Outside the quiet room, a soft knock came at the door, pulling someone up out of the daze that crossing worlds had left behind.
"Lady Seraphia, are you awake?"
A girl's hushed voice came through the door.
It sounded young, and carefully, painstakingly polite, like a student waiting outside the staff room.
"I'm Nora, the novice sister assigned to look after you. The Hero Candidate has arrived at the church, and the Bishop asks that you come to the meeting room as soon as you can."
A Hero Candidate?
The words were strange and familiar at once, and the churn of confused thought stalled for a moment.
Only then came the sudden realization that the body had changed.
It is an odd thing to say, but one's own body really is the one existence a person 【lives with day and night】.
So a sudden change in it produces a very strange feeling indeed.
There was a distinct new weight to the head, and the ears were buried somewhere in a mass of hair; that sensation against them was no illusion.
The chest had grown heavy, and looking down, the toes were nowhere in sight—
So this is what a girl's chest is like. On somebody else it had never seemed like much of anything, but not being able to see your own toes was a genuinely novel experience.
Size... a D, maybe? Possibly more. And these clothes were strange: a black waist cincher, plus a window cut deliberately into the front, leaving the whole rounded shape of the things and that one deep valley perfectly visible.
And beyond the usual four limbs, there was an unmistakable pair of extra 【limbs】 at the back.
The sensation was bizarre. But the previous life had come with one peculiar party trick: the ability to wiggle one's ears. Controlling this new pair at the back turned out not to be very difficult at all. The two were subtly alike.
Only when those limbs were folded around to the front did they become visible: a pair of white feathered wings. Angel's wings.
"Mm..."
The sound that came out of that throat was not the slightly coarse male voice of every previous day, but a girl's voice, with something cool and distant in it.
The answer was all but shouting itself.
The strangeness of the body had left no attention to spare for the surroundings. By the time she finally caught up with herself, she registered that she was standing in a room done in thoroughgoing Western-fantasy style.
The effect was peculiar.
Not the Middle Ages as they had actually existed, but the 【Western fantasy world】 of a modern person's imagination, transplanted whole into reality.
The walls were pale grey stone brick, their surfaces left deliberately rough, yet the joints ran as neat as if a machine had cut them. A silver-white holy emblem hung on the wall, its edges worked into the ripples of hand-hammering, and the whole of it far too symmetrical.
The dark bench against the wall was carved with vines and moon patterns, its cushion dark red velvet. It looked like old church furniture, but sitting down on it gave the soft rebound only a modern chair has.
A fireplace was set into the wall, burning without a sound. The warmth in the room did not radiate out of the flames, though; it wrapped evenly around the whole body, like being back in a modern air-conditioned room.
Beyond that, the round table held a silver pot, a cup, a white towel, and several pieces of confectionery she could not have named. Everything sat where a hand could reach it, tidy as though it had all been prepared well in advance.
In the corner of the room stood a broad wardrobe and a broad, smooth full-length mirror—
Well. Wherever this was, at least the plan of getting rich off manufacturing glass and mirrors was dead on arrival.
Time... to confirm what she had turned into.
The click of high heels echoed through the quiet lounge, along with the awkwardness of being forced up onto her toes by the shoes.
The wings at her back did not seem to be mere decoration?
The thought had barely formed when instinct took over: the wings simply spread, slowly, and she floated up off the floor.
Deeply unscientific.
But very magical.
The wings did not need to beat. Spread like that was enough to drift and move, so she crossed several metres without a sound and came to rest before the mirror.
And in that moment, the one who had crossed over saw her new shape.
The girl in the mirror wore an expression of surprise.
A clean, exquisitely made face. White hair grown to almost absurd length, the eyebrows and those long lashes white as well; were it not for the faintest wash of gold in the eyes, the whole person would probably turn invisible on falling naked into a snowfield.
She knew this face. It had been converted from anime styling into photoreal flesh, but the features were far too distinctive to miss at a glance.
It was a character from 《Song of the Lost Supplicants》: Seraphia Vail.
The clothes were that character's instantly recognizable costume, down to the last detail.
A white clerical robe draped over her, cuffs and hem embroidered in pale gold. It did carry a certain flavour of a church maiden, or an apostle of the angels.
The chest, the sides of the waist and the thighs were another matter entirely.
The cut-outs worked in expressly to display the valley at her front; the half-shrugged-off overcoat and the lining beneath it that bared her slender shoulders; a skirt guaranteed to flash the instant she moved, if "skirt" was even the word for something engineered to add 【spice】; and then the white over-knee socks sheathing thighs with a little softness to them, and the heels that drew her legs out longer still.
