Chapter 213: The Enemy is Shy, I Shall Go and Undress Him!
The news of Taigen Sessai's death swept across the Tokaido region faster than a plague wind.
In the days that followed, a steady stream of detailed intelligence flowed into Kaede Village, carried along the invisible fear network of the yokai under his command. The initial reports from the Tanuki Spirit, supplemented by the Great Kappa's observations and corroborated by the swift Kamaitachi, pieced together a flawless picture of the shifting political landscape.
After Sessai drew his last breath, the Imagawa Clan did not fracture into the bloody chaos the outside world had so eagerly anticipated.
Quite the contrary.
Imagawa Yoshimoto—that young, deeply insecure female daimyo who refused to step outside without an escort of at least forty ashigaru, six mounted samurai, and eight palanquin bearers—did something entirely unmatched in the wake of her teacher's passing.
Taigen Sessai had left behind a careful posthumous strategy. And at the exact moment when rival lords assumed she would be paralyzed by grief and indecision, Yoshimoto executed every single one of those inherited stratagems.
One by one. Without a single compromise.
using the lingering dread of Kobe Hikaru's name, she forged an alliance with Hojo Ujiyasu. She then joined forces with the Hojo to launch a horizontal and vertical containment strategy against Takeda Shingen, ultimately forging a three-way pact that solidified the Koso-Sun joint military agreement.
Riding the momentum of this diplomatic triumph, she tightened her grip on the military assets of Suruga, Totomi, and Mikawa provinces, ruthlessly centralizing all power under the Imagawa banner. Taking advantage of a narrow window of time—while the second-generation Uesugi Kenshin was bogged down with Echigo's internal affairs and unable to look south—the Imagawa Clan moved like thunder, integrating every controllable resource in the Kanto region.
Overnight, she became the undisputed supreme warlord of the Kanto and Tokaido. The geography of her three provinces formed the shape of a fully drawn battle bow, and the arrow was nocked.
Her standing main force swelled to seven thousand seasoned troops. Factoring in branch families, vassals, and the necessary logistics to maintain homeland stability, she could directly mobilize nearly twenty thousand personnel. In this expanded, chaotic world, supply lines and logistics were the lifeblood of any campaign, and this sheer volume of manpower was second to none among the daimyo of the Sengoku period. It was a military machine capable of rivaling the greatest powers in the world.
Yoshimoto's ultimate goal was glaringly obvious.
She intended to march on Kyoto.
By carving a bloody path westward from the Tokaido, clearing the road to the capital, and seizing the Kinai region, she would claim the righteous mandate to rule the world. She might lack the overwhelming individual martial prowess of rival generals, and she was certainly terrified of decapitation strikes by rogue warriors, but as long as she could garrison herself within the thousand-year-old fortress-city of Kyoto, she would be untouchable. As a blood relative of the Ashikaga Shogun family of the Muromachi Shogunate, she possessed the absolute pedigree and qualification to claim the highest seat.
Only one obstacle blocked her path. Owari Province.
The Oda Clan.
It was a pathetic, fractured family clinging to half a province, fielding a meager force of barely one or two thousand men. Their head was a fledgling daimyo who had held power for less than six months, scraping by on an income of no more than two thousand koku.
Against the Imagawa's seven thousand elite vanguard troops, this was not an obstacle. It was a pebble on the road.
At least, that was what Yoshimoto believed.
And so, she gathered the vast majority of her military assets and marched majestically toward the gateway of Owari Province.
Okehazama.
It was the narrowest, most suffocating valley on the winding road to Kyoto. Taigen Sessai's posthumous strategy had specifically circled this exact location in red ink.
Yet, upon arriving at the mouth of the valley, Yoshimoto ordered the army to halt, set up camp, and rest.
She did this because she was brimming with absolute confidence, and because her feet hurt. After forcing a march of seven thousand men for three grueling days under a blistering summer sun, they arrived at noon. The heat was suffocating, baking the armor of the ashigaru. Yoshimoto decided it was only proper to stop, enjoy a refined cup of tea, eat some sweets, and wait for the sweltering heat to break before crushing the Oda.
