The five kings didn’t announce war. That was the interesting part. There was no dramatic declaration, no war drums, no public address to rally the people behind a righteous cause. That kind of theater was for rulers who needed their people’s faith to sustain them.
These five didn’t.
Orders moved downward through command structures with clean, clinical authority — each directive frad as precaution, reinforcent, necessary escalation in response to border volatility. No one said the word war out loud. It sat beneath every sentence like a stone at the bottom of still water — invisible, unmistakable. Quartermasters tripled their requisition orders. Engineers ran stress tests on relay towers at hours no one asked about. Junior officers received redeploynt papers in the middle of the night and knew better than to ask why.
The shape of it was already there.
They were called in together.
Not to the public reception halls with their high ceilings and decorative columns built to make visiting dignitaries feel appropriately small. Not to the formal council chambers where decisions were made slowly, surrounded by advisors, with everything recorded and archived.
A war room.
The table at the center was wide and low, covered in layered projection maps that cycled through shifting overlays — border zones glowing amber, supply corridors traced in blue, contested regions that had spent the last several months quietly becoming the focal points of every single incident worth reporting. The light from the projections threw sharp angles across the faces of the n standing around it. Nobody sat. Nobody looked relaxed.
The five kings looked like what they were: people who had stopped asking questions and started making decisions.
Drevos spoke first, as he usually did. His voice didn’t carry the kind of weight that ca from volu — it ca from certainty. The kind of certainty that had stopped needing to justify itself years ago.
"You’ve proven your value," he said. His gaze moved across all of them, unhurried. "We don’t need to test you anymore."
Bart leaned forward, elbows on the table’s edge, and cut straight past ceremony.
"We’re moving."
Orsel followed, his tone asured, every word placed carefully like he was laying stones across a river. "Limited engagent first. Strategic strikes on identified hostile installations. Suppression of the forward positions that have been staging incursions."
Mourne, quieter than the others, added the word they all cared about most: "Controlled."
And Edran finished it, the way Edran always did — short, direct, no room for interpretation. "And effective."
Then all five of them looked up.
"You will lead," Drevos said. Not a question. Not a request.
Almond nodded.
"Understood."
The next phase didn’t wait for sentint.
Armies moved — not in the chaotic surge of desperate montum, but in formations. Disciplined columns, asured advances, thousands of soldiers across five kingdoms crossing into designated forward zones in synchronized waves driven by the sa communications infrastructure Almond and the others had spent the last several weeks quietly mapping, studying, and in several key places, carefully compromising.
From the outside, it looked strong. It looked like exactly what five coordinated kingdoms looked like when they finally stopped deliberating and committed to sothing.
From the inside, it was already cracked.
Fraisea had spent four days ensuring that particular detail was airtight — the routing fractured across relay points that would, within the week, quietly stop existing. The ssages moved through gaps in the network like water through fissures, fast and invisible, leaving no record worth finding.
And enemy kingdoms received them.
That was the plan.
Almond and others waged this war by secretly moving pieces and manipulating the kings, but they didn’t plan to make them win this war.
Nope.
Ainen had contacted the surrounding kingdoms that were about to be attacked days ago.
At that ti, he only told them that there would be a war soon, and they would get the necessory help to win it.
And now that the war started, it was ti.
The fractured communication would directly relay all the orders and plans of the army chiefs and others to the enemy kingdoms, who can promptly strategize to deal with them.
The first clash proved the point imdiately.
Drevos’s eastern force advanced into the Greyveil sector at dawn, moving through fractured terrain of listone ridges and low scrub forest that had always made direct assault expensive. They expected resistance — they’d war-gad this specific approach for weeks, had contingency plans stacked three layers deep.
What they didn’t have contingencies for was three separate enemy factions erging from different angles with coordination that had no business existing between groups who’d been rivals a month ago.
The confusion didn’t announce itself cleanly. It seeped in. An attack from the northeast — unexpected, but manageable. Then pressure from the south. Then a flanking probe from terrain intelligence had flagged as too rough for organized movent. Units began shifting positions to compensate, plugging gaps as they appeared, and as they shifted — they walked straight into prepared ground.
BOOM!
A loud sound rang from behind. The reinforcent was coming to save them, but this sound didn’t bode well.
A long-range ballistic bomb landed
"What’s going on?!" The general of this army segnt shouted as he saw the reinforcent that they called getting blasted.
Who would tell him that the information about their incoming reinforcent, and even their distance was relayed to the enemy, who quickly loaded their long-range artilleries which landed in positions the targeting systems had calculated based on intelligence given to them through leaked communication lines.
And this was the scene at every other front of this war.
The large coordinated attack that the five kings thought they were making, and would sweep their enemies didn’t work. Instead, their secretly prepared warfronts got wreaked badly.
"Damn it! Why isn’t he answering?!"
"That bitch is also not picking up the call!"
The five Kings sat in the alliance city’s palace, watching the war from fifty different screens as they had attacked at fifty places of five enemy kingdoms at the sa ti.
And they were losing at all fifty places.
Almond and others had entirely vanished after the war started.
But they didn’t vanish literally.
Instead, they were assassinating the strongest subordinates of those five Kings and directing the whole flow of this war.
And they were done with that in just half an hour after the war started.
"If we lose all those slaves, we are done. They will take over our everything."
"If I am going to finally et my end, I won’t leave without causing as much destruction as I can."
All five kings were furious, and their auras were surging.
They were naturally the strongest.
Kings were kings because they were one of the top 10,000 powerhouses in this realm where trillions of people of myriad kinds lived.
Granted, these five kings were at the bottom of the bottom.
But they were stronger than average Tier-15 powerhouses.
One King was at Tier-17, two were at Tier-16, and the remaining two were at Tier-15.
They were the main dish.
"Hello, folks."
Suddenly, Ainen’s voice rang in the hall as the five kings looked up.
From a whirling shadow that had quietly appeared there courtesy to Lily’s Dreadling, Almond and the gang erged and landed quietly.
"You are challenged for your King rank." Almond calmly stated. "Five versus five. Group battle or individual battle, make your choice."
[Conditions satisfied: All proxy subjects of both sides doesn’t exist.]
[Arena of Kings shall open.]
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