A moment passed. Then another.
Imagawa Yoshimoto pressed a hand to her chest and sagged back against the rest at the head of the hall.
"You—"
She jabbed a finger at the gray figure stepping out of the shadow of the pillar, and the finger was shaking. "Could you please act like a normal person!"
"Is it so hard to announce yourself at the door!"
"This is the castle keep of the lord of an entire province — and you came in over the roof?!"
Imagawa Yoshimoto's voice had climbed well above its usual pitch. Her delicate features were written over with fright after the fact and with anger — but mostly with pure flustered indignation.
For that one moment, every emotion proper to a girl of sixteen or seventeen was on full display.
Kobe Hikaru leaned against the pillar, entirely at ease.
"I'm a Demon," he said.
"Demons walking the night roads don't call ahead. That's ordinary enough — and I came the same way last time."
Imagawa Yoshimoto's mouth opened, then closed. She was angry enough to bend her folding fan out of shape.
But she found she had no answer for him.
The wretch was telling the truth. He was a Demon.
And the last time he had come to the Imagawa mansion, when he cut down the Thunder Beast, he had come exactly like this… and he had saved her life doing it.
Don't get angry.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
The fan came down against her knee with a slap.
It took Imagawa Yoshimoto roughly the time it takes to drink half a cup of tea to get her breathing back under control, tuck the loose strands of hair behind her ear, straighten her collar, and recover the dignity a provincial lord ought to possess.
Though the tips of her ears were still red.
From temper.
"That conversation just now — you heard all of it?"
She did not bother circling the point.
"Mm."
"Then what's your read on it?"
Kobe Hikaru came away from the pillar and sat down cross-legged facing her.
The lamplight in the hall slid light and shadow in turns across his pale face. With no oni mask covering them, the crimson demon eyes showed the violet tracery drifting in and out of visibility within.
The sight held Imagawa Yoshimoto for a beat too long before she snapped back to herself.
She cursed silently at herself.
Kobe Hikaru paid no attention. He simply spoke.
"Tsuchimikado Miyu."
He said the name once, and then laid out what he had heard:
"An apprentice onmyoji of the Onmyoryo. Daughter of the head of the house. Ostensibly here to deliver an imperial decree — actually here for the Shikon Jewel. You blocked her well."
Imagawa Yoshimoto made a small sound in her throat and snapped the fan open again, hiding half her face behind it.
"Naturally."
The look above the fan carried a trace of smugness. She had been praised, and much as she didn't care to admit it, it pleased her.
"But the Onmyoryo won't let it end there," Kobe Hikaru went on, passing over it lightly, evenly. "Sending an apprentice was itself a probe. Their real methods are probably still to come."
"I know that much."
Yoshimoto folded the fan and tapped its handle against her knee.
"The Onmyoryo runs deep. The Tsuchimikado house has been building for centuries, and what they hold in hand is far more than what they show — the talismans, the shikigami, the barrier arts, those are their livelihood. If they truly moved, they'd be no less dangerous than a few thousand elite troops."
"But they won't break openly with me."
There was real confidence in her voice as she said it.
"At least not now. Suruga is far away, and there are still the lands of Totomi and Mikawa — plenty of unrest within them, granted, but in name they belong to the Imagawa clan all the same. Besides, Kyoto has a mess of its own to sit in."
"The shogun, the Emperor, the kugyo, all of them checking one another — they have very little capacity to manage matters out here. At most they can work some mischief from behind the curtain, and anything done from behind the curtain can't carry much force. Not hard to handle."
Kobe Hikaru nodded and said nothing more.
What he was thinking about was something else.
"The Hojo petition — the request for true god status. Where has it gotten to?"
"It reached Kyoto long ago, I'd imagine. Though the review is a troublesome process."
Imagawa Yoshimoto glanced at him.
"You do understand what that Hojo Ujiyasu woman is calculating, don't you?"
"I do."
Kobe Hikaru's answer was flat and direct.
Certification as a true god looked on the surface like elevation — status handed to him, a proper name. In truth it was a tether.
Hojo Ujiyasu had submitted the petition under guarantee of her own name as provincial lord, which meant that the legal foundation of his so-called godhood originated with the Hojo clan.
Once the certification passed, his standing within the Shinto system would be hooked to the Hojo.
The Hojo rise, he rises.
The Hojo fall, and Kyoto could seize on the pretext to take his position as a true god back again.
It was a chain no one could see.
With a single document of petition, Hojo Ujiyasu had bound herself and a powerful yokai onto the same boat.
She had gotten herself a god.
And she had gambled that Kobe Hikaru would not refuse.
Because he needed the name as well.
"That woman is cunning past all measure."
Imagawa Yoshimoto's mouth twisted slightly, a thread of scorn in her voice.
"A true god isn't like a clan guardian deity, something sustained purely by 'protection.' A true god has to hold several things at once."