Posthumous strategies are dead, but human hearts can change. Sessai had warned her of this very flaw.
Miles away, the moment the news of her encampment rippled through the yokai fear network, Kobe Hikaru stood silently in the courtyard of the Kaede Village shrine. His pale, calloused fingers methodically stroked the string of Camellia prayer beads, quietly grinding their favorability.
His Crimson Demon Eyes narrowed, piercing through the distance toward the west.
A moment later, he brushed the dust from his dark robes.
He needed to go.
This was not merely out of a sense of obligation to a dead strategist's final request. Strictly speaking, he had never promised Sessai anything concrete; the phrase "do my best" was a notoriously flexible contract.
But calculating the shifting pieces on the board, Hikaru knew he had to intervene. Not out of loyalty to the Imagawa, and certainly not for Yoshimoto's sake.
He was doing it for himself.
For Kyoto.
He would have to march on the capital eventually. Hagoromo Gitsune was deeply entrenched there, her nine tails suffocating the city in absolute darkness. Though the Great Yokai had been suspiciously quiet over the past two months, Hikaru was not foolish enough to believe she was resting. The strongest entity of this era was merely coiling her strength, preparing to strike.
Sitting back and waiting for her to complete her grand design was a death sentence. His own 'development' had to outpace hers.
While he could theoretically storm Kyoto alone or at the head of his Hyakki Yagyo when he grew strong enough, having an obedient daimyo—or better yet, a puppet Shogun holding the supreme authority of the land—paving the way would make the logistics infinitely smoother. Elevating Yoshimoto to the heavens directly served his own pragmatic interests.
As for why he didn't back Hojo Ujiyasu of Sagami, a daimyo who had also placed massive bets on his power? The answer was simple.
Ujiyasu's ambitions were pitifully small.
The Imagawa had offered him a seemingly smaller tribute, merely enshrining him as their family's guardian deity in a pragmatic alliance. But if the Imagawa seized Kyoto, Hikaru would automatically become the guardian deity of the new ruler of the world. His status would skyrocket to the heavens.
The Hojo, on the other hand, had cemented him as the 'true deity' of Sagami and Musashi, using the power of incense to anchor him exclusively to the Kanto region. Ujiyasu had no burning desire to conquer the world; she was perfectly content ruling her corner of the map.
Her methods were sound, but her vision was hopelessly myopic.
To Hikaru, the Kanto region was nothing. Even the entirety of Japan was microscopic in his eyes. It was barely the size of a single province in the Heavenly Empire, a mere fraction of the landmass from the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods two thousand years ago.
"Tanuki Juzaburo, pass down my order," Hikaru's voice was flat, carrying a chilling authority.
"Have the Great Kappa of Shimizu Port mobilize his forces toward the western sea. Order the Snow Woman of the north to press her blizzards directly against the border. Make it look like a full-scale invasion. Give Echigo enough suffocating pressure to ensure they don't get any clever ideas about stabbing us in the back."
While it was highly unlikely they would move—intelligence suggested the second-generation Uesugi Kenshin was currently pulling her hair out over the loss of her top-tier administrator, Naoe Kanetsugu—Hikaru left nothing to chance. His yokai forces existed precisely for moments like this.
The Tanuki Spirit slammed his forehead against the dirt in absolute reverence, dissolved into a wisp of pungent demon smoke, and burrowed into the earth.
The courtyard fell into a heavy silence.
Hikaru turned on his heel and walked toward the towering wooden Torii gate.
A pristine white figure stood beneath the crimson wood, having clearly waited for him. White kosode, vivid red hakama, and a waterfall of midnight-black hair cascading down her back. A massive Japanese longbow was slung over her shoulder.
She didn't utter a word. She simply watched him with deep, calm eyes.
"I need to go to Owari. To Okehazama," Hikaru stated.
"I know." Kikyo nodded, her tone smooth and unyielding. "I will go too."
Hikaru stopped and studied her.
