Streaks of light filled the air, flying towards a staggering snowpyre and ending its life. The thrower, Gaius, panted lightly as he retrieved a knife from its corpse, which had toppled over to join the other ten plus corpses on the snow-covered ground.

After checking that there was no more snowpyres in the vicinity, Gaius began the grimmer job of slicing them up to retrieve the ether cores inside their bodies. By now, the boy was an experienced hand at this. Thirty seconds was all it took to open up a body and retrieve the important ether cores within them. Some snowpyres had more of these cores, some had lesser, but they all took around the same time now.

All were equal under Gaius’ knife.

“Twenty-six from this. Not bad.”

“With that, the emergency teleport function can be used again.” A robotic voice came from his tunic. “You should return and deposit the cores first, just in case anything goes wrong.

“Yeah, I know,” replied Gaius. It didn’t take him long before he was pouring fifty cores down something that looked suspiciously like a garbage chute embedded into a wall of the Library, which, now that he thought about it, actually resembled a certain counting device for gemstones.

The little boy felt melancholic at the thought of Heritage Basestation being teleported away, but he couldn’t leave Nakama alone in the Library. But they wouldn’t be gone for long either. The connection between the passageway at the ruined fortress and Heritage Basestation would be restored in around a week or so, after all.

No, what really made Gaius melancholic was whether he should return to the camp after the passageway was restored. Nexus had laid it out clearly — the Demigod Nox was the key to Nakama’s recovery, and if he continued to be bound by the regulations of Heritage Basestation, he would never make any headway short of the Last Star turning into a true god.

And the boy had the feeling that the latter wasn’t going to be a good idea. At all.

When the last of the little balls vanished into the gaping maw of the chute, Gaius took to the skies once more. “I want to enter the Southern Continent. One of their human cities. Get me a path there.”

“Will do. Ten kilometres southeast,” said the artificial intelligence.

The boy put on a burst of speed, and before long, he was staring at an azure rift…inside a cave. “Nexus, this portal is inside a cave, in complete darkness. How am I to get inside?”

“Other than buildings constructed before the Blighted Night, do not step into places where the firmament’s light cannot touch, eh?” The wooden sculpture climbed out of Gaius’ tunic and hopped on his shoulder. “But it shouldn’t affect you. Divine powers of the same source will not hinder each other, while that of different sources would mutually impede. You carry a divine source within you, so stepping in shadows won’t affect you.”

“Is this restriction yet another one from the great gods?”

“The Demon God, most likely,” replied Nexus. “It’s too coincidental to be anyone else, given the timing. Of course, this is something only the top in the Five Lands would know, so by this criterion you’re one of them.”

“I’m flattered,” Gaius said dryly. “How confident are you that nothing’s going to happen to me when I step inside?”

“Uh, fairly confident,” replied the wooden sculpture. “Besides, if you’re don’t try it out now, you’ll never do so again.”

Gaius stared at the wooden sculpture, willing it to show any hint of deception, before taking a cautious step into the cave. The shadows rippled around his foot, where it landed, but that was it. The little boy took another step, and another, before breaking into a light jog towards the azure rift.

As he stepped into it, gravity stopped working for a second, and a piercing pain assaulted his chest. It receded swiftly as the Intersection appeared around him, but it was an unpleasant sensation that Gaius didn’t really want to experience again.

“That hurts!”

“Some of the entrances are less user-friendly than others, Master Gaius,” said Nexus. “It’s the nature of the beast. Other passageways rip the user apart and reconstruct them anew at the other side…which just begs the question of whether the perp was put together correctly.”

“Ouch. Do you know which rifts they are? I’m never going to use them.”

“I have an extensive record, Master Gaius,” replied Nexus. “Your preference has been recorded.”

Gaius glanced at the innocuous looking rift, and then turned to look at his surroundings. They were at a mountaintop, and surprisingly enough, a small settlement was built at the foot of the mountain. “What’s that?”

“A camp similar to Heritage Basestation, but it belongs to the Southern Continent.” The voice paused. “Or it used to, anyway. It’s now the home of some bandits.”

“Bandits? Aren’t these camps heavily defended?”

“You’re speaking from the perspective of Ark City,” said Nexus. “Ark City only has one such passageway to the Intersection and Heritage. The rulers of the Five Lands have no such issues.”

“A place like this, where there’s a connection to Orb, is expendable?” Gaius shook his head. It was somewhat unbelievable to him, but clearly his world had been too small to be useful as a reference. “Where does this settlement’s passageway lead to on Orb?”

“An abandoned and ruined town, after the East-West Alliance trampled through it,” replied Nexus. “I’d like to clarify one thing, though. Unlike Heritage Basestation, there’s no connection from this settlement to Heritage, which accounts for why this place is so weakly defended and overlooked easily.”

Gaius looked at the rift behind him. “It’s a place I can use, in other words. Only the two of us know about this rift, and furthermore, it’s a death trap for anyone crossing over from here anyway.”

“If you’re looking to move troops, you’ll be better off with the routes I suggest.”

“I’ll think about that later,” said Gaius. “For now, I’ll bring this camp under my control.”

“How?”

“Silly thing.” Gaius drew a couple of sigils, which floated behind him obediently. “I’m a Knight. That’s a convincing enough reason for the entire bunch to obey my words. They can die if they don’t comply.”

“Cold…”

The little boy fixed the Auspices of Concealment onto his face. He’d randomly generated one, since his small stature would give away his identity as a child.

The wind howled as Gaius descended upon the camp. Snow gathered around him as a dozen pair of eyes looked at him from inside the wooden walls made of logs tied together — the boy didn’t bother to rein in his presence.

Perching on top of what probably was a flagpole, Gaius looked down on the assembled crowd of bandits coldly. Most of them actually looked like farmers, and the little boy remembered that they were most likely forced into a new…trade from the war.

“Where is your leader?”