The Developer Reborn As Archmage

"Anything the matter, princess?" Seris asked as she untangled her ponytail, taking off the last bit of clothing item that she had on herself.

Darya felt as if her feet were encased in hardened concrete.

Why am I freezing? Isn't this exactly what I wanted?

"N-n-nothing," Darya said shakily, inching timidly towards the bathtub. Looking at Seris right now was like looking at the sun. Darya was tingling all over her body, and her cheeks were burning hot.

"It's just cold water, princess," Seris said, approaching her from behind. Darya was doing her best not to fall apart. The first piece of the domino was kicked when she felt Seris's hands quickly loosening the waist straps of her dress from behind.

It was going to fall off before she readied herself. Out of options, Darya walked into the bathtub.

"Wait!" Seris yelped, hurriedly pulling the dress off her. Darya slithered out of it just in time to hide herself underwater. She stuck out her head just enough not to stare up at Seris, but ended up doing it anyway. She was a moth to this elf girl-shaped flame.

"This dress is going to need a proper beating to get this blood off," Seris said, plopping it into a separate water bucket. "We should hurry."

Seris splashed into the bathtub with a large sponge and a bar of soap. Darya was lurking in the corner like an embarrassed crocodile. She felt as if her face was flushed hot enough to boil the water. She hadn't expected the pretty elf to be this pretty.

"What are you doing, princess?" Seris asked with an amused look as Darya slowly stood, covering her chest with her arms. Their eyes met for a moment, and Seris seemed to read her expression. "...are you embarrassed or something?"

"I f-f-forgot m-my memories and all that..." Darya muttered under her breath.

Seris sighed deeply. "Ugh! This is really hard to get used to!" she said, closing the gap between them. "Do you have any idea how many times we bathed together? We've been together since you were nine years old!"

Seris turned her around and started lathering soap. It took a while to get used to it, but Darya eventually warmed up. Seris went to town on brushing any Dreagan blood off her. Darya's brain was brute-forced into accepting this new world and the unprecedented amount of skin contact. She felt better when she was safely hidden under a thick cloud of soap bubbles.

It only ended when Seris rubbed her tanned skin pink. Darya was a brand-new princess by the time the dirty soup was cycled out. Seris tossed the sponge away and sat down with a grunt as the tub filled up again.

"Done at last..." she said, leaning back on the edge.

Darya wobbled close and sat next to her. Seris was somehow just as comfortable naked as she was with clothes. Darya had never been that way, not even when she had her own place with all the privacy she ever needed. She always had to wear something to feel like a person with a definite shape.

I was never comfortable with anything. Sounds weird after dying, but I didn't want to be me at all. I don't even remember why now.

There was a lot that she didn't like about herself, and they weren't limited to her appearance. Her self-image was a blob. At thirty, she couldn't even remember exactly how or why she ended up that way.

She knew she didn't have a great childhood.

Then again, that was the way of the world. The exact way one broke to pieces stopped mattering beyond a certain age. There was a threshold between blaming your circumstances and being responsible for yourself as an adult.

Darya, being who she was, had never slowed down enough to fix anything about herself. She was still in pieces, but she had naturally outgrown and forgotten most of it.

Suddenly, she remembered her pale hands resting on a table. Fingers scattering away on the keys of her favorite brand of keyboard. Everything she ever did had been about running. Nellie—

Wait, who am I thinking about?

Darya raised her hands and watched the water slither off them with a frown. Her hands were tanned. She had just remembered pale hands, a keyboard, and another name.

She heard a noise at the back of her head resurface.

[Soul Merge Conflict: Resolve Identity]

It was a Verse command again. It didn't stay long enough in her brain to comprehend what it was. A fleeting sense of wrongness gradually dissipated. She remembered feeling exactly like this a while ago.

Is Verse still fixing something? What could it be?

She had been losing her mind ever since Seris took her clothes off, but she felt the adrenaline spike blunt a bit now. She wondered if Verse was stabilizing her psyche. It was a brain interface after all.

"What's wrong, princess?" Seris asked in a soft voice, raising her face off Darya's shoulder. Her hazel eyes shone like gems, and Darya felt electricity ripple through her staring at them.

Hell, no brain interface could make me immune to elf charms!

"N-nothing..." Darya said, looking at her blankly. It was a good thing she was brown enough to hide how flustered she was.

Seris grabbed her face gently and started rubbing her thumbs on Darya's cheekbones.

"Why are you like this? You're so adorable now!" Seris said, squeezing Darya's cheeks.

"N-not used to being touched—" Darya said, averting her eyes.

"Eh? What happens if I tickle you?" Seris asked with a devious grin, eyeing Darya's armpits.

"No! I'll die again!" Darya yelped in panic as she leaned away. That was no exaggeration. Her heart could actually pop if she got into a tickle fight with a pretty elf.

"Come back, I'm joking, of course!" Seris said, giggling as she pulled her back.

Darya relaxed as Seris wrapped her arms around her warmly.

"Ah! I'm so glad you came back, princess!" she said, resting her head on Darya's shoulder again.

"What if I'm not the same princess anymore without my memories?" Darya asked, trying to remain calm.

Seris was entirely too warm and soft. This had nothing to do with her body type. They were similarly petite. Seris was a bit bonier than Darya, who had a certain amount of squish. She was feeling this great cotton-candy warmth and the softness mostly inside her head. This was all new. On Earth, she had never been this close to someone that she was actually attracted to.

"I hope you'll remember things eventually," Seris said, running her hands on Darya's back. "If not, we can always make new memories. At least I didn't lose you. I don't know what I would've done without you."

