Cato–Mii-Es alliance

The Cato–Mii-Es alliance is a clandestine bargain between Cato and Mii-Es, built not on shared ideology but on overlapping needs. Cato wants to dismantle the System without treating its inhabitants as his enemies, while Mii-Es wants to protect independent deities and their worlds from the Nine Great Clans. Their relationship becomes strategically important because Cato can sever worlds from the System and move them into base reality, whereas Mii-Es possesses the access, credibility, and political network needed to make that capability useful without immediately exposing its source.

Formation and Unequal Leverage

Mii-Es first encounters Cato as a power that cannot be dismissed as a skirmisher or local nuisance. Cato has spread his forces across hundreds of worlds, using factories, mines, refineries, solar panels, and retoolable production lines to turn slow exponential growth into a system-wide military presence. His expansion is difficult to detect until it becomes overwhelming: even the Inner Worlds show signs of his artifice beyond the System’s reach. To Mii-Es, this makes Cato resemble a disease that has spread far beyond its apparent point of origin.

Cato’s own position is more nuanced than his campaign’s scale suggests. He repeatedly distinguishes between his quarrel with the System and hostility toward its people. He tells Mii-Es that his purpose is not to conquer her personally, and his conduct supports that distinction: he is prepared to sever worlds from the System, but he is also interested in making the transition as painless as possible. Mii-Es recognizes the practical value of that restraint. The Core Worlds want what independent deities possess; Cato, by contrast, has no need to seize her resources. That difference gives her reason to believe that Cato may leave her and her people alone even while he attacks the order on which their existence depends.

The Promise to Restore Mii-Es’s People

The most personal and potent element of the alliance is Cato’s offer to help restore Mii-Es’s extinct species. Cato establishes that Mii-Es is not the same species as the natives of Ikent and that he has found no living members of her people elsewhere in the System. Mii-Es confirms that her homeworld disappeared long ago: when she was Copper, she believed it was still intact, but by the time she ascended from Alum, nothing remained beyond Clan holdings. She doubts that any other member of her race ever reached Bismuth.

Cato’s suspicion comes from a dungeon where one of the Lineages encountered monsters resembling Mii-Es. The resemblance recalls his discovery of monsterized Sydeans, and Raine and Leese have begun preliminary reconstructions from collected samples. The genetic evidence is incomplete, but Cato believes the dungeon organisms may preserve a match to Mii-Es’s people. He still requires a sample from Mii-Es to eliminate the remaining uncertainty, and even a successful match would not guarantee healthy individuals or sufficient genetic diversity. Cato therefore presents the offer as a possibility rather than a certainty, unlike the more reliable reconstruction planned for Initik’s people.

Mii-Es nevertheless accepts the risk. Cato asks for a drop of her blood, explaining that it belongs to the same process used to create a new body for Yaniss and the body intended for Mii-Es herself. A full scan would provide more information, but gods rarely descend to ordinary planets, and the biological systems that once accompanied Mii-Es may not have survived her ascension. Mii-Es studies him, questions what he would do with the sample, and finally agrees to provide it. The offer changes the alliance from a merely tactical arrangement into a possible act of historical recovery: Cato is not only offering survival outside the System, but a chance to reverse the disappearance of an entire people.

Mii-Es as a Secret Backer

Mii-Es converts Cato’s promise and protection into a covert support network for independent gods threatened by the Nine Great Clans. She tells the gathered deities that she has an anonymous ally who can serve as a last resort for anyone targeted by a Clan purge. She distributes code phrases and instructions, first to gods near Gyvestral, whom she considers especially vulnerable, and then to a wider circle. The protocols allow threatened worlds to seek help without immediately naming Cato.

The secrecy is essential. Mii-Es risks exposing her relationship with Cato, while Cato risks revealing that he has a political connection inside the independent-god community. She believes that disclosure would not necessarily be irreversible, because Cato claims he can save a planet’s people even when the world itself is purged, but she does not want to test that protection through careless action. Her role is therefore both intermediary and shield: she translates Cato’s capabilities into political assurances while keeping his identity out of the immediate chain of communication.

Cato’s willingness to save people is also inseparable from his willingness to destroy the System’s hold over worlds. Mii-Es understands that he has the ability and determination to sever a world and bring it into base reality, and that he considers the process morally preferable when carried out with minimal suffering. This creates a difficult form of dependence. Cato does not demand that Mii-Es surrender her sovereignty, yet the protection he offers is powerful enough to reshape the choices available to her. Her alliance with him is secret because it is voluntary, but it is mutually beneficial precisely because neither side can achieve the same result alone.

Negotiations with Initik

The alliance acquires a second layer when Mii-Es learns that Initik has also been working with Cato. Initik reveals that his own cooperation has lasted nearly a decade, while Mii-Es has been involved for no more than a month. She admits that Cato has impressed her favorably under the circumstances, even though she has no desire to be dictated to by anyone. His respect distinguishes him from the Core Worlds, which seek control and extraction rather than coexistence.

Mii-Es does not initially tell Initik that Cato may restore her people, because the information would obviously compromise her. When Cato later offers a comparable personal bargain to Initik, the two gods recognize that such offers are among his most effective instruments. They do not disclose the details of their separate agreements, but the exchange confirms that both have entered Cato’s orbit through a combination of political calculation and deeply personal stakes.

Initik remains cautious about Cato’s promises. He believes that Cato can save worlds, yet struggles to believe that Cato will actually choose to do so. Mii-Es shares the desire for more certainty, but accepts knowledge of Cato’s capability as sufficient for action. Their conversation shows the alliance’s central tension: Cato’s partners must trust not only his power, but his restraint, priorities, and willingness to expend that power on people who offer him no obvious material advantage.

Conflict with the System and Its Aftermath

The alliance is formed against a background in which the System is not merely a government but a total environment. Muar experiences the System’s temple on Uriva as a return from a dead, meaningless System-less void, while Cato treats that same structure as an oppressive order that must be dismantled. This contrast explains why Mii-Es’s cooperation cannot be reduced to simple religious conversion. She understands the System’s value to its adherents and still chooses to work with the force seeking to remove it because the System’s political hierarchy threatens her people more immediately than Cato does.

Cato’s methods make the stakes material. When System anchors are destroyed on Sydea, essence fails across towns, lights and stores shut down, and System-supported geography begins to collapse. Mountains crumble or vanish, lakes become muddy plains, alien forests wither, invasive monsters disappear, and transplanted life dies rather than returning neatly to an earlier ecological condition. The same danger appears on a larger scale in the planned assault on Haekos, where Cato anticipates ecosystem collapse, oxygen loss, oceanic instability, and the need for frantic remediation after the fighting. On Heyk, the System’s collapse leaves massive flora die-offs, falling oxygen levels, and alien biomatter that native bacteria cannot decompose.

Mii-Es’s alliance with Cato therefore carries a responsibility beyond military opposition. It offers threatened gods a way out, but that way out requires preparation, evacuation, reconstruction, and trust in Cato’s ability to manage the consequences. The alliance’s significance lies in this contradiction: Cato is both the enemy of the System’s stability and the architect of a possible refuge from its collapse. Mii-Es becomes the political partner who can make that refuge imaginable to others, even as she remains aware that accepting Cato’s protection means helping an outsider overturn the reality that has defined divine life for more than a thousand years.