Statecraft
The reason Princess Roberta had not obediently returned home was extremely simple.
She simply did not feel like it.
One might protest that no proper princess wandered about as she pleased, yet the Kingdom of Venice was by no means an ordinary monarchy.
It possessed the free-spirited temperament unique to the city-states that dominated the Italian Peninsula, the pragmatic mindset that could only have been forged as a bulwark nation holding the front line against the demonkin invasions, and a rootless family tradition handed down for four generations from a merchant founder.
Among all the human dynasties on the Europa Continent, the current royal house of Venice was the most alien of groups, and Roberta was no exception.
You have no talent. Give it up.
Even after freely drawing upon the royal family’s connections and wealth, her aptitude had been so abysmal that she could not handle a single Plain Knight; that was why she had walked the path of an engineer rather than that of a military noble.
Fortunately she possessed talent in engineering and had managed to produce reasonably respectable results, yet that did not mean she had fully reinvented herself as a professional mechanical engineer.
Still less had she become a versatile genius capable of mastering every field.
"Princess! Please grow some mushrooms for me instead!"
"What?"
"I'm counting on you!"
So when Asty suddenly dumped the mushroom-cultivation experiment on her as though tossing over a parcel, Roberta could only wear a foolish expression.
Of course it was not because the task of mushroom farming was too lowly for a princess of Venice.
The royals of Venice were never the sort who fretted over such distinctions.
When the reigning head of state, Queen Regina, ran the country the way a gangster managed her turf, there was no chance her children would turn out normal.
The reason Princess Roberta could not hide her bewilderment and blurted out something half-witted was purely that the work lay outside her field of expertise.
"Um… about the blueprints…"
"Yes. I'll take them and look them over! The experiment logs are in that cabin over there, so please refer to those!"
Thus Roberta, feeling exactly like an engineering student who had just been handed a biology project by her professor, hesitantly held out the blueprints she herself had drawn. Asty accepted them, made a show of skimming the pages, and then fled at top speed.
"…What."
Suddenly telling me to grow mushrooms.
The girl stared blankly after the Saintess’s retreating back.
I got stuck with a complete lunatic.
The blasphemous thought refused to leave her head.
Having foisted the high priesthood of the neighborhood mushroom kingdom onto the princess who was still dawdling instead of going home, and having received in exchange a set of mysterious blueprints, I was on my way back to the lodging.
Idly examining the scrap of doodles that bore Princess Roberta’s handwritten signature, I felt an inexplicable sense of wrongness and tilted my head.
"Strange."
Why was the level of finish so high?
The details were remarkably concrete, the lines clean, the three-dimensional rendering excellent.
There were even separate drawings of the completed weapon and an exploded view.
Looked at closely, the exact measurements and finer points were a little rough, yet in an age when industry standards had not even begun to form, such imperfections barely counted as flaws.
"Really strange."
I tilted my head again.
My feet stopped of their own accord.
This was not a blueprint produced by the craftsmen of the Kingdom of Venice.
It was not a question of probability; it was simply impossible. The only letter Princess Roberta had sent home had been dispatched a week before Count Montpellier’s coronation.
And the Second Prince who had attended the coronation as proxy for the Queen of Venice had merely shown his face and left.
There was no way a man who had done nothing but stamp his presence could have found time to deliver a secret reply, and there was no reason to deliver in secret blueprints that had been brought expressly to show me.
In the first place, the date Roberta’s letter left for home and the date the Second Prince arrived for the coronation were only a week apart.
If these drawings truly belonged to Venetian craftsmen, the postman carrying the letter would have had to cross the border and reach Venice in three days at most.
A special envoy bound by protocol and diplomatic formalities could never travel faster than an ordinary courier, so the Second Prince would have required somewhat longer to journey from Venice to Montpellier.
Therefore the postman would have had to use some earth-shrinking technique to deliver the letter, the Venetian craftsmen would have had to grasp the concept of personal firearms and produce a plausible set of drawings in a day or two, and then the Second Prince and his retinue would have had to shrink the earth again and reach Montpellier in three days…
"Hmm."
