is important on Sunac: Cato’s campaign depends on coordinating distant versions of himself and transmitting information across worlds, yet every technical solution must be designed to avoid the System’s surveillance and technological prohibitions.

Later, Cato-Sunac is still processing data from observation creatures and orbital spy-eyes monitoring millions of people across dozens of worlds when multiple portals open at once. The simultaneous openings occur on every world targeted for leaflets, including Sunac, and immediately trigger alarms because similar portal activity has previously accompanied divine intervention. The planet is therefore not merely a passive setting for propaganda. It is one node in a distributed experiment in political communication, watched from orbit while its population becomes the object of a struggle over interpretation.

Divine Intervention and Condemnation

The propaganda operation on Sunac is interrupted by the arrival of Azoths. Raine, present in the city, detects a divine presence pressing down upon the capital before a rent opens in the air and three Azoths emerge. Two of them resemble Cato’s human frame closely enough to suggest a connection, and the sight leaves Cato unusually stricken. Their appearance transforms the atmosphere from one of frightened uncertainty into direct confrontation with the System’s higher powers.

The Azoths do not simply arrive as individual combatants. Across the targeted worlds, they function as coordinated agents of a larger System decision. The Crusade quest changes into an evacuation order, though the change applies chiefly to the higher ranks because portal restrictions prevent Copper- and Silver-Rank citizens from responding in the same way. Cato pulls his forces closer to Sunac and the other propaganda worlds, uncertain whether the evacuation is a trap. The higher ranks leave under the Azoths’ supervision while the portals flicker and reorganize, eventually leaving only one portal on each world.

The decisive announcement comes through the Azoths: “This world has been condemned by Cato!” On Sunac, as on the other targeted planets, a dark spot appears at the point farthest from the capital Nexus. It expands into a ring that sweeps across the atmosphere and surface at hundreds of miles per hour. The wave dissolves everything in its path: towns, cities, dungeons, plants, animals, System-made structures, and ordinary people. The process takes only five or six minutes to cross the planet.

The exterminatus is presented as a punishment attributed to Cato, even though the System is the power carrying it out. This accusation is central to the conflict’s political logic. Cato claims that the System is the entity assigning quests, extorting essence, and trying to kill the population; the System answers by making its own planetary destruction appear to be the consequence of Cato’s invasion. Sunac becomes the clearest expression of that reversal, with the aggressor and the supposed protector competing to define responsibility while civilians bear the cost.

FungusNet and FernNet continue transmitting while the wave advances, preserving a stream of observation until the destruction reaches the capital city, its Nexus, and the unsuspecting Copper and Silver citizens there. Raine and Leese abandon their frames in the orbital networks because they can do nothing against reality itself turning against the planet. Then the portals close and the signal is lost. Sunac’s ending is consequently not a negotiated conquest or a conventional defeat but the removal of an entire world from the communicative system that once connected it to the wider civilization.

Meaning Within the System Conflict

Sunac exposes the ethical contradiction at the center of Cato’s campaign. Cato insists that the System must be destroyed because it routinely destroys planets and reduces its inhabitants to participants in a game they cannot win. Yet his counter-invasion brings danger to worlds that did not originally choose to fight him, and his enemies exploit that danger to justify exterminatus. Cato recognizes that he may have to pass through armed human opposition if it stands between him and the destruction of the System, while still wanting to preserve as many people and things as possible. Sunac demonstrates how difficult that distinction becomes once the System makes civilian survival a weapon in the struggle.

The world also clarifies the technological and social asymmetry between the opposing sides. Cato’s communications, maps, observation creatures, orbital infrastructure, and distributed selves allow him to monitor and influence populations across enormous distances, but the System retains authority over portals, quests, rank restrictions, dungeons, and world-scale annihilation. Even Cato’s advanced technology must operate through organic workarounds because the System’s imposed physics disables most complex machinery. His war against the System is therefore fought inside an environment whose rules he rejects but cannot yet escape.

Cato’s later political position makes Sunac part of a wider question about replacement rather than simple destruction. He does not want to be the arbiter of access, planetary leadership, railguns, retroviral engineering, or digitization, but he accepts that removing the System and the existing hierarchy makes him responsible for creating a successor structure. Sunac is a warning about the consequences of that responsibility. A campaign intended to free worlds can still expose them to retaliation, manipulation, and mass death, especially when the old order controls the mechanisms by which worlds communicate, evacuate, and survive.

As a location, Sunac thus embodies the System’s power to make distance political. It begins as a world merely close enough to hear about Cato’s invasion, becomes a test audience for an alternative social order, and ends as a condemned planet whose final transmissions are overwhelmed by annihilation. Its destruction gives concrete form to Cato’s claim that the System is not a neutral game structure but a coercive power willing to erase ordinary lives in order to preserve its authority.