Chapter 114: Clash of Kings
The chill that had nothing to do with the night air lingered in Bruce’s bones long after the vision faded. He stood naked in the bamboo grove, Lena at his side, both of them staring into the dark canopy as if they could still see the ghost of that jagged silhouette cutting through the void.
“It’s a needle,” Lena breathed, her voice hushed. “Not a sword. A silent, single needle.”
Bruce nodded, the tactical assessment clicking into place with cold clarity. An armada they could scatter, drown, or burn. A single, focused entity designed for stealth and pinpoint penetration was a different kind of threat. It spoke of confidence, of a predator who knew exactly what—or who—he wanted.
“We wake everyone,” Bruce said, his voice a low command that carried no room for debate. “Now. War room in ten minutes.”
The compound, moments ago a place of sated sleep, erupted into controlled chaos. Lights blazed on in the villas. Bruce, throwing on a pair of pants, moved with a purpose that was a current thrumming through the shared bond. He didn’t need to shout; a sharp, focused pulse of his intent down the connection was enough. Wives stirred from their beds, the last vestiges of post-coital languor burned away by the sudden, psychic alarm.
Ten minutes later, they were gathered. The war room felt different. The maps, the holographic displays, the tactical readouts—they were the tools of a conventional enemy. The thing coming for them was not conventional. Anya, her violet eyes wide and absorbing data only she could see, stood before the main viewer. With a wave of her hand, she projected the vision Bruce had received onto the screen. It wasn’t a detailed image; it was an impression of absence, a ship-shaped hole in the fabric of reality, trailing tendrils of null-space.
“It emits no signature,” Anya stated flatly. “No heat, no radiation, no mass distortion consistent with known propulsion. It is a conceptual weapon. A breach.”
“How long?” Susannah asked, her hand resting on the sandalwood grip of one of her revolvers. Her posture was loose, ready, her eyes the flat, assessing brown of the drylands.
Anya consulted the swirling, internal calculus of her creation sense. “At its current, un-changing velocity? Eight hours. Maybe less. It is not moving through space in a linear way. It is… folding the distance.”
“Then we fold it right back into the fucking sun,” Julianna snapped, her fingers crackling with tiny arcs of blue-flame and condensation.
“Unlikely,” Ketut said softly. She had her palms flat on the polished obsidian table, her eyes closed. “It does not belong to the elemental spectrum. It is not of earth, fire, water, or air. It is of negation. It unmakes.” She opened her eyes, black and troubled. “Where it passes, the song of the world… stops.”
A grim silence settled. Jasmine broke it, her gold-flecked eyes hard. “So we can’t blast it. We can’t outrun it if it’s folding space. What’s the play? Let it land and greet it with a handshake?”
“We meet it,” Bruce said. His voice was calm, a deep anchor in the rising unease. “Not with what it expects. It’s coming for a war-god, for a protector surrounded by an army. It’s coming for strength against strength.”
He looked around the room, meeting each of their eyes. Camille, her expression fiercely protective. Isabella, analytical but resolute. Sophia, coiled like a spring. Freya and Briana, leaning into each other for support. Jake, standing near the back with Oy at his heel, looking young and grim, his own latent power a quiet, frustrated hum beneath his skin.
“It won’t get that,” Bruce continued. “It will get a family. A single, unified organism. Lena.”
She stepped forward, understanding dawning. “The integration. From the grove. You want to do that… but with everyone. All at once.”
“Yes. Not you borrowing. All of us, giving. A circuit. Anya amplifies. Ketut grounds us to the living earth, a root system it cannot negate. Isabella heals the strain. Julianna and Jasmine give it fire and speed. Sophia and Susannah give it form and force. Camille shields it. Freya and Briana… you are the beginning and the end of the effort. You frame it. And I am the conduit. The focal point.”
“And me?” Jake asked, his voice steady despite the tension.
Bruce looked at the young man. “You’re the wild card, Jake. Your power hasn’t manifest because it’s waiting. It’s a different flavor. Not of this universe. When that thing gets here, you watch. You listen. You look for the door no one else can see.”
Jake nodded slowly, Roland’s bombardier eyes in a young face. “I see it, I kick it in.”
“Something like that.”
“This circuit,” Isabella interjected, her healer’s mind practical. “The strain will be monumental. Psychic, neural, physical. The act of connection will need to be… profound. Total.”
