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“I’ve calmed down.”
“It seems so. Do you have anything you want to ask?”

Now that I had finally settled, the green-haired girl spoke to me. It seemed she was willing to answer questions, but who knew how long that would last? Better to go straight for the heart of the matter.

“You girls remember the previous worlds, don’t you?”

If my memory was correct, they had been my classmates in the upper division during the sixth world. They hadn’t made much of an impression, but they had certainly been there. And yet somehow, they now stood before me in the exact form I had in my memories. I didn’t know exactly what that implied. But one thing was clear. This world was different from all the others so far.

“We only have a clear grasp of events up to the end of two worlds ago.”
“You mean… you have memories from previous worlds?”
“Not in the way you’re thinking, Amria—though yes, we do have memories.”
“What do you mean by ‘not in the way I’m thinking’?”
“We weren’t rewound. When we say we’ve understood things since the end of two worlds ago, what we mean is that only then were we finally able to arrive in this world.”

Not rewound, what did that even mean? If they hadn’t been rewound, then even assuming they were “born” at the end of the fifth word, more than thirty years should have passed. Yet they looked unmistakably like teenagers. And that “able to arrive in this world” sounded almost like…

“We’re not beings of this world. I hope these diaries will serve as proof.”
“So they are the diaries I wrote in the sixth world?”
“They’re yours. I’m sure you recognize them. Would you like to look inside?”
“No, that won’t be necessary.”

I didn’t read the diaries offered to me. Questions took priority.

“Then tell me this, can you do anything about this endless repetition?”
“Do you mean you want to keep living? Or do you mean you want the repetition itself to end?”
“The latter.”
“Then you don’t have to worry. This is the last time. More precisely, once the next world begins, everything will end.”
“End… how?”
“World collapse. As things stand, a few days after the next reset, the world will come to an end.”

It was an outrageous claim. But if anything was outrageous, it was the situation I was already in, the looping world itself.

“What if I lived without dying?”
“Dying of old age is still dying. After that, yes. Or an irregularity might occur, and this world could end sometime during this cycle instead.”
“…Then what’s your purpose here?”
“Observation, basically. Nothing more. It’s an interesting world, so you could say we came to watch.”

An interesting world, because it repeated the same time over and over. If what the girl said was true, then at last there might be salvation. The world I had thought would never end would, before long, come to a close.

“So in other words, you won’t interfere with what I do?”
“We won’t.”
“I see… One last question. What are you?”

Whether the girl’s words were true or lies didn’t matter anymore. I had no intention of pressing further. It felt like it didn’t even matter if the girl refused to answer.

“Me? My name is Deacontiral Finis. My age is probably a few billion years. A pitiful general-purpose goddess stuck with nothing but grunt work—”

◆◆◆

“A splendid tale of revenge, wasn’t it?”
“I’m not sure if I’d call it revenge… More like this world reaping what it sowed.”

A world looping around a single woman as its anchor. It seemed that rewinding time placed a tremendous burden on the world. And it was only possible because this world was so small.

After all, this world had only a single nation. Its size wasn’t even half of an average large country. There was a sea around it, but nothing especially interesting there.

“Why did it go back only a few days this time?”
“The world didn’t have enough power left to rewind any further. I noticed it beforehand.”
“Did you tell her that, Fini?”
“I did. She looked very pleased.”

Which meant that last time, she simply accepted it, and upon the moment of her death, she dragged the collapsing world down with her. That was why she had smiled at the end. As the world crumbled around her, she smiled, happily, and yet with sorrow.

And then the world drowned in confusion and screams, before it finally shattered, just like her last laughter.