But in truth, Imagawa Yoshimoto had never intended to come seeking Kōbe Hikaru in such a hurry.
Not that she didn't want him. She did.
Just not in the way a man and a woman want each other—true, that Demon God's face was not bad to look upon, but she, Imagawa Yoshimoto, was the ruler of a province, not some lovesick maiden.
Even if she was, in fact, a maiden, untouched and inexperienced, she had no eye for that sort of thing.
At least, not at present.
What she wanted was the power that his very existence represented.
The Warring States, an age of chaos, where heroes vied for the realm.
The three houses of the Tōkaidō Road—the Imagawa of Suruga, the Takeda of Kai, the Uesugi of Echigo—held one another in check across the buffer zone of Musashi and Sagami, the two provinces controlled by the Hōjō, forming a balance while each of them coveted the great chessboard of the realm.
Imagawa Yoshimoto had never lacked for ambition.
What she lacked was a single card powerful enough to overturn the board.
Takeda Shingen proclaimed herself the incarnation of Fudō Myō-ō, and Kai's military might had swelled because of it.
That busty woman didn't merely talk—it was said that around her there truly existed certain presences of unknown origin. Not ordinary samurai, nor common sorcerers, but a stranger power called divine artifacts—a band of princess-generals.
The reports Imagawa's spies brought back amounted to only a few sparse lines: that within Kai's army, now and then a few figures in bizarre armor would appear, able to break a formation single-handedly, able to fight a hundred men alone.
That the aura upon those people resembled neither humans nor yōkai.
Stranger still, Takeda Shingen seemed to harbor no fear at all of exposing these presences, and even deliberately pushed them to the fore.
Imagawa Yoshimoto had taken a hidden loss in the last round of border skirmishing with the Takeda.
Not a defeat in open confrontation—the Imagawa clan's military strength was no weaker than the Takeda's. Even if the enemy had those who could fight a hundred men alone, the Imagawa clan held the three provinces of Suruga, Tōtōmi, and Mikawa. Even without full control over all that territory, they remained the strongest in the Kantō, the foremost bow-drawer of the Tōkaidō Road, commanding several thousand troops—by sheer weight they could crush the other side to death.
No, the loss came from something else, from several baffling night raids of late.
Sentry posts uprooted, scouts vanished, frontline commanders knocked over in their own tents in the dead of night—the enemy came without a shadow and left without a trace, nothing at all like normal military operations.
Imagawa Yoshimoto did not know the true nature of those things.
She knew only that the Takeda side had some kind of monster whose fighting strength went beyond all convention.
And Uesugi Kenshin needed no mention at all.
She proclaimed herself the avatar of Bishamonten, waging war everywhere in the name of exorcising demons.
Wherever that great banner bearing the character "Bi" arrived, even yōkai would retreat three leagues in dread and terror.
Imagawa Yoshimoto put no faith in reincarnated gods and buddhas, but she believed in power.
That Uesugi Kenshin's army could fell mountains, smash temples, cut down monsters, and banish demons—this was fact.
That there were monsters within Takeda Shingen's army—this too was fact.
So what did she, Imagawa Yoshimoto, have?
Before, there had been her teacher Taigen Sessai, but lately Master Sessai's condition had grown worse and worse.
Beyond that, all she had was a single Shrine enshrining the Demon God, Kōbe Hikaru, and a famed blade—Raikiri—renamed half a month ago in that Demon God's honor.
As well as the legend she had deliberately spread, passed mouth to mouth among the townsfolk, of the descent of the thunder-cleaving oni.
But she did not have that man.
That yōkai who in a single night had slain the Thunder Beast and split the Suruga night sky with lightning—he had come, and he had gone.
Leaving behind only a headless beast's corpse and a single blade thrust into the ruins.
Like a dream.
All he left was the fact that she had no way to follow through.
Imagawa Yoshimoto did not like to dream. She liked to turn dreams into reality.
So she raised her troops.
