The VDsKM - Verdusk’s Might
Verdusk’s army was always going to lose the Great War. Surviving on one front was possible, but being sandwiched between several factions and struggling to hold them back was without a doubt the VDsKM’s doom.
The army was known to be strong, but strength crumbles against sheer numbers and suicide bombings and repeated artillery fire.
The army had faith, as Predzkya’s homeland was their homeland, but faith crumbles when your Goddess doesn’t answer your prayers and those you fight against claim She is backing them.
The army had skill, but skill doesn’t stop white phosphorous from burning the air nor does it stop bullets from shredding one’s convoys.
The VDsKM, by the Great War’s end, was a limping, wounded animal; it was bleeding and heaving for air. Chamber-President Maravina saw his act of self-immolation as one of defiance against a world he deemed unfit for purpose. Billions of souls were wiped in an hour via back-to-back catastrophes, and the VDsKM was arguably the worst-hit by this.
The Trinity Alliance - a Forced Hand
The TA was, like Verdusk’s army, primarily Spiralist, but as the war raged on and threatened to spill over to western Europe multiple factions began to grown nervous.
Would Verdusk stop once it pushed past the Germanic territories? Would it suddenly decide that was enough land? Maravina and his army seemed hell-bent on staking a claim, and staking that claim was getting awfully close to invasion of our territory, so at some point a line had to be drawn.
The TA, made up of a multitude of factions from the Spiralist US and UK to the Catholic Armies of Italy and even included troops and supplies from further south, intervened to prevent the growing VDsKM from “overstepping” their boundaries. They joined after the UDF’s retaliations and soon found themselves fighting a two-way war.
While the TA was desperate to hold the VDsKM back, they also hoped that joining the war would allow their Spiralist factions a piece of Verdusk’s Holy Land. They were the ones least-hurt by the Cataclysm, but they certainly still felt it. Most of the TA’s casualties during that day came after the nukes fell - most of them came from Marianne’s wrath.
The United Dimitrigrad Vederation - The Meat Grinder
The UDF never cared for right or wrong, seeing the ends as justification for any means. Even long before the Great War. the UDF had been known as a cruel, violent machine. Siezed territories would be used to fight neighboring ones, unethical tactics would be used to force surrenders, and POW’s would be used as shields during advancing assaults.
When the war blossomed, the UDF’s cruelty did too. Artillery bombardments were interspersed with chemical shells, soldiers were thrown into the firing lines, corpses were wired with explosives, all in the name of the great advancing line. None were spared the cruelty; officers and Commissars and Generals who failed to show progress were sent to the front with knives and grenades; soldiers and prisoners alike were thrown ahead of advancing lines to soften resistance; and civilians left alive were conscripted to push head-first into enemy territories.
However, as a result of the UDF’s everything-at-once offensives, they were hit by the Catastrophe harder than anyone else, barring Verdusk itself. The UDF sent most of its army into Verdusk on the eve of the war in an attempt to hold back the opposing Trinity Alliance as well as to trample the VDsKM. This move, seen by the UDF’s leaders as foolproof, backfired when two-thirds of the greater Dimitrian army was annihilated in one day. The UDF crumbled soon after, unable to hold the vast swathes of territory it once choked, and the intense rise of the Rizen soon after the war didn’t help them either.