Delphica Schism
| Leviathan Protocol: Delphica Schism | |||||||||
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| Part of Operation Leviathan | |||||||||
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| Belligerents | |||||||||
 Vaeringheim Division, Bassaridian War League Temple Enforcement Council – Reformed Stripping Path
| Dissident faction of Delphica municipal security force Schismatic cult cells |
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| Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
| 5th Regional Command, Vaeringheim Division Cult Operative Lead — Azure Sentinel Sect
| Disavowed local precinct command; presumed cult-aligned ringleaders (unidentified) | ||||||||
| Units involved | |||||||||
Ground Detachment – 1 Centuria (Vaeringheim Division)
Aerial Detachment – Ptisis (Vaeringheim Division) Spiritual Forces – Temple Council Authorization
| Approx. half of the Delphica municipal force (rebellious) Schismatic civilians and armed cult enablers |
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| Strength | |||||||||
| ≈ 373 ground personnel • 1 Ptisis (4 aircraft) • 56 cult operatives (embedded) | Estimated 150–200 irregulars with limited heavy capability | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| Minimal; no reported fatalities | Dozens detained; command ringleaders apprehended | ||||||||
| One of the earliest post-operational Leviathan Protocol deployments in eastern Bassaridia Vaeringheim; first known case of mutiny led by internal temple-aligned personnel following the Somniant era | |||||||||
The Delphica Schism refers to a high-priority internal security deployment carried out under Leviathan Protocol on 55/3/51 PSSC, in the eastern Bassaridian city of Delphica. Positioned on the southern shores of the Northern Strait of Haifa, Delphica has long served as a spiritual and administrative conduit between the interior councils of the Vaeringheim heartland and the maritime cult enclaves of the east. The eruption of a violent mutiny within the city’s municipal security force—centered on a rejection of the divine wisdom of Sisera and the doctrinal authority of the Reformed Temple—triggered a rapid-response intervention from the Vaeringheim Division of the Bassaridian War League. The operation involved the deployment of a full Centuria accompanied by embedded cult operatives and aerial surveillance units. In coordination with temple wardens and municipal authorities, loyalist forces moved swiftly to disarm the rebellion, secure sanctified spaces, and reassert lawful command over both the civic and spiritual institutions of the city.
The schism developed in the context of growing spiritual unrest across eastern Bassaridia Vaeringheim, a region where the proximity to the Haifan maritime corridor has long allowed both orthodox and heterodox ideologies to circulate with greater velocity. In the weeks leading up to the crisis, encoded flyers and subversive broadcasts appeared in shrine-adjacent quarters of Delphica’s old city, bearing sigils that mimicked, distorted, or outright defaced the iconography of Sisera. Reports filed by Temple Aprobelle agents identified the texts as consistent with known hallmarks of schismatic cult propaganda—specifically, those disseminated by fringe sects active in the post-Somniant periods in Thermosalem and the uplands near Acheron. Surveillance logs noted an uptick in temple defacements, unauthorized ritual activity, and localized refusal of doctrinal recitation during audits. While each event in isolation remained within acceptable thresholds for Temple intervention, the aggregate pattern was sufficient to trigger a standing alert within the local office of Leviathan Enforcement and Cult Containment.
The break occurred just after first light, under an overcast sky with steady easterly winds and intermittent rain bands typical of the Haifan littoral during the early third month. At approximately 06:45 local time, an estimated half of Delphica’s armed municipal force defected from its command structure and began seizing communications nodes, shrine courtyards, and traffic choke points across the lower terraces of the city. Operating in small, well-organized squads, the mutineers installed autonomous loudspeaker rigs and initiated a series of public broadcasts condemning what they called “the Host’s false priesthood” and “the desecration of divine covenant under temple rule.” Their message, echoing rhetoric from the failed uprisings of the early Somniant era, claimed that Sisera’s teachings had been co-opted into a system of psychic coercion, that the Temple was no longer a sanctuary but a mechanism of domination, and that true revelation could only be reclaimed by purging civic life of spiritual oversight altogether.
Emergency provisions contained within the Charter of Harmonious Doctrine were invoked at 08:12, jointly signed by the city’s seated magistrate and the Presiding Warden of the Temple District. This granted extraordinary jurisdictional powers to the Vaeringheim Division and elevated the situation to Leviathan Protocol Tier II. Under this designation, War League units were cleared for limited-use shock deterrence and counter-command seizure, while Reformed Stripping Path operatives were authorized to supervise surrenders, conduct forensic audits of schismatic materials, and monitor for spiritual anomalies across the affected shrine networks. The city was declared under unified command by 10:20, marking the beginning of one of the most complex and tightly coordinated doctrinal suppression actions of the post-Leviathan period.