Gathering two thousand elite soldiers, she marched east out of Suruga, straight into the Hōjō clan's sphere of influence.
Not for the sake of war.
War was merely a means.
The aim was only one—to lure that Demon God out.
Yes.
Though she had come to the front in person, this time the Imagawa were, in a certain sense, actually fighting on two fronts.
At the same time as opening war with the Hōjō clan, they had long been in friction and conflict with the Takeda clan as well.
Had it not been for the string of defeats against the Takeda, the Imagawa would never have turned this way.
...
Yadaihara.
It was already the fourth day of the two armies' standoff.
The autumn wind swept over the withered yellow grass, drifting across the open ground between the two forces.
On the hills to the north, the Hōjō clan's line stood as rigid as iron—fifteen hundred men arrayed upon the heights, spears like a forest, iron armor gleaming.
Unlike Imagawa's two-front war, this was already the greater part of the Hōjō clan's elite.
Hōjō Ujiyasu stood upon the raised platform of the main camp, her jet-black long hair blown streaming backward by the wind, light armor over a deep-purple kosode kimono, that exquisite face so grim it could have dripped water.
She hated war most of all.
To be precise, she hated most the wars she had no choice but to fight.
If it were a siege defense, she could smile as she watched the enemy shiver in the cold winds beneath her walls.
If it were an ambush, she could patiently wait half a month for a single killing blow.
But to be dragged out into the open like this, into a face-to-face standoff?
Repulsive.
Far too repulsive.
"My lord, the Imagawa formation is shifting."
The retainer at her side raised a hand, pointing south.
Hōjō Ujiyasu followed his gaze. Three leagues to the south, the Imagawa clan's line was slowly advancing forward.
No longer the probing of before.
More like a formal push.
The infantry squares arrayed themselves into three horizontal ranks, cavalry spreading out on both wings, banners like waves.
Behind that great banner embroidered with the Imagawa crest, a sumptuous palanquin was borne by four burly men, advancing slowly.
Imagawa Yoshimoto.
That woman had come to the front line herself.
The corner of Hōjō Ujiyasu's mouth twitched.
"Has she lost her mind?"
Whatever Imagawa Yoshimoto's scheme was, she, Hōjō Ujiyasu, would never show weakness on her own home ground.
"All forces—"
Her voice cut through the autumn wind: "Meet them."
The war drums thundered.
The dull beat seemed to well up from deep within the earth, shaking a heaviness into every chest.
The Hōjō clan's line began to push downhill.
Spearmen in front, archers behind, cavalry sweeping to the two wings, the two armies closing slowly upon the autumn plain.
Three leagues.
Two leagues.
One league.
Until they came within the archers' range.
"Loose—"
The command rang out from both sides almost at once.
Arrows soared into the air, crossing at their zenith like two flocks of birds flying against each other.
Screams erupted before both battle lines.
The ashigaru in the front ranks fell, and the ranks behind trod over the corpses and pressed on.
The spear formations made contact, the crash of collision dense as a rainstorm.
Blood sprayed, staining the withered yellow grass red.
This was the head-on collision of two provinces—no flashy tactics, no roundabout stratagems, only a slaughter of iron and blood.
Hōjō Ujiyasu stood upon the raised platform, watching the battlefield ahead with an expressionless face.
Her lips were pressed tight.
This was a battle that should not have been fought.
For the sake of some baffling Demon God, she had been dragged into a meaningless war of attrition.
And so had Imagawa Yoshimoto.
Two women, two rulers of provinces, bleeding each other dry upon this plain for the sake of a single yōkai.
Absurd.
But it was precisely then, as the slaughter at the front reached its white-hot peak—
that the mist rose.
Hōjō Ujiyasu was the first to sense the wrongness.
That mist did not drift down from the mountains, nor was it water vapor steaming up from the ground.
It rose from the very center of the battlefield—along the contact line where the two armies clashed—out of thin air.
Red mist, faint, its color almost imperceptible, but Hōjō Ujiyasu could smell it.
Rust.
