The night still hung deep and slow over everything.
The profound stillness of a moment before was torn apart in that instant by the army coming down from the north.
Uesugi Kenshin's pupils froze.
The Mitsu Uroko crest.
The Hōjō clan.
The instant that banner unfurled in the night wind, she understood—what had come from the north was not her three thousand men.
It was Hōjō soldiers.
Then what of her three thousand?
The answer needed no telling.
Almost at the same moment, a horseman bearing the Bishamonten command-banner came galloping up—the scout Uesugi Kenshin had sent out moments earlier to make contact with the northern army.
He half-stumbled, half-scrambled in from the flank, dropped to one knee, his voice shaking.
"My lord—the northern main camp… the whole force is gravely wounded and routed! The four divine artifact ladies were forced to fall back north with the remnants, and Lord Naoe… his whereabouts are unknown!"
Whereabouts unknown.
On a battlefield, everyone knew what those words meant.
For Naoe Kanetsugu, after all, held no power of a divine artifact.
But Kenshin did not answer the scout at once.
Her gaze passed over that great Mitsu Uroko banner, past the line of a thousand-odd Hōjō troops, and came to rest on the gray-robed figure standing on the gentle slope far beyond.
Kōbe Hikaru was still standing there.
The crimson oni mask looked all the more piercing under the moonlight.
He had not moved, had not even taken up any stance for battle.
He simply stood.
Yet in that single instant, Uesugi Kenshin grasped the situation she now faced… it was nothing at all like what she had imagined.
Before her, the three thousand who should have been arrayed to the north had been scattered. In her plan, the Hōjō—split and divided—should have been swallowed up by her army. Instead they had marched south without hindrance, and in the course of it, in this very moment, had neatly sealed off her line of retreat back to the north.
And behind her lay the Hōjō clan's home base, Sagami Province.
More than that, it was the place where Takeda Shingen's Red-Armor corps was briefly encamped.
One ahead, one behind.
All of them enemies.
Or rather—all of them people waiting for her to make a mistake.
She, who was meant to encircle the enemy and carve off Musashi Province, had fallen instead into being encircled herself!
The five hundred household guards had risen from the ground, the Kurumagakari formation tightening once more, the spearmen leveling their points outward, the archers nocking and drawing.
But bewilderment was written across their faces.
There was no fear—the Echigo elite did not know the meaning of fear.
Yet confusion was inevitable.
They did not understand.
They had come here to encircle someone else.
How, then, did it look as though they were the ones being encircled?
And before the guards' confusion could last very long, another scout came rushing in.
From the northeast.
From Echigo, the seat of the Uesugi clan's headquarters, cutting through Kōzuke and circling around by a roundabout path.
What he brought was an urgent dispatch relayed by fast riders straight from the Echigo homeland.
The armor on the rider was crusted with sea salt, his face ashen.
"My lord—an urgent report from Lady Sentōin, regent of the Kantō—"
"A large-scale landing on the northern coast of Echigo! The enemy flies the banner of the Imagawa clan, with a strength estimated at over five thousand!"
"Kasugayama Castle has already gone to alert, but the garrison within is fewer than a thousand men—I beg my lord to return with all speed!"
"!?"
…
At the same time.
North of Kōzuke Province, which lay north of Musashi Province.
On the northern coast of Echigo Province, the night stretched vast and dim, a thick grayish-white fog lying over the water like a natural curtain, sealing the coastline off from the open sea.
Then the curtain split open.
One ship, two, ten—
Dozens of vessels of varying sizes drove out of the fog, their hulls sitting deep in the water, their decks packed with fully armed samurai.
No family crest was painted on the sails—that was deliberate.
But the shape of those ships was unmistakably Suruga-built.
Broad-bottomed and low-sided, a mixed fleet of mid-sized atakebune and small sekibune suited to sailing the inner sea, their prows sheathed in iron, bamboo poles lashed to their sterns as makeshift flagstaffs.
The cloth strips hung from those poles unfurled in the sea wind.
A single character was written upon them.
"今" (Ima).
Imagawa.
The fleet of the Imagawa clan of Suruga.
The greatest waterborne power of the Tōkaidō.
When the first ship ran up onto the sand, its hull let out a dull grinding groan, timber striking gravel until the whole vessel shuddered.
The gangplanks came down.
Armored ashigaru poured off the ships, treading the wet sand, spreading swiftly into formation.
