Statecraft for the People
Roberta of Venice. Danger level: extremely high...!
While Asty, reeling from the blueprints of the wheel-lock musket, etched Roberta's name into the mental list of persons of interest she kept, Roberta herself—left behind among the mushrooms—obediently examined the experimental records Asty had left her.
There was no reason not to.
It was easy to misjudge her because of her status as a princess and her free-spirited ways, yet in the city of Montpellier as it stood now, Roberta was nothing more than a visitor. And not just any visitor: a troublesome guest who had ignored every proper procedure, slipped across the border, and simply settled in.
If she disappointed Asty and lost the Order's protection—the sole basis for her continued stay—there would be nothing strange about being thrown out of the city at any moment.
That was why Roberta could not refuse Asty's request.
If she were expelled from French soil, she would lose forever the chance to explore the dazzling knowledge the Saintess had shown her.
She had lived a life utterly unconnected to farming and did not particularly believe she could live up to the Saintess's expectations. Yet if she gave up or slacked off, she would be driven out without even a chance to make excuses.
To remain at the Saintess's side and continue examining new devices as she was doing now, she had to give everything she had to the task she had been asked to perform.
...Of course, this was entirely her own delusion.
It began with the part about being expelled if she lost the Order's protection.
The current King of France, Thomas I, could never harm her. She was a genuine princess, beloved by the entire Venetian royal family.
If the one who crossed the border had been some worthless serf or commoner, he could have been beheaded on the spot or enslaved without issue. Doing the same to a neighboring country's royalty, however, meant war.
Moreover, the Kingdom of Venice was the frontline bulwark holding back the demonkin invasion and a great power that dominated northern Italy. Considering that Queen Regina of Venice had been the one who mustered and dispatched ten thousand elite soldiers in the recent war, Thomas I was in no position to force Roberta's repatriation; he ought to have invited her to the palace and treated her with the utmost courtesy.
And in the first place, had Roberta not crossed the French border to support her brothers and sisters in the faith against the tyranny of the wicked Claude V? She herself had followed purely out of curiosity about the Saintess and had completely forgotten the fact, but strictly speaking she was no illegal entrant at all.
Even if she did nothing but breathe, she was an important guest who constantly reminded the Montpellier dynasty of its diplomatic debts.
What is this? Why isn't she going home and just staying on? Is she demanding something because we won thanks to them?
Come now. Surely not. The soldiers have already returned home and the compensation for participation has been paid. If they wanted more, they would have spoken to the Saintess long ago and tried for additional negotiations—not left her alone without even attendants.
Then why is that princess still here instead of going home?
...I wonder.
As a result, hair follicles on the scalps of Thomas and his son, unable to endure the stress, were staging successive escapes, yet Roberta, shut away in a corner fiddling with blueprints, had no way of knowing any of it.
Even within the Venetian royal family—famous throughout Europa for its complete lack of foundation or restraint—the youngest princess who had played with particular freedom was hardly likely to take an interest in such complicated political interactions.
Anyone want to go ask how long that princess plans to stay?
If I don't live up to expectations, I might get thrown out...!
And so Roberta, trapped in a baseless delusion, worked diligently to complete the task she had been given—
and she succeeded.
It was the moment her danger rating rose by roughly two levels.
Before continuing the story, let us make one thing perfectly clear: this success was by no means the product of her genius flowering.
Common sense made that obvious, did it not?
Roberta was thoroughly versed in mechanical engineering, not biology.
Even the greatest genius needs foundational knowledge for talent to bloom, and Roberta had not a scrap of information about nature or ecosystems stored in her head. She had no talent in that direction to begin with; even if she had possessed some, the lack of basics would have rendered it meaningless.
"Huh? It worked?"
In other words... it was pure luck.
A stroke of fortune possible only because it happened to be the season when mushrooms released their spores. Results obtained by following Asty's prepared experimental method exactly as written. Fruits of patience that Asty would have found first if she had only been a little luckier, that she would have grasped without difficulty if she had only tried a little longer—yet somehow they had fallen into Roberta's turn.
"Saintess! It worked just as you wrote down! The mushrooms I put in with the sawdust grew!"
"Uh... already?"
Of course, to Asty's eyes it looked nothing like coincidence.
An experiment that had failed miserably when she herself tried it had borne fruit the moment it passed to Roberta. How could that possibly be chance?
