After the hectic first day, the academy orientation period went without problems. After her shocking display of martial skill through behourd, Garnet's name soared through the sky, spoken with both awe and contempt.

Whether because of her entrance exam grades or her combat skill, there was no doubt that Garnet was among the best and deserved her full scholarship. That didn't mean that no one saw her as a parasite, but fewer people were willing to openly speak of it.

However, Garnet herself only grew more prudent and cautious. The gap between her and Adrianne was enormous. There was no doubt that Adrianne not only had raw talent, but she also utilized her family's wealth and knowledge as well as she possibly could.

Her Regal Wasp being painted instead of polished reflected what kind of person Adrianne truly was. She did't waste money just because she had it by the boatloads, nor did she care that people thought she was a penny-pincher.

Adrianne was a cold woman of few words, but she did not act as if Garnet's entire existence as a blight. When this was combined with her excessive generosity, Garnet began to wonder... if Adrianne was actually being too nice, to the extent that she felt uncomfortably bothered by it.

Still, Garnet wasn't an ingrate. She didn't want to harbor ill and suspicious feelings toward such a generous benefactor. Furthermore, Adrianne had an actual reason to treat Garnet nicely: because Ruby had saved her mother.

Garnet saw no reason to be suspicious of Adrianne at all.

But being the center of attention was bothersome. Like the fact that Garnet had been 'proposed' several times in this week alone!

Garnet wanted to cry because romance was the last thing she wanted this early in the school year, in the so-called season of love.

Garnet wasn't dumb. She was more than aware that many of those young, handsome, rich, and influential men proposed to her not out of love, but because they saw her as the perfect material for a political wife, to be groomed and shaped as they saw fit.

Ha, as if I would want to be with any of those snobs.

Still, not everyone came to her with such intent drawn on their faces.

Some of her so-called admirers came to her after being charmed by her martial prowess and because they felt a strong sense of chivalry. Garnet could feel their sincerity. Still, she rejected them anyway.

She was too grounded to believe in love at first sight and, if she was being romanced by rich men, she was aware that there would be a great many pitfalls ahead. If she made the wrong move, her life could be in danger. Still, that didn't mean she didn't believe in the power of love.

Love alone could be enough to overcome all hardships. Garnet knew that well, considering how she had been raised without a father. Despite being a single mother in an age where unmarried mothers were considered tainted, Ruby had carved out a respectable place for herself and raised her daughter alone.

And, much as Dame Alcott was unwilling to admit it, she had also taken care of Garnet in her own way. She had given Garnet free reign to enter her manor as she wished, read all the books she wanted to learn from, and use any of the tools she needed to train. Dame Alcott had spared no mercy in chastising Garnet whenever she made any mistake, but was even more willing to actually correct her.

Dame Alcott had been her mentor in all but name. For that reason, Garnet loved and respected her. Garnet knew that Dame Alcott had a good reason why she wouldn't accept any disciple.

Just like martial skill, wealth, and influence, love was a form of strength. Therefore, a loveless marriage was a marriage with a glaring weak point. Garnet had no intention of marrying someone she didn't love.

Before she knew it, the orientation week had passed and it was Saturday.

"Excuse me." Garnet entered the classroom politely and bowed. "Is there anyone here named Luna Linker?"

"That's me," a young woman her long hair tied back in a messy half-braid answered with a smile. "What's the occasion, Miss Pucheria?"

"Well, I was told to meet you by certain someone," Garnet bashfully responded. "And I figured that bothering you during the orientation period would be a hassle."

"Hmm, how thoughtful you are. I thought you were simply being prideful or had forgotten."

What, does this mean she waited for me for almost a week straight?

"I'm sorry." Garnet twitched.

"Never mind. Since tomorrow is recess period, it's a good time for me to do that it." Luna smiled widely and rubbed her hands in excitement, relishing the thought of working on Garnet's armor. "I can't wait!"

Garnet was really creeped out by her. She felt like Luna would gobble her up if she turned her back on her...

"I... I see..."

Garnet wasn't accustomed to anyone being nice to her, at least not unless they had been equally kind and respectful to her mother. Those people weren't especially numerous.

However, since Luna had been recommended by Adrianne, Garnet steeled her resolve and tried to ignore how uncomfortable the other woman made her feel.

"Then, let's meet tomorrow after the morning mass!" Luna said to her.

"Alright." Garnet nodded.

During the morning mass, teachers and students would gather in the Academy's church for morning prayers and sermons. Specifically, anyone who considered themselves a worshipper of the benevolent God of Light would go there on a Sunday morning.

