Travel was a huge pain.

  To save time, Rykard had ventured north and climbed over the mountains. A much less comfortable path than using the path in the south-east of his Competitor’s Hexagon, but traveling the sides would have cost him two days. This way, he was in position by midnight of the current one. He decided to sleep there, then prepared to summon the Hexagon.

  The phrase, he had thought long and hard about, if long and hard meant that it had come to him in the post-coital nap following the first threesome of his new harem. Sandwiched between the big breasts of tall women, there had been only one wish: what if I could have more of this in a more compact package.

  The thought that was added was merely that he wanted this future haremette to be useful as well and so, he had forged a phrase that was simple and to the point.

  “I want a sexy shortstack master artificer for my harem,” he decred.

  The world around shivered with amusement, the belly ughter of gods making the tiny particles in the air dance like sand on a drum. Rykard grinned with them, as they stretched their vast presences through the worlds and caught a Hexagon for him that contained what he wanted. If the gods were gracious, they would understand what the requirements for joining his harem were.

  This was a test case second and outlet for Rykard’s desire first. The king was neither ashamed nor cared to hide that fact. He knew what he wanted - he wanted to plough a submissive barely tall enough to reach his midriff, one that had a fat ass and giant tits. All the squish of a grown woman in a package he could manhandle with his pinky.

  If there was any drawback to this approach, it was that he had no idea what kind of world he would be dealing with.

  As the intricate spellwork of divine runes piled polygon upon polygon of sediment into this reality, a shape soon became apparent. A steppe, it seemed at first, ft but not ft enough to see far, hills breaking up the continuous expanse of tall, mostly dry grasses. Then the trees came. Many of them - and a single kind.

  Pines.

  Hilly steppes, dry grass and pine trees, Rykard knew this combination from the northern and southern extremes of his world. This was a taiga, a forest near the frigid areas, often extremely hot in the summer and always bitter cold in the winters. Right now, it was neither, the blessing of the gods still preventing any unforeseen weather from occurring.

  Finally, it finished up, giving Rykard a map to check out.

  ‘No cities again,’ Rykard thought and clicked his tongue. He had a split retionship with popution centres. Their luxury was acquired in return for the sheer volume of the citizens. When it came to conquering pces, it was difficult to do that when there was no clear base of operations. There were seven temples, however, so that was at least a pce to start. Traversing the unknown forest, it would probably take him at least a day to reach the nearest one, from his current position at the middle of the bottom side of the Hexagon.

  He could also just set out into the pine forest until he came across something. There had to be people around and it was very possible they were dispersed again, like they had been in the case of Aulone.

  ‘Going for the centre hasn’t treated me wrong yet,’ Rykard thought. It only made sense. The Exile Hexagons were known formations, so why not put the most important pce in the middle of its outline?

  Shouldering his backpack, the king marched northwards. Wandering like this was unbecoming of the feet of lesser monarchs. Rykard rather enjoyed this hands-on approach to expanding his domain. To look at a map and call something his property was one thing, to have walked all of it himself a whole other.

  For a whole day, he marched north. In optimal conditions, a Hexagon was about three to four days across, and a hilly forest was far from optimal conditions. Not that the map really told him where he was. A convenient marker, there was not. By his estimation, he would need at least two, probably three days to reach the temple he had picked as his first destination.

  Occasionally, Rykard spotted signs of sapient life. Chimney smoke rising in the distance, a hare caught in a trap, an old camping site, broken arrows, and all of the other little signs that people were active. Never was it close enough for him to conveniently run into someone or to justify venturing off his path for long enough that he would find the source of the smoke.

  Instead he just enjoyed the silence and suffered the consequences of not having any of his submissives with him. ‘Maybe I should get some kind of carriage, if only to have a pce to drain my balls,’ he thought, with all of the pride of a dom that refused to take care of the issue with his own hands.

  Towards the afternoon of his second day traveling, Rykard stood on the southernmost of the noteworthy chain of hills. According to the map, that meant he was about halfway to his destination. Taking in the scenery, Rykard just enjoyed the sight of the pines and… of the bck pilrs of smoke that rose above them.

  Furrowing his eyebrows, he looked around. That wasn’t the simple, greyish smoke of a chimney. That was the thick pilr of ash and dust of a rge building put to the fme.

  Rykard checked his surroundings. First where the chain of hills was, then the sun, and finally the pilr of fme. Swiftly, he made the calcutions in his head.

  There was no doubt about it, the fire came from the temple to the north-east of where he was. It hadn’t been his targeted destination, but he did still note that, one way or another, one of the seven cathedrals was afme.

