I didn't know exactly why Kang Jiesu kept appearing in the most random pces, but the timing was perfect, so I immediately ran forward to help the two men who had crashed into each other. I reacted quickly, and the sudden development had briefly stunned the security guard who was monitoring me, so I had just enough time to slip away like an oily snake.

  By the time the guard realized that I had escaped from his grasp, it was already too te.

  I was already kneeling at the scene of the collision.

  "Oh no! Are you alright?!" I asked the fallen guard with a (fake) worried tone of voice.

  Incidentally, I ignored my cssmate completely and focused all of my attention on the guard who had volunteered to search for my missing pendant. I picked up his helmet which had rolled a few feet away on the ground and offered it back to him, summoning all of my acting ability to sound as fretful and sympathetic as possible.

  "Are you hurt anywhere?"

  The guard was fairly young, no more than seventeen or eighteen with blue eyes and straw-colored hair that reminded me of a golden retriever. He looked rather dazed and stunned from the sudden impact. Given his age, he must have been a junior guard on the hierarchy.

  This was a rather eborate ploy, but I wanted to appear like I was on the same 'side' as the guards.

  Fighting those men directly was more-or-less impossible, so my rationale was that if I could get them to lower their vigince, I might be able to finagle some type of beneficial arrangement. Earning their trust was an invaluable step in this process, and I didn't want them to think that I was in any way trying to 'escape'.

  For this reason, I chose to help the guard and not Kang Jiesu.

  + + +

  My cssmate groaned and stirred on the ground.

  "为什么一下子...在哪里啊...?" (Why out of nowhere... where am I...?)

  It was sort of difficult to comprehend exactly how he had managed to crash into the guard so forcefully. In the four years that I lived in the Royal Pace, I had never seen a head-on collision like this, especially since the Royal Guard was supposed to be well-trained and nimble. If they couldn't dodge a reckless pedestrian, how were they supposed to dodge an arrow in the middle of battle?

  "I didn't see him at all..." the young guard mumbled from the ground. "He was just suddenly there."

  "That's weird..." I remarked, quickly confirming that there wasn't any obvious wounds on the guard's arms and legs. If anything, he was probably only a little bit bruised, but there wouldn't be any way to be certain unless I removed all of his armor.

  It occurred to me that perhaps Kang Jiesu's secret power was teleportation.

  This was the second time that my cssmate had suddenly appeared in a random location for no reason, so it only made sense that a magical or miraculous entity was the underlying cause. The first time, I had assumed he had desperately teleported to a random location due to the effects of the Holy Sword, but if it was twice in one day... did it mean that he had wished for that ability from God instead?

  I gnced quickly around Kang Jiesu's body.

  Surely enough, there wasn't any sign of that frightening sword around him.

  + + +

  The older security guard who I had slipped away from finally made it to my side again.

  His firm grip appeared on my shoulder, and there was a sturdy squeeze.

  I looked up to him momentarily, and I was surprised to see an annoyed look on his face. Superficially, he was still smiling, but there was a grim shadow behind his eyes that hinted at his irritation. Apparently, he wasn't happy at all that I escaped from his grasp without warning. Since I didn't try to run, he didn't sound any arm, but he definitely was not pleased. Officially, I was supposed to be under their close supervision.

  Perhaps there was a component of jealousy too? His younger colleague was apparently winning the maiden's heart after bending the rules, and any rule-abiding citizen would be frustrated to see a cheater get ahead.

  —Click.

  Metal shackles locked onto my wrists.

  It caught me by surprise.

  "Huh??" I remarked in confusion.

  This was completely outside of my calcutions.

  The younger straw-haired guard from the collision also seemed surprised.

  "What the hell is that for, George?" He spoke up on my behalf.

  The evil guard (George) tugged on the chains, almost yanking me off bance until I was forced to stumble back to his side. The man kept very little sck in the chains, so I could barely take a single step in any direction. He seemed quite adamant on keeping me right by his feet like a leashed dog.

  "You're leaving me alone to search for a 'missing' pendant, aren't you? I figured I could use some extra security. That's all."

  "But... handcuffing a civilian for no reason..." The younger guard mumbled.

  "No. I do have a reason. I just don't trust the whore. She's suspicious."

  The junior guard and I both flinched at the foul nguage. Technically, maids were not the same as prostitutes, so it wasn't entirely accurate to describe me as a sex worker. Technically, any servant in the royal pace could find themselves in a thorny situation when a superior commanded to them to have sexual intercourse. It was not exclusive to maids, although the nature of our jobs frequently put us in close proximity with our masters.

  "I didn't do anything..." I mumbled.

  "I don't care," the evil guard's voice was ft. "You can stay like this until the Crown Prince returns, and we'll see what His Majesty says about it then. I doubt he'll be happy to learn that his py toy tried to escape."

  + + +

  Meanwhile, Kang Jiesu clearly had no idea what we were speaking about.

  At some point, he must have noticed that there was a half-naked maid chained in shackles held by this burly-looking man in full armor, and my sliced-up wardrobe was damaged to the extent that there were little bits of skin exposed. For a high-school teenager, it must have been quite a provocative scene, and my cssmate tried his best not to stare.

  His eyes met mine, and there was a fsh of recognition.

  "你是..." (You are...)

  He seemed to have recalled that I was the maid assigned to him st night.

  "但是为什么..." (But why...)

  To be fair, it was probably extremely difficult for him to deduce exactly how I had gotten into this situation.

  However, there wasn't any time for prolonged expnations, and I realized that everything would depend on Kang Jiesu's superficial interpretation of the scene in front of him. As soon as I realized this, I buried my face in my hands and started to sniffle, trying my best to summon fake tears to my eyes.

