After Yuto served Gilgamesh his barbecue, the king finished his meal and eventually left with Enkidu and Siduri.
Before departing, however, Gilgamesh gave Yuto one final instruction: if anything happened to Sakura, he wanted to know immediately.
The King of Heroes looked unusually serious when he said it, and only after Yuto nodded and promised to contact him did Gilgamesh finally leave with peace of mind.
Once the three of them were gone, no new customers arrived for quite some time.
It was already well past midnight, naturally one of the quieter stretches of the restaurant's opening hours, and after cleaning away the plates Gilgamesh had left behind, everyone found themselves with nothing particularly urgent to do.
Yuto, Tohru, Erina, and Hisako sat together and chatted casually about amusing memories from the past and various things they had encountered during the day.
Yuto occasionally contributed something of his own, though most of the conversation was inevitably carried by Tohru's seemingly endless stream of chatter.
"Oh, right. Tohru."
Yuto suddenly called her name.
The dragon girl immediately turned toward him. "What is it, Boss?"
"Tomorrow, could I trouble you to watch the restaurant for me?"
Tohru froze for a moment before looking at him in confusion. "Eh? Boss isn't going to be here tomorrow?"
"Mm."
The moment Yuto nodded, confusion quickly gave way to restlessness.
"Why aren't you taking me with you?! I want to go out with Boss too!"
She did not even know what Yuto intended to do tomorrow, nor did she seem particularly interested in finding out before objecting.
She simply wanted to follow him.
At that moment, Tohru looked remarkably like a kitten desperately competing for attention, cute enough that Yuto could not help smiling.
"Didn't we already make plans tonight? Next time, we're going to the amusement park together. Don't tell me you've already forgotten, Tohru."
He raised one finger and lightly flicked her forehead, and the crisp little tap seemed to knock her thoughts back into place.
"Oh. Right."
Tohru scratched her head and gave him a foolish, embarrassed smile.
She had become so worked up over the thought of Yuto going somewhere without her that she had completely forgotten about the promise they had made only a short while ago.
"So, can I leave the restaurant to you tomorrow?" Yuto asked again.
This time, Tohru nodded firmly without the slightest hesitation, her expression practically shouting, Leave it to me!
For once, she looked surprisingly dependable!
"But aren't we closed during the day?"
She quickly noticed the obvious problem.
If the restaurant was not even open during daylight hours, there did not seem to be much reason for her to stay behind and watch the place.
"It's not about keeping the restaurant open. I'm worried something might genuinely happen with Hestia and Sakura."
The smile on Yuto's face faded as his expression became more serious.
If anything unexpected happened to Sakura during the gods' meeting, there was a very good chance that she and Hestia would come straight to the restaurant.
Having Tohru here to receive them would make things considerably easier.
Tohru immediately understood.
She had been listening earlier while Sakura explained everything, even though she had not joined the conversation herself.
"I understand! Leave it to me, Boss!"
She confidently patted her chest.
Yuto nodded. "If Sakura and Hestia really do come here, contact me immediately."
Tohru answered with an equally earnest nod before immediately asking, "Then what is Boss doing after sunrise?"
Erina and Hisako also turned toward him.
For some reason, his plans seemed unusually interesting to all three girls.
"I have something to take care of. Don't be so curious."
Yuto looked at them helplessly.
He had absolutely no intention of announcing that Utaha had invited him out shopping.
After what had happened yesterday, with Tohru and Kanna secretly following him during his outing with Megumi, he had decided that revealing his destination beforehand was probably not the wisest idea.
Tohru obediently nodded and let the matter go.
Erina and Hisako, however, exchanged a glance and silently reached the same conclusion.
There was definitely something suspicious going on.
Still, Yuto had already told them not to pry, and continuing to ask would have been rude, so the two girls reluctantly abandoned the subject as well.
...
Time passed quietly after that.
The hour hand on the restaurant clock gradually moved halfway between three and four, leaving only another half hour before four in the morning and the final stretch of the restaurant's opening hours.
Outside, the sky remained mostly black, though the darkness was no longer complete.
A faint, hazy blue-white glow had begun seeping across the distant horizon, carrying the first suggestion that sunrise was approaching.
The crowds along Ichinose Street had thinned considerably too.
Men in business suits were almost nowhere to be seen anymore; after spending the night indulging themselves along the street, most office workers had already hurried home
No matter how much fun they had during the night, they still had work the next day, and that was something they could not afford to neglect.
The people who remained wandering through Ichinose Street at this hour were mostly older men, ranging from idle people with nothing better to do to upper-level company employees, managers, and members of various underground organizations.
Compared with younger workers, these people generally possessed far more control over their own schedules.
Inside the restaurant, meanwhile, something genuinely unusual happened.
Ainz and Rimuru logged out before it was even four in the morning.
For those two to stop gaming this early was rare enough that Yuto immediately looked over in surprise.
"You're heading back already?"
Neither Ainz nor Rimuru possessed anything resembling a normal human face anymore, so judging their moods through expression alone was practically impossible.
Even so, both of them were radiating an unusually serious atmosphere.
"Mm!"
Rimuru answered with surprising determination.
Yuto stared at the pair for a moment longer, as though he had just witnessed some rare natural phenomenon.
