The sensation was a strange one.
If she had to draw a comparison with something from her previous life, it was like playing a fighting game: she had only pressed one key, and the character she controlled automatically performed a long string of moves, from the block through to the interposed counter, the whole thing completed with a single button.
By the time her thoughts had caught up, it had already turned into a standoff, with her gripping a great bow of light levelled at her opponent.
And just as the thrill of handling herself with room to spare in a fight came welling up, the sound of a burning roof beam breaking reached her.
【That direction is...】
The pale gold eyes could not help drifting that way for a moment. In her perception of emotion, there was a person beneath that beam about to come down.
If Seraphia left it alone, the beam breaking and falling would absolutely take that person's life.
【Anyone who's been in a fire this long should be past saving already... and even if I wanted to do something about it now, it's probably far too late... the enemy in front of me is no pushover either, I'm not skilled enough at fighting yet, and if I make any unnecessary movement that shouldn't be there, she'll probably seize the opening...】
In this second life, Seraphia wanted to be as careful and cautious as she possibly could.
After all, as an angel-monster she seemed unlikely even to go through the ordinary human cycle of birth, ageing, sickness and death. For a body with limitless power like this one, dying of old age was a very distant matter.
"Wingfolk of the church. We're not enemies, are we?"
Wingfolk, so called, seemed to be a kind of demihuman: a demihuman race whose two arms were wings, along the lines of the traditional harpy image.
Calling a proper, genuine angel of the church a thing like that made this woman aggravating well beyond the ordinary run.
Miss Angel narrowed her eyes slightly, studying the distinctive emblem embroidered on the black clothing of the enemy before her. That was absolutely the symbol of some clandestine organization—
Red hair, golden eyes. She did not seem to have seen this person's face on the game's cover, nor in any of the more common fan works.
Apparently someone fairly unimportant in the original.
"...Perhaps."
"Why don't we each take a step back?"
Once that had been said, both sides retreated slowly through the fire, as if by unspoken agreement.
For Seraphia, going into a fight without being fully familiar with her own body, acting on instinct alone, was not a hundred percent safe choice.
Death was not the only issue. If possible, she did not even want to be injured.
That inertia of thought from twenty years of growing up in her previous life's country, that instinct to avoid bloody conflict, made her choose, for the moment, to fall back.
As for the red-haired girl opposite, her airy nonchalance was mostly on the surface.
Unlike Seraphia, who could not yet distinguish strength by fluctuations of mana, the red-haired girl could clearly sense the powerful mana contained within Seraphia's body, mobilized through her combat movements.
【Seventh tier... no, eighth? The technique is badly lacking, but the instincts are sharp, the instantaneous mana burst she uses to reinforce her body is extremely fast, the innate magic is troublesome as well, and the way she switches forms makes no sense at all.】
Shu's emotions drew closer from a distance. The commotion and the mana fluctuations produced by the fight just now had drawn his attention this way.
"Don't come over here!"
Seraphia spoke at once to stop him.
This Hero of destiny, still at the beginner stage, was no match for the woman in front of her.
"Cough, cough... Miss Seraphia...? This person is... I see... I understand."
Shu, who came coughing into the scene from further off, fixed his eyes on it and took in the sight of the two of them at a standoff, and when he saw the special emblem on the red-haired girl's chest, his expression turned dark all at once.
"Everything here, this was your doing, wasn't it!"
The old sword in his hand, its very guard and grip faded with age, came up, the point aimed straight at that red-haired girl with the not-quite-smile on her face.
And just as the atmosphere began to grow taut as drawn swords and bent bows again, the roof beam that had broken earlier in the burning finally failed to hold, and came down along with chunks of the building.
At the moment Shu's gaze was drawn to it, precisely in the instant the thing fell, he saw the barely breathing worker beneath it, a cat demihuman whose ear and tail fur had been burnt away.
"Eh?!"
Seraphia watched the Hero Candidate she was supposed to be protecting throw himself, as though his life meant nothing to him, straight beneath the falling fragments of the beam, bracing both hands against the ground and absorbing the entire force of the impact with his own back.
That was no laughing matter.
She saw clearly that under the shock of it, Shu's amber eyes very nearly flew out of their sockets. He held the bracing posture, but his body was trembling faintly.
Surely his spine was about to snap?!
【No—right now—】
Seraphia yanked her gaze back, and what expanded steadily in her golden eyes was that crimson blade.
The blade instantly cut apart the great bow and the arrow condensed in her hands, and then that keen edge was stopped near Miss Angel's throat by an enormous arm formed of 【shadow】.
"Ho... so there was another one hidden away... time to withdraw, then."
Then she felt a surge of sharp pain come from the top of her wing.
"A souvenir."
The red-haired girl swept swiftly past her, put her weapon away, and standing at the exit behind her, waved a white feather glowing with white light at her.
"She let me go...?"
Seraphia's mind had not yet recovered from changes that came like lightning and flint, when out of her shadow, amid the firelight, several pitch-black 【Shadow Beasts】 ran and shot away towards the other woman.
"Well then. Goodbye."
Pursued by the Shadow Beasts, she was quickly gone.
"Big Sister... are you all right? I'm sorry... I broke the prohibition, but I couldn't watch you get hurt..."
Nephim's timid voice came out of the shadow once more.
【Illustration 1】
(An attempt at knocking together Nephim.)
The prohibition... yes, there had been something like that.
While in concealment, Nephim was permitted only to pass messages back and forth within shadows. She was forbidden to fight using her own magic in the human world, and could not let anyone learn of her magic.
But Seraphia felt nothing but gratitude towards someone who had just saved her life—
"Whew... I was careless. Thank you, Nephim."
Seraphia, who reckoned she had just taken a walk past the gates of death, only felt that she had sweated a great deal, and that in this high-temperature environment it was evaporating quickly.
But she did not catch what Nephim had actually said: merely that she 【did not want Big Sister to be hurt】.
Nephim, hiding in the shadow, believed an attack of that degree would only have injured her—
"What a strange feeling." Running clear of the fire, the red-haired girl watched the several Shadow Beasts close behind her dissolve instantly into nothing. "My instincts were screaming the whole time that this was an opponent I absolutely could not beat, and yet once the fighting started she came off clumsy, with no killing intent, not even any focus on the fight. Such a waste. All that vast mana—"
She laughed lightly and vanished into the night.
And Seraphia, who took some ten-odd seconds to come round, only then realized that Shu was still pinned beneath the stone.
She hurried forward and lifted the fallen chunk of masonry off Shu's back, throwing it aside.
Both of their emotional signatures were still there. Both were still alive.
"...And here I thought you charged out because you could actually catch the thing."
Miss Angel picked the two of them up carefully and headed outside.