Chapter 38: The News
The sun, a fierce Balinese orange, was already high when Bruce surfaced from sleep. He was alone in the vast bed, the scent of jasmine and sex and last night’s cigar smoke lingering in the air. He could feel them, all six threads in his chest, humming with a steady, satisfied warmth. One thread—Lena’s, a shimmering prism—was nearby.
He found her on the shaded terrace off the bedroom, sitting cross-legged on a daybed, a tablet in her hand. She wore only one of his discarded t-shirts. It drowned her small frame, the hem brushing her thighs. Her dark hair was a mess, her expression focused.
“Morning, Sombra,” he said, his voice rough.
She looked up, and her face lit with that absolute devotion. “You’re awake. Feel okay?”
“Like I could lift a mountain.” He meant it literally. The integration was complete. The power felt like his own limbs now, not borrowed armor. “Where is everyone?”
“Camille and Priya are in the garden. Sophia’s doing yoga by the pool. Freya and Ketut are arguing with the chef about breakfast spices.” Lena smiled. “Anya went into town. She said she needed a real newspaper, something tangible.”
Bruce nodded, pouring himself a glass of water from a carafe. The domestic normalcy was a stark, beautiful contrast to the deep ocean trench. He watched Lena’s brow furrow as she scrolled. “What’s got you hooked?”
“Just… the aftermath. The reports are all over the place. ‘Unexplained seismic activity ceases.’ ‘Global monitoring stations baffled.’ The official line is a sensor malfunction that triggered false alarms.” She shook her head. “The cover-up is instant. Makes you wonder how much of this happens.”
Before Bruce could respond, the sound of a speeding motorbike cut through the compound’s tranquility. It skidded to a halt on the gravel drive below. Light, frantic footsteps pounded up the teak staircase.
Anya burst onto the terrace, her silver-blonde hair wind-whipped, her golden-violet eyes wide. She was breathing hard, clutching a folded, newsprint tabloid. The local English-language paper.
“Guys,” she gasped, holding the paper out. “Check out the local paper.”
Lena took it, Bruce leaning over her shoulder. The front page was dominated by a grainy, obviously zoomed-in photograph. The headline screamed: MIRAGE OR MIRACLE? MYSTERY FIGURES OVER SUNDA TRENCH.
The photo was taken from high altitude, likely from a helicopter or surveillance aircraft. The quality was poor, the ocean a choppy gray expanse. But in the center of the frame, standing seemingly on nothing, was a group of figures. Seven of them. A large, muscular man at the center, surrounded by six slender, unmistakably female forms. A disc of faint, golden light was just perceptible beneath their feet. The resolution was too low for clear facial features, but the shapes, the postures…
“Fuck,” Lena breathed.
“It’s us,” Anya said, her reporter’s cadence clipped, clinical. “Shot was taken at 18:43 local time yesterday. Right when we were there. Someone had a bird in the area. Probably military. The article says the image was ‘leaked from confidential aviation channels.’ Governments were evacuating people along the coastlines, then all of a sudden the catastrophe didn’t happen. And now… a picture of us standing on the ocean.”
Bruce felt a cold weight settle in his gut, different from any divine threat. This was human. This was exposure. “How clear is it? Can they identify us?”
“Not from this,” Anya said, tapping the grainy image. “But it’s a data point. If anyone is looking for ‘unusual occurrences’ or ‘persons of interest’ connected to the non-event, this ties it to a specific location and a specific group. A man and six women. In Bali.”
The relaxed morning shattered. The threads in Bruce’s chest pulled taut, not with fear, but with a sharp, collective alertness. He could feel the others sense it; Camille’s protective instinct spiked, Sophia’s focus snapped to them, Ketut’s earthy calm rippled with concern.
“Shit,” Bruce muttered, running a hand through his hair. “We were caught.”
Within minutes, they were all gathered in the main living area, the newspaper spread on the low table. A tense silence hung in the air, thick as the humidity.
“This changes nothing,” Sophia said finally, her Spanish accent firm. “We did what was necessary. If they have a picture, they have a picture. They do not have our names. They do not know what we are.”
“Yet,” Priya added, her healer’s mind analyzing the threat. “Pattern recognition is a powerful tool. Multiple women, connected to one man, in Bali. If they cross-reference immigration records, long-term visas, property purchases… it is a trail, however faint.”