  Zhang Guiyu was an expert at crying for no reason, so this was the one moment it would actually be helpful to break down in tears. Since my original pn had gone to the gutter, my best shot at escaping this situation id with my childhood friend. I needed to appeal to his emotions and his sense of justice. In fact, I even tugged at the chains to emphasize the idea that I was a captive in distress.

  The look on Kang Jiesu's eyes grew deathly serious.

  He seemed to notice there were traces of dried blood along my arms.

  "这世界三观不正" (This world is so screwed up), he muttered under his breath.

  He immediately began walking towards the evil guard and me.

  If he was nervous, there was no indication of it. Kang Jiesu was always the perfect model student and ideal css president that any cssmate could possibly want. He wasn't afraid to confront authority figures for issues that he believed were important, and he somehow always managed to make things work out. If anything, he and I had totally opposite personalities, and I used to get incredibly irritated at the fact that he would help literally anyone. If it was a girl who needed assistance, I could predict with 100% certainty that he'd definitely go charging in blindly like white knight.

  He pced his hand on the metal chain that connected me to the evil guard.

  "Misunderstanding. Mistake. Mine (object). Give back." Kang Jiesu spoke in broken phrases of Galuterican.

  The grammar was completely nonsensical, and he incorrectly stated that I was his possession (like an inanimate object), but the general gist of what he wanted could roughly be understood even though his accent was extremely strong. In essence, he was demanding that they hand me over to him.

  The Otherworlder's sudden flex of nguage skills honestly caught all of us by surprise. Earlier this morning, I recalled that Kang Jiesu had figured out how to say 'hello', and by the end of the day he was already formuting phrases. From what the other maids had mentioned, only one of my cssmates had the ability to transte between the nguages, so Kang Jiesu must have expanded his vocabury after spending a full day in detailed negotiations with the Archbishop.

  If anything, he must have realized at this point that he held significant political leverage in this isekai world.

  "把她放开" (Let her go), my cssmate repeated firmly in Mandarin, grabbing hold of my arm.

  I suddenly found myself caught in between two of them.

  + + +

  The evil guard (George) stared bnkly for a while.

  This clearly wasn't a situation that was in the soldier's manual, and it put him in a difficult spot. Based on the briefing that all of the pace staff had received a few days ago, the Otherworlders were VIPs — meant to be treated like foreign dignitaries or royalty from another country. As a general rule of thumb, they were meant to be accommodated with the maximum hospitality. Moreover, no one had given an explicit order for me to detained, so there actually wasn't a good reason why I should be handcuffed. In the first pce, it was doubtful that the Crown Prince gave them any detailed instructions to begin with.

  "What is the Otherworlder saying?" George asked his colleague, as if he didn't understand the broken Galuterican.

  The younger guard had also managed to get up to his feet by this point.

  "Well..." he started, "Hana was assigned as the Emerald Prince's maid yesterday, so he is probably referring to that."

  I blinked. I didn't realize that I was on a first name basis with the younger guard, and in fact I didn't even know his name. It was surprising that he knew so much about me even though we've never spoken. In the past, I never considered myself to be a particurly well-known maid, but my recent promotion (and subsequent demotion) must have caught a lot of eyes.

  What kind of reputation did I have with the male servants? I honestly had no idea.

  "You mean this bitch was actually his before?"

  "Well... yeah, technically, I guess."

  Among the conservative folk, there was an unspoken code of justice that essentially boiled down to 'first come first serve'. Given that polygamy was fairly common in the Kingdom of Galuterica, there were many instances when a man of higher status might desire the wife or concubine of a man of lower status. Apparently, many men despised that type of situation, and it was common for the townsfolk to side with the underdog who had 'possession' of the woman first. While it was still technically possible for someone like the King to annul and overrule a subordinate's marriage into order to 'steal' a woman, many people protested that as a fgrant abuse of power.

  A deep frown appeared on the evil guard's face.

  I secretly wanted to cheer on the nameless nice guard. I didn't know if he was intentionally helping me, but it would have been impossible to break through the other's guard's thick skull without a sensible mediator, and I was endlessly grateful for the assistance.

  "Sir, we were asked to 'guard' Miss Hana. I don't think it's clear from His Majesty's instructions that he would have wanted us to lock his maid in chains. This doesn't look good in front of the guests, anyways."

  He was clearly trying to de-escate the situation.

  "His Majesty took this maid because he wanted to enjoy her body. He'd be furious if we gave the girl to another man, even if that man is her former master." The senior guard spoke stiffly. "Feelings aside, my loyalty is to the prince. If we must fight, then I will fight."

  "如果不放开她, 我会让你后悔" (If you don't let her go, I'll make you regret it).

  The tone in my cssmate's voice was gradually getting darker.

  It felt like there was some kind of ominous atmosphere rising from Kang Jiesu.

  "I... I think he's just saying that he's lost!" I chimed in, hurriedly mistransting Kang Jiesu's confrontational attitude. "If we take him back to his room, I think he'll be satisfied with that! And we can all go together! Afterwards, I'll go back to the Crown Prince on my own."

  I didn't know exactly what my childhood friend was thinking, but it couldn't possibly be a good outcome if he provoked a fight. The royal guards were strong, and I had already seen Kang Jiesu's corpse after he had been skewered by Prince Leopold's sword. Even if he had some kind of teleportation ability, it was extremely doubtful that my cssmate possessed genuine offensive skills.

  We had almost defused the bomb by this point, so it was more than good enough to take the win even if it was small.

  The nice guard reached over his colleague's hands and nervously unlocked the metal shackles around my wrists.

  They fell to the floor with a solid clunk.

  "See?" He said simply. "Everyone is happy now."

  ?