As Chloe proclaims her new name to be Chronoa the hero, something jumps from Hinata’s astral body which we quickly come to understand is her unique skill. It is soon explained that Chronoa takes Hinata’s abilities until Hinata ends up vanishing completely. This lends more believability to my crackpot theory that the Chronoa body that appears in the future where Rimuru currently is will end up housing Hinata. Despite any weird predictions I have that will definitely be wrong, Chronoa and Hinata start off to create a legend and help people. I don’t comment on it a lot, but I like the music that’s playing this section a lot. A lot of the strange symbolism with Chloe, Hinata and the hero Chronoa makes a ton more sense now. I thought they might be related in some way and at the very least it doesn’t surprise me that Chloe ends up being the hero. I thought she would be a reincarnated version of the hero instead of the other way around. And with Hinata mastering Chloe’s body – that sounds wrong on so many levels – that lends even more to my theory that she will end up taking the body in the future. What’s interesting here is that when Chloe is in charge of the body she has blue eyes and when Hinata is in charge she has purple eyes.

As much as I don’t like time travel weirdness, I do like that it is using this as an avenue to give us some more lore about the history of this world. A lot of this we knew to an extent, but seeing it happening in front of our eyes is also interesting. A thousand years before the current timeline, Granville founded the council of the Western Countries. Chronoa lets it all happen, probably because she wants the timeline to stay the same. I do think this is a fun one. Hinata’s experience fighting Veldora in the dungeon at Rimuru’s event gives her the experience to seal him when going back in time and training for another 1700 years. She learned all of his tricks when she fought him once so now she actually stands a chance. I also love Chloe telling Hinata to be reasonable because Veldora is a nice guy. He is a nice guy, but he also likes burning down villages. Either way, her experience lets her beat him with relative ease and lock him into the unlimited prison that we found him in all the way in the first episode.

There’s a little thing I didn’t fully understand about this part of the story even up to last week. I thought that Leon somehow went after Chloe to this world, but it looks like both of them might have been sent here at the same time and that is why Leon has been so desperate to find his little sister. This version of Chloe is going to disappear soon when the new version of her comes to this world, which means that Hinata will be taking over the body. My guess is that once Hinata takes over she can only stay in the Chronoa body until her real body comes to this world. Chronoa cares for Shizu who in turn trains the new Hinata when Chronoa disappears due to Hinata’s appearance. This also explains – although it didn’t need an explanation per se – why Shizu happened to be on the scene when Hinata appeared. Past Hinata and Chloe have the memories of present Hinata and Chloe, but present Hinata and Chloe only have the memories from the moment they appeared up until the present without the time-jump. Although Chloe in the present gained some of her memories back after merging with a spirit back in season 1. I think. Also, present Hinata has no memories at all because present Hinata is currently a donut. Sorry.

At the very least it gives us something conclusive about how time travelling works. It’s a very common theory for this stuff in fiction and probably the one I like the most out of all of them. Every time jump basically creates a new world. This does always makes me wonder what happens to the old worlds. You could just say that they disappear completely, but in a story like The Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint – post about this Webtoon coming soon – there is more nuance to it. I would prefer it if Chloe and Hinata’s life are basically a broken up timeline that spans from summon to present, then far past back to summon and then picks back up in the present timeline. That is just enough suspense of disbelief that I can manage in one show. 

Everything is beginning to click into its rightful place. Luminus built the ark with Chronoa in it from a request that Chloe made to her and Granville knew about it all along. This explains Luminus’ anger at Chronoa being taken because it’s her dear friend Chloe that is being taken. There’s one more question to be answered though, and that is the third personality that is in there somewhere of the actual Chronoa. It seems that this is where the power taken from Hinata went. This lets me believe that in the future, Chronoa will not just wake up as Hinata as I predicted, but instead have their own wicked personality first which will have to be dealt with. Hinata also needs to have the willpower to keep Chronoa contained for three hundred years, but she has enough trauma of her own to be experienced with bottling up your feelings. 

We also get to see the early days of Shizu and Hinata journeying together as Hinata prepares Shizu to take over her role as a hero. We even get to see what I can only guess is Fuze’s dad in Heinz. But unfortunately it is time for Hinata/Chronoa to move on. Hinata’s real body is about to appear in this world after all, and that way she will lose control of Chronoa. So instead she takes preventative measures and goes into a slumber inside the holy ark in Luminus’ castle. At the limit of her time, she gets frozen in time. Again, I’m surprised by how much I’m liking the music in this episode. It’s not something that has really stood out to me in previous episodes of the show. Perhaps it’s just because it is such an emotional episode, but it feels very well done. I’m finding myself enjoying this episode much more than I expected. And with all of that, we return back to the present day in the next episode and with a title like “where the soul resides” I’m pretty confident that my prediction that this body will end up being Hinata’s is correct. I’m glad the timestuff seems to be over for now, and I’m looking forward to next week very, very much. Until then, thanks for reading!