  Trying to get an even better view, Rykard climbed up a neighboring, slightly taller hill. The dense cover of tall pines continued to obscure what he wanted to see. Something else, however, caught his eye. A second pilr of smoke, far to the north. It rose high up into the air, the ck of winds in this newborn world keeping the fallout of the fire near its origin. Now that he was actively seeking such signals, he noted a fainter pilr to his west. The fire there must have been already fading.

  ‘What is going on?’ he wondered, calmly. One cathedral burning was a coincidence, three was not. For all Rykard knew, the other ones could have caught alight while the foliage and hills were blocking his view of the pilrs.

  “And would you look at that!” A loud voice shouted, grabbing Rykard’s attention.

  Directing his gaze down from the sky, the king found three men approaching him from the ever-present forest. They were all fit and rough, their naked upper bodies covered with the kind of scars one got from wrestling bears and falling against rough pine bark. They were armed with sturdy axes, as fit for splitting skulls as they were logs of wood. All were tall and had a mad glint in their eye, as they ascended the hill.

  “Which of the churches did you escape from, fancy boy?” The man leading the trio, a blond guy with shaved hair, asked mockingly. His expression shifted slightly, when he noted that Rykard was as well built as all of them were, under those incredibly expensive clothes. “Herak, the way you look.”

  “I’m an outsider,” Rykard told them with a disarming smile. “Your squabbles with the church are no matter of mine. I do have question tho-”

  Rykard had to stop halfway through his approach. An axe was swung straight at his throat, missing him only because he took an alerted step back. “Yeah, you just keep talking, fancy boy,” the leader of the trio growled.

  “You make this much harder than it has to be,” Rykard said, licking his lips with a growing smile. It had been a while since he st heard his blood rush in his ears. That swipe of the axe had been unexpectedly brutal. Not since the war had someone tried to take his head in such a primitive and honest way.

  They wanted a fight, to the point that they were grinning back. Like starved wolves, they stared at each other, just two steps dividing them. All three raised their axes. A gesture of the leader’s head, and the two behind him fnked out. These people had experience hunting rge game.

  “Let’s even the numbers a bit.”

  Rykard’s green eyes glowed with surging power. Mana welled up beneath the skin, tearing through the border between dimensions. The men were no fools, realizing they had to charge in. The speed of their legs was entirely inferior to the strength of Rykard’s will. The sovereign reached into the conjuration dimension and grabbed a handful of energy, pulling it back and allowing it to take shape.

  Ethereal blue fire surrounded Rykard in a circle. One man wisely backed away, the other was mid swing and could not stop himself. He was stopped, instead, by the animated wall of flickering heat that consumed him whole, dragging him backwards in a wave of incinerating energies.

  By the time the man hit the grass, he was a scorched cadaver. The blue fire elemental consolidated fully, as it turned back to Rykard. A fox as tall as a man, of flickering azure, the tips of its ears and tail rising to an incandescent white. It revealed teeth of liquid stone as it prowled towards the second man. Its presence incinerated the tall grass so fast, it was ash before it could develop the heat to spread the fme any further.

  The second man took two steps backwards, then stumbled. The fox pounced immediately, its body turning into a cascade that enveloped its victim with terrifying ease. Flesh sizzled, lungs emptied in a terrible scream.

  Rykard smiled.

  Not because of the death, he always found the sound of dying men distasteful, or even the violence at rge. No, he smiled simply because he was, once again, the victor. A sweet taste that he would never get sick of.

  The axe of the leader swung for his head. Casually, Rykard’s fingers closed around the descending shaft and stopped the attack wholesale. One hand in his pockets, the other engaged in a wrestling match, the mage strained the muscles in his arms. It was difficult to hold an entire man off like that. The leader of the now one-man party put both hands and his weight into the stopped motion. Still, Rykard kept him still. That was all he needed to do. The screams stopped.

  ‘Now do I leave this one alive, or do I have my help turn him into coal?’ Rykard asked himself.

  Rykard made a decision and the fire fox reformed in response to it. Slowly, it tapped towards its master, keeping enough of a distance that Rykard himself was not bothered by the fmes.

  A moment of weakness, eyes flickering to the scorching hot elemental, and Rykard stepped to the side. He released the axe, letting the warrior fall according to his own momentum. Walking away, the mage put his other hand into his pocket. Behind him, the man growled, trying to keep the living fme at distance with his sturdy, mundane axe.

  “Tell you what,” Rykard took a seat on a shallow stone, facing his assaint again with a smug expression. “You answer a few questions and I’ll consider letting you live.”

  Immediately the man spat in the king’s direction. He was good at it. Despite the several metres between them, the saliva hit his shoe. “That’s the answer to what you should eat tonight, cunt.”

