Melee A Trois / Literature

• Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire The final battle at Xizor's skyhook has the Empire vs. the Rebels vs. Black Sun.
• In one of the Discworld books, a good Dwarf brawl is described as having "100 participants, and 150 alliances."
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain: A series staple.
    • In For the Emperor, Gravalax is the site of a mini-Space Cold War between the Imperium and the Tau, but relations are somewhat amicable because neither side actually considers the planet to be worth getting into a shooting war over. Then the planet falls into a civil war between PDF factions, directed at the top by genestealers, and the Tau join the Imperial Guard in an Enemy Mine.
    • Caves of Ice is initially between the Imperial Guard and the Orks. Then a necron tomb awakens and lays into both of them.
    • In The Traitor's Hand, the fight against the Chaos forces is greatly simplified by the fact that two separate Chaos factions are on the planet. At the end, Cain follows Chaos Space Marines to a ritual they are trying to disrupt; the Marines clear their path.
    • In Cain's Last Stand, the main conflict is between the Perlian PDF with Cain as de facto leader and a Chaos invasion under the aegis of the 13th Black Crusade. Then the necrons get involved and wipe out a considerable amount of the Chaos forces on the way to their objective.
    • Invoked in The Emperor's Finest. While working with the Space Marines, Cain ends up trapped on a genestealer-infested space hulk. He tricks another group of stowaways, an Ork WAAAGH!, into fighting the genestealers for him, reducing it to a mop-up job for the Space Marines.
    • In The Last Ditch it's Imperial Guard, orks, and tyranids.
    • In Choose Your Enemies, the Valhallan 597th intervenes to deal with eldar raiders only to collide with Amberly Vail's investigation of a Chaos cult. The eldar battle the Imperials in the background for most of the book but save Cain from an assassination attempt and then help defeat the cultists, since they're Slaaneshi.
  • In Dan Abnett's Ravenor, there are the forces trying to summon a daemon, the forces trying to exploit Enucia, an evil language, and then the Inquisitor Ravenor and his retinue. When the daemon-summoners try to assassinate one of the language forces, Ravenor watches it psychically, making the target assume he had been behind the plot.
  • In James Swallow's Blood Angels: Deus Sanguinius, a battle between the Blood Angels still loyal to the God-Emperor and those who have thrown in with Arkio is complicated when Word Bearers Chaos Space Marines join in.
  • Gaunt's Ghosts: First and Only by Dan Abnett has an Inter-Service Rivalry between the Tanith First and a Jantian regiment flare into violence in the middle of an invasion of a Chaos-held world. Gaunt comes out on top because he'd befriended the Vitrian Dragoons also assigned to the assault.
• In the Green Rider series by Kristen Britain, there's a board game called Intrigue which is considered best played with three players in a Mêlée à Trois type game.
• C. J. Cherryh's Downbelow Station features a war between Earth and the rebel Union that becomes three-sided when the Stations and Merchanters, caught in the middle, form an Alliance so as not to be sold out in a peace treaty between the other two.
• The Hobbit has the Battle of Five Armies: Elves and Lakemen vs. Dwarves vs. More Dwarves vs. Orcs and Wargs. Gandalf intervenes to get the dwarves to ally with the elves and men right at the outset, however. Other semi-independent factions that join the goodies later on include the Eagles and Beorn.
• The central plot conflict of Atlas Shrugged has three sides: the strikers, the scabs and the looters.
• A Song of Ice and Fire features a great number of factions fighting each other, each with their own point of view justifying their actions. This is most overt in the War of the Five Kings, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Even after that war grinds down, new factions rise up or splinter away.
  • While there were technically five kings in total, only four were active at any one time for Renly was slain before Balon Greyjoy crowned himself.
• Any Matthew Reilly book will probably have at least one of these. Most of the battles in Scarecrow turned into these, with the heroes repeatedly fighting 3 different mercenary armies, as well as whoever they were trying to fight in the first place. In the Jack West series, by the end, there's Jack's group of heroes; Sphinx's group who want to help Sphinx Take Over the World; General Garton Rastor who wants to destroy everything; and the Order of the Omega who want to rule and have women subjugated.
• At the end of War of the Spider Queen between Halisstra, Quenthel, and Danifae.
• Harry Potter:
  • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has the Death Eaters versus the Ministry of Magic versus the Order of the Phoenix. No group likes any of the others very much. Later, the first two groups become one and the same.