Operational Objectives and Strategic Framing
The invocation of Leviathan Protocol in Delphica was not a reflexive reaction to localized unrest, but a calibrated enforcement decision rooted in the doctrinal architecture of the Reformed Stripping Path and the centralized internal threat assessment mechanisms employed by the Council of Kings. The schism, while limited in geographic scope, was interpreted as spiritually systemic. It originated not from an external cell or known insurrectionary movement, but from within the civic apparatus of a temple-administered city whose shrines had long been regarded as doctrinally reliable. The rebellion's location heightened its potential risk. Delphica, a city historically tasked with safeguarding ritual supply routes, could not be allowed to serve as a precedent for theological insubordination within the municipal command structure.
The primary objective of the operation was the immediate isolation and disarmament of the mutinous security faction before the surrounding population could be drawn into what Temple surveillance analysts classified as an emerging crisis of belief. Restoration of lawful command was to be accomplished with minimal public spectacle and under strict rules of non-lethal engagement, barring exceptional threats to cult leadership or protected civic infrastructure. Simultaneously, temple wards and shrine precincts throughout the lower terraces and coastal periphery were to be placed under direct Centuria security supervision. These spaces, already compromised by propaganda and minor ritual tampering, were designated “civic sancta,” zones wherein spiritual integrity, law enforcement, and psychological reassurance intersected.
Secondary objectives involved a forensic sweep of mutineer quarters, abandoned broadcast centers, and seized shrine offices to extract both material and symbolic evidence of doctrinal tampering. This evidence was to be transmitted via encrypted uplink to Temple Aprobelle for pattern analysis and used to update the Leviathan Index of Schismatic Signatures. This was not merely a stabilization action—it was a doctrinal quarantine, aimed at severing ideological contagion before it could breach the coastline and drift toward mercantile centers or sympathetic hinterland communities.
At the strategic level, the Delphica operation represented an inflection point in Leviathan-era enforcement. It was one of the first post-operational deployments where warfighting formations and spiritual cadres operated from the outset under a unified field structure, with embedded oversight cells from both the Stoa of Rex Catonis and the Umbral Oracle. This integration was not symbolic. Every temple-adjacent action was paired with a cult-certified detainment process, and every detainee subject to biometric and spiritual scanning within two hours of apprehension. Moreover, the Azure Sentinel Sect was dispatched with pre-loaded kill warrants for specified mutineer commanders, though the use of such authority was ultimately not required. Their presence, however, sent an unmistakable message: while spiritual reformation permits open-ended interpretation of revelation, it does not extend to the armed defiance of sanctified order.
The framing of this intervention, then, was not as a battle or a riot suppression, but as a ritual containment. Every maneuver—from corridor control to aerial overwatch—was subordinated to a logic of spiritual clarity and procedural legitimacy. Delphica’s streets were not to be occupied in the military sense, but liturgically cleansed and returned to harmony under the Host Spirit’s mandate. The mutiny, while brief, was understood to be part of a longer war—a conflict for doctrinal alignment in an age increasingly shaped by post-Somniant uncertainties and maritime pluralisms.
Operational Details
The deployment to Delphica unfolded across a twelve-hour window beginning at 09:15 local time, following confirmation of dual-authority broadcasts emanating from the Lower Citadel precinct and the eastern municipal depot. Initial contact was established via a secure C2 node aboard a Bijarian Command Vehicle, with forward tactical elements drawn from the 2nd, 5th, and 9th platoons of the Vaeringheim Division’s 4th Centuria. These units, pre-staged in nearby Luminaria for coastal interdiction training, were rerouted by heli-lift insertion through a Ptisis detachment operating under standard rapid-response protocols. The first Noctiluna-class helicopters touched down at the city’s southern perimeter under cover of dense stratus, dispersing Kalithros-armed arrest teams at three key corridor junctions within the temple ring road. These initial deployments were designed not to engage directly, but to partition the mutineers’ maneuver corridors, preventing them from linking shrine perimeters with the core civic compounds in the northwestern quarter.
