Chapter CLXXVIII – Forgive us our occupation.

52nd of Summer 5860
Esmira, Former Serene Republic of Esmira

A new day dawned on a new Esmira.

A new Esmira which had significantly less Esmira than yesterday.

On the 50th, the Protection Squadron had set up camp outside Esmira to rest after their victory. On the 51st, to the victor went the spoils. The treatment of rebellious subjects in history had never been pleasant in history whether it be Gemeinplatz or anywhere else, and this time was no different.

The black gambesons had descended down on the city like rabid animals, taking everything not nailed down to the floor, and even then, they had the tools to unnail stuff from the floor just so that they could take it. Unluckily, for the residents of Esmira, this was the civilized form of plunder. Not the desperate looting of men looking for supplies, neither the drunken victorious plunder of men celebrating a victory. Rather the plunder was an exercise in state terror.

First came the senators who had stayed in Esmira. Consul Sezer had gone out of the city to lead the Esmira army to Hauptstadt, so the senators were put to death in his absence. Right in the middle of the city square, impaled on pikes, to stay there until their bodies were too decomposed to stay impaled. Alongside them was the senate building, the “house of decadent republicanism” as the Chancellor called it, which was put to the torch after it was stripped of all its valuables. There was plenty to strip too – countless statues to be recycled for fancy governmental offices all over the Empire, vases worth generational fortunes, furniture fit to cushion the hindside of the Divine Itself. Wealth built up by generations upon generations of the Serene Republic’s finest burghers, divvied up in only a day by the Protection Squadron soldiers. The building had a long, fabled history, enough to make up for at least three chapters of this work if it was to be written out. Alas, it only survived for three chapters before it was burnt down.

Then came the plunder of those who were guilty by association: the citizenry. Most of them were unprotected, unready, not having had any time to make an escape. The soldiers had surrounded the city when they set up camp to make sure nobody tried to get out, and so by the morning they had quite the harvest of bodies to reap. The good thing about firearms is that they made the job of massacre quite easier, removing the messy part where a soldier had to make contact and maybe even be eye-to-eye with their victim. A modern, civilized weapon for more civilized times such as these. An egalitarian time, when man, woman, and child were shot and killed as easily as one another. The PS marched in neat, civilized columns while the citizenry scattered in a most uncivilized fashion. After the people were liquidated the turn came for their assets, which were redistributed as swiftly as the demise of their owners.

The soldiers found themselves quite joyous at being handed such great wealth, and so they moved and plundered with great fervor to acquire as much as possible before things would inevitably cool down and peace would be restored. It was thrilling, in a sense, to be allowed to do what one is normally forbidden from doing. The Protection Squadron soldiers, most of them “law-abiding”, loyal subjects who had joined in exchange for the plentiful pay, were mostly men of the lower classes who could never even dream of such power. It was a crime, a grave sin even, to murder a fellow Believer. Yet, when a man was in uniform, it was his duty, a Divine-given right even, to murder. These people were the subjects of the Emperor, same as them, and thus when this mass of subjects was condemned to death, what else could the soldiers do but carry out that order? Not killing anyone would be the true crime here.

Without the people left, the last order of business was to set fire to the rest of the city. The orders were to make sure that Esmira couldn’t rebel again, to be a thorn in the side, and the easiest way to make sure of that was to pluck the thorn out entirely. The abundant supplies of gunpowder carried by the troops helped ensure there was plentiful of suitable kindling for their task. Esmira was not built in a day, but it would be destroyed in one. Soon the fire that had engulfed the senate was overshadowed by the smoke covering the entire city, engulfing what unfortunate souls had been left alive or wounded. The troops retreated back out in an orderly fashion, bayonets at the ready to drive back anybody who dared make an escape out of the hellish blazes.

The fire lasted until the morning of the 52nd, and the ruins were still smoldering by then. It was visible for miles, for such a great city doesn’t go down in a little amount of smoke, visible to the reinforcements which had been called to defend from a “small Imperial detachment from the sea possibly looking to harass the countryside or prepare for a prolonged siege of Esmira.” They had no clue what had exactly happened before they arrived, but the enemy camp in the distance and the ruins of Esmira gave a pretty clear idea as to what. A black column of smoke rising up to the heavens, as if it carried the souls and sins of the dead up to the Divine Realm for their final judgement.

A moment of hesitation came to the officer of these men. What would he report to his superior? They were blissfully unaware on their way to Hauptstadt, and if such a force could erase a city off the map, who knows what they could do to an army? Yet, with the revelation as to the fate of their home, they were now dead men walking who could do nothing. The army would starve without the city to supply them, especially if they tried to siege the capital where they had arranged for supplies to be brought by sea. If they were informed and returned to the nothing that stood in place of Esmira, its treasuries surely emptied by the enemy, then the mercenaries would abandon them and there would remain a miniscule force which would be easily destroyed by the Empire.

Thus, it was decided. A few of the men among the reinforcements were chosen to return as messengers to relay their fate to the main Esmiran army. The mercenary and adventurer allies among the reinforcements disbanded and went on their way. The remaining reinforcements, the men truly of Esmira, who had no family or home left, drew their weapons against their much larger and more well-armed foe.

“Cut them down!”

A suicide attack concluded the history of the Serene Republic of Esmira on the 52nd of Summer, 5860.