Outside the orbital space of World 26, the stars went dark.
One after another, ten thousand massive stone battleships rumbled out of the deep-space warp channel, spreading across the void for a hundred thousand miles like a moving mountain range. Each ship was three miles long, carved out of rough black granite, and bristling with rusted iron rams, boulder-flinging trebuchets, and rows of black-iron cannons. Thick clouds of black coal smoke poured from their rear chimneys, turning the clean starry sky into a coughing, sooty haze.
At the very center of the formation floated the Black-Crag Sovereign, a five-mile-long flagship shaped like a giant spiked club.
Standing on its high stone prow was Star-Lord Crag-Devourer.
The twenty-foot-tall titan wore heavy armor hammered from dark meteor iron, and around his waist hung a belt made of linked sea-serpent skulls. Behind him stood fifty Rank 7 Peak stone-giant commanders, each one holding a heavy war drum or a jagged stone halberd.
Less than two miles ahead of the flagship’s spiked nose sat the main wormhole highway junction connecting World 26 to the inner sector.
And right in the middle of that four-lane stone highway stood a neat little brick booth with a green glazed tile roof, a glowing neon sign that said [WORMHOLE TOLL BOOTH #1 — HAVE EXACT CHANGE READY], and a single red-and-white painted bamboo bar lowered across the road.