"What is it?" Ainz asked in his deep voice. "Is this really so strange?"
"Yeah. Very strange. I honestly didn't expect you two to log off this early."
Ainz and Rimuru both fell silent, and for a few seconds an awkward atmosphere settled between them.
"You're going back early because there's something you need to handle?"
Fortunately, Yuto quickly moved the conversation along.
"Ahem. Didn't we mention it while eating sukiyaki earlier?" Rimuru cleared his throat. "The plan for Ainz and me to cooperate and conquer our respective worlds. We're going back now to start making preparations."
Ainz silently nodded beside him.
Yuto stared blankly at the pair.
He had already heard the plan earlier, but he had not expected them to begin acting on it immediately.
"You're starting today?"
"The sooner everything is resolved, the sooner we can relax," Ainz answered with complete seriousness.
"Dragging things out unnecessarily will only interfere with our gaming."
Yuto's smile became slightly strained.
So in the end, it still came back to playing games.
"All right. Then good luck."
There was not much else Yuto could say.
After all, he had absolutely no experience conquering worlds, so verbal encouragement was about the only useful contribution he could make.
"Mm. Don't worry. We already have a plan."
Ainz nodded confidently, and since Yuto was not particularly curious about the details, he simply smiled and nodded along.
Then Ainz suddenly spoke again.
"Kamisaka, can you directly connect our two worlds? I mean allowing us to travel between them without using the restaurant as an intermediary."
Yuto's expression changed slightly.
The question was obviously related to their plan. If Ainz's world and Rimuru's world could be linked directly, coordinating their forces and transporting people or supplies between them would become considerably easier.
But directly connecting two independent worlds was anything but a trivial request.
Yuto fell silent as the idea genuinely caught his interest.
If such a thing were possible, the consequences for both worlds would extend far beyond simply placing two forces beside each other.
Until now, he had never seriously considered attempting something like this, mostly because the concept itself sounded impossible.
Every world existed independently.
Even beings of unimaginable power ultimately lived as part of their own respective worlds.
Take Hestia's world, for example.
It contained both a divine realm and a mortal realm, and those places might appear separate enough to have entirely different rules and inhabitants, but when viewed as part of a greater whole, both were still components of the same world.
If a world were compared to a cookie, then the divine realm and mortal realm were like two halves divided by a groove running down the middle.
The halves might be called by different names and appear separated from each other, but in the end, they still belonged to the same cookie.
What Ainz was proposing was fundamentally different.
It was closer to taking two completely separate cookies and somehow physically joining them together—or perhaps trying to combine a cookie with a piece of meat.
The countless changes that might occur naturally within a single world were one thing.
Joining two fundamentally different worlds belonged to an entirely different level of transformation, something so absurd that most people would never believe it possible in the first place.
Yet Yuto found himself genuinely curious.
Ever since gaining the restaurant, he had gradually become accustomed to encountering things that should have been impossible.
He still had no understanding of the restaurant's true origin, but somewhere along the way he had begun to feel instinctively that the "restaurant" might possess a significance far greater than that of any single "world."
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the restaurant existed on a level above worlds themselves.
To anyone else, the idea of directly connecting two independent worlds would sound ridiculous.
But to Yuto, knowing what this restaurant was already capable of, there seemed to be the faintest possibility that it might actually be achievable.
Could he do it?
Or rather, could the restaurant do it?
As Yuto sank deeper into thought, a voice suddenly sounded inside his mind.
The instant he heard it, he somehow knew what it was.
The voice belonged to the restaurant.
The sensation was extraordinarily strange, like meeting someone on the street whom you were certain you had never seen before, yet somehow feeling just as certain that you had known them for your entire life.
Yuto knew he had never heard the restaurant's voice before. Even so, it did not feel unfamiliar in the slightest.
If anything, it felt impossibly familiar, as though the presence behind that voice had always been there and he was only now becoming aware of it.
The voice remained in his mind for only a brief moment before fading away.
Once it finished speaking, a faint smile unconsciously appeared on Yuto's lips.
He looked toward Ainz.
"Sorry. I can't."
Ainz did not appear particularly disappointed.
He had already anticipated that possibility, and besides, he had prepared another method.
"In that case, it's fine."
He spoke thoughtfully in his deep voice.
Ainz and Rimuru chatted with Yuto for a little while longer before finally leaving the restaurant.
Fafnir, meanwhile, remained stubbornly seated at the table with his gaming headset still covering his head.
With the large black helmet over him while he sat perfectly rigid and upright, he looked almost like an enormous lollipop planted in a chair.
Tohru could only sigh.
Even after learning that the so-called expert on television had lied to her about gaming, seeing Fafnir in this state still made her instinctively worry that he was somehow ruining himself.
Yuto, however, was no longer paying any attention to Fafnir.
His thoughts remained fixed on the words the restaurant had spoken inside his mind.
'Connecting worlds... isn't possible yet?'
He quietly repeated the answer to himself, paying particular attention to its wording.
The restaurant had not simply told him that connecting worlds was impossible.
It had said it was not possible yet.
And that one additional word changed the meaning considerably.
Because if it was not possible yet...
Didn't that imply that someday, once some unknown condition had been fulfilled, directly connecting entirely separate worlds might actually become possible?
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