The smell of blood.
"What is this..."
The retainer beside her had not finished speaking.
Crash!
Thunder split down from the clear sky.
Straight... down between the two armies.
Purple lightning burst apart in the center of the plain, turning a hundred-foot expanse into scorched earth.
The soldiers still locked in slaughter at the front were hurled away by the blast wave, the front ranks of both Imagawa and Hōjō scattering at once.
A second bolt.
A third.
The purple lightning was like a wall, cleaving the two armies brutally apart.
"—What is that thing!?"
Hōjō Ujiyasu took a step back.
She saw it.
From the scorched earth where the thunder had fallen, white bone spikes broke through the soil.
One, two, ten, a hundred.
The bone spikes bored up from the ground, dense and countless, forming a forest between the two armies.
A white forest of bone.
Those bone spikes rose at scattered heights, the shortest waist-high, the tallest overhead, carving the entire battle line into an impassable barrier.
Any soldier who tried to cross would be blocked by the bone spikes, driven back by the lightning.
The battle was brought to a forced halt.
Not because of any retreat order from either side, but because a sudden, foreign power had pressed pause upon war itself.
Blood mist spread among the forest of bone.
All was utterly silent.
The cries of slaughter and battle dissolved into nothing.
The soldiers fell back and back again, their faces filled with horror, startled awake to the vast mist all around them, the blood-red hue piercing through to the sky.
And in the center, where the battlefield had been split apart.
Bone and blood opened a path like trees of a forest.
A figure walked out from the mist.
Gray robes, pale long hair.
A crimson oni mask covered his face, and beneath it his exposed eyes glowed with an eerie red light.
His left hand rested on the hilt at his waist, his right hand hung at his side, fingertips wreathed in dense purple arcs of electricity.
He stood between the two armies.
Standing in the center of the bone forest and the thunder.
One man.
Blocking a battlefield of three thousand.
With a single body—he stopped the war!
Hōjō Ujiyasu's breath caught for an instant.
That figure, that head of pale long hair, those crimson eyes.
That was, beyond any doubt, the one she had seen in her dream.
On that night when Odawara Castle had fallen into a nightmare, in the depths of a dream she had taken for illusion, this figure had appeared.
"It's him..."
She murmured: "It's that yōkai."
Her hand unconsciously clenched the railing.
To the south.
In the Imagawa clan's main camp, the curtain of the palanquin was thrown open.
Imagawa Yoshimoto rose to her feet.
The twelve-layered jūnihitoe kimono lay fold upon fold, her deep-brown long hair streaming in the wind, the golden butterfly ornament in her hair glinting in the sunlight.
Across that lovely, delicate face bloomed a smile so radiant it verged on losing control.
Her two hands clasped before her chest, her slender fingers trembling faintly with excitement.
"He's here."
Her voice was not loud, yet it carried an irrepressible elation: "He's finally here!"
The lady-in-waiting at her side was startled by her reaction: "My lady? That one up ahead... is a yōkai, isn't he?"
"That is no yōkai."
Imagawa Yoshimoto shook her head, those bright eyes fixed unwaveringly on the gray figure at the battlefield's center: "That is the Demon God."
"He is my Imagawa clan's Demon God."
She gathered up her hem and stepped down from the palanquin.
"Ready my horse."
"My lady!? You intend to go yourself—"
"Ready my horse!"
Imagawa Yoshimoto's voice suddenly rose, that lovely face brimming with resolve.
"I have waited nearly a month to find that man."
"Now that he stands right there, do you think I would let him slip away again?"
The lady-in-waiting opened her mouth, but in the end said nothing, and turned to fetch the horse.
Imagawa Yoshimoto stood before the ranks, the wind lifting her sumptuous sleeves.
She gazed at that lone figure standing between the thunder and the forest of bone, and the smile at the corner of her mouth softened somewhat, growing gentle.
And growing earnest, too.
"Lord Demon God."
She said in a low voice: "This time, I won't be letting you slip away."
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