“We can’t just sit here,” Freya said, her small hands clenched. “We need to know who took it. Who has the original. We need to… contain it.”
“Contain it how?” Camille asked, her voice the calm center of the storm. “We’re not assassins. We protect. We create. We heal.” She looked at Bruce, her brown eyes full of a fierce, wifely worry. “But we also need to protect ourselves. Our life here.”
Bruce stared at the grainy photo. His own blurred figure looked like a statue, an idol surrounded by devotees. A target. The peaceful sanctuary of the compound suddenly felt porous, the jungle hiding unseen eyes. The urge to act, to strike preemptively with the terrifying power at his command, was a dark whisper in his blood. But the steady pull of the six threads—his anchors, his conscience—held him back.
“We don’t kill. We don’t terrorize,” he said, the words definitive. He looked at Ketut. “We need information. Can you feel anything? From the photo? The intention behind it?”
Ketut took the paper, her slender fingers smoothing the page. She closed her dark eyes, breathing slowly. She was reading the énergi of the moment, not the ink, but the residual signature of the event itself. Minutes passed.
“Fear,” she whispered. “The one who took this… it was not aggression. It was awe. And terrible, shaking fear. They saw us and knew they were seeing something that broke their world. The leak… it feels… desperate. Not an attack. A cry.”
“A cry for what?” Lena asked.
“For understanding. Or for warning.” Ketut opened her eyes. “The thread is thin. But it is not hostile. Not yet.”
The revelation didn’t relax the tension; it complicated it. They weren’t facing a faceless, malicious agency. They were facing a frightened person with a world-shattering photo.
The stress needed an outlet. The divine power within them, denied a violent release, sought another. The air in the room grew thick, charged. Bruce felt it first—a heat low in his belly, a stirring that was more than lust. It was a need for reaffirmation, for the visceral truth of their connection, to drown out the chilling exposure of the photograph.
His gaze found Lena’s. She saw it immediately. The fear in her eyes melted, replaced by a dark, liquid understanding. She stood up from the couch, never breaking eye contact, and pulled the oversized t-shirt over her head. She stood naked before them, her perfect curves a defiance against the grainy, anonymous image on the table.
“They see a mystery,” she said, her voice low and rough. “Let’s remind ourselves what we really are.”
It was the permission they all needed. The anxiety transmuted into a raw, hungry electricity.
Freya was on her feet, shucking her shorts. “Fuck their pictures.” She walked to Bruce, who was still seated, and straddled his lap, her small, perky breasts in his face. He took a nipple into his mouth, sucking hard, and she moaned, grinding down on the hard ridge of his cock straining against his shorts. “We’ve got the real thing right here.”
Camille began unbuttoning her sundress, a slow, deliberate strip. Sophia moved behind Anya, helping her out of her tank top, hands immediately cupping the heavy, pale breasts from behind. Priya and Ketut moved together, a dance of dark and light skin, their mouths meeting in a kiss that was both tender and fierce.
Lena approached Bruce from the front. She pushed Freya’s hips back gently, just enough, and yanked Bruce’s shorts and boxers down to his thighs. His cock sprang free, thick and veined and already leaking. She didn’t hesitate. She dropped to her knees, took the massive head into her mouth, and sucked.
“Christ, Lena,” Bruce groaned, his head falling back. Her mouth was hot, wet, expert. She used her tongue to swirl around the glans, then plunged down, taking an impossible amount of him into her throat, her devotion evident in every straining muscle of her neck.
Freya, not to be outdone, wriggled around, presenting her ass to his face. “My turn again,” she demanded, pushing her round, spectacular cheeks apart. Bruce leaned forward, his tongue finding her dripping slit from behind, licking and thrusting as Lena deep-throated him.
The room dissolved into a tableau of carnal worship. Sophia had laid Anya back on the thick rug, her mouth buried between the taller girl’s thighs, Anya’s back arching, a string of filthy, grateful curses in Russian pouring from her lips. Camille joined them, her hands and mouth exploring Anya’s breasts as Sophia ate her out. Priya and Ketut were a tangled, kissing heap on a nearby divan, Priya’s voluptuous body pinned beneath Ketut’s slender frame, their fingers working in each other’s wetness.
Lena pulled off Bruce’s cock with a lewd, wet pop. Her eyes were glazed. “I need you in my ass. Now. I need to feel you there while the world tries to find us.”
