In a Different World with a Smartphone

How did things end up like this?

There were plenty of reasons that I could think of, but at the end of the day I could only put it all down to my own incompetence. I was sullying the name of Kousaka Masanohbu, as a member of Takeda’s Elite Four.

My former lord, Takeda Schingen’s orphaned son Katsuyohri-sama, was completely incompetent in all matters of the state. The natural thing to do would have been to leave all such tasks to retainers who were competent in such fields, which may have assured our survival as a clan at the very least.

Alas, Katsuyohri-sama was blinded in his desperation to surpass his father. We naturally couldn’t help comparing him to Schingen-sama, and I was sure he had caught on to that fact.

As a result, he put us, who had served the Takeda since the times of our previous lord, down as disloyal retainers, and kept us by his side in name only. From there, he instated one unnecessary policy after another as though he were a raging bull.

As to be expected, all of our funds were exhausted in no time at all. Our

Lord’s ‘solution’ to this was to raise the taxes to an unfair degree for all the people of Takeda, to essentially steal from them however much he needed. This only caused further strain on the citizens under us. In no time at all, this led to violent uprising from the farmers and the peasants, and news of this chaos was quick to reach the emperor’s ears.

Considering Yamamoto Kansukay’s attempted revolution not so long ago, combined with the current state of affairs, the emperor came to the natural conclusion that the Takeda Clan has shown no signs of reflecting upon its past misdeeds, and ordered that the clan be disbanded, with its land confiscated.

Katsuyohri-sama himself was also exiled from Eashen as punishment. You could say that he’d merely reaped what he had sown, but from time to time I couldn’t help but think to myself that I should’ve attempted to stop his rampage even at the cost of my own life. Such regrets had weighed on my mind ever since coming to Brunhild. In spite of this all, I had been granted such a critical role as prime minister in my new homeland.

To be frank, when the youngster in front of me first assigned me this role, I almost wondered if he were naught but a fool after all. I couldn’t believe that he was essentially ready to give up full decisive authority on all political matters to a man who was little more than a complete stranger to him.

As such, my new lord, Mochizuki Touya-sama was the very polar opposite of our previous lord Katsuyohri-sama. He made no move to directly intervene in the politics of the country. So long as he thought it a good idea, he was willing to seriously consider anyone’s suggestions, regardless of who had come forward with them. By nature, he managed us under the philosophy of ‘live and let live,’ and essentially left us to manage affairs as we saw fit.

I was happy that he had placed so much trust in us, but it had still left me worried about whether things would really turn out fine for our country under the rule of someone with such a personality. It didn’t take very long for me to figure out his reasons for this, however.

Touya-sama was very rarely at rest, always on the move doing who knows what. If I took my eyes off him for even a moment, he would vanish off to somewhere with little notice, if any at all. If he were just wandering around within our duchy’s borders, then that would not have posed much of a problem, but I had quickly learned that he was the type of man to take off to some country on the other side of the world without giving it a second thought. It hadn’t taken me very long at all to learn that having a lord capable of using transportation magic would be such a handful to deal with.

If we were ever to leave the final decisions on everything to Touya-sama, then we would never make any progress at all. As such, his closest retainers had no choice but to make many of the decisions between ourselves.

That said, there were many matters in which Touya-sama himself was the only one who could make the final decision. Partially because of that, it had become somewhat of a routine of mine to go searching for our whimsical grand duke at least once every few days.

The documents have really begun to pile up these days… Honestly, just where is our grand duke loitering about this time?

“His Highness? He said he was going out to check up on the paddy fields in the castle town.”

“Hrm, I see. I may still make it in time if I hurry.” Having gained valuable information from Tsubaki, one of our former Takeda shinobi, I set out swiftly after our lord. Were my prayers to be answered, he may very well have still been in the duchy, at the very least.

Troublesome as it was, I did not dislike my job. Ours was a small country, yet founded by a renowned hero. I was most curious to see how far we could go, and to what extent we could influence the state of the very world itself. I was looking forward to the day that I could witness such greatness with my own two eyes.

Right now, though, my top priority was to grab our grand duke by the arm and have him sort through his paperwork. My own personal hopes for him and our own internal political affairs were two different things, after all.