Objectively speaking, the cultivation method Roberta had discovered was so simple it was crude, yet to Asty—who had fallen into despair precisely because she could not discover that crude method—it was a shock so intense it was frightening.
What is this? Is she really a reincarnator? And not an amateur like me, but someone who actually majored in it?
"Have you ever heard of nitroglycerin? Or dynamite?"
"Uh... no? Both are words I'm hearing for the first time."
And when people confront phenomena they cannot understand, they seek gods.
Suspecting the intervention of a transcendent being, Asty rattled off whatever future knowledge sprang to mind, yet Roberta did not smile wickedly and cry out "Hail the reincarnator." Of course not—she was not one. She was simply a princess with a keen interest in building mechanical devices.
"Why?"
The actual reincarnator herself, however, remained completely unconvinced.
A genius who had accurately pierced the purpose and operational methods of firearms from a few conceptual sketches alone was now distinguishing herself even in biology. Would it not be stranger not to grow suspicious?
This was a world in which transcendent beings who could interfere with human souls treated their followers like limbs and exercised influence. The present incident was nothing more than a misunderstanding, yet Asty's suspicion was, separately from that, entirely plausible.
"Princess Roberta. Would you like to enter into a formal contract with me?"
"A contract?"
"Yes. The Order will sponsor Your Highness's inventions. In return, you will give priority to making the things I request."
Whatever Roberta's true identity might be, the method of dealing with her was simple.
Use sponsorship as bait to decide the direction in which her talent would be exercised, and in exchange seize the fruits of research first. And the ability to choose the subjects of experiments meant, directly or indirectly, the ability to designate the location. Under the pretext of creating an environment suitable for experiments, one could build an isolated facility, lock her away, suck the results dry, and cut off her political influence at the same time.
"Hah...!"
Watching Roberta pure-heartedly moved by a proposal laced with such cunning intent, Asty smiled as benevolently as she could manage.
She forced down the thought that she would have felt more at ease if this princess had been a cunning person instead.
"Then let's discuss the concrete terms next time. For today, rest well. I'll go check the experimental results myself."
"Yes!"
Once Roberta had left and Asty was alone, she stood still and ordered her thoughts.
Frankly speaking, what Roberta truly was did not matter.
Whether she was simply a genius whose latent talent had blossomed upon contact with knowledge of the future, or whether—like Asty herself—she was a vanguard of invasion born through the intervention of some other transcendent being.
There was as yet no way to find out, and no particular reason to try.
The danger of the person called Roberta sprang from her peculiar genius and from her status as the youngest princess of the Kingdom of Venice. Whatever her identity and purpose might be, so long as those two things could be firmly controlled, the chance of her becoming a fatal variable remained low.
If after all this they come charging in with a 'you die, I die' attitude, there's no answer.
The real problem was the opposite case: not this sort of covert maneuvering, but a frontal assault.
In other words, the possibility that it would not be petty checks or shadowy games using apostles, but a god descending directly to the earth and trying to crush everything by force.
From the dialogue with Vesta, it seemed that even among transcendent beings a certain set of rules existed, yet to ignore the matter on that basis alone was to leave a variable far too fatal unattended.
Since opening her eyes in this world, Asty had never been directly entangled with any transcendent being other than Vesta—and precisely because of that, it felt all the more dangerous.
When people confront what they do not know, they seek gods.
Asty regarded with paranoid wariness and fear those otherworldly transcendent beings who certainly existed somewhere, who were hostile to her, yet who still refused to show themselves.
"...I should go see the Goddess before long."
Having ordered her thoughts, Asty muttered to herself as if sighing.
No—strictly speaking, it was not muttering to herself.
At her side there was always the Lantern Bearer girl.
"..."
Yet the girl defined herself as a tool, and tools do not think for themselves; thus Asty's complaint ended in a form little different from a monologue.
Silence that returned no answer no matter how one cried out.
"Rebecca, next time lend me the lantern. I need a one-on-one talk with the Goddess."
"Understood."
To receive a proper answer from the girl who claimed to be a tool, one had to call her name directly like this.
Asty turned with a bitter smile—
"Huh?"
and froze solid at a sight she had never expected.
The eyes of the Lantern Bearer girl, which she had thought would be as sunk and still as always, were blazing with a jealousy whose reason she could not fathom.