"No, not this time," William knew how battle maniac Ibra could get when he was in front of such a big battle.
"I want to go!" like a child, Ibra shouted and even hit the ground with his glaive.
"I want you to do something else for me," William rolled his eyes, seemingly used to how his friend acted, "it's a very important task."
William then told Ibra about a job that would suit him. As he expected, Ibra didn't object and his interest piqued the moment he heard about this task.
"... And above anything, you need to keep yourself hidden all the time. You do know you won't get any help from us, so don't act unless you are absolutely sure."
"Got it," Ibra grinned, "but that doesn't mean after that I can do whatever I want, right?"
"No problem," William shrugged, "just make sure to do it right. You do know the consequences of failure."
"I won't fail," Ibra then turned around, going in a different direction than what William headed towards.
William didn't hurry to change into his fox form, not yet. The area around the city was emptied for kilometres around from trees. It wasn't a protective measure from the city, but it was the aftermath of the brutal fights that occurred recently.
William got how bad the general situation of the walls and other defences of the city when he got to the outer region. There he saw gaps taking the whole height of the walls, with lots of holes that filled the ground outside.
Once he entered the forest, he didn't keep running forward. He took out a few of the vibrant ores he received from Ibra, used his sword to dig holes and buried lots of ores there.
He knew it'd be difficult to memorise the places of these ores, so he used something else to locate these ores later on. Every one kilometre he ran, he stopped, distributed the ores over a hundred metres area. He took an ore from his ring, one that could shine at darkness with faint blue light.
He inserted these over the trees around, to be easily seen from far.
He kept moving forward, and every five kilometres, he stopped and moved diagonally, spreading more vibrant ores.
He didn't care about the type of these ores. Any ore with the word vibrant in its name shared the same general characteristics as the Scarlet Vibrant ores.
William knew the monsters coming towards the city were at least hundreds of kilometres away from here. This wasn't a secret about this kind of summoning pocket worlds. They just needed enough space for monsters to spread over and gather in enough numbers, before landing at their targets like locusts.
He knew he had enough time and a large area to cover with the vibrant ores. After covering up fifty kilometres, he shifted his activity, starting to move diagonally, spreading the ores over a broader area.
*Roar!*
William kept doing this for almost five hours before the first signs of the monster tide appeared with faint roars at first.
"They are here," William didn't stop what he was doing, didn't even turn around and took shelter at the areas he fortified using ores. Instead, he continued to run forward, spreading the vibrant ores.
In less than half an hour, the faint and distant heard roars of the monsters started to grow fiercer, louder, and closer. And yet William didn't slow down his actions.
If anything happened, then he threw away all his organised arrangement of the ores, worked to just scatter ores anywhere, anyplace he went, without any order at all.
At this moment, William didn't care about organising anything. He knew it was pointless, and instead he focused on spreading more ores.
"Here they come…" In less than ten minutes, the early lines of the monster tide appeared in front of him. First the treeline shook, the ground trembled violently, before lots of trees fell down. Many monsters were exposed in his eyes, and he recognised the true nature of these monsters.
"The dark white grade Brown Leopards? No f*cking way! What are monsters from the outer world doing here?!!!"
William was shocked when he spotted these monsters. Out there in the vast world, these monsters were considered pretty much weak. They were one type of monster lying at the lowest pyramid of power in the monster world in the outer world. But to William, to this tiny world, he knew this was very bad news.
"They can't come here with their full power, but that doesn't mean they are that weak," William knew it was impossible for anyone from the outer world coming down here to keep his scary level of power.
Even if these monsters were one of the weakest in the outer world, being here would place them easily as the strongest of all monsters in this tiny world.
"Time to check them out," William didn't like this. He got that these monsters came from a pocket world that was turned into a summoning orb. But that didn't explain the presence of such scary monsters here.
These leopards got their relatives here in the tiny world, mostly seen at bronze and silver grade. It was rare to find a gold grade one of these in the tiny world. And they were much smaller in body size compared to these Brown Leopards.
William was familiar with the leopards in the outer world, and so he knew he didn't mistake them with their weaker relatives here. And that made him think of a much crazier thought that'd explain all this.
The only thing he could think of was that this summoning orb came from the outer world, passed to here by any means, ending up in the hands of Richard.
William knew if Richard was really on the side of the dark masters, then this would explain all this. However, it was his first time to hear about the existence of such a weapon in the hands of the dark masters.