Damien stepped out of the portal to the proto-space. It was daytime and dark clouds covered the skies, foretelling a very rainy weather.

They'd crossed the proto-space, only finding common Spirit lord monsters with none of them giving any worthwhile fight. Only Colosso had given something worthwhile, and that wasn't much given the familiarity they'd had with the monster.

"What a complete waste," Keilan commented, grumpy.

Damien only grunted.

"We could have stayed longer, you know, maybe we'd have eventually come across an elite monster."

"Another time. We have a war on the horizon, so we can't afford to go off for a long time fighting monsters when there are more important matters to deal with."

"Ugh. Alright then, lead the way." He waved.

Together, they moved out of the jungle, carefully keeping their presence tight just in case any Empire pillars were in the area. They made their way across the jungle, coming out in a location further away from any empire city. Leaving the curtain of trees and into direct sunlight, Damien turned to Keilan.

"I think it's about time we made a quick exit out of this territory."

"Sur—"

[Don't!] Gray voice boomed.

Startled, they both turned to the floating being hanging over Damien's shoulder,, "What gives, Gray? You could have burst my eardrums."

Surprisingly, Gray didn't retort to his joke.

[This place has been spatially locked down.]

That news brought them to a stop.

"Do you think they know?" Damien asked.

"I think so, why else would they lock down space?" Keilan replied.

[No, it's not that. From your senses, I think this is only a portion of the locked-down space.]

"Wait, how can you tell? I can't sense anything."

[Damien, I'm practically making use of your senses. Dig deeper]

Grumbling, he closed his eyes, focusing, he channeled the majority of his will into his perception; digging deeper, and true to what Gray had just said, he sensed it. At first what he took notice of was the low hum, a low vibration in the air that would have been hard to notice for most people if they weren't searching. Searching for the origin of the sound, he surprisingly found it to be everywhere, it saturated the air like a barrier, a barrier suppressing the concept of space. Damien frowned, Firming his will, he gently pressed down on the barrier, finding it solid at first, until gradually, it began to ben—

[Stop doing that.]

"Why? With enough effort, I could punch a hole through."

"Yea," Keilan said, "me too. I could probably also command the wind to break down the barrier. Easy peasy."

[None of you should try that, that's a bad idea. There's a trick to this thing. Only a few beings have the capabilities to break through the spatial lockdown, and that's where the trap comes in. The moment this barrier becomes compromised, someone will immediately take notice, and then you'll have a swarm of Spirit lords down on your heads, or worse, the Emperor himself.]

Damien frowned, turning to Gray.

"How can you tell? I could sense the barrier and its malleability, but nothing else; how do you know?."

[Intent. I'll teach it to you when we have the time, but right now, you both are going to have to cross this territory without any spatial means. There should be an end to this lockdown farther to the west.]

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"So.. the war's begun then?" Damien said grimly.

[Yes, I think so. How does that make you feel?]

"I don't know," he looked to the sky, contemplative. "All our lives we've waited for this moment, the moment when the Empire's rule would be broken. But now that it's here I can't stop thinking about how many lives are going to be lost. How many children won't get to know their parents more, with only a distant memory to guide them."

He looked away, "I could find a way to end it, to avoid the wanton destruction that's about to take place, but I know that my wishes wouldn't be mirrored by Solaris. If I choose for a more peaceful resolution and the Empire doesn't agree, the alliance we're building will fracture, with every kingdom fighting for itself. No cohesiveness. And that's practically giving the Empire the free reins to pick them off, one by one, like flies."

"If they take the Greensend continent," Keilan added, "then the world is doomed, since there's not going to be a kingdom capable of even trying to match them, let alone have a chance at defeating them."

[So, war is the solution? A war to end all wars?]

"Something like that," Damien nodded. "I don't know about the part of 'ending all wars', that's an impossibility that even I know. What I know for sure Is that the world will be a lot less tense when the Empire is gone."

[You do know that a lot of Kingdoms will be vying for the vacuum left behind by the Empire's demise? Both in power and territory?]

"I know. We'll cross that bridge when we get there."

***

"Space all over Empire territory has been locked down, no spatial movement in or out," Helera informed.

"Huh, that was fast, but at least we expected it," General Malsash said, the short, broad man putting his right hand on his chin.

Damien interrupted, "I'm not a strategic genius or anything, but... The attack on Cirin taught me something: When the enemy expects you to come from the sea, you walk through the fire instead. Solaris expects us to begin our attacks on the coastal cities because those are easy and very vulnerable to get to, as noticed by how they're already evacuating citizens. Instead of playing to his game...." he drew a stick along the map, across the borderlands, and straight into the border cities, "... We come straight at their gate."

Everyone's face took on contemplative looks.

"But that will leave us trapped between the borderlands and their Cities. We could be overwhelmed if the Torinian queen decides to take opportunity." General Leshan said, a woman with more muscles than some men. She, like everyone else in the room, avoided looking him directly in the eye. He didn't comment on that, as long as they did their jobs.

"And then we leave her with something else to deal with. Send in an army or two to keep her occupied, let her have a problem of her own to deal with."

"Hmm. That might work, but just as a precaution, we should leave the transportation portal open, just in case things go south." General Berol advised. He was a tall handsome man with piercing black eyes that seemed to see all things.

"But that could leave us very vulnerable if they manage to sneak in a Monarch, or worse, a Spirit lord," Leshan said.

Damien shrugged, "That's a risk we're going to have to take. You should probably post sentries near any opened portal, powerful sentries."

They were in the war council chamber in the castle. An oval room of Emerald and shadow. A huge round table was placed in the middle of the room, with a map of the continent illustrated over it.

Damien had arrived in the City to hear that, aside from the spatial lockdown all over the Empire, there were other bad news stacked upon it.

Everyone had once contemplated who was going to ally with the Empire during this oncoming war. Damien had suspected one kingdom, that was why he'd given his speech earlier on. But even he hadn't predicted that not one, but two kingdoms had already allied themselves with Solaria.

The beast kingdom of Torin, a vast and powerful Kingdom based deeper into the Borderlands had been Damien's suspect. They hadn't been active in international matters for a while now, even staying out of the feud between the Empire and other kingdoms, but Damien had still gotten the intuition that if any kingdom was going to ally themselves with the Solarians, it was going to be them. And now his intuition had come true.

The second one threw a wrench into all their plans: The Ant hive.

The hive was a very reclusive Empire, dwelling deeper underground with hardly any reason to come up to the surface. Their dominion covered practically all of the borderlands and far into Empire lands. Now, one would begin to think that their encroaching into Empire territory would have caused altercations, but no, from Damien's understanding, the Empire and the Ant hive had chosen to both stay on their lane, one up and the other down below. He wondered what had made them take their stance.

"What of the Hive?" Leshan asked, and the whole room looked to Damien for answers.

It wasn't that the hive was some almighty kingdom like Solaria; on the contrary, they lacked in quality compared to other kingdoms. But what they lacked in quality they made it up in quantity. For every common soldier the Empire had, the Hive had ten times that in numbers. Their Spirit lords weren't considered powerful compared to those on the surface, but they also made up for that in numbers. They could swarm any kingdom with numbers.

Damien was quiet for a while, thinking, before he spoke.

"With them holding unchallenged dominion over the borderlands, it'll be extremely hard for us to move troops across or even fight there, so most of our altercations with Solaria anywhere in the borderlands or close to it will be done with the SkyShips. Concerning the Hive, itself, defenses and contingencies are already being thought of on the chance that they attack."

The war had just taken another turn.