"Girls, if Hana doesn't want to talk, you shouldn't force her," Stel said in a stern but gentle voice.

  In the very end, it was my former teacher who came to my rescue.

  At 31 years old, Stel was more-or-less the oldest maid in my circle of friends, which made her a quasi-legendary figure in sense that she had practically lived through everything that had happened in the Royal Pace in the st 15 years. In fact, she had outsted three generations of majordomos and eight head maids. Everyone respected the things that Stel had to say, and most of us expected her to be promoted to a position in management sooner or ter.

  To be honest, Stel was something of a walking enigma. She didn't appear to have the same motivations as your average run-of-the-mill maidservant, and likewise she was starting to get so old that she was probably never going to get married. This industry did not treat a woman's age kindly, and despite the fact that Stel still appeared to be in her 20's, I was quite positive that her current sary was less than mine. In the Kingdom of Galuterica, the average maid could expect to see her sary decrease as she grew older... which was seriously unfair.

  In either case, I really wanted to know why Stel had picked that useless otaku — Lu Liwang.

  He must have been her first choice while everyone was making pairs yesterday (none of the younger maids would dare bicker with someone as legendary as Stel von Istar, who incidentally had aristocratic blood), so it was especially odd given that... well... to put it kindly, Lu Liwang wasn't exactly the most attractive guy. He was an otaku who looked precisely like how one expected a stereotypical otaku to look like, so...

  Well, if it were my decision judging based on appearances alone, I definitely would have ranked him second-to-st.

  (Note: I obviously would have put Kang Jiesu in st pce — 12th).

  Basically, I genuinely could not understand exactly what Stel was thinking. She seemed to view the world in a different way.

  ...I kind of wished I became better friends with her.

  + + +

  "I don't think there were any surprises during the Archbishop's 「Ability Rating」 this morning," Stel remarked.

  The 31-year-old had adroitly shifted the table's conversation to an entirely different subject, and all of the eyes that were preciously focused on me like ser beams evaporated instantaneously. I sighed deeply, grateful to be spared of any kind of detailed interrogation. Truth being told, all of us here were very skilled professional maids, and everyone was quite adept at reading basic social cues. I think all of my friends acquaintances quickly got the message that I didn't want to talk, so they promptly gave me the space that I apparently needed.

  Towards my left, Lisa reached over and silently grabbed my hand.

  I looked over at her, blinking in confusion.

  She smiled at me softly, as if to tell me wordlessly: 'You can tell me about it ter. Don't worry. Everything is okay.'

  Before I could process my thoughts, Lisa had already looked away and jumped back into the main conversation.

  "Just like everyone expected, the Golden Prince was the highest — at level 61," she said cheerfully.

  + + +

  The gist was that earlier this morning, the Archbishop managed to get all the Otherworlders to use the 「Ability Stone」, which was a precious magic orb that produced a floating number whenever someone pced their hand on it. A newborn infant was level one, and the average human adult was somewhere around level ten. The scale was exponential, so level 11 was twice as powerful as powerful as level 10. This generally meant that a level 20 warrior was already incredibly powerful, and level 30 was virtually unheard of.

  I quickly did some mental math. If level 10 was equivalent to 1 kilojoule of energy (note: running a lightbulb for 10 seconds), level 61 was equivalent to 2^51 ≈ 2*10^15 or roughly two quadrillion kilojoules... which was somewhere on the order of a megaton of TNT or the energy released from a modern atomic bomb.

  ...It was actually a very rge difference, which is actually fairly concerning. Was this degree of power scaling commonpce in this universe? What kind of setting was this anyways? A Shounen Jump manga? Sailor Moon where the final boss is a pnet-eating monster?

  "Level 61..." Nene sighed in admiration. "That's absolutely incredible..."

  "Is the Golden Prince your favorite Otherworlder, Nene?" Lisa asked.

  "Well... I wouldn't say that's exactly the case... Like, I mean... it's just a meaningless number... so..." Nene stammered for a second and turned a faint shade of pink, before she went suspiciously quiet.

  "I mean, he does seem to be like a conventional Hero type," Francesca interjected. "It's really not strange to find that kind of man attractive. To me, it almost looks as though the Golden Prince walked straight out of a fairy tale. I think all of us could tell from the very start that he was the strongest one in the entire group. He seems to enjoy basking in the attention."

  Incidentally, the 'Golden Prince' was referring to Sha Guadi, the nose-picking idiot who sat in front of me in homeroom.

  "The King is probably going to give 「Excalibur」 to the Golden Prince, I suppose," Lisa mused out loud.

  "Well, that's not guaranteed at all." Lilian spoke up. "Didn't your mistress score extremely high too, Lisa? The Empress (Hong Baiye) was level 59. That's not so different from the Golden Prince's rating, and when heroes get to power levels that high, raw power is hardly the deciding factor anymore. Skill, experience, and battle instincts are much more important in a real fight."

  "...The King is never going to give 「Excalibur」 away based on merit though..." Vienna, the ever-sting pessimist of our group, joined the precisely the right moment to ruin Lilian's ray of optimism. "The Golden Prince is a man and the Empress is a woman, so the King is automatically going to give preference to the former, regardless if he actually deserves it."

  "How can you be so confident that the Empress is definitely a better choice than the Golden Prince?" Francesca countered sourly. "We're all just making silly guesses here. At the end of the day, we're just a bunch of insignificant maids, and it's not like anyone takes our opinion seriously. From my point of view, you might as well get a better outcome by choosing a wielder for「Excalibur」 with a random coin toss."

  "I mean... I would like to think our instincts and judgement are better than a random coin toss..." Lisa chuckled.

  "But how can you be really sure?" Francesca pressed onward. "The average investor in the stock market thinks they are smarter than everyone else, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that we're no better than monkeys at making predictions about the future."

  "You shouldn't use that as an excuse for decision paralysis though," Lilian responded briskly.

  "I'm not paralyzed by my choices at all!"

  "Isn't leaving everything to pure chance no different than running away because you're afraid to make a decisive action?"

  "No! In fact, I'm quite confident." Francesca retorted. "If all of you choose to hedge your bets with the Empress, I'll pick the Golden Prince, because if all of you are wrong, at least one of us needs to be right."

  Stel ughed.

  "The ever so lonely and painful path of the philosophical contrarian..." she mused aloud.

  "I still think that's really stupid logic though..." Lilian grumbled underneath her breath. "Only a complete idiot would choose to live their life like that."

  "Well I doubt Francesca would be alone though," Lisa joked. "At least, I'm quite sure that at least Nene would join her on the other side."

  "W-Wait a minute!" Nene excimed. "I never said anything about liking—"

  Stel turned around to look at me.

  "What about you, Hana? I know our masters did not score very high, so we're automatically disqualified from this silly contest... but would you entrust the future of the Kingdom to the Golden Prince or the Empress? What are your thoughts?"

  ?