She turned, bending over the coffee table, shoving the newspaper with its damning photo onto the floor. She presented herself, reaching back to spread her cheeks, revealing her tight, pink hole.
Bruce stood, his cock throbbing. He spat into his palm, slicked his length, and positioned the broad head against her rear entrance. “This is ours,” he growled, not just to her, but to all of them. “This truth. This is what they can never see.”
He pushed.
Lena screamed, a sound of pure, shattering ecstasy as he invaded her. It was incredibly tight, a searing, perfect pressure. He sank in, inch by glorious inch, her body yielding to him with a trust that was absolute. He bottomed out, his pelvis slapping against the sumptuous curves of her ass.
He set a brutal, claiming rhythm. Each deep drive into her rectum was a physical renunciation of the outside world, a reassertion of their private, divine bond. The slap of skin, Lena’s choked sobs of pleasure, the wet sounds of joining, became the only reality.
Freya climbed onto the table in front of Lena, lowering her dripping cunt onto Lena’s waiting mouth. “Suck me, Sombra,” Freya gasped, and Lena obeyed, her tongue lapping fervently as Bruce fucked her ass.
Bruce felt the climax building, a crescendo pulled from the very core of their linked energies. He saw Camille watching him, her hand between her own legs, her protective energy wrapping around him like a shield. He saw Priya’s knowing, approving gaze, her healing current soothing the ragged edge of his thrusts. He saw Ketut’s dark eyes, holding the solidity of the earth beneath them. He saw Anya unraveling under Sophia’s relentless tongue, her fiery light flashing bright. He saw Sophia’s focused bliss.
He was the center. The anchor. The god.
With a final, powerful surge, he buried himself to the hilt in Lena’s clenching depths and came. His release was a torrent of hot, claiming seed, flooding her insides. It triggered a chain reaction. Lena convulsed around him, her scream muffled against Freya’s pussy. Freya bucked, crying out as she came on Lena’s face. Across the room, Anya and Camille shuddered in tandem, and Priya and Ketut clung together as their own peaks crashed over them.
Bruce stayed sheathed in Lena, panting, the world slowly coming back. The fear was gone, burned away in the crucible of shared flesh. The grainy photo on the floor was just paper now. A curiosity. A clue to a mystery they would solve on their own terms.
He slowly pulled out of Lena, catching her as she slumped. He held her, Freya still draped over them. The others migrated over, a exhausted, slick, satisfied pile of limbs on the floor.
After a long silence, Anya, her cheek pressed to Camille’s thigh, spoke, her reporter’s brain never fully offline. “The photo gives us something, too.”
“What?” Bruce asked, stroking Lena’s hair.
“A starting point,” she said, her gold-violet eyes sharp. “We know someone was there. In a helicopter. We find the bird, we find the photographer. We find them before whoever they leaked it to decides to come looking for the source.” She looked at Bruce, a fierce loyalty burning through the post-coital haze. “We don’t wait for them to find us. We use it. We turn their clue into ours.”
Bruce looked at the circle of his wives, their bodies gleaming with sweat and his release, their faces resolute. Exposed, but unbroken. A target, but a fortress.
“Okay,” he said, the word simple, final. “We find them first.”
The resolve hung in the air, solid as the teak floor beneath them. It was Freya who broke the languid, post-coil silence, her small body stirring from where it was draped over Bruce’s leg. “So, how do we do that? Stare at the photo until Ketut gets a vision?”
Ketut, tracing patterns on Bruce’s chest, shook her head. “The énergi from the paper is static now. A fingerprint. We need the living source.” She looked at Bruce, her dark eyes thoughtful. “The photo is a point in a line. We find another point on that line. Something from the same moment, but… different.”
Priya sat up, her voluptuous frame glowing. “The helicopter. It has a signature, yes? Mechanical, but it was there. Immersed in the same energy field we were generating.”
“You want to track a helicopter?” Sophia asked, a skeptical eyebrow raised. She stretched, the hard lines of her abdomen flexing. “From yesterday. In an ocean of air.”
“Not track it,” Anya said, her reporter’s mind locking onto the idea. She crawled over to the discarded newspaper, careful not to touch the sticky patches on the rug. “We identify it. This wasn’t a commercial flight path. It would be military, coast guard, or a private charter from a nearby island. The time is logged. We find which birds were in that airspace.”