“It will be,” Bruce said. There was no leer in his statement, only a stark and necessary truth. “We forge the weapon in the one furnace hot enough. Our union. Not as separate acts, but as one. Here. Now.”
There were no blushs, no awkward glances. The stakes were carved too deep for modesty. This was mechanics of the highest order, biology and metaphysics fused.
“The main chamber,” Camille said, standing. “The floor is stone from the island’s heart. Ketut can tie us to it.”
They filed out, a silent procession, not to bedrooms, but to the great central chamber of the main villa. It was a vast, circular room with a floor of polished volcanic rock, and a domed glass ceiling open to the stars. The very spot where, in softer times, they’d shared meals and laughter.
Now, Ketut went to the center, knelt, and placed her palms on the stone. A deep, resonant hum filled the room, a subsonic note that vibrated in their teeth. Veins of soft, amber light spread from her touch, weaving through the black rock like glowing roots, pulsing in time with the island’s geothermal heartbeat.
“It is ready,” she said, standing. “The earth holds us.”
They undressed without ceremony, garments pooling on the luminous stone. The mood was not one of arousal, but of intense, focused preparation. They were tuning instruments for a symphony of terrible power.
Bruce stood at the center of the glowing root system. “Form the circle.”
They arranged themselves around him, each wife finding her place instinctively. Anya directly before him, her small form humming with latent amplification. Ketut and Isabella to one side, earth and healing. Julianna and Jasmine opposite, fire and time. Sophia and Susannah, strength and war. Camille, Freya, and Briana completing the ring, protection, potential, and cessation. Lena stood just behind Bruce, her hand on the small of his back, his shadow, his conduit to them all.
“Now,” Bruce said, his voice a graveled command.
Anya moved first. She stepped into Bruce’s space, reached up, and pulled his face down to hers. Her kiss was not passionate, but consuming. It was a key turning in a lock. As their mouths met, he felt it—a surge, a dial being turned not to ten, but to a hundred. His senses screeched, then clarified with painful acuity. He could hear the chlorophyll processing in distant plants, see the infrared pulse of his wives’ blood, feel the magnetic pull of the planet’s core.
She broke the kiss, her violet eyes blazing. “You are amplified,” she whispered, her voice echoing in his skull.
Isabella and Ketut approached together. Isabella kissed him, her tongue tracing his lips, and a cool, sustaining energy flooded his system, a buffer against the coming storm. Ketut kissed him next, and the solid, unshakable permanence of continents settled into his bones. He was no longer a man on rock; he was the rock.
Then Julianna and Jasmine were on him. Julianna’s kiss was a conflagration, her power searing through his veins like napalm. Jasmine’s was a blur, a kiss that seemed to happen in a dozen places at once, compressing seconds into moments, speeding his heart to a drumbeat that thundered in his ears.
Sophia’s kiss was pure, undiluted force. It didn’t arouse; it fortified. Every muscle fiber in his body sang with tensile might. Susannah’s kiss was different—cold, sharp, a kiss of triggering mechanisms and kill-shots. It honed his intent to a razor’s edge.
Camille’s kiss was a fortress gate closing. He felt an invisible, shimmering shell solidify around his spirit, impenetrable and loving. Freya’s kiss was a wellspring of raw potential, a blank page screaming to be written upon. Briana’s was a deep, quiet null, a promise of an end that gave purpose to the fight.
The power was a hurricane inside him, a chaotic, screaming chorus of divinity. He was on the verge of flying apart.
Then Lena’s touch at his back became a pull. She didn’t kiss him. She connected.
Her potential, now permanently woven with threads of their combined strengths, activated. She became the regulator, the processor. The hurricane did not calm; it was channeled. Bruce was no longer a vessel about to burst. He was a particle accelerator, a contained and focused beam of impossible energy.
“The circuit needs to be physical,” Lena gasped, her own body trembling with the flow. “It needs to be grounded through the act, or it’ll arc and kill us all.”
She moved around him, her eyes locked on his, and lowered herself to her knees. She took his cock, which was already engorged to its full, monstrous girth from the torrent of power, into her mouth. She didn’t suckle or tease. She engulfed him, taking the entire staggering length down her throat in one smooth, impossible motion, her nose pressing into his pubic bone. The physical connection was a lightning rod.