【Illustration 1】
(An AI-knocked-up character sheet. Roughly like this.)
Every one of these was a carefully designed element, and the design philosophy behind them was, unmistakably, "the player's eyes will absolutely travel downward."
And behind that clerical regalia the enormous white wings spread from her back, a wingspan of easily three metres by eye, and then... there was the halo, that pale gold angelic ring of pure energy floating over her head. However hard she shook it, the halo stayed directly above, giving off its soft glow.
《Song of the Lost Supplicants》. She had never actually played it, only ever cloud-gamed it through forum slap-fights and character threads, but anyone who had spent any time at all in those circles would have found it hard not to know the title.
On the surface, it was a fairly standard harem-oriented isekai RPG.
A male lead chosen by destiny, a fated adventure, an assortment of beautiful girls met along the way, plus affection ratings, personal events, route branches, and a by-the-book main story that ends with the world saved.
At least, that was what the marketing said.
And Seraphia Vail was one of the most notorious pieces of malice in the whole game.
She joins the protagonist's party early in the story.
An affection value is provided, and it can be raised through this interaction or that one, and events that look a great deal like feelings warming up will even fire.
But there is no romance ending. This character will, without exception, turn hostile before the late game proper begins, and as a boss who is very hard to beat at that.
Nor is there any hidden option along the lines of "if the player just tries hard enough, fate can be changed."
The only thing all that affection banked in the early game affects is the difficulty of fighting her later.
If the affection is high enough, Miss Angel goes easy on you.
If it falls short, then before the late-game plot begins she hands the player a brutal boss fight that will drain very nearly every resource they have.
So this character's reputation has always been a delicate matter.
Plenty of people love her.
More people curse the dev team.
Because from the design alone, Seraphia was built to main-heroine specification, full stop.
The white-haired-character angle by itself meant a great many players bought the game purely for the white-haired angel girl on the cover.
Only to play through to the end and discover that the character they had long since reserved as their cyber-wife could not, under any circumstances, be wed.
The person who was now Seraphia Vail let out a soft sigh.
What a drag.
Granted, being sprung from a thoroughly mediocre life was a genuinely happy development.
But given the choice, she would rather not have become Seraphia. She would rather have become the male lead from the original work, the one called Shu: the man who gets to gather any number of remarkable girls into his arms, beloved by the world, its self-evident centre.
Knock, knock.
The same soft knocking came from beyond the door a second time.
"Lady Seraphia... are you ready?"
This time the voice was even more cautious than before.
"The Hero Candidate in your charge is already waiting in the meeting room."
That lucky soul chosen by fate was waiting not far beyond the door.
Her gaze fell back to the mirror, where the angel girl in the glass wore a gloomy expression.
An ending where she dies. A perfect life still out of reach.
Enough.
There was no room now to sink into unnecessary feelings like this.
Seraphia drew a deep breath and, facing the mirror, adjusted that exquisite face back to a normal expression.
There were a great many things in this world that could not be changed, and anyone who wallowed in their feelings instead of facing reality was a pure idiot, and life would fling them off.
She sorted quickly through what mattered right now.
First: as a character who accompanies the protagonist from the opening stretch of the game, and given that this situation appeared to be the first meeting with that protagonist, it should still be the early game.
Second: the certainty that she would eventually end up opposing the protagonist for some reason. The specific reason was unknown, but once enough information had been gathered afterwards, there might well be a way to avoid it. Her opponent was the man the world doted on, after all, and making an enemy of someone like that was genuinely unwise. And as the Hero of destiny, he was bound to be off saving the world or something...
She opened the door. Standing outside was a small sister with the air of a little animal about her, her face not what anyone would call pretty, but clean and neat. A broad clerical wimple covered her head, letting only a few soft strands escape at the sides of her face.
The instant their eyes met, the little sister dropped her head.
A clerical robe in white and black with gold ornament: what this little sister wore was self-evidently the clothing a member of the clergy ought to wear. By comparison, the thing on her own body looked for all the world like some kind of s*x-shop outfit.
"Lady Seraphia, please come with me to the meeting room. I'm terribly sorry... there are more Hero Candidates this time than in any generation before, and His Holiness has further proposed that every one of them be accompanied by a 【Holy Wing】, which is why you have been asked to assist when you have only just joined the Church... the necessary details will all be explained to you together shortly."
An extremely familiar flavour—
That particular kind of unreasonable demand handed down from above, where in the end the only person pushed out to explain it is one pitiful junior staffer.
Seraphia laughed softly.
For someone who had just crossed over and understood nothing at all, this situation was very good.