Insane talk.
No matter how one looked at it, that sequence of events was absolutely impossible.
I also considered the possibility that Princess Roberta had commissioned French craftsmen instead of her own country’s, yet if that had been the case a report would already have reached me.
Saintess! Saintess! I’ve drawn the blueprints for the new weapon you spoke of!
So in the end these drawings could only be Roberta’s own work.
Exactly as she herself had claimed.
"I'm going crazy."
Yes. It was possible.
She had never been a princess who had anything to do with elegance or grace.
The first time I saw her she had been firing a hand cannon at demonkin from the top of the walls; her drawing a firearm blueprint herself was not especially surprising.
As the first person to receive the idea notebook she had had ample time to absorb the new concepts, and if she possessed engineering knowledge, producing drawings would not have been difficult.
But why was the quality this high?
I was no expert, so I could not be certain, yet the work looked good enough to take straight to a workshop and place a mass-production order.
Could Roberta also be a reincarnator like me? Or had Vesta or some other transcendent intervened?
Even if I had given her future knowledge, there were limits; for a non-specialist to produce a musket blueprint at once from a handful of hints I had tossed out—
Wait. Musket?
Once more an inexplicable sense of wrongness halted my thoughts.
What was it? What had I missed? Was there another reason these drawings felt strange besides their excessively high finish?
Confused, I hunted for the source of the incongruity until I recalled the contents of the notebook I had handed to Roberta.
The difference between muzzle-loading and breech-loading. The four ignition systems usable before the advent of metal cartridges. The function of rifling cut into the bore. Basic front and rear sights, and paper cartridges as well.
I had taken the partial, uncertain scraps of knowledge I had acquired while being tormented by lunatics waving priest weapons in my previous life, summarized them as intuitively as possible, and passed them on.
And the most important piece of that information was the firearm’s ignition system.
The method of creating a small explosion behind the bullet seated in the chamber in order to drive it out.
Matchlock—lighting a fuse to ignite the powder.
Wheellock—using a spring and pyrite to strike sparks.
Flintlock—employing a stronger spring and a piece of flint.
Finally the percussion cap—placing a chemical compound, fulminate of mercury or something of the sort, inside a small copper container.
These four systems rose in both performance and cost as one descended the list; the percussion cap, which I myself barely understood, required not only metalworking skill but some chemical process or other and was therefore impossible to produce at present.
Rifling that improved accuracy was expensive given the limits of metalworking and could not be expected to yield dramatic results.
Hence the highest-grade weapon realistically manufacturable was an outrageously expensive flintlock musket; the highest theoretically possible was that same musket with rifling added.
"…"
And Roberta’s blueprint was terrifyingly realistic.
A plain, unremarkable wheellock musket that discarded the prohibitively costly flint and also abandoned the accuracy-enhancing rifling.
An extremely cheap, easily produced mass-issue firearm containing neither unnecessary ornament nor engineering flourishes.
"Ah."
Only then did I grasp the true source of the incongruity I had felt.
I had never told Roberta that this was a weapon for common soldiers.
I had not spoken a single word about how this small iron rod would end the age of knights and open the age of gunpowder, nor had I written any such thing in the notebook I gave her.
In the first place I myself did not believe the age of knights was about to end; why would I spread such information?
Yet Princess Roberta’s design prioritized cost reduction and mass production as though that were the most natural thing in the world.
Could it be…
Had she read the future from nothing more than those fragmentary hints?
Had she, entirely on her own, deduced the purpose and the concrete methods of employment of a weapon that had never yet been built?
"Crazy."
I was afraid.
Whether this was mere coincidence or the manifestation of truly incomprehensible genius I still did not know, yet of one thing I was certain.
I did well to stick her in the mushroom farm.
The youngest princess of the Kingdom of Venice, Roberta Venezia.
Danger level: Extremely high…!