In the past, he would have rejected her instantly. A war between two daimyo was a meat grinder of thousands of men, a shura field choked with soaring blood energy and unpredictable chaos. Kikyo possessed terrifying spiritual power, but beneath it, she was still a mortal woman with fragile flesh and bone.
But things were different now.
Kikyo took a single step forward.
Without a single hand seal or incantation, the edges of her silhouette violently blurred. In the blink of an eye, her physical form dissolved into a blinding sphere of pure, condensed spiritual light. The light didn't sting the eyes, but it moved with terrifying, instantaneous speed, sweeping around the Torii gate and materializing directly beside Hikaru.
Her boots touched the dirt without a sound. Not a single crease on her hakama was disturbed.
Spirit Transformation Technique.
She looked up at him, her dark eyes reflecting a silent challenge.
Hikaru's lips twitched. A faint, rare smile broke through the rigid, deadpan lines of his demonic face. He hadn't actually planned on leaving her behind anyway.
"Then let us go, my priestess."
He glanced over his shoulder. "Momiji, Botan. Guard the shrine. If anything breaches the perimeter, summon the Snow Woman and the Great Kappa... or drag Naoe Kanetsugu out of her office to handle it. We will return shortly."
Before the two shrine maidens emerging from the main hall could even open their mouths to reply, the air pressure violently collapsed.
A deafening crack of thunder shattered the sky, accompanied by a blinding eruption of demonic and spiritual energy. One undead samurai and one priestess shot upward from the earth like a reverse meteor, vanishing into the horizon.
Momiji and Botan stood frozen on the porch, their jaws slack.
A long, agonizing minute passed.
Botan blinked, rubbing her eyes. "That kind of movement technique... did Lady Kikyo also turn into a yokai?"
Momiji slowly turned her head away. She really, really didn't want to deal with her idiot junior sister right now.
Okehazama.
Situated at the southeastern throat of Owari Province, it was a suffocatingly narrow valley winding between steep, jagged hills. Rolling inclines choked the north, dense, impenetrable forests guarded the south, and the central passage was a miserable dirt road no wider than twenty zhang.
The Imagawa main camp sprawled across a wide, gentle slope at the western mouth of the valley. Seven thousand men blanketed the earth. Banners bearing the Imagawa crest hung limply in the stagnant air, hundreds of tents stretched toward the tree line, and the thick, greasy smoke of cooking fires choked the sky.
It was just past noon. The summer heat was a physical weight, pressing down on the valley like a wet blanket.
Deep inside the opulent main tent at the center of the encampment.
Imagawa Yoshimoto lounged on a low wooden couch draped in imported brocade. She lazily fanned herself with a folding fan painted with elegant pines and cranes, her other hand stuffing a sticky piece of sweet rice cake into her mouth.
Her Junihitoe kimono, heavily embroidered with deep purple and spun gold, pooled across the tatami mats. The stifling layers of fabric tightly bound her slim-waisted, narrow-shouldered frame, leaving only her delicate, flushed face exposed. Heavy gold ornaments dragged down her flowing jet-black hair.
She was a sixteen-year-old girl, yet she held the absolute authority of three entire provinces.
Right now, she was aggressively chewing her rice cake while skimming through a stack of scout reports.
"How many peasants has the Oda managed to scrape out of the mud?" she mumbled, swallowing heavily.
"Reporting to my Lord!" A senior vassal knelt just outside the tent flap, his forehead pressed so hard into the dirt his knuckles were white. "According to the scouts, the Owari Oda Clan's main camp has a garrison of roughly one thousand two hundred to one thousand five hundred men. Even if we count their logistics corps and blacksmiths, they do not exceed three thousand!"
Yoshimoto nodded, her cheeks puffing out as she took another bite of mochi.
"Fifteen hundred."
She held up a single, manicured finger, calculating the absolute worst-case scenario. Seven thousand elite veterans against fifteen hundred starving farmers. She held a numerical advantage of nearly five to one.
More, the Imagawa Army was a finely tuned machine. Decades of brutal drilling under Taigen Sessai had turned the Suruga Ashigaru into a wall of iron discipline, and the Totomi cavalry was widely feared as the finest in the Kanto region. Throw in the fanatical vanguard forces of the Mikawa Matsudaira Clan, and the battle was already won.
