I was really exhausted by the time that I finished my errands. I was running on minimal sleep, and a full day of shopping and maintaining a poker face in front of my business partners rapidly wore down my stamina. As a matter of fact, I really would have liked to have climbed back in bed in the middle of the day, but I had a gnawing premonition on the back of my mind that I might not get this opportunity again in the future.

  Right now, there weren’t too many people who knew that I had been ensved, and I had to consider the possibility that I might lose the the broad legal rights that I currently enjoyed through Kang Jiesu in the future. No matter how I thought about it, my circumstances could only possibly go downhill.

  This was very likely my single best opportunity to pce any backdoor countermeasures.

  As such, I powered through my exhaustion.

  + + +

  Unfortunately, I ran into problems as soon as I returned to the main entrance of Royal Pace.

  A cadre of six royal guards immediately detained me, blocking the path forward with their steel pikes.

  “By the Crown Prince’s order, no one is to be allowed inside or out of the castle while the investigation is ongoing. The arsonist — the terrorist — will be identified and punished for high treason.”

  Arsonist?

  No one had stopped me from leaving the Royal Pace this morning, so this must have been a very beted order that had been enacted retroactively. I wasn’t sure if it was very useful to lock down the Royal Pace so many hours after the incident occurred, but I noted that they specifically mentioned Prince Leopold. If I had to guess how this happened, perhaps the Crown Prince had personally intervened after he grew frustrated with the sheer incompetence of the royal ministers? The preliminary effort to identify a suspect apparently had not gone well.

  “Ma’am, we’ll have to take you in for questioning,” one of the guards said.

  “You’ve been designated as a suspicious individual for leaving the Royal Pace this morning.”

  To my utter dismay, one of the guards produced a set of handcuffs and dangled it in front of him.

  Was this really going to happen to me every single day?

  No one had even suggested that the Royal Pace was under lockdown this morning.

  Moreover, the entire idea behind this procedure was stupid. It was so deyed that I was quite sure that the arsonist had left the pace grounds already, and I couldn’t think of a reason why the real culprit would come back. At least, if I had been the one in charge of this investigation, wasn’t it more reasonable to think that the people who walked away and never returned were more suspicious?

  In either case, I did not resist arrest. My situation would only get worse if I tried to fight or run away, and I felt retively confident that I’d be released after a few hours of simple questioning. I hadn’t committed any crime after all, so I had absolutely nothing to fear. As a matter of fact, when I considered my alibi…

  My alibi…

  …What had I been doing during the time of the arson, anyways?

  I suddenly remembered that my memories were bnk.

  I had no idea what I had (or hadn’t) done.

  When I woke up yesterday, I had a fair amount of suspicion that Hong Baiye was responsible for the explosion, but obviously I had no idea exactly how she had accomplished it. Based on what I knew about that girl, she was never the type of person to get her own hands dirty. I considered her to be the queen of manipution, and it was much more of her style to get someone else to pull the trigger.

  Considering the chess pieces that Hong Baiye had her disposal…

  Wasn’t I the most likely pawn?

  There was a sinking feeling in my stomach when I realized that I couldn’t exclude the possibility.

  The arsonist might have even been… me.

  + + +

  I suddenly felt some renewed urgency about the situation. Assuming that I really was guilty, I had no way of knowing exactly what kind of evidence they might have collected. There could have been witnesses, and I didn’t think it would be a very convincing defense to say that ‘I don’t remember anything.’

  If I was their number one suspect, there was even a risk that they’d turn to Inquisition-style methods to draw out a confession if I they genuinely believed that I was hiding something. In this universe, there were ‘truth serums’ that made it impossible to speak lies. Therefore, truth serum + torture was widely considered to be reliable evidence in a criminal trial, but Hong Baiye had made it physically impossible for me to snitch on her.

  This was only ever gone to end horribly.

  I tried to throw up any excuse that I could get the guards to reconsider their behavior.

  “W-Wait a minute! I am a personal sve of Kang Jiesu — the Emerald Otherworlder! I have only been following my master’s orders, and I only went outside to run some of his errands…”

  I pulled off the cloth wrapped around my left hand, trying to demonstrate that I had a valid magic seal.

  However, the guards were unimpressed.

  “Sorry. Orders are orders.”

  “If you have any compints, bring it up with the Crown Prince during your interrogation.”

  There was a click as the manacles locked around my wrists.

  “B-But… what about diplomacy?” I pleaded. “My master would be outraged if he found out that I was suddenly taken away from him. The Archbishop has struggled to negotiate and earn the trust of the Otherworlders, and it would be foolish to ruin those diplomatic efforts over something like this.”

  “That’s really not my problem, miss.”

  A tone of frustration crept into my voice.

  “You’re just turning it into the Crown Prince’s problem! Can’t you use your brain? If the Crown Prince is reprimanded by the King, you’ll be the ones who are ultimately bmed and thrown under the bus…”

  + + +

  “Exactly what is going to become my problem?” A deep voice came from behind me.

  A heavy hand appeared on my shoulder, and an icy chill immediately ran down my spine.

  I didn’t want to turn around.

  —It was Crown Prince Leopold.

  Where had he come from? How long had he been standing there?

  Was this all of his doing?

  Suddenly, I had this vague suspicion that maybe I had been intentionally targeted. That person seemed like the type of person to resort to underhanded maneuvers, and I didn’t have a good feeling about the nature of his involvement. Ordinarily, there was no reason for a member of royalty to concern themselves with the early phases of a criminal investigation. The responsibility should have been delegated to someone else.

  “I like it when you wear your hair down,” the Crown Prince remarked suddenly out of the blue.

  His fingers traveled through the locks of my hair.

  I immediately shivered.

  “Although I have to say I’m not very thrilled to hear you calling someone else ‘master’.”

  He gently stroked the nape of my neck.

  “You’ve been quite a busy woman. Did you forget that we have unfinished business?”

  + + +

  I whirled around to face the Crown Prince.

  He was wearing full military garb, an officer’s uniform with full regalia. It was blood red with a bck trim — the primary colors of the Galuterican fg — which symbolized fraternity and nobility. However, as a young child, I used to think that it was red so that it could hide any bloodstains from the victims they sughtered.

  The colors of murder, tyranny, and state-sanctioned violence.

  “I… I didn’t ask for this!” I excimed, my face flushed. “And I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t touch me!”

  “Oh?”

  Prince Leopold feigned some degree of surprise.

  He promptly took his hands off of me. Meanwhile, his hands went to a pair of two swords that hung at his waist. He pyed with them idly, fidgeting with them as if they were mere toys.

  “Can I assume correctly that you do not wish to be the Emerald Otherworlder’s sex sve?”

  “That should be obvious! I don’t want any of this!”

  “Then I suppose that gives me no choice but to rescue you from your plight.”

  “...?”

  Confusion fshed across my eyes.

  I didn’t understand what he meant. Svery was irreversible in the Kingdom of Galuterica, and the Archbishop had been quite clear that the Obedience Crest couldn’t be removed after it was pced. There wasn’t any way for me to ‘rescued’ from my circumstances, and if anything, I would very much prefer to be rescued from Prince Leopold’s ominous clutches right now.

  “This person called Kang Jiesu — I think I should go kill him.”

  “...?!”

  “You wouldn’t have any objections if I did that, right…?”

  ?