Hostility between Muar and Cato

Muar and Cato’s rivalry is the book’s defining struggle between a champion of the System and the figure determined to break its hold over the worlds. Muar is not merely an enemy assigned to Cato by circumstance: he becomes the bearer of the Crusade, the one person who has witnessed Cato’s works beyond the System, returned, and converted that knowledge into a campaign of pursuit. Cato, meanwhile, is not simply evading Muar. Through infiltration, agents, and the gradual spread of his influence, he turns the System’s own scale and rigidity against it. Their opposition therefore joins personal enmity to a conflict over whether obedience, progress, and even reality itself must remain mediated by the System.

Foundations of the Rivalry

Muar’s commitment begins with direct knowledge of Cato’s capabilities and the consequences of worlds being severed from the System. He regards Cato as a threat because Cato has corrupted dozens of worlds and stolen several outright, not because of an abstract doctrinal disagreement. The danger is made tangible by the contrast between System-supported existence and the blank, System-less space Muar remembers: a silent void without status, purpose, or any ability to understand or interact with the surrounding world. Muar’s fear of that condition helps explain the intensity of his opposition. To him, the System is not only an authority but the structure that makes meaningful advancement and comprehension possible.

Cato’s own experience points in the opposite direction. The System’s rewards make killing feel good, a mechanism Cato recognizes as one of the forces producing the murderous psychopaths at the top of the ranks. The quest structure does not merely describe desirable actions; it alters behavior through pleasure and compulsion. Muar therefore fights to preserve the order that gives the worlds their recognizable rules, while Cato fights against an order whose incentives make violence feel natural. Their rivalry is consequently also a dispute over agency: Muar sees the Crusade as necessary action against a genuine invader, whereas Cato sees the System’s imperatives as another form of domination.

The Crusade Becomes a Systemic Weapon

Initik’s decision to send Muar out with a Crusade initially appears calculated and limited. It is meant to force people to take Cato seriously, but Initik believes he has created only a personal quest that might spread. Instead, the Crusade propagates from the Core Worlds across the entire System. Its call to arms is not one optional incentive among many. It becomes an imperative that subordinates every other quest and reward, while simultaneous portal changes prevent the lowest ranks from moving between worlds.

The consequences expose the danger of Muar’s success. The new Crusade drains higher-ranking figures from their worlds, taking mentors, trainers, protectors, guards, and troubleshooters with them. Initik understands that the battlefield Cato creates can devastate entire worlds and that Cato can destroy Golds and Platinums, perhaps even kill gods. The mobilization may therefore be incapable of achieving its stated objective while still inflicting immense collateral damage. Muar receives essence whenever actions against Cato flow upward through the Crusade, and the rewards accelerate his progress through Bismuth toward Azoth. His personal advancement is thus tied to a campaign that increasingly behaves like an autonomous System process rather than a controlled human decision.

Cato’s counterstrategy exploits the same conditions. After agents miss a check-in near the threshold to the Inner Worlds, various Cato identities begin planning under severe surveillance and restricted portal movement. Direct force is difficult outside territories already infiltrated, but the movement of Golds and Platinums creates cover: a lineage can cross a portal without drawing attention if it does not concentrate too much activity on one world. Scouting remains possible, though spreading Cato becomes dangerous with so many powerful observers present. The rivalry becomes a contest between Muar’s institutional mobilization and Cato’s distributed, concealed expansion.

Muar as Crusader and Intermediary

Muar does not limit the Crusade to battlefield action. He enters the Temple on foot and without Skills as a demonstration of piety, joining worshippers ranging from Coppers to an Azoth around the central pylon. His Crusade Skill, Commune, allows him to send questions and specific information directly to the gods. Because the gods do not appear to communicate extensively with one another, Muar repeatedly explains Cato’s abilities and methods to separate divine powers. He treats this repetition not as a burden but as an honor: even after the Crusade has spread throughout the System, he considers it his quest because he alone has gone beyond the System, seen what Cato has built, and returned.

That role gives Muar unusual authority despite the limits of rank. When he meets Morvan and other higher-ranking figures, he feels like the only adult in the room, arguing that Cato’s threat must be confronted at its roots rather than after entire worlds have been compromised. Muar rejects the notion that a single strategy can determine the fate of planets, insisting instead that individuals must act against Cato’s influence and agents before infiltration becomes irreversible. He doubts the Ahruskians’ confidence that destroying selected worlds will be enough, correctly recognizing that such a measure would merely be a setback if Cato’s wider network survived.