The Church of Light was the largest religious institute in the Kingdom, with significant political pull and wealth amassed in its name. In fact, the Church of Light maintained its own paramilitary force, the Crusaders.

The Crusader-affiliated engineers had been the designer of the upgraded Starfall Crusader armor roughly fifteen years ago. During that time, many knights and nobles had switched away to the elusive Southern Bluebird and the fierce Crimson Meteor, or even imported armor suits from neighboring countries. Some of these nobles donated their Starfalls to the Church's service.

Faced with a surplus of usable but underpowered machines, the Church funded research toward performance improvement and life extension.

This upgrade package gave life to the old frame, bringing its performance much closer to its modern counterparts. The original Starfall guild who had made those suits were absorbed into the Church and become their primary supplier of military armaments.

Some Starfall Crusaders would end up in the service of unaffiliated knights such as Sola Linker, the Marchioness Marianne's prized pupil and most trusted attendant.

"What about you, Miss Pucheria?"

"I'm going to visit the Church of the Three Goddesses and pray for a bountiful spring," she said.

"Right, this is the spring season after all!" Luna nodded in approval. "Are you participating in the gospel?"

"Absolutely."

While the Church of Light was the largest religion in the Kingdom, it wasn't the only one.

It was said that the origin of all the gods was universal. The God of Creation made the universe. He appointed the God of Light and Goddess of Shadow as King and Queen of the universe. With them came the four lesser gods: the Earth God, the Flame God, the Water Goddess, and the Wind Goddess.

The Church of Three Goddesses was devoted to the worship of the Goddess of Shadow, the Goddess of Water, and the Goddess of Wind. The three Goddesses were said to govern everything related to weather, climate, the night sky, and the tides.

The Church of Fire and Earth did not survive the chaos if history. Many of their original scriptures had been lost in time. Countless wars, schisms, and the rise and fall of empires over the past few thousand years had been the cause.

A few surviving artifacts and scriptures had been preserved by the Church of Light. In cathedrals around the Kingdom, replicas had been made available for the public to see and revere.

The Church of the Three Goddesses had been born as consolidated remnants of three branches of the same religion. The Church of Light had sworn an oath of brotherhood to protect its existence and to ensure that it would survive a turbulent future.

The historical reason for this oath of protection was unknown to everyone except the highest-ranked of the clergy. However, most people accepted the official explanation: that members of the Church of the Three Goddess also indirectly worshipped the God of Light.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

This interpretation was supported by the holy book, The Chronicle of Three Goddess, which mentioned the God of Light as an equal entity to the Goddess of Shadow.

Among the oldest scriptures in the Church of Light's possession was The Testament of Baal, a three-thousand-years-old book explaining the creation of the universe, the Lumen (light), the Tenebrae (darkness), as well as the four holy spirits (the four elements).

Ultimately, both Churches also worshipped the God amongst Gods, the God of Creation. Both religious and intellectual philosophers agreed that the two Churches were simply facets of the same faith.

Members of the Church of Three Goddesses often participated in the Sunny Spring Festival, a holiday marking the distinct change of seasons, while plants grew, animals thrived, and people celebrated under the grace of the sun.

In exchange, members of the Church of Light also participated in the Fall of Redemption, a solemn holiday period in which people prayed for a safe and peaceful winter to come, a season in which the nights were longer than the days and calm snow often turned into fierce storms.

During the Sunny Spring, the clergy of the Church of Light conducted a ceremony of reverence. Accompanied by representatives of the Church of the Three Goddesses, they sang a collaborative gospel song comprised of the Church of Light's choruses and Church of the Three Goddesses' hymns.

Garnet planned to participate in the hymn, which would take place at the end of the next two weeks. Until then, there were practice sessions twice a week, followed by a final rehearsal on the Saturday before the festival.

"I wonder if Lady Adrianne will participate?"

"Probably not. Lord Avan will assuredly represent the Lyster Family instead of her. More so since he's part of the Church's minor order, as an acolyte."

"I see."

Garnet realised that she would probably see Avan many times over the next two weeks. She wondered what kind of person he was really, since they only meet and interact directly during the first day of the orientation.

CHAPTER 08 - A MOMENT OF SILENCE, PART 1

"...We're in a game world?" Reinhard balked when Adrianne finally dropped the bomb and explained to him her own situation: she had been a maid named Kuro, whose young mistress had played the otome game in front of her on a regular basis.

"More correctly, it is a real world that resembles a game setting." Adrianne took a sip of her ale. "The world is the same, the characters are the same, but in this world... how do I put it, we're not the same two-dimensional caricatures."

