?


    The portal the old man used before toe here was silver in colour, the type that would work on limited distances.


    The portal they arrived at was dark gold in colour, much bigger than the one the old man used. "An intercontinental portal level… Where are you taking me?!!" The old man''s face changed when he recognised the grade and use of this portal.


    "To the central department of course, where else?" the middle-aged man started to take lots of spirit stars. A single one of these was worth a thousand of spirit gems, worth a billion spirit crystals. He didn''t just take one or two, he took batches of them out of his ring, like they were trash andmon things to find.


    The old man was knowledgeable about how these grand portals worked. So, he didn''t speak and watched the middle-aged fellow scatter the spirit stars around, enough to fuel the activation of this portal.


    Then the two men went into a journey that took them far away from here. Starting from here, a hidden force sat their eyes over William without thetter knowing anything about it.


    As this was going on, William was walking in the bustling city streets, following Smith, heading towards a grand building with lots of spirit masters inside and around.


    Seeing this made William sigh. The ce he visited before was looking like a real desert or something. But this was like an oasispared to that ce.


    "It''s done," William had to go inside and send the warning. He was the only one with Panther''s Bullet. And to send a long-distance message, people working in this ce needed such a Bullet and the one who owned it.


    William didn''t exin much, only warned Panther about a huge disaster that might befall the fort and the city in the uing period of weeks, months, mostly one year. He knew speaking about the Transformers with Panther might backfire instead of doing any help.


    The crux of those dirty folks'' work depended entirely on the presence of traitors in any ce. And William knew Panther quite well after all these years. He hated nothing more than traitors from the human side.


    If he got wind of such a thing, then he''d end up creating more trouble in the entire city. So William limited the amount of information he needed to know. He also did that also to prevent the leak of such intel to the ears of the Transformers.


    William thought about what the old man said to him while walking through the city streets. Two of his deadliest enemies, two who didn''t know each other before, met up and were speaking about him.


    Without the need to think much, he knew they were scheming something big against him. His thoughts drifted towards his current adventure here, mistaking their ns and intentions to target him while he was away.


    He thought the chances of them conspiring to hit the Scorching Lands city were minimal, or even close to null. Yet he didn''t n to leave anything for luck, sent this message for Panther to start preparing for a grand war, just in case.<novelsnext></novelsnext>


    He knew Panther wouldn''t take such warning lightly. Thetter would start amassing lots of forces, even recruiting mercenaries, folks from ces outside the Scorching Lands area, and even rogue masters roaming the world freely.


    "Now let''s go and check over the portal zone," William got out from this grand building, turned to Smith as he added, "you know where that ce is, right?"


    "Sure," Smith didn''t add anymore, led them towards another street where it took them all the way to the centre of the city.


    As they walked, Ibra and Lina kept speaking with William about what thetter and the old man spoke about. They grew curious about these Transformers, and how William got to know them.


    William satisfied their curiosity by telling them part of the truth. He revealed that these Transformers were behind the grand attack thatnded over the Lair of the Fox before the start of the grand war. He even went to the extent to im that they yed a role in that grand war.


    William wasn''t lying, after all these Transformers really yed a role there. The devastation that urred in the fort, the one that took a month to remove its marks from the fort, was done by them. When these two heard such stories, they got satisfied and kept chatting among themselves about what William just revealed, totally forgetting about their other question regarding how William knew all this.


    Then they grew interested in knowing about the identity of the other enemy the old man spoke about. As this enemy got the power to cause such a severe bacsh to a dark gold master, something that the Transformers couldn''t do, that meant it was something terrifying.


    William didn''t hide the truth, told them bits and pieces of it. In fact, he found in telling them the right answer a way to solve their growing doubts about their old missions, the ones he kept sending them out to do from time to time.


    "Holy sh*t! Are you sure it''s the same damn bastard which we ran away from before, the same one you sent us looking for in the past years?!!" Ibra got stirred up the moment he heard what William said.


    "That''s why I kept trying to locate it, wanting to deal with this monster once and for all. It''s a threat, a real danger like you saw."


    "Tsk! I now can understand why you did all this before… And here I thought you were trying to torture us or something… I thought you grew dull and bored from living inside the guild, doing nothing but training, and wanted to find a source of amusement by sending us out… Tsk!"


    William went speechless, even blinked twice while looking at Ibra in a weird way. He never thought such an insane conclusion jumped into the mind of that fellow. And when he turned to Lina and she nodded, he realised this wasn''t just exclusive to Ibra.