The pursuit also turns Muar into an intelligence coordinator. When Kelem reports signs of Cato’s agents, Muar awards extra contribution points through the Crusade interface and uses the information to identify the surrounding faction network. He then meditates in the Temple and communicates the warning to the World Deities interested in Osk, including the named gods of the Three Gods Faction. He selects two long-standing Crusade members who reached Azoth alongside him and warns them that Raine and Leese are dangerous. Even with their high ranks, he refuses to risk an understrength assault, relying on Kelem’s forces to outnumber the sisters.

Direct Confrontation and Unequal Power

The rivalry becomes personal when Muar confronts Raine and Leese. Their opponents dissipate into white light and reform behind other armored figures, until the sisters face a paladin they recognize. Muar stands with mace and shield radiating light, only slightly higher in rank than the sisters but possessing the strongest Domain present. His strength is not Cato’s support but the backing of the System and its gods. Even so, Raine and Leese can match him, making the encounter a contest rather than an effortless execution.

Muar’s confidence is ideological as well as tactical. He tells the sisters that they cannot ultimately win because the gods now watch them and will eventually track them wherever they go. The statement crystallizes the rivalry’s asymmetry: Cato’s agents possess mobility, infiltration, and adaptation, while Muar commands institutional surveillance, divine attention, and the rewards of the Crusade. Yet the need to assemble superior numbers before engaging Raine and Leese shows that the System’s authority does not erase danger. Cato’s network has produced opponents capable of standing against the very champion sent to destroy it.

The gods acknowledge Muar’s efforts by offering to elevate him to one of the Chosen and place him in direct cooperation with an Elder Deity’s daughter. The offer raises the stakes of the rivalry: Muar is no longer merely a high-ranking participant in a quest but a potential divine instrument. His pursuit of Cato is rewarded with greater proximity to the powers that define the System, even as every new elevation risks binding him more tightly to the reality he is defending.

Escalation, Consequences, and Final Context

The Crusade’s spread has consequences beyond the immediate hunt. Cato’s influence, System collapse, and the resulting remediation repeatedly transform the conflict from a matter of defeating an enemy into a question of whether worlds can remain habitable. When the System withdraws, essence-supported lights and stores fail, mountains crumble or vanish, and lakes become muddy plains. On Heyk, the collapse threatens massive flora die-offs, falling oxygen levels, and the accumulation of alien biomatter that native bacteria cannot decompose. The rivalry therefore operates on ecological as well as military scale: Muar seeks to stop Cato, while Cato’s campaign exposes how much ordinary life depends on the infrastructure Muar defends.

Muar continues to function as a signal that Cato remains active even when Cato himself is unseen. Raine observes that the Crusade is the only quest available beyond the rank-up quest, and Dyen argues that its existence proves Cato is still somewhere in the world-system. Muar likewise treats the continued presence of the quest and the discovery of agents as evidence that Cato is gathering strength and waiting for the right moment. The absence of a visible enemy does not weaken the rivalry; it makes every unexplained movement, faction connection, and quest notification part of the pursuit.

The conflict also reveals that neither side fully controls the mechanisms it uses. Initik’s Crusade becomes broader and more compulsory than intended, while Cato’s efforts must contend with a System capable of altering portals and embedding objectives into reality. Quests weaponize dopaminergic reward pathways, and their goals become the path of least resistance. Cato’s frames can resist some biological adulteration, but they cannot completely block the System’s altered reality. Muar receives tangible essence and advancement from the same machinery, while Cato confronts its ability to turn imposed objectives into apparent choice.

By the time Muar stands beside Misse Eln at the endgame, the rivalry has entered the crisis of the System itself. He bristles when Cato addresses Misse Eln without an honorific, reading the disrespect as another sign of Cato’s heresy, yet he remains present as the conflict moves beyond ordinary factional politics. The sudden absorption of Mishkell and the collapse of the frontier are linked to the concentration of power that Cato questions and opposes. Around the War Worlds, physics resumes as the System’s control fails: a hundred suns become subject to ordinary proximity and gravity, and the System forcibly relocates Misse Eln and Muar to the Font. The final setting makes their rivalry paradoxical. Muar has spent the campaign defending the System’s order from Cato, but the struggle ends amid the order’s unraveling, where the question is no longer simply whether Muar can catch Cato, but what remains of the world that made their opposition possible.