“Raph!” Raph-chan was looking pleased with herself. Did this mean something she had done to Chris had boosted his precision in finding Kizuna? Chris proceeded to take out what looked like a world map from the hat I had given him and then drew a circle around a corner of the continent.

“Is that where Kizuna is?” I asked.

“Pen!” Chris confirmed.

“Wow! That’s amazing, isn’t it, Master!” Filo was in her monster form. Perhaps due to her further increase in levels, she was showing off what she could now turn into. She was a higher class of monster from the humming fairies in the field guide. I thought for a moment and the name came to me—humming cockatrice. I’d thought a cockatrice was a monster with the power to turn people into stone, but this one was a bit different—with the power to control sound waves.

It was basically a big chicken. But appearance-wise, she had feathers a bit of a different color from her filolial queen form. She could fly like that too, which I couldn’t get my head around.

Enough about Filo, anyway.

“Now that we have a read on Kizuna’s location, should we prepare to set out?” I asked.

“Indeed. We should proceed with as much secrecy as we can afford,” Glass said.

As the discussion continued, a ball of light appeared in the room.

“What’s this? Did someone cast some magic? Raphtalia?” I asked. She could use light magic, so it would be easy for her to create a ball like this.

“It isn’t me,” she replied. So it looked like it wasn’t her. If this was some kind of attack magic, I had to be ready to defend against it. Even as I considered my options, the light scattered apart.

What it left behind was . . .

“A mirror?” Glass said. That’s exactly what it was. A mirror, which I remembered seeing when I was here before. It had appeared in the middle of the room.

“What’s the mirror vassal weapon doing here?” someone shouted.

“Don’t ask me,” I replied. The mirror showed no intent to attack us. It just floated in the air for a while and then started to unleash a blinding light.

“What’s going on now?” I asked.

“I’ve seen this before!” L’Arc said. “When we came to get you, the mirror did the same kind of thing!” Right. That was after we defeated Kyo, when Kizuna and the others had come for us. I blinked a few times and then looked around . . .

“Where are we now?” We were together in an old, extremely dusty-looking room. I looked out the window. It looked like some kind of house. Outside the window, the surrounding area was quite overgrown, suggesting no one had touched this place for a while.