Yet no matter how he shouted at it, the wheel took two days entirely to vanish from his eyesight. William kept trying to get out, and it didn't work until the golden wheel turned into a tiny speck of light in the far distance.
And then he finally returned back.
The first thing he did was to check on his body. Nothing much happened, and then he checked over the current situation outside.
"I was gone for five days… That's a long time indeed…" he estimated to last that long, or even a bit longer than that. Luckily things didn't develop that much outside.
With the influx of masters from many places in the continent, the city masters decided against starting to act. They waited until the entire city was filled to the brim with masters, and lots of areas outside had tents of endless masters as well.
Then they started to build more defences there. From one point, this would help in strengthening the city defences, and from another point, this would help later on when they'd expand the city.
They expected a new surge of masters joining here. And so they started to plan for the up ahead, planning for the future.
One day before William's return, they started to act. They lured away the five traitors, separated them into different places, and went away from the city, much further than what they initially planned, to evade any curious eyes from the masters staying outside the city.
As the city leaders lured away these traitors, William's friends started to dig and search all over the places Thomas pointed towards. He already marked the karma threads of these traitors, and searched the entire area outside, for any of the places that got linked to these traitors.
The search resulted in a huge number of potential places to hide the crystals. These five were already leaders of huge forces, and they got business and interest in tons of places.
So it was expected how huge the list of places Thomas pointed at was. The good news was that most of these places were inside the city, and almost half of them were in the main bases of their forces.
The city leaders already excluded the possibility of them storing away these crystals in any of these bases. They were filled with tons of masters, with a very high risk of getting these crystals exposed and found by others.
So they had to search for other places in the city. Using the current heat about the upcoming battle, and with the lack of a large number of masters inside any place away from the defences spots, they found not much hardship in doing what they wanted.
And if they pumped into someone curious about what they were doing, the city leaders on their side already gave them a scroll, to enable them to access any place under the excuse of looking for any weaknesses in the city to repair before the upcoming war.
They got stopped on a few occasions, and that scroll did indeed help. No one questioned them again after that, and they entered most of the places without any trouble.
"We ransacked the entire city, without finding them!" Sara was furious. She thought such a task would be quite easy, but it felt like they were butting their heads against a hard wall or something.
"We still have places outside the city to look at," Peter paused, looking at Thomas before adding, "and even if we didn't find any out there, we still have one last place we haven't looked at yet."
"I know, I know, their rings, right?" Karoline seemed like the only one enjoying all this, "I now realise why William kept collecting rings, why all of you did that…"
"We don't do that out of option," Ro interrupted her, "he did that to us! He is the main villain here…"
"Then he is a genius! Hahahaha!" Karoline took Ro's words in the totally opposite meaning, making the latter unable to follow her logic, preferring to remain silent like others, and let Karoline live in her dreamy world.
"I didn't mean that," Peter looked at the two before adding, "I meant there are their bases, and we didn't check there yet."
"I hope it didn't reach such a stage," Berry sighed, "we discussed it before. If they hid these out there, then we would have little chance of finding these crystals without starting a big mess in the entire city."
"We need to take risks then…" Lara looked around, before adding in a low tone, "We all have darkness-based masters in our teams, right?"
"You want to use them to…"
"We have no other option, right?" she rolled her eyes when Thomas was about to object to her plan.
"And if they got caught? What will happen then?" Anjie looked deeply at Lara, taking an extra note about her as being brave and wouldn't stop at anything to get what she'd want.
"Then we'll use force," she shrugged, as if she didn't care about the mess that would erupt in her city, "we will fight the masters defending there anytime soon anyway if we don't find the crystals anywhere outside. So… Let's just pray we will find these crystals there."
"We shall also notify other city leaders about this," as no one objected to what Lara wanted to do, Anjie added, "We need them to start acting and check the content of their rings. If they didn't find any there, then it's up to us to find the crystals here by any means."
And as everyone slowly nodded, they all agreed on this.
They were on their way outside the city when William contacted them. They told him everything, and they were relieved he didn't press them to hurry things over.
After all, they didn't have any say in any of that!
"They'll take a few days like this to finish scanning everything," William thought to himself after speaking with his friends, "during this time, I shall get little rest before starting to repair my two monstrous weapons…"
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