“What happened with the coalition army?”

“All of the members are working hard to rebuild their own respective countries.”

The damage done by the Spirit Tortoise had indeed been awful. I had seen the scars left by the battle. We had managed to defeat the Spirit Tortoise here in Melromarc, but its massive corpse was still lying out in the fields with an expansive wasteland of wreckage extending out behind it.

“Let us review the current situation. At present, all of the dragon hourglasses across the world have come to a halt.”

“The red hourglass on my status screen has stopped, too.”

“I see.”

“But the other hourglass shows a time of three and a half months.”

The room took on a somber atmosphere.

“That three and a half months is our cutoff. We need to complete preparations for the battle with the Phoenix before then.”

We already knew that the Phoenix would be reawakened.

“There’s more. We learned something in the world we ended up in after pursuing Kyo, the enemy who stole the Spirit Tortoise’s energy.”

I told the queen what we had found out in Kizuna’s world.

In Kizuna’s world, legends told of the waves as being a phenomenon resulting from the fusion of two worlds. It was said that if the current fusion were to reach completion then the limits of what a single world could contain would be exceeded, ultimately leading to the destruction of the worlds.

To prevent that from happening, heroes known as vassal weapon holders were slipping into other worlds through the dimensional rifts created by the waves and attempting to kill the other worlds’ heroes that possessed the holy weapons, since those heroes were the pillars of the worlds.

A commotion broke out among the queen’s advisers.

“And is all of this a fact?”

“Honestly, I think it’s all pretty questionable,” I went on. “They hadn’t actually pulled it off, and one of the holy weapons over there . . . one of their four heroes lacked the ability to fight against other people. If it really were true, surely the four heroes would need to excel in combat against other people, don’t you think?”

Although, it actually might very well have been true. For some reason, though, Kizuna refused to accept it.

“We did find something in that world that seems to offer a different explanation of the waves. Rishia.”

“Y . . . yes!”

Rishia pulled out the manuscript that Kizuna and the others had given her and showed it to the queen.

“We’re not sure what the text means, but many of the drawings seem to be related to the waves. If we can decipher the text, we might learn something.”

“Understood. I shall request the dispatch of those that decipher such things from all of the other countries so that we commence the task using all available resources.”

“I want you to put Rishia on that team. She’s already learned the language of that world, and she seems to be really good at this kind of thing.”