The boys turned to Yamika with wide eyes, utterly shocked by her words. Noroi pondered deeply; Yamika was the first to catch his gaze: an orange-haired girl, a metal helmet with two horns, and a wolf pelt draped over her shoulders ,something ancient. Then he glanced at Haruki beside him, wearing a traditional school uniform, from a completely different era.
Suddenly, realization struck Noroi, and he threw the thought at the other two.
"We're from different centuries… but how?"
He turned first to Haruki, firing questions at him as he tried to piece things together.
"What year are you from?"
Haruki tilted his head at the odd question, as if it came straight out of a sci-fi time-travel movie, yet he answered simply.
"Two thousand and twenty-four."
Noroi ran his fingers through his hair, trying to ease the headache caused by the jumble of thoughts racing and intertwining in his mind. He slowly shifted his gaze toward Yamika, who was standing there, observing everything that seemed unusual to her.
He spoke, drawing her attention to ask.
"Hey… what about you? Which year are you exactly from?"
Yamika lifted her eyes from Noroi's hidden sword coiled around his wrist and looked directly at him. She placed her hand under her chin, pondering for a moment before answering.
"Eight hundred and twenty-four."
Yamika's simple answer was the missing piece in the puzzle of Noroi's mind, allowing him to arrange all his thoughts together. He realized that what initially seemed like a world merely gathering humans from anywhere had clear rules. He turned his gaze toward Haruki, the person closest to the year he came from, and spoke directly to him.
"That makes everything make more sense!"
Noroi's tone was enthusiastic, and he began explaining, gesturing with his hands as if drawing a map in the air to organize everything in his mind.
"The one who designed this place must have pulled us here by linking different years together. But even though the years are different, they all connect to a single year: the year twenty-four."
He paused for a moment to catch his breath, then continued, his eyes glowing with excitement.
"This means that this time gate, or maybe a wormhole,is governed by certain rules that cannot be broken. Each of us is from a different century! I'm from the twenty-second century, you're from the twenty-first, and she's from the ninth! If this means anything, it could mean that we might find other humans from different centuries. This isn't a coincidence,it's a scientific miracle!"
Noroi looked at them, expecting excitement matching his own… but instead, he found them staring back with half-open, confused eyes, as if their brains were trying to reboot after an overdose of complex terminology.
Noroi's shoulders sagged in frustration. He rolled his eyes, wondering what he had expected from them, then muttered under his breath in exasperation.
"…how stupid."
A sheepish smile appeared on Haruki's lips, and he raised his left hand to scratch the back of his neck, lowering his voice in response to Noroi's conclusions, trying to ease the tension and make Noroi feel a little more at ease.
"Yes, that's… great… but, could you say it a bit more simply… just a little?"
Noroi crossed his arms over his chest and returned to his unreadable, cold expression, before replying to Haruki with a single sentence that summarized all his conclusions.
"All the centuries are progressing together on a single timeline."
"Ahhhh!"
Haruki pretended to understand, nodding slowly, then turned to Yamika, placing his hand in front of his mouth to whisper to her so that Noroi wouldn't hear.
"I didn't understand anything… what about you?"
Yamika's eyes narrowed, as if she had grasped one or two things, and her next tone was firm and confident, almost proud.
"I didn't understand! But what I do know now is that all this thinking has made me hungry."
Noroi threw up his hand in a gesture of complete indifference, then added a biting remark.
"That's irrelevant. You're from the Viking era… your brain has a thick layer of fat that makes it hard to reach."
Tension escalated between them as Yamika felt insulted and irritated, her eyes igniting with the fire of anger, especially after Noroi had mentioned her origins in a way she found offensive.
She stepped dangerously close to Noroi, pushing him in the chest with one hand while drawing her axe from her back with the other, in a clear threat, and said.
"Say that to my face again… I dare you!"
Noroi didn't hesitate to repeat his words directly to her face.
"You Vikings are a bunch of fools who think you can take everything by force!"
Yamika clenched her teeth, then let out a war cry, raising her axe high in front of him, ready to strike…
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Thank you for reading! If this moment touched you even a little , please consider adding it to your library.💐