A collective gasp went through the circle. The glowing roots in the floor flared blindingly.
“Now,” Lena gurgged, pulling off him with a wet pop, her lips swollen. “All of us. The loop must close.”
It was Sophia who understood first. With a warrior’s practicality, she turned to Susannah, pulled her into a fierce kiss, then guided her down onto her hands and knees. Sophia followed her down, mounting her from behind, entering her with a single, powerful thrust. Susannah cried out, a sharp, acknowledged sound, as the connection between strength and war snapped into place, a secondary current feeding back into the main loop through their joined bodies.
It ignited a chain reaction.
Julianna and Jasmine tangled, a frenzy of fire and accelerated motion, Julianna’s fingers plunging into Jasmine’s cunt while Jasmine’s mouth devoured Julianna’s breast. Ketut and Isabella sank to the floor, Isabella’s face buried between Ketut’s thighs, Ketut’s back arching as she chanted something in Balinese, the stone beneath them glowing hotter. Camille pulled Freya and Briana into a tight knot, their hands exploring, their mouths meeting, a triad of protection, potential, and end.
Bruce watched, the power within him stabilizing, harmonizing through their mirrored acts. He was the central sun, and they were orbiting planets, each collision and conjunction feeding energy back to the core.
Lena stood up, her body slick with sweat and ambient energy. “Me,” she panted, her eyes wild. “I’m the regulator. I have to be at the center when it peaks. Fuck me, Bruce. Fuck me like you’re going to fuck that dead king out of the sky. Use everything. Don’t you dare hold back.”
She turned, bent over, gripping her ankles, presenting herself. Her ass, legendary and perfect, was flush with the amber light from the floor. Bruce moved behind her, his cock a throbbing pillar of concentrated might. He placed his hands on her hips, feeling the borrowed strength of Sophia there, the resilient earth of Ketut, the speed of Jasmine humming in her blood.
He slammed into her.
There was no slow entry. It was a claiming, a total occupation. Her scream was ripped from her, part pain, part ecstasy, part raw power discharge. The room itself seemed to warp, the starlight through the dome bending. He set a pace that was not rhythm but devastation. Each thrust was a piston stroke of cosmic force. The sound of their bodies meeting was a thunderclap that had no echo, swallowed by the hungry null of the circuit.
Lena was babbling, her mind stretched across the spectrum of their combined powers. “I feel it—the fire in my belly, the speed in my nerves, the earth in my bones—oh god, I’m gonna—I’m all of it!”
Her orgasm triggered the cascade. As she convulsed around him, her channel becoming a vise of radiant energy, each of the other pairs reached their own peaks. Cries echoed—Julianna’s shout as blue flame licked up her spine, Isabella’s sob of release into Ketut’s core, Susannah’s choked groan as Sophia pounded into her. Each climax was not an end, but a surge, a spike of raw divine voltage fed directly back into Bruce through Lena.
The feedback loop reached critical mass.
Bruce saw white. He was no longer fucking Lena. He was fucking the universe itself, driving his essence into the fabric of reality. His release was not semen, but a silent, expanding wave of pure, golden force. It didn’t erupt from his cock, but from his entire being. It shot outwards in a perfect sphere, passing through the walls, the compound, the island, harmlessly through his wives, but tangible to anything foreign, anything other.
For a single, suspended second, the entire island glowed from within, a second sun in the dark ocean.
Then it was over.
Bruce collapsed, catching himself on his hands above Lena, who was limp and trembling beneath him. The others were in similar states of exhaustion, the glowing roots in the floor fading to a soft, dormant pulse. The air smelled of ozone, sex, and hot stone.
The connection remained. Not the screaming hurricane, but a deep, quiet hum. They were one instrument, perfectly tuned.
It was Jake, from his place by the wall with Oy, who spoke, his voice filled with awed horror. “Uh… Bruce?”
Bruce looked up. Jake was pointing at the glass dome ceiling.
The stars were gone.
In their place, blotting out the sky, was a vast, jagged expanse of darkened steel, its edges blurred and flickering as if refusing to fully commit to existence. It hung in absolute silence, a continent of negation hovering a thousand feet above them.
A single, narrow beam of dead white light lanced down, striking the center of the courtyard outside. Where it hit, color drained, sound ceased, and the very air became still and lifeless.