  • Dumbledore's backstory involves one with him, his brother Aberforth, and his partner Gellert Grindelwald. His sister Ariana is killed in the crossfire.
• In A Practical Guide to Evil there is the "Five-Way-Melee", a war- game at the war college of the Dread Empire of Praes. Catherine, the protagonist and her company of cadets, face four other companies. Nearly all the companies go in with one or more pre-made alliances, and nearly all of these alliance get broken along the way and new alliances form until there are only two companies left in the field.
• Romance of the Three Kingdoms has the Shu, Wei and Wu kingdoms all fighting to unite and be The One Ruler of China. It lasted for a dynasty.
• Redwall:
  • At the end of the book Pearls of Lutra, it's Martin II, Grath, and the other heroes vs. Emperor Ublaz and his monitor lizards vs. Rasconza and his corsairs.
  • In Triss, it's the good guys vs. Princess Kurda and her vermin vs. three giant adders.
• Magical Girl Raising Project: The ACES arc has the Puk Faction vs the Osk Faction vs Princess Deluge's Team vs a brainwashed Ripple.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four had Oceania, a totalitarian empire consisting of all of the Western Hemisphere plus Great Britain and the southern half of Africa, fighting Eurasia, essentially Soviet Russia and Continental Europe, fighting Eastasia, a cultist union of China, Japan, Korea, and Northern India. They usually united against each other but also betrayed each other just as easily. Of course, they are almost indistinguishable apart from location and language.
• In the Conan the Barbarian novella The Flame Knife, what starts out as Conan and a handful of Zuagirs besieged by Yezmites winds up as a pitched battle of Yezmites vs. Kushafis and Zuagirs, then a massive engagement of Yezmites, Kushafis and Zuagirs vs. the Iranistani army, and finally a route of Yezmites, Kushafis, Zuagirs and Iranistanis as they flee the city and a horde of ghouls eager to devour all four human forces.
• The Battle of Artaleirh in Rihannsu: The Empty Chair by Diane Duane begins with Romulan rebels, with the aid of the USS Enterprise and the renegade Romulan cruiser ChR Bloodwing, fighting a pacification force sent by the Star Empire's government. Then the Klingons show up hoping to take out the winner and get the system cheap; they finish off the Imperial ships in passing and then start on the Free Rihannsu. Fortunately, that's when Tyrava Ship-Clan turns up as The Cavalry for the Free Rihannsu.
• The "Truel", a piece of math folklore usually credited to Martin Gardners "Mathematical Games" column in the "Scientific American". Description here
• The second book of The Silent War has the heroines, empowered demon hunters, getting into an extended fight with the Brotherhood of the Pit, an old secret society of dark sorcerers, AND the Night Hand, a cult devoted to the Death Lords, and with a bad history with the Brotherhood.
• The second book of The Witchlands has two of those:
  • Safi, Vaness and their group are making their way out of the arena where slaves and slaveowners are battling, with both sides attacking them because they think they're the enemy.
  • Iseult and Aeduen fight two gangs of pirates who want to get to them and who recently turned on each other as well.
• In Mister Midshipman Easy — a sea story set in the Napoleonic wars, by Captain Marryat, first printed 1836 — the eponymous hero, Midshipman Easy, newly joined to the frigate Harpy, quarrels with two of the warrant officers, and insists on fighting them on the same day. The officer charged with arranging the duel, fancying himself a mathematician, places the three men at the points of a triangle, with instructions that each is to fire at one opponent and receive the fire from another. Easy realizes his advantage at once.
• While the party in Below is battling a force of goblins, a tiny but agile squad of gremlins appears behind the party and attacks both. The goblins and gremlins have been at war, so it's not even clear which group the goblins were trying to find in the first place. The gremlins would have been better off engaging only the goblins, but despite their intelligence, they take typical "greenskin" concepts of friend and foe to the simplistic extreme.
• The first book in the X-Men/Avengers trilogy Gamma Quest concludes with a three-way brawl at Niagara Falls. The Avengers (Captain America, Iron Man and the Vision) and the X-Men (Cyclops, Beast and Storm) try to make contact with Bruce Banner to ask for his expertise in gamma radiation after gamma-based technology is involved in the abduction of the Scarlet Witch and Rogue, only to end up fighting after Banner's transformation is provoked by the Canadian army. With neither team aware of the other's missing members (and fake X-Men having recently attacked a S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier), the fight features such developments as the Hulk tearing Vision's arm off, Storm disabling Iron Man's armour, and Cyclops and Captain America basically stalemating as their optic blasts and shield parry each other, until Beast manages to calm the Hulk down long enough to explain the situation.