Bruce felt the plan coiling into shape, a practical spear-point. His old accountant’s mind, a tool he hadn’t used in weeks, awoke. “That’s data. Records. Flight plans.” He looked at Lena, still nestled against him. “You’re the shadow. Can you slip into those systems? Find the needle?”
Lena’s warm brown eyes gleamed with something beyond devotion: competency. “Military networks are fortresses. But airport logistics, private charter manifests, harbor master logs for nearby islands?” She gave a slow, confident smile. “Those are just walls. I don’t need a door.”
The mundane focus was a strange, thrilling pivot. They were gods planning a hack. The divine energy in the room subtly shifted from sated lust to sharp, collaborative intention.
“We’ll need a space,” Camille said, ever the organizer. “The study. Lots of screens. I’ll have lunch brought there.” She stood, unselfconscious in her nakedness, and began gathering discarded clothing, her movements efficient. Her protectiveness now manifested as logistical support, creating the fortress for their hunt.
They moved as a unit, a river of smooth skin and purpose flowing from the living area to the compound’s study. The room was airy, with a long table of reclaimed wood. Lena commandeered the primary workstation, her fingers flying across the keyboard, summoning windows of code and dark-web search protocols. The rest gathered around, a council of war in various states of undress.
Bruce watched, leaning against the doorframe. The sight of them—Anya leaning over Lena’s shoulder pointing at a map, Priya cross-referencing time zones on a tablet, Sophia massaging Lena’s shoulders as she worked—stoked a different kind of heat. It was possessive, proud. They were terrifying and magnificent.
“Got a list,” Lena announced after forty-five minutes of silent, intense work. Three flat-panel screens glowed with data. “Four possible birds. Indonesian Navy Lynx on a routine patrol, a Australian Air Force P-8 Poseidon on a surveillance run—both unlikely, wrong camera angles based on the photo’s perspective. A weather research copter out of Singapore that was grounded with engine trouble.” She tapped the fourth entry. “And a private, chartered Airbus H145. It lifted off from a private resort on Nusa Penida at 18:15. Its filed flight plan was for ‘aerial photography of the sunset over the trench.’ Its transponder went dark for a twelve-minute window… exactly matching our window.”
The room stilled. “Who chartered it?” Bruce’s voice was low.
Lena’s fingers danced. The booking was under a corporate shell, a holding company. She pierced it with ease. “The charter was paid for by a venture capital firm based in San Francisco. Aurelius Digital Ventures.” A few more keystrokes. Her breath hitched. “The lead on the project who authorized the expenditure… Dr. Aris Thorne.”
“Who’s that?” Freya asked.
“A physicist,” Priya said quietly, her medical network recalling the name. “Cross-disciplinary. Quantum mechanics, but also metaphysics. He published a controversial paper last year on ‘consciousness as a topological field.’ The scientific community largely dismissed it as… philosophical noodling.”
“He’s not noodling now,” Anya murmured, staring at the screen. “He pointed a camera at the void and took a picture of us. He wanted to see something.”
“And he did,” Ketut said. Her voice held a note of grim validation. “His fear… it was the fear of a man whose wildest theory just proved true. He doesn’t want to destroy us. He wants to understand us.”
“Understanding is a prelude,” Sophia stated bluntly. “First, he tells his journal. Then, he tells a colleague. Then, a general. The path is clear.”
Bruce pushed off the doorframe. The decision crystalized. “We don’t wait for step two. We go to Nusa Penida. We talk to Dr. Thorne. We make the nature of our… existence… perfectly clear to him.”
“And if clarity isn’t enough?” Camille asked, her arms folded.
Bruce met her gaze, his hazel eyes swirling with an old, human hardness layered under the divine. “Then we become his worst theory confirmed.”
The plan was simple, brutal, and required them to be at their peak. The shared focus had banked their carnal fire, but now it needed to roar. Bruce could feel it in them, a need to draw strength from the source, from each other, before the confrontation. The study, with its humming computers and tense air, was no longer the place.
He didn’t speak. He simply turned and walked out, through the villa, towards the private gym. He could hear the soft, barefoot pad of them following. The gym was a temple of human exertion, all mirrored walls and polished steel. The late afternoon sun slanted in, painting the equipment in bars of gold.