From within the beam, a figure stepped onto their earth.
He was tall, clad in armor that seemed carved from fossilized shadow and old bone. His face was obscured by a helm that was little more than a smooth, featureless obsidian plane. He carried no weapon. He didn’t need one. The void moved with him, a slow, spreading stain on reality.
The Dead King had arrived. And he was early.
Bruce pushed himself up, pulling Lena to her feet beside him. The others rose, gathering around him, not a harem, but a phalanx. Their nakedness was not vulnerability, but a statement. They had nothing to hide. They were, every inch, what they were.
“It seems,” a voice said, emanating not from the helm but from the air itself, dry as grave-dust and cold as interstellar vacuum, “my invitation was received.”
Bruce took a step forward, the unified power of his family a quiet, ready storm in his chest. He felt Lena’s hand slip into his, her potential a live wire. He felt the solid earth through Ketut, the ready fire in Julianna’s heart, the ticking clock of Jasmine’s speed.
“You weren’t invited,” Bruce said, his own voice echoing with layered strength. “You’re trespassing.”
The featureless helm tilted. The dead white beam around him flickered. “Trespass implies ownership. This world… is unclaimed. It is ripe. I have come to still its pointless noise.”
He took a step forward. The grass beneath his foot didn’t bend. It turned to a fine, grey ash that made no sound.
Behind Bruce, Jake Chambers slowly drew his father’s gun, his eyes not on the Dead King, but on the silent, impossible geometry of the ship above. He was looking for the door.
And Oy, at his side, let out a low, warning growl. “King…” the bumbler whispered. “Dead king.”
“Dead king.” The words hung in the air, a cold echo from Oy’s muzzle. The grey ash circle continued to spread silently from the figure’s feet, a visual emptiness that drank the sound of the night insects.
Bruce squeezed Lena’s hand, a silent signal. The unified hum inside him was a coiled spring. He took another step forward, his bare feet feeling the vibrant, frightened life of the grass just outside the ash’s creeping edge. “This world is claimed,” Bruce said, his layered voice firm. “You’re just late to the party.”
The obsidian helm remained fixed on him. “Claimed by a fragment of borrowed light. By a man who plays at godhood using stolen tools. I have un-made continents.” The voice was dry, precise, utterly devoid of boast. It was a statement of fact, like describing the weather. “Your union is a pleasant trick. A localized anomaly.”
“Try us,” Julianna spat, her fingers crackling. A whip of blue flame snapped from her hand, lashing across the courtyard. It struck the Dead King’s chest and sputtered out without a sound, without even a scorch mark on the fossilized shadow armor. It was simply absorbed into the void.
“Fire is noise,” the Dead King said. He didn’t move.
Jasmine blurred. One second she was beside Julianna, the next she was behind the King, her hand driving a stone knife she’d palmed from the war room toward the seam of his helm. Her speed was such that the air popped. The knife shattered against the obsidian, and Jasmine stumbled back, her hand bleeding, her face a mask of shock. “It’s… cold,” she gasped. “Fucking absolute zero cold.”
“Speed is just fleeting disorder,” the King sighed, as if bored. He raised a single, gauntleted hand toward the villa. A pulse of that dead white light shimmered from his palm. It didn’t strike the building. It simply unmade a ten-foot section of the wall. There was no explosion, no debris. One moment it was there, elegant stone and glass. The next, it was a perfect, geometric slice of nothingness, a gap onto a featureless grey void.
A lance of pure panic, not their own, shot through the bond. It came from the suites behind that wall. The staff. The cooks, the groundskeepers, people who had no part in this.
Ketut screamed, a raw sound of shared agony, and fell to her knees. “Roberto… Maia… they’re just gone.”
The emotional shockwave was a physical blow. The unified hum inside Bruce stuttered. Grief and fury, hot and blinding, erupted from Camille, from Isabella, from all of them. It was un-focusing, shattering.
The Dead King observed this. “Ah. Attachment. The ultimate flaw in your design. Noise begets more noise.”
Susannah’s revolvers were in her hands, blasting. The sandalwood grips glowed. The bullets, forged in her will as much as steel, should have pierced reality itself. They vanished into the King’s chest plate like stones into a black pond. He didn’t flinch.
