Coming out of the meeting room, Seraphia rather felt she had just sat through several hours of new-employee orientation.
The Bishop, along with a whole pile of clergy whose names she had not retained, had taken turns telling her a whole pile of things.
From the meaning and the duties represented by her position as a Holy Wing of the Church, to another whole pile of matters concerning Hero Candidates, and finally a commission temporarily assigned to her and to that protagonist of the game.
Only when the last of them finally said "the specifics are all written on the commission sheet" did she follow them out of the church, weak with relief—
It was not all bad, though. At the very least she had crossed over at a good moment, and having someone explain all this mess to her beat groping about blind on her own.
Next came a proper look around the streets of another world.
The streets outside the church had more life to them than she had imagined. The flagstones had been worn glossy by passing wheels, and the wonderfully distinctive otherworld houses leaned against one another shoulder to shoulder, shops with signboards among them. One glance was enough to spot a shop hung with a 【Red Potion】 sign, where she assumed you could buy the recovery medicine every game requires.
The passers-by included women carrying baskets, and adventurers in short cloaks going past along the roadside, but what stood out was that some of the people mixed in among them had animal ears.
【Knew it. An isekai really does have to have beast-eared girls...】
She could not help sighing over it inwardly.
Hoofbeats and the calls of hawkers drifted over now and then from further off, and the air held bread, leather, and a little of the damp of stone brick after rain.
"So, Miss Seraphia... shall we begin searching for the monster's traces now?"
What pulled her loose, drifting thoughts back was a voice from behind her. The pair of white wings at her back, which had spread a little as she relaxed, drew slightly taut under Shu's gaze.
Shu. The protagonist of the story, the harem lead ordained by fate. For the moment he was only one of several Hero Candidates the Church had selected, but to Seraphia, who knew part of the plot, the fact that this man would become the Hero was absolute.
Although... he was a little different from what she had pictured.
As Seraphia turned, she assembled a smile, and looked at the young man standing behind her.
Pale grey hair that had not been deliberately arranged, the loose strands at his forehead hanging down to half-cover a pair of amber eyes. He looked slightly on the frail side, dressed in a traveller's outfit that was old but very neatly kept. A longsword with a faded scabbard hung at his waist.
【Don't tell me that's the finest sword in the village, handed to him by the village head when he set out from some little rural hamlet?】
Come to think of it, this gingerly way of coming over to make conversation was something she had only ever seen in her previous life, when that childhood friend of hers who had been single since the womb tried to talk to a woman.
A moment ago, among the church people, he had looked considerably more natural.
Completely different now.
Probably because Seraphia's strongest impression of this person came mostly from the howlingly funny fan works about him on the forums, and from the game cover where he stood ringed by heroines.
He was trying as hard as he could to keep his eyes on Seraphia's face whenever they met hers, but she still noticed his gaze drifting helplessly downward.
Excellent. Hero Candidate Shu had posted a time of under ten seconds in the Don't Look There Challenge.
Seraphia could understand it. A pair of E-cups plus a costume designed with a skylight cut open to expose the valley really would pull at people's eyes. But that did not mean that she, with a male soul still installed inside this body, enjoyed being looked at that way.
"Excuse me?"
"Ah! Sorry, sorry..."
He wrenched his head away at once, and a visible flush rose across that rather fair face.
So pure-hearted about it that, if you did not know better, you would take him for some male undergraduate.
"The Bishop should have made this quite clear just now. The commission proceeds chiefly on your judgement, and I will step in to protect your safety when it becomes necessary. Please don't feel any hesitation."
Seraphia smiled gently, using the manner of speech she had learned socially in her previous life: polite, and calculated to put distance between herself and the other person.
【This is a commission the Church entrusted to this Hero Candidate, after all. My job is only to make sure the guy doesn't die. And a few kind words to leave a good impression can't hurt. If we absolutely have to end up enemies later, he might go a little easier on me. Though I say I'll protect him... I still have no idea at all how you actually move mana around to fight with it... Still, going by physical ability alone, this feels like the sort of body that can punch a person clean out of sight, so it should... be fine, right?】
Miss Angel was, underneath it all, still not entirely sure of herself.
