"Yes, so he found a way to escape his debt."
The light woman's voice continued to laugh. Though Emilia was clever, she was somewhat unable to sort out the temporal relationship at the moment. She went over the entire sequence of events in her heart once more, then discovered in surprise that the other party was right.
The contract had been signed in the present, so only its present self was qualified to collect the debt. But after truly following time to reach the present, Thomas Bennett had gone to the past, and its past self had not signed the contract, so it could not collect the debt.
This seemed to have become an unsolvable problem, and unsolvable meant that the man whose hand had just been severed appeared to have broken free from the Ancient One in the Woods' restraints through this method, gained immense power from the being behind the door, and even avoided having the destiny of the Chosen Ones seek him out again by voluntarily admitting defeat.
Emilia vaguely felt that everything tonight had been a scheme. In this scheme, she had been used, becoming the person who gave the other party an opportunity to cast aside everything and gain freedom.
She had come tonight filled with unease, concerned with how to defeat one powerful enemy after another and finally stand before the Ancient One in the Woods together with Shade. Yet she had never expected that the first "gatekeeper" had planned from the very beginning to use tonight's opportunity to completely escape all of this.
Having lived freely since childhood, Emilia Sinode did not truly understand the concept of "freedom." But after figuring everything out, she somehow understood just how important "freedom" was to those trapped deep within the vortex.
"The Bennett Family of Vesta