As they started to circle the entire zone, looking for anything useful like a weak point or a place they could use to enter, William went out of his building, and looked around, before giving a single order.
"Assemble the entire guild, we are going out for a hunt!"
The moment William said it, everyone inside the guild branch stopped what they were doing. All knew their boss, and all recognised him right on the spot.
But that wasn't why they all looked like this. Something new appeared around William, a vague gigantic shadow of something, something they never saw before around their boss.
"What? Why are you standing like this? Didn't you hear what I just said?" William was puzzled by their response. He expected them to hurry up, move as fast as they could, gather up everything in the guild, and follow him out.
But they stood in their places without taking a single step or making a single sound. Seeing the entire guild stand in such a way, all looking at him in such disbelief, made him doubt himself to come out from the building naked!
"Even if I go out naked, they won't show such a response... What's going on?" William was puzzled, and when he checked himself and found nothing, he felt more puzzlement.
"Boss... There... There is something around you..." when the nearest guild masters to him noticed what he did, and from the look on his face they knew he didn't see what they saw, one of them said, referring to that shadow surrounding him.
"What's there? I can't see anything!" William thought they were pulling a prank on him, but all of them? All of these masters? That was quite unrealistic.
"Boss... It's something grand, like a huge shadow of something surrounding you," another master could tell William didn't see anything, so he added, "it's like a star, a big golden or orange star... Can't tell, it's very faint..."
"Oh, it is?" William was inwardly shaken, but he kept his cool in front of everyone. The description he heard was related to the spirit he used Mystic Art upon. "Don't stand like that, move and bring everyone. We'll depart right away... Follow me!"
William didn't say anything else, and moved towards the gates of the guild. As he walked, all masters parted ways for him to pass, and he noticed they cleared a large area for him to pass through.
"Don't tell me I ended up with something from that spirit... Does that mean it also got something of me?" he couldn't help but feel like a frog in the depth of a well. The more he thought he grasped things about the spirit world, the more he learnt how deeply mistaken he was.
As he marched out of the city, he didn't care about the shocked gazes of all the masters he met in the city. They were shocked because they recognised him, recognised the Fox guild masters marching all out. And that meant something huge was going to happen.
And they also noticed the huge shadow that enveloped him, something they never saw before. It drove fear, awe, and admiration in their spirits, making them unable to shift their eyes off him until he and his guild members went away from the city.
William kept walking towards the destination Lara marked for him while checking himself and the area surrounding him from time to time. Seeing nothing made him not get what was going on.
"Shouldn't I see it? Why can't I?"
The more he thought about it, the more he got confused. In the end, he decided to drop thinking about this matter until he'd meet with that spirit. If such a thing happened to him, then a similar thing must have happened to that spirit as well.
What William didn't know was that there was something bigger he got himself involved in, something that started a long time ago without him realising it!
As he led his guild masters towards where his friends were, the entire city exploded with the news. The masters who spotted the scene reported it back literally to everyone they knew, met, or saw.
The news spread like wildfire, and the reputation of William and the Fox guild made things explode even further.
"What do you think happened for the man himself to lead his entire guild out?"
"I'm sure it's dark masters... That fox master never moved out to fight and it didn't turn out to be related to dark masters."
"Don't forget monsters! I'm sure something huge is going to happen soon."
"Why are we standing here and speculating? Let's go out, let's see for ourselves what's going on!"
"Yes, let's go!"
All of a sudden, many masters led the wave, and then a tsunami appeared! The entire city that got filled to the brim with masters got suddenly emptied, with tons of masters moving in succession, heading towards the direction that William and his guild masters took.
Even the ones who were stationed outside got the news and followed the rest as well. Under the watchful gazes of the top masters remaining behind in the city, they watched the entire grand army of masters gathered here for many days move in unison.
Such a scene was indeed breathtaking! They received orders from the city leaders away from the city and were thinking about how to raise an army and go to aid the little team entrapped in the middle of monsters.
The city leaders came up with that excuse to avoid any suspicions from masters related to the five traitors. And yet when they saw how the whole master army moved from the city, heading towards the same direction their leaders specified, they all got confused and didn't know what to do.
"We need to report this," after long minutes of discussions, they decided to tell the faraway leaders about such a move. When the leaders got wind of this, they asked Lara for clarification.