No war cries, no horns.
Only the dense tramp of feet and the faint clink of armor plates.
The second ship put in to shore.
The third.
More ships came out of the fog, as if rising up from the seabed, one after another.
More and more men gathered on the beach.
Three thousand, four thousand.
In the end it settled at around five thousand.
Imagawa Yoshimoto had all but dragged out every soldier who could move—a joint levy across the three provinces of Suruga, Tōtōmi, and Mikawa, plus ships borrowed from the minor lords nearby.
Five thousand men, dozens of ships, setting out from the ports of Suruga, tracking north along the inner sea, rounding the southern tip of Sado Island, and at last reaching the northern coast of Echigo.
It had taken very nearly a full month.
This was, of course, no spur-of-the-moment venture.
It was something Kōbe Hikaru had begun planning the very day he struck his pact with Imagawa Yoshimoto at Yadaihara.
One of the conditions he had set for the Imagawa—that when they met a supernatural battle, they obey his command without question.
And the first order of that command was this very thing.
Assemble a fleet, sail north along the inner sea, circle around to the rear of Echigo, and stand by.
Wait for his signal.
The means of relaying that signal was not complicated either.
Mingled among the Imagawa army were a few small yōkai.
Three of the twenty-three Demons he had deliberately kept back—a kappa able to dive into the water, a one-eyed little monk who could fly though neither high nor far, and a tanuki spirit who served as their leader.
The tanuki spirit could receive Kōbe Hikaru's orders through dread, then pass them on to the Imagawa commanders.
It was not precise enough, and now and then a message came through garbled, but the broad direction held true.
This was a maneuver set in motion nearly a month in advance.
From the moment he agreed to Imagawa Yoshimoto's terms, this piece had already been placed on the board.
…
Suruga Province, the Imagawa main castle.
Imagawa Yoshimoto sat upon the seat of honor on the highest tier of the castle keep.
Her jūnihitoe robes lay in layer upon layer; today she wore a sumptuous set woven of deep purple and gold, the collar drawn snug about a slender neck, the golden butterfly ornament in her hair glinting in the candlelight.
In her hand she held a folding fan painted with pine and crane, tapping it against her knee now and again.
Kneeling before her was a messenger samurai just returned from the north.
"…All five thousand men have landed on the northern coast of Echigo. They are currently establishing a beachhead, and there is already a stir in the direction of Kasugayama Castle."
"Understood. Withdraw."
The messenger withdrew.
The paper door slid shut.
Imagawa Yoshimoto set down the fan and closed her eyes.
Three seconds of silence.
Then—
"Ha."
She let out a single laugh.
Very soft, pressed down in her throat.
Those five thousand men were the very limit of what she could spare; the internal defenses of the Suruga Province she actually controlled had been all but hollowed out, the garrison left behind not even a thousand strong.
Should the Takeda seize the chance to strike, she would not even have the means to resist.
The provisions, ships, and supplies along the way for five thousand men had eaten through half a year of the Imagawa clan's stores.
And they'd had to swing out on so vast a detour.
And she'd had to let those few scraggly, misbegotten little yōkai march along with the army—
She, Imagawa Yoshimoto, the proud lord of Suruga Province, hegemon of the Tōkaidō, had been run in circles at the command of a yōkai.
Even the timing of the deployment had not been hers to decide.
"Damned Demon God."
She cursed again.
But the corner of her mouth was curved upward.
Because she had seen the other side of it too—
That woman of Echigo who called herself the incarnation of Bishamonten, that God of War who had once left her utterly powerless on the field—right now the rear of that very woman was being trampled beneath the feet of her own army.
Uesugi Kenshin.
So you have a day like this too.
Imagawa Yoshimoto took up the folding fan again and hid the corner of her mouth behind it.
The smile would not be pressed down, however she tried.
"Unifying the realm and all that… though being played like a puppet by that fellow does grate."
She murmured to the empty room.
"But—well, at least the direction isn't wrong."
…
Imagawa.
Five thousand men.
Landed at Echigo.
These three pieces of news drove like three blades, one after another, into the heart of every Echigo soldier present.
It was not merely that they were being encircled in turn.
Their own main base—their very home—already had an enemy at its gates!
Kasugayama Castle—that was the foundation of Echigo, the ancestral house of the Uesugi, the great rear guard of them all.
And now the five thousand of the Imagawa clan of Suruga stood at their doorstep.
