As far as I’m concerned I think part of a rotating motion is not only an active defense but also a reaction to impact. If he has already hit the pose of the king must also be one of actually being hit and then having the force applied to it. Try it, it will give you a more dramatic pose. When you have tried it (photos with two actors would be fast and enough) you can judge for yourself. In the end it’s your artwork.
HI All
@tobbew, moved the pawn and the queen into more attacking positions and fiddled with the king a little bit.
Added some motion blur as was suggested earlier by Modron. Struggling with them fireflies, the more samples I render the more there are, I thought it was supposed to be the other way round.
Shaun
Drama, Drama 
I love the white marble shader. That’s a really nice material.
Fireflies usually come from small and strong lights or from small glossy things with low roughness in your scene. I see a few candidates, like the spear head and the crowns. Basically you have three ways to deal with them. Avoid them, sample your way through them or make the glossy rays that stem from them only visible for the camera.
The culprit for the fireflies here was the HDR that I was using, found out by accident. I rendered the image with a transparent background and placed the background in PS.
On a short note: Yes, totally understandable. The cosmic image has lots of small and strong lights. Did you try to use multiple importance sampling for the world HDRI? That was introduced to tackle these kind of problems.
Now let’s see, what feedback you’ll get over there in the finished section 