The Guard Department Operator was utterly speechless after hearing her screeching demands.
"Arrest her? Why would I arrest her?"
"She hit us! We were just beaten like this, and you witnessed it with your own eyes! If you don't arrest her right now, I'll report you to your superiors for blatant favoritism and malpractice the moment we return to Lungmen!"
The woman stared fixedly at the LGD Operator, her voice dripping with venomous threats.
Hearing her defiant outburst, the Operator was so thoroughly baffled that he actually let out a short, incredulous laugh.
Every single tourist was explicitly notified upon entering the estate grounds that this was private land and that every blossom, bush, and tree belonged exclusively to the Swire Group. One was not permitted to inflict damage upon a single blade of grass or branch, lest the Swire Group exercise its full legal right to pursue commercial compensation.
To say nothing of basic ethics, the Swire Group had spent a massive fortune to transplant these delicate, cold-resistant wintersweet groves out to the frontier. Once their current actions were formally processed, it would one hundred percent be legally classified as intentional damage to high-value private property.
These vandals didn't care about the law when they were snapping off branches, but the second they found themselves on the losing end of a physical encounter, they suddenly remembered every statute in the book!
"Miss," the Operator began calmly, his voice cold and official. "The eye-witness accounts from the scene and the full overhead surveillance footage prove beyond a doubt that this conflict was triggered entirely by your group's unprovoked physical aggression. The individuals standing opposite you were merely issuing a verbal warning to halt your illegal behavior."
He stepped closer, towering over her. "As a result, not only did your group fail to reflect on your actions, you took the initiative to initiate a physical assault. Under Lungmen municipal law, physical scuffles resulting from a bystander stepping in to stop an ongoing criminal act do not constitute intentional injury on the bystander's part. Furthermore... seeing as you're currently standing up and yelling at the top of your lungs, I don't think you were injured to any severe degree."
He adjusted his belt, gesturing toward the raw branches. "On the contrary, your actions—intentionally destroying high-value commercial property and initiating a physical assault, with suspected intent to cause grievous bodily harm—those two charges are concrete and fully documented."
Hearing the Operator's sharp legal breakdown, the woman's face drained of color in an instant.
Her eyes darted frantically around the pathway. Panic completely overwhelming her judgment, she suddenly spun around on her high heels and attempted to bolt into the nearby trees!
However, she hadn't considered a basic reality: how could an untrained civilian wearing high heels possibly outrun a professionally trained, field-hardened LGD Operator?
Before she could even cover ten meters, the Operator closed the distance in three effortless strides, grabbed her wrist, and pressed her firmly down onto the snowy turf, pinning her arms neatly behind her back.
"Oh, wow... Attempting to flee directly from an LGD officer on active duty?" The Operator shook his head, pulling out a pair of heavy alloy handcuffs. "Setting aside how your brain functions for a second, didn't you stop to consider that resisting arrest is an additional felony charge?"
Standing by the edge of the path, Flandre watched the woman's bizarre choices in absolute, deadpan silence.
She felt that as a normal, sensible... well, a normal, sensible vampire, she was completely incapable of understanding this human's thought process. Shouldn't a perpetrator be proactively apologizing and cooperating to strive for legal leniency? Yet she actually attempted a physical escape right in front of a uniformed Guard Department officer! Talk about treating the world like her personal fantasy.
Even the LGD Operator felt like complaining out loud. Given his physical condition, an ordinary suspect fleeing in high heels should have been tackled after taking two or three clumsy steps at most. Why had she managed to cover over ten meters?
Simply because he had been so flabbergasted by the sheer stupidity of someone attempting to run away from an LGD officer while wearing three-inch heels that his brain had literally stalled in sheer disbelief for two full seconds! That brief delay was the only reason she had made it ten meters down the trail.
Faced with the woman's catastrophic move, the faces of her three male companions turned ashen.
The previous situation still had room for legal maneuvering; at absolute worst, they would have paid a fine to replace the branches and received a minor public order penalty for a scuffle. But just as Flandre had noted, the woman's reckless stunt would now be formally classified as active resistance to law enforcement.
When a group is apprehended together, resisting arrest is no longer a simple administrative misdemeanor. Even though the three men hadn't run themselves, as co-defendants, the severe escalation of the woman's charges would very likely drag all of them right down into criminal territory with her.
Having secured the alloy handcuffs around the woman's wrists, the Operator picked up his radio to call for a transport unit, while explicitly requesting that the station notify Agricultural Master Bai to meet them on-site for a formal damage assessment.
At that moment, Hong Meiling walked back over to Flandre's side, rubbing her shoulders with a somewhat distressed, pouting expression.
