DID YOU KNOW? YOU CAN NOW READ THREE TO SIX CHAPTERS AHEAD. CHECK MY PROFILE FOR THE LINK.
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Hachi led them down the broad, polished hallways of the central administration building, her steps swift and purposeful. She stopped before the heavy double doors of the grand strategic hall, before pushing them open and bowing to the side to let Kanade, Ari, and Kirara pass through.
Inside, the room was filled with an oppressive density of magicules that would have brought an ordinary soldier to their knees.
Assembled around the massive carved wooden war table were the core pillars of Tempest's military and governance. Benimaru stood at the head, looking composed yet visibly sharp-edged, flanked by Shuna and Hakurou.
Geld stood like a silent monolith nearby, while Gobta, Rigurd, and Rigur occupied the side seats alongside Kaijin, his three dwarven brothers, and Kurobe, who was quietly observing the blueprints scattered across the table.
In the shadowed corner of the room, Ranga lay curled, his golden eyes tracking every entrance, while Hinata Sakaguchi stood near the windows alongside her Paladin captains, Saare, Grigori, and Litus.
Then there were the three sources of the overwhelming gazes Kanade had registered from outside the barrier.
Veldora was easy to spot, lounging back with his arms crossed and a toothy grin plastered on his face.
Beside him sat Velzard. During Ari's impromptu visit earlier, she had come into direct contact with the White Ice Dragon, allowing Kanade's fine-tuned magical perception to memorize her frost-laden signature.
The third presence, however, was someone he didn't recognize at all.
She was a stunning young woman with dark hair, clad in attire strikingly similar to Hinata's holy armor and tabard. Yet, despite her serene posture, the sheer depth of her power felt virtually endless to Kanade's analytical senses, a boundless, silent ocean resting just beneath the surface. Out of everyone present in the room, she was the only one who gave him serious pause.
Benimaru raised a hand as the trio entered, offering a brief, formal nod. "Lord Kanade, Lady Ari, Lady Kirara. We appreciate you joining us. I was just about to catch everyone up to speed on our planned course of action and how we intend to secure the perimeter while Lord Rimuru is..."
"Do not bother," Velzard interrupted softly, her cold, smooth voice cutting through the hall with absolute authority. "And do not bother involving yourselves in a battle of this caliber. The Sovereigns have taken the stage now, however impromptu their gathering might have been. It is no longer a matter for mortal council."
Veldora threw his head back and let out a hearty, booming laugh. "Gahaha! Indeed! The name 'Twelve Sovereigns' carries quite the sufficient power behind it, wouldn't you say? It is a moniker truly worthy of Rimuru being involved with such an august group!"
Velzard turned her head, fixing her younger brother with a single, stern, freezing glare.
Veldora's laugh instantly choked in his throat, his posture straightening like an obedient schoolboy as he clamped his mouth shut and looked away.
Ignoring the domestic dynamic of the True Dragons, Kanade shifted his gaze directly toward the black-haired young woman he didn't know. "And who might you be?"
The woman turned her deep eyes toward him, eyeing him analytically for a long, quiet moment before speaking. "Chloe. Chloe Aubert."
Kanade snapped his fingers, a faint spark of realization lighting up his expression. "Ah. That's why your magicule trace felt vaguely familiar. You were supposed to be one of the otherworldly children Rimuru took under his wing, weren't you?"
He paused, scanning her adult, fully matured form. "Though I admit, I'm caught off guard seeing you as an adult. Are you under some kind of magical curse that aged your body?"
Chloe blinked, her expression remaining neutral. "No. I am not under a curse."
"So you possess the innate ability to grow older at will?" Kanade pressed, stepping a fraction closer.
"...Yes," Chloe replied simply. "I do."
Kanade gave a thoughtful nod. "I see. So you're directly manipulating your own localized time flow to age yourself, then?"
Chloe's composure cracked, a subtle flicker of annoyance crossing her features as her eyes narrowed. "What is with all these endless questions? Why are you asking me all of this right now?"
"Kanade," Benimaru interjected firmly, stepping up to the war table with a warning frown. "Do not derail the council. We have pressing matters to discuss regarding the city's defenses."
Kanade merely shrugged, utterly unbothered by the reprimand. "I just want to know what Chloe here is intentionally keeping to herself. After all, she looked genuinely surprised to see me step through that door just now, even though we've never officially met."
He tilted his head, his tone shifting into something quieter and far more calculated.
"Or perhaps we have met, and I simply don't remember it, except I possess perfect recall, so that's impossible. Which leaves only one logical conclusion: we meet in the future. And considering the not so impossibility that a psychotic version of Kaede just launched a full-scale assault straight out of a future timeline, time travel doesn't seem all that far-fetched anymore. Especially when Chloe herself just confirmed she can manipulate time."
The air in the room grew noticeably colder.
Kanade wiped every trace of casual lightheartedness from his face, fixing Chloe with an intensely sharp, icy expression.
"So tell me, Chloe," Kanade asked, his voice dropping into a cold, uncompromising demand. "What went wrong?"
