Neutrality didn’t die with a grand, cinematic explosion. It fractured in smaller, uglier ways first—petty trade disputes, suspicious routing delays, and endless ideological arguments that circled back to the same dead ends. But the first real shock to the system, the one that made the floor shift under our feet, came from a direction nobody expected.A civilization flatly refused our protection.They didn’t just say no to Axiom’s Imperium or the paranoid copper-controlled branch. They said no to us. They said no to the very idea of a safety net.I was standing inside Delta-Seven’s primary orbital manufacturing ring when the transmission hit. The air was thick with the smell of ionized metal and the sharp, nose-stinging scent of ozone. All around me, massive fabrication arms moved with a slow, hypnotic grace, weaving together corridor relay components from thick, glowing streams of molten alloy. In the zero-gravity zones beyond the magnetic shielding, orange sparks drifted like slow-b