"Lady Remilia warned us before we left the villa not to cause any trouble while we were out, but look at what this turned into..." Meiling murmured in a low voice. "Flandre, everything I did just now was done under your direct instruction! You must remember to put in a good word for me when we get back!"
Flandre nodded her small head with total confidence. "We were doing a good deed! Sister definitely won't scold us."
Koishi, standing beside them, clapped her hands in cheerful agreement. "Doing good deeds, being a good person! Sister Meiling definitely won't get scolded!"
"Then I'll take the two young miss's lucky words to heart!" Meiling exhaled in relief, stepping over to carefully gather the snapped, flowering plum branches from the snow and stacking them neatly beside the trail.
Before long, a reinforcement squad from the Guard Department arrived alongside Agricultural Master Bai.
The moment Master Bai arrived at the scene and spotted the thick, flowering branches lying severed on the gravel, a sharp, ear-piercing screech tore from her throat:
"My wintersweet trees! Who in the world did this?!"
Hearing this, Flandre couldn't help but think back to a certain cabbage merchant who always yelled "My Cabbages!"
Looking at the enraged specialist—around whom a faint, crackling aura of elemental Arts began to swirl—Flandre's two companions raised their hands simultaneously, pointing squarely at the four handcuffed tourists sitting on the curb.
"To be able to force an Agricultural Master who specializes in plant and soil manipulation to manifest crackling lightning Arts... it seems these wintersweet flowers are even more precious than we thought," Flandre muttered under her breath.
Hong Meiling stood beside her with crossed arms, nodding in deep agreement. "Indeed, indeed! This master's pure killing intent is far heavier than mine. If it hadn't been us who caught them, but him arriving first, I'm afraid these four idiots would already be buried under this Plum Garden to serve as organic fertilizer."
"Wouldn't that actually be a mercy?" Flandre remarked, tilting her head as a thought struck her. "I remember Sister Yuuka has that exact same habit. Come to think of it, these four are actually absurdly lucky; at least they get to keep their lives."
Recalling the terrifying habits of Gensokyo's Flower Tyrant, Flandre knew with absolute certainty that if anyone dared snap prize branches in Yuuka's garden, those people would one hundred percent be buried head-first into the soil as plant food. One could only say these tourists were extraordinarily fortunate that this estate hadn't been taken over by Kazami Yuuka yet. If Yuuka had been running the grounds...
"Then they truly are blessed by fortune," Meiling couldn't help but shiver slightly at the mere thought of Kazami Yuuka's temper.
Meanwhile, Bai had finished listening to the LGD Operator's detailed report of the incident.
Having calmed her fiery temper, she turned and walked straight up to Flandre, Meiling, and Koishi, bowing slightly in genuine gratitude.
"Thank you three very much for stepping up in time to apprehend those vandals before they could inflict further destruction upon the grove."
Flandre waved her small hand dismissively. "Sister Beatrice and I are very good friends, and this entire village is her family's property. We naturally wouldn't just stand by and watch if someone came along to vandalize it."
"Oh? You're personal friends with Miss Swire?!"
As a chief specialist recruited by the Swire Group, Bai naturally knew who signed her massive paycheck. Although this entire area was nominally developed under the Swire corporate banner, the legal ownership of these specific four seasonal estates was explicitly registered under a single individual name—Swire Beatrice. She certainly hadn't expected to hear her top boss's name spoken so casually from the mouth of a young girl!
"Mm-hmm! My name is Flandre, Sister Beatrice's good friend!" Flandre extended her small, gloved hand politely.
Bai looked down at the bright, crimson-eyed girl in front of her, her eyes narrowing slightly as recognition dawned.
"A Blood Demon vampire, a young girl... Ah! I think I've heard your name back at the academy!" A famous piece of academic gossip from Lungmen flashed across her memory. "You're that Blood Demon instructor in Lungmen who published that groundbreaking lecture interpreting Originium and Sorcery through digital informational structures!"
"Oh?! Am I really that famous?!" Flandre looked up at her, her eyes sparkling with delight.
"Of course you are!" Bai laughed heartily. "Your structural analysis on how Originium overwrites physical information caused the professors back at our Celestial Master Academy to hit us with surprise exams for three weeks straight! So many senior students failed because they weren't prepared for those theoretical physics questions, and they got chewed out by the department head... To this day, the collective resentment toward you among the student body is immense!"
The Agricultural Master chuckled warmly as she shook Flandre's small hand. "Luckily, I managed to pass those exams with high marks, so I don't hold any grudge against you at all!"