After thoroughly enjoying Raize's specially prepared cuisine, both humans and dragons were extremely satisfied. These dragons never placed much importance on food, yet Raize's cooking allowed them to genuinely savor the experience.
Even the big-eater Kanna was completely stuffed after Raize prepared extra portions for her.
"So anyway…"
After gulping down Raize's special liquor in one go, Kobayashi began acting drunk, arguing with her coworker Takiya about the topic of Fafnir as a butler.
"I like butlers around fifty years old!"
Kobayashi shouted with a flushed face as she argued loudly with Takiya. While speaking, she boldly used her drunken courage to repeatedly pat the shoulders of Fafnir, who was fully focused on gaming.
"This kind doesn't even need consideration!"
Fafnir, his body swaying slightly from the pats, continued playing his game with a blank expression and made no move, merely protesting coldly.
"Stop it. You're interfering with my game."
Smack! Smack! Smack!
On the other side, the equally drunk Takiya joined in, teaming up with Kobayashi to attack from both sides, also patting Fafnir's other shoulder under the excuse of drunkenness.
"No, no. Young, handsome, sadistic butlers are also very appealing these days."
"I already told you to stop!"
Fafnir's body swayed left and right under the repeated pats. His expressionless face gradually turned into a twitching grimace. If not for the fact that these two humans were at least tolerable, he would have acted long ago.
Raize held his wine cup and drank together with Lucoa and Tohru, watching the scene like an amusing farce. Seeing Fafnir suffer was quite entertaining.
Treating this harmonious scene as post-meal and post-drink entertainment, Lucoa drained her glass, then turned her head and smiled at Raize. She slightly opened her eyelids, and a glimmer of spiritual light flashed within her heterochromatic eyes as she carefully examined him.
Strangely enough, Raize's strength made him extremely sensitive to unusual gazes, yet he felt no reaction at all to Lucoa's curious and probing stare.
Because he felt no gaze whatsoever. From Raize's perception, Lucoa was merely smiling without any abnormalities.
He was unable to sense the subtle gaze of the unimaginably powerful Feathered Serpent God.
Lucoa bore no ill will toward Raize, but she was deeply curious. Among all the humans present, only this one was completely unfathomable to her. Takiya was an ordinary human. Kobayashi was a human with exceptional magical potential, and she also carried part of the power of a gods sword within her.
Lucoa could even read minds if she wished. She had secretly done so with Kobayashi, the human who sincerely treated Tohru, and knew that Kobayashi was not the scheming type of human from their world. She was pure and kind-hearted, and Lucoa acknowledged her for being able to bring about such changes in Tohru.
But Raize was entirely different. As a human, he was completely unreadable. With Lucoa's power that transcended the limits of worlds, even the loss of her divinity had not diminished her strength in the slightest.
Realizing she could not see through Raize's essence greatly piqued Lucoa's interest. She chose a compromise, attaching the power of time to her eyes to glimpse his past.
Yet the result disappointed her. At most, she could see Raize from a few hours ago. Anything further back was completely invisible.
This completely ignited Lucoa's curiosity toward Raize.
Who was Lucoa? She was a dragon who had come from another world and settled in the human realm during ancient times, before humanity's birth. In this world's mythology, she was one of Mesopotamia's creator gods and supreme deities.
Her strength was unfathomable, such that only the most underhanded methods could ever be used against her.
A frontal confrontation with Lucoa? Even beings who understood her true nature lacked that confidence. Even if Tohru transformed into her true dragon form, she would still be smaller than one of Lucoa's eyes.
In the original anime and manga, Lucoa's true form was vast like a mountain range, impossible to see in its entirety at a glance.
A human whom Lucoa could not accurately observe was something she had never encountered before.
Since she could not see his past, she would instead use her power to prophesy his future.
Her future prophecy resembled the deductions of great powers in Eastern fantasy novels—similar, yet different—but sufficient to yield useful information.
"Hm—"
An arcane fluctuation imperceptible to everyone present surfaced within Lucoa. Her heterochromatic eyes etched with mysterious patterns began to shine with brilliant starlight.
Even stripped of her divinity, Lucoa could still be called a god. Feathered Serpent God or Dragon God, it mattered little—strength was the ultimate truth.
As she activated her prophetic ability using her own power to explore Raize's future, what appeared before her remained a pitch-black fog. At most, she could see Raize's state for tomorrow.
Lucoa continued extending her prophetic perspective. To her surprise, the further she looked into his future, the thinner the black fog became, allowing her to glimpse tiny fragments of information.
A faint smile curled at her lips. Seeing an opening, Lucoa increased her power and directly accelerated toward a more distant future. With her curiosity fully ignited, she was determined to see what made this special human tick.
The scenery before her gradually became clearer. At the very least, she could now see bits of Raize within the black fog.
However, the information was still fragmented and incomplete, far from forming anything meaningful. Lucoa continued accelerating toward the future.
After crossing vast stretches of black fog, she finally stopped when she felt she could see clearly.
Then, a sudden and abnormal change caught her completely off guard.
Crack…
"…"
Her perspective suddenly felt bound by an overwhelming force. Blood-red divine might, like the universe's first explosion at creation, completely submerged her future vision. Her thoughts nearly came to a halt, threatening to drag her into total oblivion.
The scene before her eyes was now perfectly clear, yet before she could feel joy, Lucoa keenly sensed that something was terribly wrong.
Why was everything within her vision completely frozen, like a photograph? Was this truly the future revealed by prophecy?
The swaying of the forest, the whisper of the wind, the flow of water—all entered Lucoa's sight, yet everything was motionless.