"I see..." Reinhard said. "I'd have thought it was some kind of tabletop game setting, but to think it was actually a reverse harem game..."

"Chronicles of Steel Maidens was known for its deep world-building, apparently," Adrianne said. "At least, by the standards of otome games. In this particular case, Miss Garnet is the protagonist character."

"She does have that intense charisma in her, I admit." Reinhard rubbed his chin and smiled. "Can't say I see the womanly appeal in her, however."

Adrianne did not bother to hide a look of disgust.

"Hey, I'm saying what Reinhard would actually have thought!"

"Does that mean you're not Reinhard?"

"In a sense, perhaps I am. But, just as you consider Kuro as a distant memory of the past, I consider Reinhard a distant memory of the past." Reinhard bitterly smiled. "It's probably not much of a stretch to say that Reinhard died and I took his place before his soul could disperse completely."

"...What?"

"Reinhard... well, he was kidnapped and tortured." Reinhard's voice slightly grim, yet there were no sign of trauma in his tone. "I think they were trying to teach him a lesson, for being a depraved man, bedding girls left and right without care. But they went too far and panicked..."

"I think, at some point in his deathbed, Reinhard was begging for a second chance. And the moment I gained consciousness, I woke up in a dehydrated and battered body, with Reinhard's memories in the back of my head."

"I see." Adrianne clasped her hands together, thinking. "So, who were you in Modern Earth? No, wait, for that matter, what year did you come from?"

"My name was Kazuya Elson Brown. I was an American-born half-Japanese, born from a long line of gunsmiths. Around the time of my death, I was nineteen, in the year two thousand and eight. Traffic accident, I think..."

"Two thousand and eight?" Adrianne looked even more shocked than before.

The gap of knowledge was simply enormous. Two thousand and eight predated the era of the smartphone, as well as Japanese media proliferation in the US. This was still a period when someone watching Japanese animation would be considered a big nerd.

"What about you, Kuro... I mean, Lady Adrianne?"

"December 2019, Kuro died of gunshot wounds," Adrianne recalled, to her horror. "She was protecting her mistress from a kidnapping attempt and managed to disable some of the attackers, but the last one got desperate and pulled out a gun before escaping."

"So... they don't use the gun from the start?" Reinhard asked confusedly. "I mean, I know Japan was pretty strict, but what the heck?"

"It was Japan, after all. Using guns in a criminal act would be like using a tactical nuke on a battlefield. The moment you shoot, you're fair game for everyone. Law enforcement, private investigators, and organized criminals will dogpile on you like rabid beasts," Adrianne scoffed. "Speaking of nuclear weapons..."

"Don't even think about it," Reinhard cut her off.

"Right. So, the first thing you did after arriving here..."

"I did what I can do. I forged the most advanced gun I can make in this world. For that reason, I had to do research on percussion caps to make unitary cartridges. And, with the bolt action system, it took two years for me to make my current smoothbore gun."

Reinhard looked like he wanted to cry as he said, "I do it to remember my family back on earth."

Adrianne couldn't say that she could relate, but that didn't mean she thought Kazuya was wrong for reminiscing. If Adrianne were to die right now and be reborn on Modern Earth, she would probably try to forge something too.

"It has a lot of potential for refinement," Adrianne remarked. "The bolt action allowed it to shoot rapidly, but the power..."

"Yeah, it has the power of an ordinary two-pounder cannon, albeit much more accurate and man-portable."

In this case, the word 'pounder' referred to the projectile weight. A one-pounder cannon fired a one pound ball made of solid iron.

However, Reinhard's gun was far more advanced. It had a long, high-precision barrel made of solid iron, which saved a lot of weight. The cannons of this era usually constructed of rolled iron barrel with solid iron bands or bracers for structural reinforcements. Despite having the power of a two-pounder cannon, it was smaller than A one-pounder falconet, a type of obsolete small cannon that was popular a century ago.

Adrianne knew that artillery pieces in the House of Lyster's arsenal included the nine-pounder falcons and eighteen-pounder culverins. A falcon shot could easily kill an armored soldier with a shot to the head. A culverin could accomplish that with a torso shot, even where the armor was thickest.

While a knight's steel armor could be anywhere between one and a half (low-quality steel) to two and a half (highest quality steel) times as strong as iron armor, they still didn't want to be in the receiving end of a cannonball.

However, the mobility of armor suits was high enough that, in an open field battle, it was difficult for cannons to hit them.