Sophia roared, charging, her body a missile of enhanced muscle. She tackled him, aiming to drive him into the earth. She might as well have tackled a mountain. He didn’t move an inch. His hand closed around her throat. A faint grey film spread from his fingertips, crawling up her neck toward her face. Her struggling slowed, her mighty strength seeping away into the void.
“NO!” Freya screamed, and a surge of raw, untamed potential lashed out from her—a cascade of brilliant, chaotic energy that swarmed the King. It fizzled against him, diverting, but it made his grip on Sophia loosen for a microsecond.
That was all Lena needed.
She didn’t attack him. She attacked the bond. She reached inside Bruce, inside all of them, and with the brutal precision of a battlefield surgeon, she yanked. She pulled the fraying threads of their grief and rage and fear, and she slammed them back into a single, white-hot point: Bruce.
The feedback was excruciating. It was like having his nervous system used as a winch cable. He bellowed, his back arching. But it worked. The scattered focus vanished, replaced by a painful, laser-sharp unity.
Bruce’s own power, amplified by Anya, grounded by Ketut, tempered by them all, surged forth. It wasn’t a blast of light or heat. It was a wave of pure, defiant existence. A command of ‘I AM’ made manifest.
It hit the Dead King like a physical hammer.
For the first time, he was forced back a single step. His foot left the ashen circle, imprinting on the live grass, which instantly withered and died. The grey film retreated from Sophia’s neck. She collapsed, gasping, as Susannah dragged her clear.
The featureless helm turned fully toward Bruce. “Interesting. A localized reinforcement of the probability field. You are… a stubborn knot.”
“Get the fuck off my island,” Bruce growled, the words vibrating with power.
“No,” the Dead King said. He raised both hands this time. The void above them seemed to press down, a weight on the soul. “I will simply cut the knot.”
A crushing pressure descended, not on their bodies, but on their connection. Bruce felt it like a vise around his heart, squeezing the light from the bond. Lena cried out beside him, blood trickling from her nose. Anya stumbled. The golden hum began to dim, to fade into a dying whine. The Dead King was targeting the source of their strength—their unity itself.
Desperation, cold and sharp, cut through Bruce. They were losing. The circuit was breaking. He needed more. They all did.
His eyes met Lena’s. Her gaze was terrified, but then it hardened with a feral understanding. She gave a single, sharp nod.
“Again!” Bruce roared down the bond, not with words, but with a raw, primal imperative. “NOW!”
It wasn’t a gentle reconnection. It was a desperation fuck against the encroaching void.
Bruce grabbed Lena, turned her roughly to face him. His mouth crashed down on hers, stealing her breath, stealing her fear, channeling it into need. His hands groped between them, finding his cock, already hardening again from the adrenaline and the desperate flow of power. He was wet from their previous union. He didn’t guide himself. He shoved, brutally, up into her.
She screamed into his mouth, her legs buckling. He held her up, one arm locking around her waist, the other tangling in her hair, forcing her head back. He fucked her standing there, in full view of the spreading void and the unmoving King. Each deep, punishing thrust was a hammer blow against the pressure collapsing their bond. “Give it to me!” he snarled in her ear, his hips pistoning. “All of it! Every fucking drop!”
“Take it!” she shrieked, her nails digging into his shoulders, her cunt clamping around him in spasming waves. “Oh god, take it all!”
It was ugly, and raw, and base. It was a animal reclaiming its mate in the face of extinction. But it worked. The circuit, flickering, surged back to life, fed by this violent, carnal current.
The other wives, sensing the shift, didn’t form a beautiful circle. They lunged for contact wherever they could find it. Isabella grabbed Ketut from behind, pulling down her pants, her fingers plunging into her pussy, her teeth sinking into Ketut’s shoulder. Julianna and Jasmine clawed at each other’s clothes, Julianna biting Jasmine’s nipple, Jasmine shoving two fingers into Julianna’s ass with a brutal twist. Camille pulled Freya and Briana into a tangled heap on the ground, mouths and hands seeking wet, aching flesh.
It was not lovemaking. It was a frantic, public exchange of vital energy, a last-ditch transfer of power to sustain the fight. The air filled with the sounds of slapping skin, guttural groans, and sobbing pleas.
The Dead King watched, his head slightly tilted. “Fascinating. The biology of last hopes. It changes nothing.” He clenched his gauntleted fist.