• StarCraft novels:
  • Discussed in Liberty's Crusade. Arcturus Mengsk is a talented chessplayer but dislikes comparing it to war. Among other things^note both sides always start with exactly equal numbers on exactly flat terrain, there's never a side of green pieces that suddenly appears mid-match and attacks both sides (referring by implication to the zerg and protoss attacking in the middle of his guerrilla war with the Confederacy).
  • The novel Shadow of the Xel'Naga ends up with a three-way fight over a Xel'Naga temple between the Dominion's Alpha Squadron under General Duke, Kerrigan's new Kukulkan Brood, and a protoss battle group. Nobody wins: after taking serious casualties Duke orders the temple nuked. The warhead wakes up a baby Energy Being inside that eats the protoss and zerg and blasts the rest of Duke's warships out of his way as it leaves the planet.
• Animorphs:
  • The Ellimist Chronicles has Ellimist, now a Living Ship, arrive in a star system where two non-FTL-capable species are fighting a war. When he reveals himself to them, one side immediately attacks him and the other takes it as an opportunity for a flanking attack. Ellimist, a Higher-Tech Species, nonlethally disables both groups of ships and attempts to mediate a truce.
  • The three-way conflict between Visser Three^note Esplin 9466, Visser One^note Edriss 562, and the Animorphs lasts most of the series, reaching a climax in the Interquel novel VISSER. Both Vissers want to conquer Earth for the Yeerk Empire, but Visser Three (who's actually in charge of carrying it out) favors open warfare, while Visser One pushes for a secret invasion so her children don't get killed in the crossfire. The Animorphs play both of them off each other, especially Marco (whose mom is Visser One's host), and it gets to the point that Visser One (who knows the Animorphs are human but kept that to herself since keeping it secret would discredit Visser Three)calls Marco for help during her trial in VISSER.
  • The endgame of the series also turns into this. The former Visser Three (now Visser One after Edriss's death) has moved to open warfare after discovering the Animorphs are human and forcing them into hiding. Tom's Yeerk, once he gets the morphing cube, is nominally loyal to the Empire but secretly starts assembling his own faction of morph-capable Controllers. In the penultimate book, he approaches the Animorphs with a deal: the codes to get into the Pool Ship, in exchange for letting him and 100 of his faction escape in the Blade Ship. Of course, Jake correctly guesses that he has no intention of letting them live and plans to destroy the Pool Ship with both them and the Visser on it. The Taxxon Resistance, seeing the potential of morphing, make their own deal with the Animorphs to fight with them^note provide a distraction, really in exchange for all being allowed to morph anacondas to escape their Horror Hunger once the war is over.
  • And then the Andalite military '''finally''' shows up, after letting the Animorphs fight all on their own for three years, once the Animorphs have Esplin in custody. It's only thanks to that victory, the cultural experience and military cred of Ax and the newly-freed Alloran, and Jake's political savvy, that they prevent them from razing the Earth and win the right to make their own terms of surrender for the Yeerks.
• Aeon 14: The Orion War. The two primary combatants are the Scipio Alliance^note the main protagonists' colony New Canaan, their backers the Transcend Interstellar Alliance, and their local proxies the Scipio Empire, Silstrand Alliance, ASN, League of Sentients, Hyadeans, and the Genevian Marauders and the Septhian Alliance and the Orion Freedom Alliance.^note the OFA itself and its local proxies the Hegemony of Worlds, the Triselieds Alliance, and the Nietzschean Empire The third side is the ascended AIs of the galactic core, who have been playing Let's You and Him Fight with all of humanity for millennia.
• Fed Up by Jessica Conant-Park and Susan Conant features a fight at a wedding reception over a video camera which contains footage of the wedding and incriminating evidence between a camera operator, a producer, and the bride's best friend.
• The Fortunes of War novel Battlestations!: The "cosmic scramble" at the climax involves multiple Klingon Houses, the Romulans, the Tholians, and more than one unidentified race's ships in a massive brawl over the transwarp MacGuffin aboard the crippled Enterprise.