"Future Chloe?"
Damien was about to frown when Future Chloe playfully winked at him.
Then, the stunning woman slowly wrapped her arms around Damien's neck, pressing her lips to his.
"!!!"
Damien was no inexperienced novice.
Not to mention his past, just Shion, Shuna, and Darkness had given him plenty of real-world experience.
A mere kiss was far from enough to shake his resolve.
However, what truly surprised Damien was Future Chloe's attitude toward him.
'Not Rimuru, but me?'
Clearly, this world's Chloe...
Or rather, all timelines... had been completely altered by Damien's presence.
There was no original storyline, no Future Chloe as a Great Holy Spirit of Time, and none of the messy complications.
In the world Damien inhabited, Chloe's fate would walk alongside him until the end of time!
On the other side, after parting from Damien, Future Chloe's figure swiftly merged into the young Chloe's body.
At the same time, Artoria opened her eyes.
Scenes flashed through her vision in an instant.
Finally!
All the figures settled on one incomparably majestic, towering giant god.
"You are the first cause of the cosmos, the most ancient, formless embodiment of fate..."
"Kronos!"
Not Cronus, the father of Zeus, but the supreme god from another Greek mythological system, the origin of all, the first cause that propels the universe's development.
Of course, this had nothing to do with Kronos himself.
What Chloe absorbed was purely the template of this great god's power.
In the context of the Douluo worldview, it was akin to inheriting his divine position, becoming the second-generation First Cause.
"Huh?"
Due to the time-stop effect, Treyni hadn't seen Future Chloe's arrival.
To her, Artoria had already completed the construction of the divine body.
The next step should have been for her to assist Damien in summoning a elemental soul suitable for Chloe.
But...
"Why?"
Treyni was stunned, realizing that Chloe had somehow already completed the fusion of spirit and flesh.
'What just happened?'
She hadn't even summoned the elemental yet, so how was it done?
Damien offered no explanation.
His full attention was now on the newly reborn Chloe.
[Chloe Aubert]
[Race: Divine Spirit - Goddess of Time]
[Magicules: 1,800,000 EP (Special Awakening)]
[Unique Skills: Absolute Severance, Infinite Prison, Supreme Unity of the Void]
[Special Skills: Soulbound (A variant of Twin Martial Soul, manifesting as a guardian goddess by Damien's side)]
"Lord Damien!"
Chloe opened her eyes, and while the time-stop effect still lingered, she rushed straight into Damien's arms. "This time, I absolutely won't lose to anyone else!"
"What?"
Damien didn't quite catch the meaning of the girl's words.
He leaned down, looking at the girl in his arms, who, like Alice, had undergone a dramatic transformation.
Gone was the plain black cloak and simple school uniform. Now, Chloe exuded the aura of a Goddess of Time.
Unlike Alice's crystalline space constructs, Chloe was surrounded by golden grains of sand symbolizing time.
They flowed like a river, or like the ethereal wings of a celestial maiden, accentuating Chloe's petite figure with an air of mystery and nobility.
"A secret!"
However, Chloe didn't directly answer Damien's question, instead playfully sticking out her tongue.
Of course, the girl had no intention of hiding anything from Damien.
She fully shared the memories she gained after merging with that figure... her future self... with Damien.
As it turned out, Chloe was originally an otherworlder who had crossed into the Cardinal World centuries ago alongside her brother, Leon.
But during the crossing, an accident occurred due to her unique time-based power.
This caused her to be summoned hundreds of years later by Yuuki Kagurazaka.
For clarity, Damien decided to assign specific ages to Chloe to better understand her story.
Chloe (age 8) and her brother Leon (teenager) crossed into the otherworld.
Due to an accident, Chloe was swept into a time rift.
Leon, seeing his sister vanish, began repeatedly performing otherworlder summoning rituals to see her again.
Over 200 years later, Leon (age 200), now a Demon Lord, summoned Shizu (age 6).
Eighty years after that, Yuuki Kagurazaka summoned Kenya, Alice, and the other children during his own otherworlder summoning.
Among them was Chloe (age 8), who had been pulled from the time rift into this era.
Up to this point, the events were nearly identical to the original story.
"Then, I met Damien-nii."
"It was Damien-nii who healed our bodies."
In the original story, it should have been Rimuru who healed Chloe.
But this time, due to Damien's intervention, Chloe's fate had changed.
In the original, because Rimuru parted with the children early, he didn't encounter Hinata Sakaguchi on the road, and Shion and the others from the Monster Kingdom weren't slaughtered by the Kingdom of Falmuth.
This meant Rimuru didn't go on a killing spree and didn't awaken as a Demon Lord at that time.
Chloe, due to the death of an unawakened Rimuru, embarked on a time-loop journey to save her teacher.
In the anime timeline, Chloe deliberately acted spoiled to delay Rimuru's departure, leading to an early meeting with Hinata.
What followed was the death of Shion and others, and Rimuru coming to terms with his true resolve.
After Rimuru killed 20,000 Falmuth soldiers, he awakened early, summoning a powerful weapon like Diablo.
Of course, none of that had anything to do with Damien.
Nor did it concern this world's Chloe.
In Chloe's memories, she was saved by Damien.
Then, together with Damien, she fought across countless worlds.
To better protect Damien, Chloe entered the time dimension, guarding him from that angle and shielding him from temporal interference by others.
The beautiful woman who appeared earlier wasn't truly Future Chloe but a gift left in the river of time by her future self.
"However, these memories don't contain anything about what will happen in the future."
Knowing the future in advance would mean altering it, and the adult Chloe wouldn't do something so foolish.
***
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