Concurrent with the aerial insertion, two Oble-Lisea 4189 quadwalkers were deployed to assume sensor-mast overwatch positions overlooking the Temple of the Copper Veil and the lower docks, respectively. From these vantage points, movement telemetry, heat signatures, and encrypted subchannel traffic were relayed to the Centuria command net and cross-indexed in real time by embedded cult analysts. Ground pressure remained deliberately restrained through the mid-morning hours, in part due to the complex terrain of Delphica’s old city—dense, narrow passageways carved into the cliffside terraces above the Northern Strait—but also to give time for certified Kleisthenes operatives from the Stoa of Rex Catonis to establish judicial staging zones within the sanctified perimeter.
These operatives, deployed in a ratio of one to five alongside arrest teams, bore dual authority to adjudicate surrender terms and conduct on-site detainment certification under the statutes of the Charter of Harmonious Doctrine. Where resistance was anticipated or symbolic defilement had occurred, these tasks were deferred to forensic-specialist cadres of the Umbral Oracle, whose operatives worked in tandem with Syrinx-class armored infantry vehicles to conduct shrine reclamation and evidence extraction. Many of these vehicles operated without dismount for the first phase of the operation, instead serving as hardened mobile platforms from which arrest warrants were announced and containment glyphs projected across adjoining courtyards. The symbolism of this visual doctrine—temple mandates spoken through armored megaphones, with shrine façades illuminated in protective sigils—proved sufficient to induce surrender across the southern precinct by midday.
In areas where surrender proved less forthcoming—particularly in the northeastern arc nearest the central archives—engagement was escalated. A single Killbot 4200 unit was deployed to the outer gate of the archive compound, where its presence deterred an attempted fallback barricade and forced capitulation after the first illumination volley from an Odiferian-class mortar carrier. No high-impact or lethal munitions were used throughout the operation; illumination and smoke rounds alone sufficed to create controlled panic, confusion, and retreat among the rebel remnants, most of whom had not anticipated a full Leviathan-tier response.
The final stage of the operation was conducted under transitional light, as quadwalkers were repositioned to form a four-block perimeter around the Civic Harmonic Court, where remaining mutineers were instructed to report for ritual deferment and doctrinal reintegration. It was in this phase that the Hetairos cell from the Azure Sentinel Sect was activated to apprehend three high-value individuals—ringleaders linked to the initial broadcast recordings and the distribution of schismatic tracts. All three were seized without resistance. The entire action, from airborne insertion to final detainment audit, concluded without recorded injury, loss of life, or structural damage to the city’s sacred architecture. The Delphica operation thus stands as an exemplar of doctrinally-aligned force application: limited in scope, tightly constrained in posture, and carried out with deliberate emphasis on ritual legitimacy and spiritual coherence.
Aftermath and Doctrinal Significance
The restoration of order in Delphica was not treated as a return to status quo, but as a moment of doctrinal renewal. Within twenty-four hours of the operation’s conclusion, the Temple District announced a complete audit of the city’s shrine curricula, municipal training protocols, and devotional infrastructure. Preliminary findings suggested that the schism had been preceded by months of spiritual drift and unattended ritual deviation, including improper alignment of Host Spirit iconography in two outlying sancta and unauthorized alterations to broadcast liturgies. These findings were used to justify the rapid establishment of a permanent Leviathan Liaison Cell in Delphica, jointly staffed by temple magistrates, forensic auditors, and psychospiritual monitors from the Stoa of Rex Catonis.
The detained mutineers, numbering just under eighty, were processed through the Civic Harmonic Court under sealed proceedings. Approximately half accepted doctrinal reintegration under guidance from cult operatives assigned by the Order of the Umbral Oracle. These individuals were remanded into community service within the Temple’s coastal restoration initiative, a project aimed at rebuilding ritual sanctity in the Strait corridor. The remainder—those who refused reintegration or were identified as ideological anchors—were transferred into long-form containment under the authority of the Conclave of Deliberants, pending further adjudication. The city’s police force was formally disbanded and reconstituted within the month under the new Civic Custodial Guard, with its officers now required to undergo regular spiritual calibration under Kleisthenes oversight.
At a broader scale, the Delphica Schism served as a doctrinal template for future Leviathan-tier interventions. . It prompted a revision to the Council of Kings’ Regional Stability Directive, which now includes inland-sea cities such as Delphica among locations designated for perpetual cultic surveillance. For scholars of the Reformation era, the event offered a sobering reminder that spiritual deviation does not always emerge from the margins of society, but can metastasize within the very structures built to preserve doctrinal order.