Because of that, defensive cannons were often loaded with a bundle of grapeshots, smaller projectiles fired in a cone or cloud pattern, which basically turned them into giant shotguns, trading stopping power for a greater chance of hitting a fast-moving target.

A single grapeshot was often made to be one or two pounds of weight. A single grapeshot was unlikely to kill an armored soldier, but more than enough to impede their movements and cause minor to moderate damage.

"A steel barrel would be flat out impossible. The tools of this world are neither precise nor durable enough. I can make a high-precision iron barrel... but the pressure limit is less than ideal, which restricts the projectile speed."

"Is there any material you could use other than iron?" Adrianne asked curiously. She wondered if perhaps she should help Reinhard in some way.

Reinhard grinned.

"There is. I can use gunmetal, or what people here call red brass. Until Earth started to manufacture steel precision barrels in the eighteenth century, gunmetal was used in their place."

"What about the chemical composition?"

"Eighty-eight percent copper, eight to ten percent zinc, and two to four percent tin."

"That's considerably cheaper than bronze."

The most expensive component in bronze was ironically the tin. A single pound of pure tin cost as much as a thousand pounds of wrought iron or a hundred pounds of steel ingot.

Bronze typically consisted of ninety percent copper and ten percent tin, although this varied by region. Since copper and zinc weren't tremendously expensive, gunmetal would cost considerably lower than bronze by cutting the tin percentage in half. But it would still cost a considerable amount of money.

"It's way beyond my reach as the son of a baron." He shook his head. "It's already hard enough for Father to provide me with something better than an Indigo."

Adrianne was quiet for a moment. Even for her, funding such an expensive project was beyond her reach.

"I wish I could help, but it's not like I have much wealth to spare either." Adrianne finally gave up. "I don't think it's plausible unless you're willing to seek a wealthy sponsor."

"...What about the Marchioness?"

"Her husband, rather," Adrianne corrected him. "My father is a proponent of artillery combat, especially in a defensive role. He might be a pushover, but he would be ecstatic if he saw your bolt action gun."

"Is that an indirect marriage proposal?" Reinhard teased her. "I should prepare a gun as a betrothal gift, in that case."

Adrianne looked seriously irritated, but didn't say anything. Reinhard knew that Adrianne could be rather passive outside of the battlefield, but he didn't want to push his luck...

For that reason, he switched to a different topic. "So, about Reinhard Kingston, does he have a role in the game?" he asked.

"Yeah..." Adrianne smirked. "A recurring comic relief character. As a matter of fact, your game counterpart slept with both Lady Serena and Lady Lina on separate occasions. I was supposed to be the one who beat you up as punishment."

At least, that how it went in Theodore and Avan's route. The subplot was different in Lewis's route, but Adrianne couldn't remember many of the details.

Reinhard was visibly hurt by that statement, and he wasn't even the dominant personality in that body. "I mean, I saw that coming. But by God's almighty toe, Reinhard sucks balls!"

Suck balls? Is that some American swear words? Also, his taste in women was questionable. Adrianne thought.

"Reinhard was there as a vapid contrast to the serious and mostly chaste love interests of Garnet. He was a bad caricature of a nobleman, and I honestly wonder how in-game Reinhard could get away with his stunts."

"Well, the actual Reinhard didn't..." Reinhard sighed. "And here we are."

Adrianne realized how blunt she had sounded before, but it wasn't really worthy of an apology.

"Did you... resent them? Your kidnappers, I mean," Adrianne hesitantly asked him. It was an awkward change of subject after the humorous exchange they'd just had.

"I'm honestly conflicted. On the one hand, those bastards went overboard. On the other hand, the old Reinhard should have seen it coming. He made more enemies every time he bedded a woman without commitment."

Adrianne couldn't agree more.

Even among the respected nobles, not everyone could remain celibate. However, sleeping around was contemptible behavior.

"Without their actions, I might have ended up like Kuro, a mere fragment of a soul and pile of old memories in someone else's body." Reinhard shook his head. "I'm well aware how selfish that sounds... That's why I'm determined to live as Reinhard Kingston, a proper nobleman. The old me died on Earth, and I have no intention of pretending otherwise."

There was a moment's hesitation.

"Of course, I did exact my revenge," Reinhard said. "But I did it through legal means, with no hard feelings involved."

That explains why he stopped throwing himself at anything with a skirt. Adrianne could honestly respect that.

"You're a good man, Kazuya!" Adrianne told him earnestly. "And I pray for success in your endeavor."

"Likewise, my dear Lady Villainess." Reinhard winked. "Don't call me that name in public, though!"