"You thought about it?" Darya asked, using one hand to wrap around Seris. She was rigid and awkward, trying to hold the pretty elf like an oversized vase that might topple.

Stop being pathetic and act right, goddamn it. Do I need classes to learn how to do this?!

"It was horrible," Seris said, turning her face away as if she didn't even want to look at Darya while she reminisced. "I have to live so much longer, you know. That's a lot of years to mourn you."

Darya looked at the back of her neck with a jolt. Seris was an actual young elf. She had been too distracted by her elven beauty to realize what grief meant to someone who was going to live several human lifespans. Her eyes widened when these words came out of Seris.

"How old are you, Seris?"

"Me? I'm only six years older than you," Seris said, lifting her head. "...and of course, you don't remember your own age." She realized her mistake before Darya even pointed it out. "You turned nineteen last month, princess. I'm turning twenty-five in a few months."

She says only six years older. Only. It's not a long time for her. She's so young in elf years.

"That's a lot of years left to cry about me," Darya said, running her hand on Seris's back. "I'll try really hard not to die from now on."

Seris hugged Darya tighter, burying her face in the crook of her neck. Darya knew she had finally stumbled into saying something that hit the spot just right. That was encouraging.

I'm not too bad when I actually try, huh?

They talked more while idling in the bathtub. Seris was more concerned about the past and how things used to be. They were technically childhood friends, but they had been glued to each other even tighter than family members.

Seris had arrived in Karossa as the ward of Lord Altazark, Darya's father. The youngest son of the royal family had been sent to Seris's home kingdom of Rhakali in the temperate north of Vainfall in exchange. Darya knew this was an Elven tradition in Vainfall to send their young to gain firsthand experience in other regions. It must have also been in Karossa's best interest to strengthen their trade agreements with a resource-heavy northern state.

They got out of the bath after there was nothing left to clean.

Darya finally got her wish to nerd out over the interior design of the Desert Rose in their shared bedroom.

She only had her past experiences for context. On Earth, she had been lucky enough to buy her own apartment in her mid-twenties. The years had passed her by in a daze, and by thirty, she was just beginning to make the space her own with tasteful furniture. Nothing that she ever did compared to what she was seeing in this very girly bedroom on a ship.

It had truly been built for a princess with matching furniture with floral carvings, red velvet cushions, and black silk curtains. There were three wardrobes, two book racks in a corner with a desk and a chair, a double bed in the center, and a couch in the other corner.

She could tell the room had been rearranged to accommodate two people. Seris explained the layout when she asked.

The Desert Rose only had space for three proper rooms besides the bathroom on this deck. The two men, Fominel and Emil, were sharing one room while Rossarie had her own.

Seris said she had always been in Darya's room, even before she lost her room to Rossarie, who had joined the party months after they set sail from Karossa.

"We're always together, even in the palace! I haven't had my own room in years because you never let me go!" Seris said with a laugh.

Sounds like I had a thing for elf girls before I died as well.

Seris didn't let her admire the interior design for long.

"Lie down, princess. I have to heal you," she said, pulling out her wand from the belt hanging on a chair.

Darya tightened the towel around her chest and lay down as she wanted. Something poked her on the back as she did. Watching Seris preparing her mana with a breathing exercise, Darya reached around to pull the rigid thing underneath the sheets.

It was a small book the size of a palm. The cover was intricately detailed with what seemed to be ivory or a similar white material with translucence. It was bound with black leather, and it had a chain of decorated beads attached to the spine.

The front cover was a skull. The empty eye sockets were filled with polished quartz or a similar milky-transparent gem. The grid pattern of the gems mimicked a honeycomb.

A journal or a grimoire?

She flipped through the pages. It was written in English, but the words didn't make sense. It was some sort of notation, or an encrypted text. Some of the text blocks were organized weirdly, as if the shape itself mattered.

[Inspect]

Item: The Oracle Book of Ends

Category: Book/Grimoire

Weight: 0.1 lbs

Worth: Unknown

Effect: Unknown

"What is this book?" Darya asked as Seris blew air from her mouth, ending her breathing exercise. Her rosy skin was glowing with mana now.

"I don't know where you got it, but you were trying to translate it. It's written in a strange language," Seris said, leaning over Darya.

Strange language—Wait!

English was a strange language in Vainfall.

Darya frowned, her mouth half open in surprise. Verse had integrated her so seamlessly that she had never even noticed she was using an entirely new language.

She still couldn't understand the content of the book.

What use is encryption in a world that doesn't even know the language? It's as good as encrypted in plain English.

Looking at it from that angle, it seemed the weird notation on the book was about compressing information rather than concealing.

She wondered if this was an Easter egg someone had put in version seventeen. For a local, it would indeed be a mysterious artifact written in a dead language.

She flipped to the end of the book and stopped at a thicker page. It was a neatly folded piece of fabric glued to the inside of the back cover. She opened it as Seris began drawing a complicated healing spell with her wand.

It was a painting that depicted a pale woman wearing silver pieces of scale armor sitting comfortably on a stone throne in a place that looked like the top of a mountain. A tall black staff was stabbed into the ground behind her, and a book as large as a table lay at her feet with a giant quill hovering above it. She had a pleasant smile on her face, one open hand extended forward in an inviting gesture.

The painting bore a signature in golden letters. It was in English letters.

'N. Strum'

Darya sat upright, glaring at the painting. "Who is this?" She muttered under her breath.

Her ears started ringing from within. She felt something trying to crawl out of her brain. She almost answered her own question as she stared deeply into the pale face of the strange woman.

[Soul Merge Conflict: Resolve Identity]