2881, The Bloodstained Throne (Part 1)
On Coruscant's ground battlefield, the situation had begun spiraling out of control following Palpatine's death.
From the beginning of the war until now, the Galactic Empire had conscripted an enormous 150 million ordinary soldiers on Coruscant.
As for the Spaarti clone troopers, 200 million had already been deployed earlier. After the war began, when Coruscant's moon Centax-1 orbited to the far side of the planet and created a window that avoided the main space battlefield, the Empire urgently transported another 80 million soldiers down to the surface.
Once news of Emperor Palpatine's death spread, the morale of those ordinary soldiers collapsed on a massive scale. On top of that, the elite Kingdom of Dawn Army forces deployed in the earlier fighting had inflicted truly devastating casualties on the Imperial army.
From a macro perspective, the Imperial army often held an advantage of more than ten to one on every battlefield, steadily wearing down the Kingdom of Dawn Army's strength.
But from the perspective of individual soldiers, what those Imperial Army troops saw was their own units being brutally slaughtered!
The tank-like charges of the Indjori Vengeance left severed limbs and mangled corpses in their wake; the Caladanians' guerrilla attacks came from every direction, with snipers as ghostly as phantoms; the Salarian special forces slaughtered their enemies while remaining completely hidden, leaving no visible opponent at all; the Fourth Legion's frontal advance was simply impossible to resist...
Every battle cast an incomparably terrifying psychological shadow over the Imperial Army.
Perhaps before, they could still claim they were defending their homes and country, preventing those Outer Rim mudfoots from ravaging the capital. But now, with the Emperor of the Empire dead, everything had become meaningless.
Even after Sate Pestage inherited the throne and immediately sent orders