The advantage was absolute.
Yoshimoto tossed the war report onto the floor, snapped her folding fan shut, and tapped it rhythmically against her palm. A smug, arrogant smirk crept onto her lips.
The road to Kyoto starts here.
She would trample Owari into the dirt, march straight through Mino, and breach the Kinai region. Once she set foot in Kyoto, she would pay her respects to the 'Emperor', secure the imperial court's divine blessing, and officially crown herself the Overlord of the realm.
Control the Emperor to command the lords. It was a flawless plan.
But first...
"Let's take a break." She stretched her arms above her head, popping her stiff shoulders. She popped her fan open again, hiding the lower half of her face so only her sparkling, lazy eyes were visible. "Three days of forced marching has exhausted the men. Let the soldiers eat their fill and sleep off the heat. It won't be too late to crush them tomorrow morning."
The kneeling vassal's jaw tightened. He desperately wanted to argue against halting in such a vulnerable choke point, but seeing the stubborn, pampered look in his young lord's eyes, he swallowed his words and bowed.
Outside the tent, the sun beat down mercilessly. The entire camp of seven thousand men stripped off their heavy armor, sinking into a deep, lethargic midday slumber.
And right in the middle of that suffocating, lazy silence—
A thunderous, rhythmic rumbling erupted from the crest of the northeastern hills.
It sounded like an avalanche.
It was the deafening roar of iron hooves. Cavalry.
Dozens of elite light cavalrymen surged over the ridge at breakneck speed. They rode in a terrifyingly tight, wedge-shaped formation, bursting from the tree line as if the very hill had split open to vomit a river of iron and blood.
The rider leading the charge was a nightmare made flesh.
Her warhorse was a massive, jet-black beast, its barding forged from overlapping dark-gold scales. It was the only heavy cavalry unit on the field.
And the rider—was a woman.
She looked to be in her early twenties, possessing a towering, fiercely muscular physique with broad shoulders and a powerful back. Polished silver armor clung to her chest, worn over a tattered blue battle skirt. The heavy breastplate strained against the generous curves of her chest, the steel plates perfectly contouring the tight, explosive muscle lines from her collarbone down to her narrow waist.
Her wild brown hair was tied high atop her head, framing a face that was devastatingly gorgeous yet radiating pure, unadulterated bloodlust. Her amber eyes burned with a piercing, predatory light that rivaled the scorching afternoon sun.
In her hands, she gripped a monstrous, long-handled greataxe.
The axe blade was wider than a grown man's shoulders. The entire weapon hummed with a sickening, razor-sharp luster—a light that didn't reflect the sun, but rather bled from deep within the metal itself, like the core of a dying star.
It possessed the exact same pure, lofty frequency as the power of faith wielded by the Divine Artifact Princess Warriors under Uesugi Kenshin and Takeda Shingen.
Yet, its essence was fundamentally, horrifyingly different.
It was violent. It was destructive. It radiated a blistering, flesh-melting heat.
If Kenshin's Bishamonten power was the serene, high-hanging light of Buddha, and Shingen's Fūrinkazan was an unstoppable chariot of war, then the power bleeding from this woman's axe was the apocalyptic fire of hell.
It was the power of the Demon King of the Sixth Heaven.
In the ancient Buddhist sutras, the Demon King of the Sixth Heaven was the absolute ruler of the 'Take-jizaiten'—the highest heaven of the Desire Realm. His true name was Mara. He was not a Buddha. He was not a god. He was not a ghost.
He was a 'Demon'.
The ultimate antithesis to enlightenment, the physical embodiment of raw desire, slaughter, and destruction.
And in this blood-soaked era, the young female daimyo of Owari Province—a girl who had just slaughtered her own younger brother in a brutal coup and earned the moniker of a 'madwoman'—had arrogantly claimed that exact divine title for herself.
The Demon King of the Sixth Heaven, Oda Nobuna.
The rest of the world had laughed it off as the delusional ravings of a psychotic child.
