Cold War
Asty’s scheme to secure firearms development know-how by using the Kingdom of Venice had been nearly perfect.
Even accounting for the parts she had failed to consider, it held true.
The reason Asty had so readily handed future knowledge to Roberta was the production limits of medieval guilds and Venice’s geopolitical position—but in truth, even without those factors, the possibility that firearms development might shatter the balance among human nations was virtually nonexistent.
After all… there was no gunpowder.
On Earth, whose terrain was suspiciously similar to this world, gunpowder invented in China had spread through India and the Arab lands into Europe, where various firearms were developed and the methods of manufacturing powder advanced alongside them.
But the humans of this world, pushed back by other races and isolated across Western Europe, had never had the chance to learn of gunpowder’s existence from other continents, nor could they make up for their deficiencies through cultural exchange between civilizations.
Frankly speaking, the mere fact that they were using powder weapons at all was practically the goddess’s grace—what real technical foundation could they possibly possess?
Moreover, black powder required seventy-five percent saltpeter among its ingredients, and unfortunately Western Europe had no saltpeter mines of any meaningful scale.
At the very least they ought to have created niter beds to cultivate saltpeter, but the alchemists who, blinded by vain dreams, might have laid the foundations of chemistry had long since been thoroughly wiped out by the Order.
Thanks to that, saltpeter procurement methods on the Europa Continent remained stuck at the level of scooping up old dirt or ash from around houses and processing it. Of course, with methods like that, even if they stamped out thousands or tens of thousands of muskets, powder would be so scarce they would end up using them as clubs.
In other words, whether the Kingdom of Venice developed muskets or rifles, until powder production increased dramatically there would be no major repercussions.
Furthermore, the knights of this world were not merely heavily armored swordsmen but slaughter tanks who had received the baptism of mana and transcended human limits.
What was needed to kill those human weapons—who could beat a starving gray bear to death barehanded—was not small, sleek bullets but slow yet heavy cannonballs, and that was the specialty of hand cannons, not muskets.
So Asty had scribbled a few lines of future knowledge she could not even properly use herself, tossed them over while taking every scrap of credit, and planned to freeload data for the Holy Kingdom’s future use at no cost.
It was villainy so extreme one could no longer tell whether she was a Saintess or a bandit—but fortunately the youngest princess of the Kingdom of Venice had splendidly thwarted the plot targeting the royal treasury with her innate intellect.
“S-Saintess, for you to give such an incredible gift…!”
Of course it was not that she possessed innate talent for political maneuvering and had seen through Asty’s sinister intentions.
She was simply a freak obsessed with mechanical engineering who, instead of sending the idea notebook received from Asty back to her homeland, had begun analyzing it herself.
If Roberta had been an ordinary princess she would never have recognized the notebook’s value, let alone felt any interest—but the royalty of the Kingdom of Venice, where demons invaded at the drop of a hat, tended to have somewhat extraordinary ways of thinking from the start.
An ordinary princess does not personally fire a hand cannon just because the fortress is under siege. Asty had simply chosen the wrong person to use for delivering the notebook.
“Rifling? Carving grooves inside the barrel to spin the bullet…?”
Moreover, Roberta was quite talented in this field.
At least enough to understand the idea notebook Asty had handed over.
“Improve accuracy and convenience at the cost of power. Then the powder consumed decreases accordingly, and stable operation becomes easier.”
No—in fact she could be called a genius without issue.
What else do you call a monster who catches up centuries with just a few pages of notes if not a genius?
Even accounting for the fact that Asty’s notes had been written from the start to introduce only core concepts, Roberta’s comprehension clearly transcended the bounds of common sense.
“In the end the core is miniaturization and standardization. This isn’t a cannon that just needs to be able to fire no matter what—it’s a mechanical device thoroughly designed to kill people. The problem is the structure is excessively precise, so if the craftsmen’s skills are even slightly lacking, defective products will pour out in droves…”
And her genius peaked at the stage of pondering how to drag the rifle in her head into reality.
Looking at the design that was excessively precise yet seemed to have mass production in mind, she intuitively grasped that this was not something made stitch by stitch by artisans’ hands.
Of course the future answer sheets of factory handicraft or mechanization did not suddenly pop out, but merely harboring the question that there might be a better method was abnormal enough.
…
So what should a technician do when hitting the limits of thought?
An ordinary person would simply pass the baton to the craftsmen of their homeland.
A brave person would go find Asty and ask this and that.
