Umweg

(Detour in German) is one of the original artificial weapons in Ex-Machina's arsenal. It was used multiple times and played critical parts in shaping the events during the story of No Game No Life: Zero.

Appearance
The Umweg unit looks like a palm-sized orbs with strips of mechanical structure appearing out of thin air when deployed. Upon activation, it will generate multiple expanding blue halos that look like magic circles. Any forms of energy caught in the circle can then be redirected.

Abilities
As its name implies, this weapon is capable of redirecting flows of energy, therefore is often used to redirect attacks. When it is summoned, it can be used immediately or planted as a remotely activated beacon. If the incoming of flow of energy is too powerful to be redirected with a single unit, multiple units could be deployed to compensate. By using many units together, it could redirect something as powerful as Dragonia's Far Cry, or even the ultimate weapons of all races combined.

History
When Riku was 7 years old, Schwi and 8 Clusters of Ex-Machina was caught in a skirmish with Aranrave and his 7 followers. When they were getting eliminated, Aranrave unleashed Far Cry as a desperate move. Schwi judged that developing a weapon capable of defending against Far Cry would take too long, and instead proposed to redirect the attack using Umweg. Her proposal was accepted and carried out, but the diverted attack ended up destroying Riku's village. As a plan to end The Great War, Riku and Schwi planned to plant 32 Umweg units in a circular fashion, to redirect all energy from the ultimate weapon of Elves, Dwarves, Dragonia and Flugels combined into the planet core, forcing the Suniaster to manifest. The plan failed when Schwi was killed by Jibril, but her heart was shared with the entire Ex-Machina race and caused them to swore allegiance to Riku.

A modified plan was proposed by Einzig: use the 24 currently planted units to redirect the energy towards Ex-Machina and create a new weapon using their Lösen algorithm. The plan succeeded in creating the Stalemartyr, which led to the end of the war.

Trivia

 * According to Einzig, Riku and Schwi's original plan of using 32 Umweg units for redirection is going to fail, due to a calculating error amounted to 10-609 seconds, which is fundamentally impossible. The Planck Time, amounted to about 5.39*10-44 seconds, is theoretically the shortest time interval measurement possible, due to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.