But right now, in this valley—
Staring at the apocalyptic aura radiating from the female warrior on the black horse, watching her swing a grey-iron greataxe the size of a door while leading a wedge of iron cavalry straight down the throat of the Imagawa main camp—
No one was laughing.
"I am Shibata Katsuie! By the absolute order of my Lord—"
The Hime-musha's roar tore down the hillside, echoing through the valley like the horn of the apocalypse.
"—I have come to take Imagawa Yoshimoto's head!"
Dozens of iron-shod hooves pulverized the wild grass, kicking up a massive dust storm that blotted out the sun.
The Imagawa camp's outer picket line didn't even last half a stick of incense. They were annihilated.
The first row of drowsy ashigaru were violently launched into the air by the charging warhorses before they could even lower their bamboo spears. Katsuie swung her greataxe in a massive, horizontal arc. A terrifying crescent of grey light tore through the air.
CRACK!
Wherever the light touched, bamboo spears snapped like dry twigs. The ashigaru's armor exploded into shrapnel as if it were made of wet paper.
This wasn't just a crushing defeat born of superior physical strength. It was the absolute, tyrannical suppression of the power fused into that greataxe.
The power of a Divine Artifact.
Because it shared the same origin as the power of faith, it naturally crushed any 'extraordinary' resistance. It carried the physical weight of a mountain. Before this divine violence, ordinary steel was rotten wood. Armor was tissue paper. Human flesh and bone were nothing more than soft tofu.
The second and third defensive lines of ashigaru were instantly liquefied into a mist of blood and shattered armor.
Dozens of iron cavalry plunged deep into the heart of the seven-thousand-man camp, carving through the panicked soldiers like a red-hot knife plunging into a block of frozen fat.
No one could stop them.
No one even dared to try.
Deep inside the main tent.
The sweet rice cake slipped from Yoshimoto's trembling fingers, tumbling onto the expensive brocade couch.
She heard the deafening explosions of shattering wood, the agonizing screams of dying men, the frantic neighing of horses, and the sickening crunch of metal cleaving through bone just outside her canvas walls.
A violent gust of wind, choked with the metallic stench of fresh blood, ripped the tent flap open.
Yoshimoto stared through the gap, her pupils shrinking to pinpricks.
She saw the wedge of dark-red iron cavalry butchering her elite guards. She saw the towering woman in the lead swinging an axe larger than a human body, bisecting three armored samurai with a single, effortless flick of her wrists.
"What... what is happening—!"
Yoshimoto wasn't just shocked; she was paralyzed by a primal, suffocating terror. Her body instinctively scrambled backward, pressing herself against the wooden frame of the low couch.
It was real, unfiltered fear. She was terrified of dying. She always had been.
"My Lord! We must flee immediately!"
The senior vassal lunged forward, desperately trying to shield her body with his own, grabbing her arm to drag her toward the rear exit.
But Yoshimoto couldn't move. Her wide, trembling eyes were locked onto the leading female warrior through the torn tent flap.
She stared at the grey-iron, violently glowing greataxe in Katsuie's hands.
That light...
It was the exact same frequency of light she had seen radiating from Kakizaki Kageie of the Uesugi Army. The color was darker, the temperament infinitely more violent, but the core essence was identical.
Yoshimoto knew exactly what she was looking at.
Because she had witnessed a Divine Artifact Princess Warrior with her own two eyes. Because she had once sat across from Kobe Hikaru and bitterly asked him why the Imagawa Clan was not blessed with a Divine Artifact. Because she had spent her entire life believing that only monstrous, heaven-defying daimyo like Takeda Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin were worthy of possessing such apocalyptic weapons.
That was the entire reason she had felt safe launching this massive expedition.
Oda Nobuna was a minor, impoverished daimyo clinging to half a dirt-poor province. She was a feral girl the entire country dismissed as a lunatic.
How could she possibly possess one too?
"How... how is this possible...?" Yoshimoto whispered, her voice cracking, tears of sheer panic welling in her eyes.
"A pathetic, tiny clan like the Owari Oda... how can they have something like that?"
—On what basis!?
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