But Roberta was neither.
She was an outsider who could freely spew curses in front of an unspecified crowd yet lacked the courage to show a friendly attitude to a single person, and a weirdo among weirdos who enjoyed it more the more burdensome the obstacle blocking her path became.
Therefore, the proud youngest princess of the Kingdom of Venice resolved to find the answer herself no matter how much time it took, and decided to challenge an impossible adventure.
Naturally, the notebook that should have been delivered to the craftsmen of the Kingdom of Venice never left her possession and remained bound right there.
It was the moment Asty’s scheme to freeload firearms development with someone else’s money twisted for an absurd reason.
“Hmm… somehow I have a bad feeling.”
“Is something uncomfortable, Your Holiness?”
“No, not particularly.”
Just a slight feeling that something had gone wrong somewhere.
I hadn’t made any particular mistake, and the refugee camp expansion project was proceeding smoothly, so it was probably just my imagination.
“Is the recruitment work proceeding smoothly?”
“Yes. We should easily fill three thousand before spring arrives.”
“Good. Then the forces gathered so far…”
I set down the pen in my hand and began calculating the troops collected up to now.
First, Count Montpellier’s original standing army of six thousand, plus the seven thousand he had scraped together by bankrupting his family assets.
Forces wrung from the southern lords who had joined the rebellion: twenty thousand, plus another seventeen thousand that could be wrung out after the sowing season.
Then the ten thousand Elite Soldiers I had borrowed from the Italian peninsula under the pretext of a holy war, plus the five hundred volunteers who had joined at Avignon, and adding the additional recruits near the city made roughly fourteen thousand—so—
“Only sixty-four thousand?”
“Pardon?”
“Fewer than I expected.”
Extremely disappointing.
Only sixty thousand troops mobilized for a war over a nation’s throne? At this rate there was no way to crush the enemy with sheer numbers.
I had vaguely anticipated it from the way recruitment was going, but facing the miserable reality head-on, I simply could not hide my disappointment.
“Sob sob. Emperor Gaozu of Han mobilized a full three hundred thousand at the Battle of Gaixia to bring down the Hegemon-King of Western Chu.”
As expected, these Western long-noses lack fighting spirit and cannot even give their all in a human-wave charge.
Even so, France in this era ought to rank among the most populous in Europe—yet even granting that it was a civil war and only the south could be used, not even a hundred thousand had gathered. The shock was considerable.
Considering that northern populations had been steadily flowing south ever since the orcs devastated Paris, it was all the more so.
“…Didn’t you say your world was hundreds of years ahead of this one? Different eras, so of course there would be fewer people.”
As I poured out complaints about medieval Europe’s pathetic mobilization capacity, Rebecca carefully raised an objection with a somewhat uncomfortable expression.
Yeah. This much is common sense by now, right?
Worth all those times I spouted twenty-first-century stories whenever I got the chance. Seeing my disciple grow so quickly makes me weirdly proud for no reason.
“No? By the standards of the world I lived in, twenty-two hundred years ago—and by this world’s standards, even fifteen hundred years ago?”
…
But Han Gaozu Liu Bang was a man from before the Common Era.
Looking at Rebecca, struck speechless by the shocking truth, I smiled awkwardly.
Yeah. Those kids from that neighborhood always did have an insane scale.
Even back in their African days they would pop out at the drop of a hat and drive you crazy.
“Anyway, the forces are fewer than expected. Normally this is exactly when you’d hit them with a round of Land Reform…”
In any case, the biggest reason forces were insufficient right now was serfdom.
Or rather, the feudal contract itself that constituted feudalism was the problem.
According to traditional feudal contracts, serfs had no obligation to go to the battlefield.
Of course that was only in theory—in practice they were frequently driven onto the field through fraudulent contracts and the like—but at least it was not the norm to conscript every last serf and deploy them to the front.
So if we wanted to scrape together more troops here, we would have to slam through Land Reform, dismantle feudalism, confiscate land from the landlords and redistribute it to foster freeholding farmers.
There was no time for that right now, and the moment the words “Land Reform” left anyone’s mouth the southern nobles would foam at the mouth and charge us, so it was pure fantasy.
“…I suppose we’ll have to settle for this for now.”
I smacked my lips in regret and checked the plan one last time.
With sixty thousand we could somehow secure a numerical advantage, but it was not enough to be optimistic about victory.
But there was no other way now.
Winter was ending.
The flames of war that had been suppressed by the cold were awakening.