"The future Chloe?"
Rin was about to frown, but then he saw the future Chloe mischievously wink at him.
The beautiful woman slowly wrapped her arms around Rin's neck and pressed her lips against his.
"!!!"
Rin was naturally not an inexperienced novice.
Not to mention earlier experiences, even Shion, Shuna, and Darkness had already given Rin plenty of practical experience.
A simple kiss was far from enough to shake Rin's heart.
What truly surprised Rin was the future Chloe's attitude toward him.
Not Rimuru, but him?
Clearly, Chloe in this world.
Or rather, Chloe across all timelines.
Her fate had been completely altered by Rin's appearance.
There was no original plot, no future Chloe turning into a time spirit, and no tangled worries remaining.
In the world where Rin existed, Chloe's destiny would accompany him until the end of time.
On the other side, after separating from Rin, the future Chloe's figure quickly merged back into Chloe's body.
At the same time, Artoria opened her eyes.
Scene after scene flashed before her vision.
Finally.
All the images stopped on an incomparably majestic, even towering giant god.
"You are the First Cause of the universe, and also the most ancient, formless and shapeless embodiment of fate."
"Chronos."
Not Cronus, the father of Zeus, but Chronos, the supreme god from another Greek mythological system, the origin of all things, the First Cause that propelled the development of the universe.
Of course, this had nothing to do with Chronos himself.
Chloe had absorbed only the power template of this giant god.
In the Soul Land worldview, it would be equivalent to inheriting the other party's divine position and becoming a second generation First Cause.
"Huh?"
Due to the effect of time suspension, Treyni did not witness the arrival of the future Chloe.
From her perspective, Artoria had already completed the construction of Chloe's divine body.
The next step should have been for her to assist Rin in summoning a Celestial Spirit soul suitable for Chloe.
But.
"Why?"
Treyni was stunned because she discovered that Chloe had already completed the fusion of spirit and flesh at some unknown moment.
What was going on?
She had not even summoned the Celestial Spirit yet, so how did everything suddenly resolve itself?
Rin did not explain.
All of his attention was focused on the reborn Chloe.
---
[Chloe Aubert]
Race: Divine Species · Goddess of Time
Magicules: 1.8 million EP, Special Awakening
Unique Skills: Absolute Severance, Infinite Prison, Ultimate Void Unity
Special Skill: Innate Twin, a variation of Twin Martial Souls, accompanying Rin in the form of a Guardian Goddess
---
"Rin!"
Chloe opened her eyes and, before the time suspension ended, rushed straight into Rin's arms.
"This time, I definitely will not lose to anyone else!"
"What?"
Rin did not understand what the girl meant.
He lowered his head and looked at the girl in his arms, whose appearance had changed drastically, just like Alice.
Her former black cloak and simple school uniform were gone.
Now Chloe possessed the dignified grace befitting a Goddess of Time.
Unlike Alice's crystals that symbolized space, Chloe was surrounded by golden sand that represented time.
It flowed like a river, or like the feathered mantle on a celestial maiden's shoulders, making Chloe's petite figure appear mysterious and noble.
"It's a secret!"
Chloe did not answer directly. Instead, she mischievously stuck out her tongue.
Of course, she had no intention of hiding anything from Rin.
She completely transmitted the memories she gained after merging with that figure, her future self, into Rin's mind.
It turned out that Chloe was originally an Otherworlder who crossed into the Cardinal World together with her brother Leon centuries ago.
However, during the crossing, Chloe encountered an accident due to her unique power over time.
As a result, she was summoned by Yuki centuries later.
For clarity, Rin assigned concrete ages to better understand Chloe's story.
Chloe at eight years old and her brother Leon as a teenager crossed into the Otherworld.
Chloe was accidentally caught in a time rift.
Seeing his sister disappear, Leon began performing Otherworlder summoning rituals again and again in hopes of seeing her once more.
Finally, more than two hundred years later, Leon, now two hundred years old and already a Demon Lord Seed, summoned Shizue, who was six years old.
Another eighty years passed.
When Yuki summoned Otherworlders, children like Kenya and Alice appeared.
This also included Chloe, still eight years old, who had emerged from the time rift and arrived in this era.
All of this was almost identical to the original plot.
"After that, I met Big Brother Rin."
"It was Big Brother Rin who healed our bodies."
In the original story, the one who healed Chloe should have been Rimuru.
This time, however, due to Rin's intervention, Chloe's fate was completely rewritten.
In the original work, Rimuru parted ways with the children early.
Because of that, she did not encounter Hinata Sakaguchi on the road, and Shion and the others from the Monster Nation were not massacred by the Kingdom of Falmuth.
As a result, Rimuru did not go on a killing spree and did not awaken as a Demon Lord at that time.
It was precisely because the unawakened Rimuru died in battle that Chloe began her endless cycle of reincarnation to save her teacher.
Up until the anime timeline, Chloe deliberately acted spoiled, delaying Rimuru's return and forcing her to encounter Hinata early.
After that, Shion and the others died, and Rimuru awakened to her true nature.
Then, after Rimuru killed twenty thousand soldiers of the Kingdom of Falmuth, she awakened early and obtained a powerful force like Kuro.
Of course, none of this had anything to do with Rin.
Nor did it concern the Chloe of this world.
In Chloe's memories, she was saved by Rin.
Then she conquered countless worlds together with him.
To better protect Rin, Chloe entered the dimension of time and guarded him from that vantage point, resisting interference from others across timelines.
The beautiful woman who appeared earlier was not the future Chloe herself, but a gift left behind by that future Chloe within the long river of time.
"However, these memories do not include events that have yet to happen."
Knowing the future in advance would itself change the future.
The adult Chloe would never do something so foolish.
(To be continued.)