The guards' formation at last showed a trace of slack.
No rout, only… a wavering.
A wavering of resolve.
But that was enough.
The momentum of faith gathered in these five hundred—that field of military might, concentrated to rival thousands of ordinary troops—in that instant, showed a crack.
Uesugi Kenshin felt it.
She stood under the moonlight, her silver-white hair blown into disarray by the wind, the hem of her white monastic robe curling like waves.
Encircled front and back.
Three thousand routed.
Naoe Kanetsugu taken.
Echigo under attack.
All of it pointed to the same single source.
She turned her head and looked once more at that gray-robed figure standing on the gentle slope.
The moonlight stretched his shadow long, reaching from the crest of the slope all the way down to her feet.
"The Imagawa fleet—that was your doing?"
She spoke, her voice still without a rise or fall. "By the distance, setting out from Suruga, they would have come north along the inner sea—you set them moving at least a month ago."
Kōbe Hikaru did not deny it.
"Correct."
"The very day you struck your pact with Imagawa Yoshimoto?"
"Correct."
"So you've been guarding against me from the very start."
"Also correct."
Kōbe Hikaru's answers were so crisp they hardly sounded like battlefield talk—more like reconciling a ledger.
Kenshin's gaze lingered on him a long while.
A month ago, at the battle of Yadaihara, Kōbe Hikaru and Imagawa Yoshimoto had come to terms.
That was public knowledge; her spies had long since brought back the gist of it.
At the time she had paid it no mind.
She had thought it merely a yōkai seeking a patron to lean on.
But looking back now—
That pact had been meant to deal with her from the very beginning.
To move the Imagawa fleet north along the coast, circling around to the rear of Echigo—this demanded a clear grasp of the inner sea's routes, the reckoning of tides and the set of the seasonal winds, the knowledge of whether a month's sailing could reach the Echigo coast before she swept south to close her encirclement, and more than that… supernatural power, such as a kappa among the small yōkai secretly stirring the sea currents to aid them.
Otherwise there would be no crossing the layered obstacles of both men and yōkai in between, no way to achieve a physical breakthrough…
Only by borrowing supernatural power could such a cross-sea long-range assault be accomplished—something that in the original world could never, ever have been done!
Under the blessing of dread, a kappa versed in sea currents and a tanuki yōkai versed in illusion truly could, just barely, manage it!
Uesugi Kenshin had skipped the intervening nodes to strike the Hōjō rear, and so carve off Musashi Province.
He had simply turned her own scheme against her—skipped past her front line, sent the Hōjō to strike her rear, and long before that had made ready to send the Imagawa to strike her very lair.
This, glaringly, was island-hopping too.
True island-hopping.
And he had hopped farther than she had, and harder, and more thoroughly.
She had hopped but one step—from Musashi to Sagami.
He had hopped two—from Musashi to Echigo, from Musashi to a place at her back.
Of course, beyond all this, there was one more thing Uesugi Kenshin cared about.
"You held these tidings back on purpose, waiting for this very moment… to shake the resolve of my army?"
Report after report, in sequence.
Every one of them of crushing weight.
Yet all arriving at once.
This too was plainly no coincidence, but Kōbe Hikaru deliberately choking off the channels of information, so that Uesugi Kenshin could gain no warning in advance.
Of course, choking off the channels of information was in itself a kind of information.
It was only that this Dragon of Echigo had been too confident in her own scheming.
So confident that only now did she wake with a start.
So confident that in this moment,
a crack at last appeared in the cool detachment upon that exquisite face.
Surprise.
Utter, thoroughgoing surprise.
"You truly did plan this far ahead."
Yes.
This, beyond any doubt, was Kōbe Hikaru's handiwork.
Turning her scheme against her, layered atop the handiwork prepared long in advance.
From the very beginning he had known Uesugi Kenshin would come back for another round; from the very beginning, his pact with Imagawa Yoshimoto had carried within it the purpose of guarding against Uesugi Kenshin.
How could he possibly have made no preparation at all?
And now.
"You've lost."
"You can island-hop—then naturally, so can I."
As for that so-called grasp of the larger picture: Kōbe Hikaru, drawn from a later age, was truly a match for anyone.
____
________________________________________
If you want more chapters, please consider supporting my page on (P). with 50 advanced chapters available on (P)
👻 Join the crew by searching Leanzin on (P). You know the spot! 😉