Her vision could no longer advance. It was as though her gaze itself had become part of this frozen panorama, dyed with its stillness.
"O time, stop your flow! For among all things, only you are the most beautiful!"
With only a sliver of consciousness still active, Lucoa seemed to hear a deep murmur that brutally severed the timeline and pierced through past and future alike.
That voice resounded within her soul—like a chant, like a sigh, and even more like a declaration.
It forced all things to feel its intense will. Just as it proclaimed: time, stop, and turn this fleeting instant into eternity.
Come, savor this wondrous moment with me. Everything within this boundless existence shall remain forever unchanged. Anything I do not acknowledge shall be frozen in place.
This is the eternal paradise I cherish—and also the infinite hell that plunges all things into deathly stillness.
That overwhelmingly domineering will spoke and governed all phenomena through divine authority. Lucoa, merely a tiny part of this vast existence, was insignificant by comparison, stuck within this vision, unable to move forward or return.
Unable to resist this tyrannical will, Lucoa struggled in vain before sinking into it. Yet within her vision appeared something that differed from the frozen world—a figure with his back turned toward her.
From behind, she could see that he had dark skin and wore silver armor. The patterns on the armor resembled serpent scales, making him appear both sacred and ominous. Within the frozen world, his blood-red hair gently swayed.
Behind him floated eight black-and-crimson blade-like wings, each nearly equal to his height. As they rotated, every single blade felt capable of severing her across the distant timeline.
Simply standing there, his presence made any observer believe that he alone reigned supreme over all existence.
But could such a being, radiating a world-crushing aura of domination, truly be called "human"?
"Hm?"
Suddenly, the red-haired man seemed to sense something unusual and slightly turned his body. His blood-red eyes, the same color as his hair, glanced backward at the being daring to peak him.
Those crimson pupils wavered as they quietly locked onto Lucoa.
In an instant—
"Ugh!!"
He did nothing. He used no power. With just that single glance, Lucoa felt as though her soul was burdened by the weight of a real universe, stripped of all freedom.
Though he had done nothing, his gaze carried an immeasurable "mass," crushing down on her with overwhelming force.
For the first time in her life, Lucoa felt small. That such a word could apply to her was utterly inconceivable.
"Oh? Interesting. From the past…"
The blood-haired youth's originally expressionless face turned amused. His tone carried a hint of surprise and delight. Yet the words he spoke made Lucoa tremble.
He… he noticed!?
"At some point in my past… the only one who could do something like this is… Lucoa. You bastard, you're watching me, aren't you!!"
The blood-haired youth fully turned around, wearing a teasing smile. Those blood-red eyes seemed to stare directly at Lucoa through the vision.
Behind him, the cluster of wing-blades reacted as if alive, sensing something daring to confront their master. They emitted ringing blade sounds, like ferocious weapons containing boundless destructive force. Like the mythical eight-headed serpent Yamata no Orochi raising its head, they aimed directly at Lucoa's vision.
A single slash, powerful enough to split the universe itself, completely engulfed her perspective. The image shattered instantly, losing all form.
At the same time, all the visual memories Lucoa had obtained shattered as well.
In reality, Lucoa had been maintaining that same posture at the table for quite some time, her expression vacant, until a certain dragon maid called out to her.
"Lucoa… Miss Lucoa… Miss Lucoa!!!"
Bonk!
A series of urgent calls echoed as a pat suddenly landed on Lucoa's shoulder. She was sitting at the dining table, still holding her wine cup.
"Ah!?"
Tohru shouted directly into Lucoa's ear. With external stimulation, Lucoa severed the vision. After her heterochromatic eyes wandered in confusion for a moment, she returned to the present and immediately covered her ears, looking at Tohru.
Seeing Lucoa regain awareness, Tohru stopped and asked curiously, "Miss Lucoa, did you get drunk too quickly because you haven't had alcohol in so long? I called you so many times and you didn't respond at all."
From the dragon maid's point of view, Lucoa had been squinting absentmindedly at Raize the entire time, staring at him as if lost in thought, until Raize left to go to the restroom. When she noticed that something seemed off about Lucoa, she directly called out to her, but Lucoa's expression never changed and she did not respond at all. She had assumed that Lucoa had simply fallen asleep with her eyes half-closed.
Lucoa rubbed her head. The violent, forced interruption of her exploration had caused a bit of backlash. It was nothing serious, but the information and memories related to that frozen perspective were also severed and vanished along with the backlash.
She no longer remembered the blood-haired young man.
All Lucoa remembered was that she had been rapidly advancing through the black fog of the future vision. After that, her memory was completely blank.
She naturally noticed that a portion of her memory was missing, but she could not recall it at all, because those memories had already been taken away—or perhaps cast into a place unknown to her.
"I'm fine. I just feel a little dizzy after not drinking for so long. Mr. Raize's wine is truly delicious."
She smiled and reassured Tohru that she was fine, but as for Raize's existence, Lucoa's interest in him had now risen to an extreme level.
Anyone who could cause problems in her prophetic exploration and make her lose the most crucial pieces of information was, no matter how one looked at it, not an ordinary human powerhouse.
Although she had lost her memories, she had also indirectly obtained some information. An existence whose future she, Lucoa, could not accurately foresee must inevitably be stronger than her present self in the future. The causal chain involved was not something she was qualified to pry, and the missing memories just now were certainly the result of backlash.
That information alone was enough to make Lucoa deeply interested. In the future, she would pay close attention to this special human named Raize.
It seemed that returning to this world once again had not been entirely without gain. At the very least, she had encountered an "interesting" person.