Bruce stopped in the center of the matted floor. He turned to face them as they filed in, their forms breathtaking in the angled light. “We go in strong. We go in united.” He let his linen pants drop. His cock, semi-hard from the charged atmosphere, thickened eagerly. “We go in reminded.”
They understood. This wasn’t just pleasure. It was a ritual. A tuning.
Freya was first. She strode forward, her small body a study in taut need, and dropped to her knees. She took him not in her mouth, but pressed his thick shaft between her incredible ass cheeks, rocking back and forth, smearing pre-cum on her skin. “Fuck, you’re huge,” she breathed, looking up at him, her green eyes blazing. “I want this monster stretching me out right before we go scare the shit out of a scientist.”
Lena was behind her, her hands on Freya’s hips. “Then let’s not waste time.” She guided Bruce’s cockhead to Freya’s tiny, fluttering entrance. Bruce pushed, and Freya cried out, her nails digging into his thighs as he sank into her unbelievable tightness. She was drenched, her creative energy a vibrant, slick flood around him.
As he began to pump into Freya, Lena pressed herself against his back, her small perky breasts flattened against his muscles. She reached around, her hand finding his balls, rolling them as she whispered filthy encouragements in Spanish. Camille and Anya flanked Freya, their hands roaming over her body, pinching her nipples, kissing her neck, grounding her as Bruce’s relentless strokes pushed her toward the edge.
Sophia approached from the front, her intent clear. She watched Bruce’s face, the strain of his pleasure, for a moment. Then she kissed him, deep and hungry, her tongue dueling with his. When she broke away, she smirked. “Save some for me.” She moved to the padded incline bench, laying back and spreading her thick, powerful thighs wide, her fingers already working her clit into a slick, swollen peak.
Bruce felt Freya’s orgasm detonate, her pussy clenching around him in rhythmic, milking spasms. He pulled out, his cock glistening. He moved to Sophia, her blue eyes holding a challenge. He drove into her in one long, smooth stroke. She gasped, her tight, fit body arching off the bench. “Yes! Harder, cielo, harder!” she demanded, her accent thickening.
He obliged, his hips pistoning, the sound of their joining loud in the room. Priya and Ketut joined them on the bench, Priya leaning over to capture Sophia’s mouth in a kiss, while Ketut attended to Sophia’s breasts, sucking and biting the hardened nipples. The synchronicity was instinctual, a perfect mesh of desire and support.
Bruce felt his control fraying. The sight—Anya now kissing Camille deeply, Lena kneeling to taste Freya’s climax, the tangled, beautiful womanhood beneath him—was too much. He slammed into Sophia, his balls tightening.
“Inside me,” Sophia commanded, wrapping her legs around his waist. “Fill me up. Let me carry your strength.”
With a grunt that was almost a roar, he obeyed. His release shot into her, hot and seemingly endless. Sophia’s own cry was sharp, victorious, her body bucking beneath him. The energy transfer this time wasn’t a defensive surge but a targeted infusion, a charging of batteries.
He collapsed on her for a second, then rolled to the side, spent but humming with power. They lay in a tangled, sweaty heap on the gym mats, the sun warming their skin. The anxiety was gone, replaced by a focused, quiet potency.
After a while, Bruce sat up. “Shower. Then we go.”
An hour later, under the cover of a velvet tropical night, they stood together at the cliff’s edge. The lights of Nusa Penida twinkled across the strait. No boat. No helicopter.
“Ready for your second trip?” Bruce asked, taking Ketut’s hand. The others linked up, a chain of unwavering intent.
He didn’t visualize the island. He visualized the thread—the frightened, awe-struck énergi of Aris Thorne, a thin, pulsing filament he could now see in his mind’s eye, trailing from the grainy photo back to its source.
He stepped.
The world dissolved not into the deep ocean, but into the manicured silence of a resort villa’s private garden. The air smelled of frangipani and chlorine. A man in his fifties, gaunt with lack of sleep, sat rigidly at a laptop on a patio table, staring at a high-resolution version of the photo that had ruined his understanding of physics.
Dr. Aris Thorne looked up.
Seven figures materialized from the darkness, naked, gleaming with otherworldly power and the sheen of recent sex. Their eyes held the depth of oceans and stars.
He made a small, choked sound.
Bruce took one step forward, his form towering, his voice the calm of inevitability. “Let’s talk about your picture, Doctor.”