"Once the Shinto certification comes down, your footing in Musashi and Sagami is solid enough, true — dread and faith both, which sounds lovely. But every move you make could then be bound by that framework called a Shrine. The expectations of the faithful, the rules of Shinto, Kyoto's scrutiny — all of it comes pressing down on you."
"Not to mention that if something happens to the Hojo, you — the 'true god' the Hojo clan vouched for — are the first item on the account to be settled."
She said it unhurried and in order, point by point.
It was the political nose one would expect from a student taught by the Black-Robed Chancellor, Taigen Sessai.
Kobe Hikaru heard her out and did not contradict her.
"You're right," he admitted.
All of it was true. The Hojo clan's stroke had been a grand one and Hojo Ujiyasu had genuinely given a great deal — but as the daimyo of a province she was, exactly as she herself had said, engaged more in an exchange of interests than in any simple repayment of debt.
But Kobe Hikaru answered with full confidence:
"I won't be leashed by it."
"Faith is nourishment, not a shackle. Same as dread — using it is fine. Letting it turn and devour you would be stupid."
"I'll take the standing the Hojo are offering. But I won't build my foundation on another person's guarantee."
He looked at Imagawa Yoshimoto.
His foundation had always been himself — this body of a Demon warrior he had possessed since before he crossed over, a yokai body that kept changing and kept growing stronger.
Not the hollow things that drop you back to your original shape the moment you lose them.
"This so-called true god certification is, at most, flowers embroidered onto brocade."
"The flowers wither. The brocade remains."
Imagawa Yoshimoto stared at him for several seconds.
Then she said:
"…That's for the best."
The folding fan turned half a circle, its face hiding the corner of her mouth.
What it couldn't hide was the odd, unaccountable pleasure at the bottom of her eyes.
Perhaps because the Hojo had not managed to pull him over entirely.
Perhaps because when he spoke, he hadn't mentioned the benefits the Hojo offered — he had laid the risks bare in front of her first.
Or perhaps simply because he was sitting here, saying these things to her.
She couldn't have explained it.
And she had no intention of trying.
Picking at reasons was the most pointless occupation there was. Imagawa Yoshimoto had always been that way.
The girl lord closed the fan and set it aside, and then drew something out of her sleeve.
A map.
Not a military map — more like a crude hand-drawn sketch, with several positions marked in ink, each one accompanied by a date and a short note.
She pushed it across the floor into the space between them.
"This is for you."
Kobe Hikaru looked down.
He saw what was marked on the map.
Three locations, scattered along the border country between western Suruga Province and eastern Totomi Province, and beside each of them the same keywords—
Blacksmith. Volcano. Stunted old yokai.
Kobe Hikaru's hand stopped.
"…What is this?"
"That 'person' you've been searching for lately."
Imagawa Yoshimoto's voice carried a trace — only a trace — of smugness she couldn't quite conceal.
"Totosai. The possible whereabouts of the personal blacksmith of Toga — the one the yokai call the Lord of the Western Provinces, the great yokai whose weight held the Western Lands under him for centuries."
"You've been sending those yokai under your command all over my territory, asking questions with no attempt at discretion. Did you think I'd know nothing about it?"
Kobe Hikaru was not remotely surprised.
He had indeed had the tanuki spirit spread an intelligence net across Suruga to track down Totosai. However covert the little yokai were in their movements, they made no small stir in the end — the kappa had questioned every waterway, the tanuki spirit had gone slipping through every marketplace, and the one-eyed little monk had even gone into the temples to ask the Tsukumogami that had lingered in the world for ages.
In the eyes of ordinary people, such activity might pass unnoticed.
In the eyes of a daimyo commanding intelligence networks across several provinces, it was no different from someone rifling through every box and chest in her own courtyard.
What did surprise Kobe Hikaru was that this girl daimyo had not merely noticed — she had put her own hand in to help.
"These three places are leads my ninja have gathered over the past half month," Imagawa Yoshimoto continued.
"Not what those little yokai of yours turned up — their intelligence net is still far too crude. All that asking around in every direction did was alert my people."
"So I looked into it for you."
Her tone was casual, as though describing some small errand done in passing.
Kobe Hikaru knew better. Turning Suruga Province's ninja network onto the hunt for a yokai blacksmith living in seclusion inside a volcano — that was not something anyone accomplished "in passing."
It took manpower. It took time. It took broad exploration of mountain and forest terrain.
And Imagawa Yoshimoto had already done it for him before he ever asked.
Kobe Hikaru looked at her, and asked nothing further.
He only turned Taigen Sessai's request over in his mind once more…
Then: "Thank you."
He reached out and tucked the map into his robes.
Imagawa Yoshimoto's fan gave a small wave.
"You're welcome."
She was smiling faintly, and rather pleased with herself.
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