"...Then I'll begin the commission at my own pace."
Shu stepped out in front of Seraphia and drew from inside his coat the special item the Church had provided: a compass of some sort, used to track anomalous monsters.
The platinum compass bore the Church's own gold tracery, along with a relief of the moon as its sacred symbol.
【The church of this world... uses the moon as its symbol, of all things. That's fairly strange.】
"As I recall, this tracks the mana traces a monster leaves behind automatically. But my precision with mana isn't high, so in all likelihood I'll only find the residual traces, and we may need to spend a little longer searching, so..."
"Mm. Please don't let it trouble you."
Seraphia spread her wings, and her heels left the ground.
As long as she never touched down, she did not have to wrestle with those shoes.
"I can watch the road for you from up high. I'll tell you if I spot anything unusual."
"Ohh... how dependable."
【So that wasn't my imagination after all.】
Seraphia studied his profile. He had probably barely spoken to a girl from childhood on, and his reactions were much the same as her own once were.
The commission began.
While Shu searched in concentration along the mana trail the needle pointed out, Miss Angel followed unhurriedly through the air behind him, looking around with curiosity at everything strange and new.
"Lady Angel, please, take this!"
Another apple was pressed into Shu's arms.
Seraphia looked down at the pile growing steadily higher in his arms, and for the first time felt that her standing as a Holy Wing was something of a nuisance.
Shu did not complain. He only hitched up a paper package that was about to slide loose.
She looked away.
【...Perhaps fly over the streets a little less next time.】
Watching Shu walk ahead of her carrying an assortment of goods, Miss Angel could not help feeling a thread of awkwardness.
"Mm... it should be right about here."
Shu, laden with parcels large and small, spoke up and cut off her woolgathering, pulling her attention back to the matter in front of them.
Without their noticing, they had left the ordinary streets and their din of voices for an old, abandoned quarter, and what stood before them was a derelict church building. Having spent that very day inside a similar structure, she recognized the style.
'Uuu, uuu, uuu...'
The sound of a small child crying carried over from further in, though there was something unreal about it, not quite like a true sound.
【What is that...?】
Seraphia's golden eyes went wide as she stared at the abandoned church before her.
Grief, fear, hunger...
It was a very strange sensation.
Just as eyes can see colour, ears can hear sound, and a nose can smell scent—
She had used some sense she could not herself account for, and had felt 【emotion】. The emotions of others.
Shu walked slowly up to the doorway of the derelict church.
"Even without using the compass, I can feel it. The air of a 【monster】."
But when Miss Angel followed him to the church door, uncertain and on edge, what she felt was a kind of closeness.
That powerful warmth of hearing your own home dialect, suddenly, far from home.
Behind these half-open church doors there ought to be a being much like herself. Frailer than she was.
"Miss Seraphia, I'm going in."
The young man's whole bearing sharpened in an instant. The naive, bashful fluster of the pure-hearted undergraduate was gone from those amber eyes, replaced by something resolute.
His hand settled on his sword hilt, and he shoved the doors open hard, revealing an interior much like a church chapel.
As the doors swung wide, a layer of old dust lifted inside the church.
The pews on both sides were furred with dust. Only in the very back row had someone rubbed out a small clear patch.
The crying was coming from there.
A small figure was curled up on the pew, wrapped in cloth too filthy to have a colour. It kept its head down, its shoulders jerking, as though fighting desperately to hold the sound in.
Shu's hand stopped on his hilt.
"...A monster?"
At the sound, the figure jerked its head up.
It did not lunge at them.
It only jumped down from the pew, trying to hide behind the altar.
Broken wood underfoot tripped it.
The small body went down on the floor, and one corner of the cloth fell open.
Seraphia saw a broken white halo floating above the child's head, and at her back, a single white feathered wing paired with one malformed, twisted, grotesque wing of flesh.
And when the small thing raised its head, what Seraphia saw on that face, so nearly a human child's, was one eye on the one side, and three on the other.
【This is... a monster? But this shape, this feeling... it's the same 'thing' as me, isn't it?】
The terror in those four eyes, on seeing the pair of them standing frozen in astonishment in the doorway, turned within moments into hope.