Ch.145145. Massive Scandal

Perceptive individuals would have already noticed, so I’ll get straight to the point.

“Hah, I see I’ve been quite underestimated.”

“Gack! Gaaah…”

Stella Yu stopped the plasma blob fired from the hand cannon, the assassin, and furthermore, all living beings in the area with her telekinesis, effortlessly thwarting the assassination attempt.

After all, a Grade 1 mercenary who was an executive of a major mercenary group—one who retired not due to injury or diminished skills but simply to pursue politics—couldn’t possibly fail to block such an attack.

Anyway, in this world where everything had been frozen, Stella approached the assassin who appeared as a bald human male and placed her palm on his head, using psychometry to extract information.

As someone who belonged to the intelligence division and whose talent for reading the records of objects and living beings (souls) was arguably unmatched among humanity at that time, Stella was able to comprehend everything—

Shortly thereafter, the Great Purge began.

While the actual assassin was a human mercenary in debt, behind him were Lokist pirate warlords. Furthermore, it was discovered that the mediator between these two forces was a private organization comprised of over 75% of Federal Congress members.

The congressmen arrested for treason through proper Federal judicial procedures mostly received punishment of having their brains separated and placed in machines to labor for 1,000 years. The 47 congressmen and 3 mercenaries who were central to this plot were sentenced to be “preserved” in a psychic stasis field for about 10,000 years.

They would have to endure 10,000 years in a state where they could do nothing but think—and worse, due to the irregular flow of time inside, they would subjectively experience what would feel like 500 million years.

After the punishments were settled, Stella Yu leveraged the burning public sentiment as a driving force to implement an aggressive expansion policy.

She was so proactive that she personally participated in the flagship, and the incident concluded with the story of how she not only cleanly eliminated the Lokist warlords who had tried to assassinate her and bring down the Human Federation, but also successfully used the strong image she gained in the process to secure long-term political power.

※ ※ ※

Anyway, back to reality.

Although the previous incident was resolved by Stella Yu, whose achievements had restructured the entire political sphere to directly report to her, regrettably, there was no politician like Stella Yu who had been dead for over 1,000 years.

However, in place of such a politician, current humanity had Theresia—a “hero” who was even more legendary than Stella Yu and enjoyed greater public popularity.

While it’s natural that Theresia, who traveled throughout the galaxy establishing numerous achievements and founding the Mercenary Guild, would be more popular than Stella Yu, who was fundamentally a politician before being a war hero, the truth is that Theresia’s status was extraordinarily elevated.

From the beginning, even before her return, Theresia was perceived in the Human Federation not just as a great person but almost like a legendary hero or protagonist of an epic.

Reliable records show that she saved over 90 billion people in lawless zones, and because she traveled so extensively, traces of her have been discovered in the most unexpected places.

Some planets even have folklore related to her that dates back thousands of years—some have even semi-deified her.

And now this legendary figure had returned leading the “Winter Wolves,” famous for fighting to the end despite absolute disadvantage. To use a 21st century Korean analogy, it would be like Admiral Yi Sun-sin appearing with a space battleship leading independence fighters while China was invading the mainland.

Her status was therefore sky-high, and in the current precarious situation, there were attempts to nominate her as Prime Minister to serve as a “symbol” to stabilize the Federation, but…

“Ah, go suck your own dick. I’ve got enough pests crawling up to bother me, and what? You want me to be Prime Minister? A figurehead at that? Should I burn your planet to the ground?”

The response was completely devoid of courtesy—and even the dialogue above had been heavily censored from her actual vulgar tirade.

Given that she was born rebellious and fundamentally opposed to being told what to do, it was perhaps inevitable that she would reject the Prime Minister position that would require her to clean up others’ messes. But despite her rough nature, Theresia was fundamentally a good person.

There was a reason for her outburst, and that reason was the behavior of the congressman who came to deliver this invitation.

He was a typical political aristocrat, the eldest son of the oldest distinguished political family that had inherited congressional seats for generations. The Congress had sent their highest-ranking member as a show of respect toward her.

But this eldest son’s mental state was… how should I put it? Perhaps he had developed a deep-rooted sense of superiority without realizing it, having spent too much time exclusively in the Solar System, the Federation’s capital, interacting only with the upper class?

Theresia, an inherent anti-authoritarian and rebel, immediately recognized this superiority complex—and furthermore, that it was the basic mindset of congressional members—and simply cursed him out.

The matter seemed to conclude with Theresia rejecting the proposal, but…

[“Ah, go suck your own dick. I’ve got enough pests crawling up to bother me, and what? You want me to be Prime Minister? A figurehead at that? Should I burn your planet to the ground?”]

Unfortunately, the proposal and rejection scene was captured by paparazzi and uploaded as an article on the psychic network internet, resulting in this congressman becoming the galaxy’s public enemy.

In real-world terms, it was as if an ordinary congressman had consistently shown an authoritarian attitude toward a resurrected Admiral Yi Sun-sin and angered him.

Not only did his tone unconsciously convey that he was making a proposal to a subordinate, but if you traced this congressman’s ancestry… it was like finding the equivalent of Won Gyun—which says it all.

The fact that a descendant of one of the Federation’s most notorious figures—someone whose interference with Theresia was prominently recorded in history books—would speak to her this way?

Naturally, from that day forward, the congressman faced death threats in real-time.

He nearly got killed by protesters in front of the congressional plaza while trying to enter, and even the congressional guards who rescued him from that crisis suspiciously fingered their holsters. His political party formally passed a proposal to revoke his party membership.

Moreover, his family businesses were mercilessly shaken by attacks from all directions, and he was constantly pressured to resign from his congressional position… yet he stubbornly held onto his seat.

Or more precisely, he had no choice but to remain a congressman.

With thousands of death threats arriving daily, if he were to resign, the basic protection system provided to congressmen would disappear, and he could genuinely be murdered by someone.

Therefore, recognizing more clearly than anyone that his congressional position was his lifeline, he intended to cling to it until the end of his term, no matter how pathetic it might seem… but at some point, he began to question things.

The death threats he was receiving must have stemmed from the opinion of the entire Congress, so why was he, who was merely selected as their representative to deliver the message, the only one suffering such hardship?

So, with emotions mixed between anger and resignation, the congressman finally appeared on the most popular current affairs program on the Federal Central Broadcasting Network and exposed everything on live television.

He admitted his fault but declared that the origin of this whole affair was the agreement of more than half of Congress, and threatened to reveal the list of those congressmen who had agreed.

Political tact? Political deals? Such things couldn’t stop this congressman who had gone off the deep end.

Determined to take everyone down with him, he spectacularly exploded into light along with the political world. Separately from these incidents, a relatively competent politician was elected as Prime Minister, and just as the situation seemed to be settling on the surface…

Bad news arrived from the defense line.

A Doomsday-class Hive Ship—famous for having invaded the Solar System, the core of the Human Federation, seven times and survived—had appeared. It had destroyed approximately 40 planets and torn a massive hole in the defense line.