Chloe didn't answer right away. Instead, she maintained her unwavering glare, her deep, luminous eyes locked directly onto Kanade's sharp, calculating ones. The silence stretching between them became so heavy that even the air in the strategic hall seemed to solidify into lead.
In the background, Veldora broke the quiet with a nervous, low mutter, rubbing his chin as his golden eyes darted between the two of them. "M-Mu... A secret time-traveler holding vital information that holds the fate of the universe in the balance?! I have definitely read about a plot exactly like this in one of Rimuru's sacred texts! It's the classic temporal paradox trope!"
Velzard didn't even bother looking at her brother, but the sudden, sub-zero drop in ambient temperature forced Veldora to instantly shut his mouth and sink back into his chair.
As the stare-down between Kanade and Chloe dragged on without a single flinch from either party, the atmosphere in the room shifted. Benimaru, watching the absolute certainty etched into Kanade's face alongside Chloe's unusually guarded silence, felt a cold knot tie itself in his stomach.
The Commander of Tempest slowly turned his head away from the map table, his crimson eyes fixing entirely on Chloe. The realization hit him like a physical blow: Kanade wasn't just throwing out wild conjectures. He was right.
"Chloe..." Benimaru's voice lost its formal command, dropping into a rare, desperate plea that drew the attention of every officer in the room. "Is there truly something we need to know? If you are genuinely from the future... if you understand what is happening right now with this anomaly... please. I am begging you to tell us."
Near the windows, Velzard leaned back, her face a mask of supreme disinterest. Internally, however, her ancient, dragonic mind was working at maximum speed. Will she actually cave and spill her secrets to these mortals? Velzard mused, her sharp gaze tracking the subtle rise and fall of Chloe's chest.
She distinctly recalled that when Chloe had approached Guy, she had been notoriously stingy with the details, offering only vague warnings of an impending apocalypse. If the girl was finally about to open her mouth and reveal the unfiltered truth, Velzard fully intended to listen to every single word.
Under the weight of Benimaru's desperate plea and the piercing stares of the entire room, Chloe finally let out a long, shuddering exhale. Her shoulders slumped just a fraction, the sharp, defensive edge around her aura softening into something far more ancient and deeply exhausted.
"I didn't meet you in the future," Chloe spoke, her voice quiet, almost frail, yet carrying clearly to every corner of the silent hall. She kept her eyes fixed on Kanade. "You didn't exist in the future at all. You never came to the Cardinal World."
Kanade tilted his head, his analytical mind parsing the statement instantly. "I see..."
"Only Maple did," Chloe added.
Kanade's eyebrow twitched upward, a spark of keen interest flashing across his face. "Maple? Why do you call Kaede by that name?"
Chloe blinked, a genuine flicker of confusion breaking through her somber demeanor. "That's... that's the name she gave me. She said her name was Maple."
Kanade fell quiet for half a second, his mind connecting the dots between Kaede's origins, her companion's familiar references, and the strange aliases floating around her existence. "Fair enough. Proceed."
Chloe took another deep breath, wrapping her arms around herself as if trying to ward off an invisible, freezing draft.
"I am from the future," Chloe confessed, her admission dropping like a heavy hammer onto the war council. "And in the timeline I left behind... only three living beings still existed in all of reality. Myself, Demon Lord Rimuru... and Demon Lord Maple."
A collective gasp echoed across the room. Shuna covered her mouth, Hakurou's hand tightened on the hilt of his cane, and even Hinata's Paladins looked visibly shaken.
"And the rest of the world?" Gobta squeaked out, his voice trembling violently. "What happened to everyone else?!"
"The rest of the world... the Western Nations, the Empire, the Heavenly Realm, Hell itself... Even the infinite worlds... everything was swallowed whole," Chloe whispered, her eyes blank as she relived the nightmare. "Devoured entirely during the catastrophic war between Rimuru and Maple as they fought each other for dominance."
A heavy, suffocating aura suddenly exploded from the side of the table, shattering the glass windows along the wall into microscopic dust.
Velzard sat up, her eyes glowing with an terrifying, glacial light that threatened to freeze the very concept of time inside the room. Her expression was devoid of its prior disinterest, replaced by an icy, lethal bloodlust.
"And what, pray tell, makes a mere human like you so extraordinarily special that you managed to survive the absolute end of all reality... when not a single one of the True Dragons did?" Velzard asked, her smooth, melodic voice laced with deadly frost.
She stared down at the young woman, every instinct as an supreme existence revolting against the claim. If she were being entirely honest with herself, she didn't believe a single word coming out of Chloe's mouth.
Velzard was simply waiting for an excuse, just one single slip in the girl's story, to freeze her very existence solid, shatter her soul into atomic fragments, and scatter her frozen remains across the infinite void of the multiverse.
"Tell me, Hero," Velzard purred, the cold air around her forming razor-sharp ice crystals that hovered inches from Chloe's throat. "How did you outlive my siblings and me? What makes you and that slime so special?"