“I can remember a little of what happened to the hammer after this. It was always taken out of Q’ten Lo as the weapon of the pacifier. An oracle would use its power to let the hammer take over their body and then punish rampaging heroes or monsters,” the past Heavenly Emperor explained. That sounded like the trick Shildina had pulled when we first met her. So the past Heavenly Emperor was the one who got sent out from Q’ten Lo to fix things. She was fated to do a whole bunch of fighting, then. “Once I ended my life as a sentient weapon, there was nothing until Shildina awoke me.”
“So tell me. Do you think the waves have ended in the future?” I asked her. She looked away as she replied.
“I can tell you . . . I recall fighting many new enemies over the years of my life. There were always those like Makina mixed in amongst them, but I cannot be sure they were always the allies of our true enemy,” she admitted.
“I see.” I rubbed my chin in thought. This trip back to the past was definitely an irregularity. More and more things were pointing to that now. We didn’t have any concrete answers yet, but the main issue still stood—we had to get back to our time as quickly as possible. “You don’t seem bothered about talking to the Water Dragon either. Why’s that?”
“I’ve never liked him. He talks too much and telling him any of this isn’t going to change things,” the past Heavenly Emperor said. It sounded like she didn’t get on with him. He didn’t seem to know much that could help us anyway. “If I show them this form, I’m worried about affecting the Heavenly Emperor further from this time . . . the original me, eh,” she continued. I could see that too. Natalia didn’t do so well with being “affected.” She still had a lot of growing to do, mentally. She wouldn’t be able to withstand the shock of discovering what was basically a clone of herself among a bunch of people from the future.
“So putting this all together, you’re a hammer with a copy of Natalia’s personality who’s from further into the future than me,” I said.
“That personality was extracted from the hammer and stored in a different vessel, eh,” she corrected.
“And why do you say ‘eh’ all the time?” I asked.
“I don’t know, eh,” she replied.
“You’re a blend of Natalia’s and Holn’s personalities, perhaps,” I ventured. Holn had that whole “little old” thing when she spoke.
“I hope that isn’t the case, eh,” the past Heavenly Emperor said. “It’s more likely I’m just getting old. I recall my verbal patterns being strange prior to my final destruction, eh.”
“Okay then. What else do you need to say?” I asked, moving her along. I now knew this was future Natalia, but the human version of the past Heavenly Emperor looked so much like a slightly older Raphtalia that I found it hard to deal with her. “Are you going to give some speech about preserving the timeline? You’re the one who killed that foxy lady, so you’re in no position to lecture on that topic. That had to be a pretty big blow to the space-time continuum,” I said.
“Huh? That fox woman? No,” the past Heavenly Emperor said noncommittally. I would have liked a little more commitment there. A disturbing golden tail flickered through my memory. “If any changes are happening, I’m the one who wants to observe them. I’m not going to come down on you too hard.”
“Awesome. I’ll go ahead and have Holn make the Raph species rather than the filolials—” I started.
“That is certainly not permitted,” the past Heavenly Emperor said quickly. “Know your place.” I’d hoped she wouldn’t take that stance. “I simply can’t stand how she styles herself as an evil alchemist, eh.” She definitely hated Holn.
“Are you expending all this charged up power just to complain?” I asked.
“No, of course not. There’s something that’s still vague in my mind, eh, but it could be a useful lead,” the past Heavenly Emperor said.
“What is it?” I asked intently.
“Do you remember that device we saw in the filolial sanctuary, prior to coming to this time?” the past Heavenly Emperor asked.
“You mean the things that Motoyasu activated?” I asked. It had looked like a big clock.
“I think that . . . was a facility for the control of time,” the past Heavenly Emperor revealed.
“There’s no filolials in this time though, so they can’t have a sanctuary yet,” I said. “Was that shrine there before they came along?” Mamoru had mentioned a “sanctuary,” but I deduced that they had to be talking about those ruins—in our time—that we’d visited during the Church of the Three Heroes debacle. Melty might know where it was, and what kind of facilities they had, but it seemed unlikely there was anything there. This was before the fusing of the worlds. The terrain was pretty different. That made it hard to locate things. Like with Melromarc and Siltvelt, there was a place called the Desert of Confusion on the way to Faubrey—again, in our time—but no such place here.
“If that shrine originated with the sword or spear worlds, that’s going to be a real pain for us,” I murmured.
“The worrying thing is how likely that sounds, eh,” the past Heavenly Emperor added.
“Not a laughing matter,” I said, wondering how the hell we would get there if that was the case.
“But we aren’t without some hope. There’s potential to get there if we can obtain the carriage vassal weapon,” the past Heavenly Emperor revealed.
“Why would a carriage offer any hope at all?” I asked.
“The carriage is a movement-based vassal weapon, eh. Like the ship from Kizuna’s world. It can trace the response from the sword and cross between worlds even outside of a wave,” the past Heavenly Emperor revealed. That was a thing, was it? Ethnobalt had used the Ship vassal weapon to send us back to this world via an anchor accessory. The same kind of thing could be possible using different weapons.
Still, even if that gave us some hope, I was pretty pissed off to learn that our hope of getting home wasn’t even in this world!
“Even the katana vassal weapon couldn’t transport us over to Kizuna’s world. You sure the carriage would be able to do something like that?” I asked.
“Like I said, it’s just a hope at the moment,” the past Heavenly Emperor repeated.
“Okay then.” The next issue was getting our hands on the carriage vassal weapon. Mamoru made it sound like a vassal weapon that was really picky about picking someone to use it, and we didn’t even know where it was anyway. I was pretty sure that Fitoria was the holder of the carriage in the future; maybe we could take the past Fitoria along with us to look for it. “I get what you want to say, but how do we look for something we have no idea the location of?”
“In this time . . . I recall it being in a place the heroes call the ‘sanctuary,’” the past Heavenly Emperor said.
“So you do know,” I replied sardonically.
“I remembered, eh,” she replied. This was one unreliable Heavenly Emperor. Natalia would probably feel dejected to know she turned into this in the future. I also wasn’t so sure we’d find anything useful in this “sanctuary.” Mamoru made it sound like there wasn’t much there.
“Ah . . . I’m out of time, eh,” the past Heavenly Emperor said, and then she popped back into Dafu-chan shape in another puff of smoke. “Dafu,” said Dafu-chan with a deep sigh. I wondered whatever she could dislike about this vision of cuteness. Maybe this was what Raphtalia would look like if she turned into a Raph species. I now knew this was Natalia as a Raph species, so I reached out to stroke her. Even as I extended my hand, however, Dafu-chan leapt away—sensing danger, perhaps. She even gave a threatening growl. It seemed she knew all too well what I had been planning to do. Maybe another time.
“Thanks for all the info. I’ll talk with Mamoru tomorrow and get him to take us to this sanctuary place,” I said.
“Dafu!” said Dafu-chan. Thanks to the information from the past Heavenly Emperor, I therefore decided to head to the sanctuary.