  “Riveting.” Rykard’s smile did not reach his eyes. A mental command, and the fox pressed one of its paws into the man’s shoulder. Flesh sizzled, scars were repced with bckened, cooked meat, and left behind was the world’s least adorable paw print. The fox went back to prowling back and forth next to the prone assaint. “How about now?”

  The leader inspected his shoulder. The limb, even if he survived, would never fully heal - not without intensive magical help. “Who the fuck are you?” Rykard clicked his tongue, and the fox got closer again. “Stop! STOP!” The man screamed. “Alright, alright, I’ll talk! The hells do you want to know?”

  “Seen any shortstacks around?” Rykard asked the most important question first. The man just stared in vacant confusion. “I did not know why I expected you to be a man of culture,” the king chided himself. “A shortstack. About this tall.” He made a gesture of height. “Massive tits and ass, adorable and sexy, highly breedable.”

  “What the fuck?”

  Rykard slightly tilted his head, then pointed with his chin at the fire elemental. “I am a busy man - answer the question. Have you seen anyone who matches that description?”

  “Fuck, no, I don’t know, Len sometimes talked about that fat-titted angel up in the northern temple.”

  Rykard gnced first towards one of the charred corpses, then turned his attention to the pilr of smoke to the north. “Which - northern - temple?” he asked sharply.

  “Like it matters, they’re all burning.”

  Circling his jaw, the mage swallowed his disagreement. It mattered infinitely if the very reason he had summoned this Hexagon, a woman that specifically fit his demands for his harem, was alive and safe or not. For one, because he would be wasting his time on this tile otherwise and, for two, because she was destined to be his. Rykard did not take kindly to his property being damaged and his women coming to harm - that was infinitely worse.

  But this man was almost three marching days away from that fire, he had nothing to do with it, nor would he know much about what was transpiring there.

  “Any reason you thought attacking me was a good idea?” Rykard asked his next question instead.

  “Might as well have fun at the end of the world, right?”

  Now it was Rykard’s turn to be confused. “The end of the world?”

  “What else would you call it? We were going about our day, suddenly the sky is covered in magical scribbles and we’re transported into a void where the sky is bck.”

  “I… did you not know you were inhabiting the Exile Hexagon?”

  “The fuck is an Exile Hexagon?!”

  The question so entirely caught Rykard off-guard that he did not have a quick answer. He had never considered that there were worlds that had forgotten about the world-creation games. How old did a world have to be, how long must it have gone uncimed, for that to be the case? More importantly, how deeply inept did the priesthood have to be to not be in contact with any divines that would tell them?

  Rather than waste his time breaking down the history of the universe to the man, Rykard just ughed. “Wow, this is a backwater. What are the local factions here?”

  “Fuck if I know. We all hate the church, that’s all I can tell you. Who knows how it will look like tomorrow.”

  “Why exactly do you hate the churches? Bad enough to burn them down, anyway?”

  The man spat out again, this time wisely aiming at the bckened ground. “Fuckers tax us, send us to war, tell us we’ll go to heaven and then one morning we’re in the fucking void. That’s the line. Fuck’em. Kill’em all.” The man stared at Rykard. “Guess you really aren’t with them, since you’re asking all this stupid shit. Who or what are you?”

  “I’m king Rykard, the one who has summoned this Hexagon to this world,” the sovereign responded, then he chortled. “What a hot mess.”

  On the face of the man understanding slowly dawned, the same understanding that Rykard had already reached. The Hexagon had been summoned by the man in front of him, igniting a civil war that had been brewing for a long, long while and now everything was colpsing at a rapid rate. So rapid that Rykard was certain he would only find ashes by the time he reached any of the temples.

  This Hexagon was in a state of true anarchy.

  While Rykard stood up, the man’s expression hardened. “Fuck, so you’re telling me this is just… natural?”

  “The way of the world, as the gods intend it,” Rykard revealed.

  The assaint chuckled, then began to ugh. There was not a hint of regret in those tones, only a fair bit of madness and relief. “Whatever!” the warrior screamed. “Fuckers still had it coming!”

  Rykard watched the man contort with pure glee. Originally, the king had resolved to execute him upon having asked his questions. Now that he had a clearer picture of it all, he was double-checking that choice.

  Quickly and unceremoniously, Rykard doubled down on his initial choice. Such an act of aggression had to be punished and the half-crazed man would likely prove an annoyance down the line again, like a pesky fly that evaded the spider’s web.

  The fire fox pounced, burning up the remainder of its energies in a pilr of azure fme that turned the ughing man into the centre of a burned circle. Without looking back, Rykard immediately began his march north.

  He had a haremette to find.