The pressure redoubled. Bruce felt a crack forming in the very core of him. Lena felt it too. Her eyes went wide with a new kind of terror. “He’s inside the bond!” she gasped. “He’s fucking unraveling us!”
Bruce kept pounding into her, a desperate, failing rhythm. He was losing. They were all losing. The void was winning.
Then, a new sound. A single, clear voice, young and terrified but unwavering.
“Stop.”
It was Jake. He had stepped forward, away from Oy. He held no weapon. His father’s gun was holstered. He just stood there, his hands at his sides, Roland’s blue bombardier eyes fixed on the Dead King.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” Jake said, his voice trembling only slightly. “This isn’t your world. This isn’t your when.”
The Dead King’s helm slowly swiveled toward him. The pressure on Bruce lessened, just a fraction, redirected.
“A child,” the void-voice echoed. “Another fragment of borrowed light.”
“I see your door,” Jake said, and his voice gained strength. “It’s not on your ship. It’s right there.” He pointed a finger, not at the King, but at the space directly beside him, where the nothingness seemed to swirl. “It’s a tiny, stupid little door. And it’s unlocked.”
For the first time, the Dead King hesitated. The featureless obsidian helm seemed to stare at the empty space Jake indicated.
Jake took a step closer. “You forgot, didn’t you? You’ve been dead so long, you forgot you walked in through a door. And doors,” he said, and now a hard smile touched his lips, “swing both ways.”
He turned his head slightly, toward the tangled, panting group. Toward Anya, whose violet eyes were fixed on him, wide with sudden, dawning comprehension. “Anya,” Jake said, calm now. “Don’t amplify him. Don’t amplify any of us.”
He looked back at the Dead King. “Amplify the door.”
Anya understood instantly. She broke from the group, pushing Briana aside. She focused her power, not on their bond, not on Bruce, but on the conceptual flaw Jake had seen—the residual, forgotten pathway the Dead King had used to insert himself into their reality.
She poured her creation, her amplification, into the idea of that doorway.
The space beside the Dead King shimmered. It wasn’t a beautiful light. It was a fracture, a screaming rip in the fabric of his own negation. A tiny, ordinary-looking wooden door, worn and grey, appeared in the air. It swung open with a mournful creak. Beyond it was not void, but a chaotic, howling maelstrom of raw, un-made potential—the space between worlds, the cosmic backstage he had traversed.
The Dead King stumbled, the absolute stillness around him breaking. He clutched at his helm as if in sudden, silent pain.
“Now, Bruce!” Jake yelled. “Now! Don’t push him! Pull!”
Bruce didn’t hesitate. Still buried deep inside Lena, he shifted his focus. He stopped trying to repel the void. Instead, using every ounce of their combined, sex-fueled power, he reached for that open, amplified door. He wrapped his will around the Dead King not to shove, but to invite. He pulled him toward the threshold.
The Dead King resisted, his feet scoring trenches in the earth. But the open door, amplified by Anya’s impossible power, was a singularity, a drain. His form began to distort, to stretch toward the screaming maw of the between-worlds.
“No!” The void-voice was a rasp now, the first emotion it had shown—a sliver of dread. “This… is not… the silence!”
With a final, soundless tear, the Dead King was ripped from his footing. He didn’t fly; he flowed, like smoke, into the yawning doorway. The door slammed shut with a final, thunderous bang that shook the island to its roots.
Then it vanished.
The crushing pressure disappeared. The grey ash stopped spreading. The void-ship overhead flickered, pulsed once, and then dissolved like a nightmare in the dawn.
The only sounds were the ragged, exhausted breaths of the family, and the soft, terrified whimpers of the few surviving staff peering from the intact parts of the villa.
Bruce slowly, carefully, let Lena down. Her legs gave way and she crumpled to the grass, trembling. He stood over her, spent, raw, his body aching. The unified hum was gone, leaving a deep, hollow silence in its place. They had won.
But as he looked at the perfect, geometric slice of nothingness where part of his home had been, at the ashen scars on his land, and the wide, terrified eyes of his people, he knew it wasn't over.
Jake’s voice was quiet in the new silence. “He won’t stay gone. A door that’s been opened once… can be opened again.”
Bruce looked at the young man, then at his trembling, battered wives scattered around him. The victory tasted of ash and blood and salt.
They had defended their world. But the war had just begun.