For the rulers of the empires present, this was news that left them feeling rather conflicted.
Ever since the War God Festival and the ensuing series of Marauder invasions, the mighty Galactic Empire had discovered that not even the Third Galactic War, at the height of the bloody Eroan Empire, had ever made them hurt this much.
For the militaristic Tirillo, the only way to wash away their humiliation was, naturally, to stack up all the Serpent Heads' heads into a viewing mound, leave them out in the sun for forty-nine days, then stuff them into an antimatter torpedo and fire it into a star. If they could then use a Colossus to BOOM that star, perhaps they would finally feel better.
So, over the following year and more, the Empire's intelligence forces and inquisitors mobilized across the board, adopting the attitude that it was better to kill a thousand innocents than let a single guilty person escape. They vigorously swept up every Serpent tentacle they could find, both within the Empire and abroad, along with every organization connected to the Serpent.
It had to be admitted that the results were encouraging. At the very least, plenty of old criminal organizations connected to the Serpent, as well as nobles and bureaucrats, had been purged. The Empire's underworld had become much cleaner as a result.
Of course, the Empire's underground forces had been so aggressive that they left a certain power vacuum in the intelligence network. This had objectively given the various anti-imperial rebel armies room to grow. But as far as the Empire's rulers were concerned, that was a minor problem.
Rebels were, at most, a case of hives: stamp out one batch, and another would always appear. But the "World-Encircling Serpent" was a thorn in their side—no, in the