[The Tiger of West Junior High]: Huh, time flow rate?
What’s that supposed to mean?
[Not-a-God Yellow Weasel]: @Viltrum’s Top Student You, at least, should’ve noticed this already.
Whether it was something about the way Leon carried himself or not, the Emperor clearly trusted him quite a bit — enough that he was actually trying to get a Viltrumite to keep pace with his own earth-shattering intellect.
And Leon actually had picked up on a few details.
[Viltrum’s Top Student]: Nyos is right.
Remember that video call when we first joined the group?
Judging by what was outside little Amiya’s window back then, at least half a day’s passed on her end.
But on mine, it’s only been a few hours, tops.
So the flow of time is different between our worlds.
[Orange-Haired, Gold-Eyed Menace to Humanity]: Whoa…
okay, I get that part.
So how’d Mr.
Nyos figure it out?
[Mala Donkey Head]: Because Mr.
Nyos is really amazing?
[Not-a-God Yellow Weasel]: Because the gap is just too large.
All of you are here discussing things that happened within a single day — no greetings, no catching up, not a single trace of time passing at all.
On my end, though, several dozen days have already gone by.
In front of his screen, Nyos leaned back against his chair, glancing around the brand-new room he was in.
In the time it had taken the group to save that girl with the long rabbit ears, he’d already had a dedicated chat room built for himself in the real world.
The equipment in here let him pull up whatever information he wanted in an instant and dive straight into research, and he’d taken a few precautions against prying eyes besides.
[The Tiger of West Junior High]: Wait, only an hour’s passed for me?
Doesn’t that mean Mr.
Nyos is aging the fastest out of all of us?
[Not-a-God Yellow Weasel]: Or, flip that around — maybe it just means I’m built to live a very long time.
Don’t be too surprised.
The way I see it, everyone who’s ended up gathered here is probably cursed with a workhorse fate they just can’t seem to die out of.
[The Tiger of West Junior High]: No way, seriously?
Am I gonna live that long too?
Can’t be — I’m just a little tougher than most people, physically.
[Viltrum’s Top Student]: Hard to say.
Going by the final tally, the slowest time-flow in the group belonged to Yuji.
First a high school top dog, later a top dog of the sorcerer world, with the most miserable six months in between turned into a whole manga — now that was quality.
And the fastest, naturally, belonged to the Emperor.
Which made sense, of course — Warhammer’s story spans thousands, tens of thousands of years.
Since they were all supposed to be growing together, there was no way the group would wait around for years while everyone else got strong, only for the Emperor to have just barely started the Unification Wars.
Amiya, Clark, and Leon all sat somewhere in the middle, without much of a gap between them. Get faster updates on g.com.
Ritsuka Fujimaru, though, was a bit of a special case.
Same as last time, her grasp of her own situation seemed downright bizarre.
When the topic of time came up, and what era she was actually in, she ended up mentioning 1994, then 2004, and then some years even further out than that.
It sounded, for all the world, like she was living inside some reality that kept flipping back and forth.
But given the risk that pointing it out might trigger some unpredictable change, Leon chose to let it go, unmentioned.
Maybe once she triggered a quest of her own, or the group unlocked some feature for voluntary world-hopping, he could go take a look for himself.
In the end, it was Nyos who put a period on the whole discussion.
[Not-a-God Yellow Weasel]: There’s still some margin of error in my calculations.
I have reason to suspect the chat group adjusts the flow rate based on actual circumstances.
It’s not out of the question that, someday, someone finishes a quest, logs back on, and finds decades have gone by.
Everyone should keep that possibility in mind.
There was already a certain someone in the Warp who loved messing with time and toying with fate — Nyos, of all people, was more than mentally prepared for this.
Once the group chat wound down, he buried himself back in preparations for what was to come, all while keeping half an eye on the situation on Terra.
“The Wrathful Songstress and the Pope-Emperor, both battered in a mutual ruin…
Ersh growing too powerful to rein in…
the Sigil-Bearers’ numbers dwindling by the day…”
Just how much time could he actually carve out for his own campaign, out of this whole mess of monsters and devils?
Just thinking about it gave Nyos a headache.
Too much of it was already set in stone.
The one die he hadn’t cast yet was this mysterious chat group.
Thinking of that young man — young in appearance, but with eyes that had clearly weathered far too much, and remarkably efficient in how he handled things — Nyos murmured to himself:
“Hope they’ve got some surprises in store for me.”
Elsewhere, after logging off, Leon found an empty alley and slowly rose into the air.
Viltrumites didn’t have that mystical Superman-brand hearing that could pick up Lois calling for help even through a vacuum.
But hearing everything there was to hear, seeing everything there was to see — that much, he could manage.
He hung upside-down in midair, sifting through the noise around him, then tracked his gaze toward the source.
The next second, a middle-aged man with an enhanced body, hard at work on his little freelance venture, got swept away by a gust of wind right in front of his victim.
Up in midair, Leon pinched the man’s leg and gave it the occasional shake.
“Can’t even lift a steel coil and you’re out here mugging people?
That desperate for a stint on the government’s dime?
Personally, I figure prison chow’s about the right fit for you.”
Before the man could even shake off his dizziness, Leon let go of his leg.
“Aaaaah—”
Timing the distance just right, Leon dove down, caught him again, hauled him back up — and repeated the whole cycle a few more times.
Finally, watching the man clutch his chest and gasp for air, Leon asked:
“You gonna talk, or what?”
“…Oh.
Right.”
After one friendly, civilized exchange between two planets, Leon dropped the man off outside the police station, then headed for the address he’d just learned.
The underworld.
A bar where people traded information.
Sure enough, a suited Black bouncer stopped him at the door.
“Sorry, sir.
Only people with clearance get through this door.”
“Just this door?”
“That’s right.”
Leon didn’t waste any words.
He walked straight up to the wall right next to it.
With a single step, he pushed straight through without the slightest resistance, as if what stood in front of him wasn’t brick at all, but a great big wad of cotton.
Right as the bouncer stood there stunned, Leon grabbed his shiny, egg-bald head and dragged him along in through the wall.
Through pipes and plumbing, through private rooms where men and women were entertaining each other, past a chorus of screams and through the backstage area.
Following the sound of hushed voices, he found the boss’s office.
Looking at the two parties sitting there, jaws dropped, he said, as casual as could be:
“Sir, your man told me I couldn’t come through that door.
So I followed your rules — I didn’t walk through that door.”
He brushed some dust off his shoulder and tossed the bouncer — buried under a heap of broken brick — onto the desk.
“He can vouch for that.”
For one second, the white-bearded boss’s brow started to furrow.
For the next second, he caught sight of the brand-new, bottomless hole behind Leon.
By the third second, his face broke into a smile:
“Mr.—no, wait, sir—what can I do for you?”
In the end, among the flood of information the eager boss handed over, Leon found a familiar face.
Machine Head — the one who talks with that electronic voice modulator.
Cross-referencing that with the stomping grounds of a few other familiar-looking villains, and sure enough, Mark’s family had to be —
“Chicago.”
Leon savored a small thrill at his own super-intelligence.
Just as he was getting ready to head out, a new group message popped up.
[The Tiger of West Junior High]: @Everyone Looks like a quest is about to kick off on my end.
I’m gonna try handling it myself first.
[The Tiger of West Junior High]: Though Fushiguro says it’s only a Grade 2 Curse on the other side.
Should be a win, right?
A dozen-some minutes later:
[The Tiger of West Junior High]: Why can’t a Grade 2 sorcerer beat a Grade 2 curse??
To be continued…