Shibata Katsuie's cavalry smashed straight through the fourth line of defense.
The Imagawa main camp's defenses were extremely tight — the camp of seven thousand men had more than three layers of sentries and five horse-barricades, all set up according to the marching regulations Taigen Sessai had drawn up in life for the march to the capital.
But those defenses were meant to stop men.
They were not meant to stop a divine artifact.
Every swing of that blinding, dread-inducing great axe sent a shudder through the air within three zhang — a shudder unlike the pressure of yokai aura or spiritual power. It was simply weight.
But weight taken to its limit could crush even the air itself.
Against ordinary mortals, that alone was enough to make her unstoppable.
Even though her own body was still mortal — even the strongest of mortals grew tired, and stamina had its limits, and if surrounded she could still die — but for a single breakthrough charge, this was more than enough.
Shibata Katsuie rode her black horse, sweeping her great axe in a wide arc. The wooden stakes of the fifth horse-barricade, right behind her, snapped clean in two the instant the axe's edge passed, their broken ends pulverized to splinters.
The dozens of cavalry riding behind her carried no divine artifacts, but driven by the sheer momentum of their horses, they struck like hammers against a wall all the same.
Thirty paces ahead stood Imagawa Yoshimoto's command tent.
The guards before the tent were already in chaos — forty ashigaru formed a desperate line, six mounted samurai reined in their horses and leveled their spears, but their hands were shaking.
Because they feared death.
And because of an instinctive cowering before the power of gods and buddhas.
At that very moment—
the tent flap suddenly flew open.
Imagawa Yoshimoto walked out.
She was not carried out under guard. She walked out on her own.
The girl daimyo, no more than sixteen or seventeen, was small in stature, dressed in layer upon layer of a deep purple-and-gold junihitoe. On this battlefield, she looked utterly out of place.
Even wrapped in such splendid robes, her frame still looked slight and frail. Now she stood before the tent, the wind lifting the hem of her garment.
In her hand she still held that folding fan painted with pine and cranes.
Her face was white.
Truly white.
Unlike Kobe Hikaru's pallor, which never saw the light of day, hers was the ghastly white of a face drained of blood by fear.
Her lips trembled. Her knees trembled too.
She was still afraid.
More afraid than anyone.
But she still stepped forward.
Because, for better or worse, she was the head of the Imagawa clan, the daimyo who commanded three provinces. She knew perfectly well that at a moment like this, she could not flee.
If she fled, everything would be over.
At a moment like this, she had to stand up and do something.
She had to... fight with her back to the water.
All or nothing!
"The Imagawa clan—"
Her voice shook too. On the very first word, she nearly bit her tongue.
But the second word came out steadier than the first, and the third steadier still.
"The soldiers of the Imagawa clan!"
The voice burst into the midday air.
It was not loud, not ringing — if anything, it carried the clear, low quaver of a young girl's voice.
But on the chaotic battlefield, that voice rang clearly in the ear of every Imagawa soldier—
They recognized it. It was their lord's voice.
The voice of the girl daimyo who usually cowered inside her palanquin, who, it was said, was afraid even of insects.
She had come out.
She stood there before the tent, standing directly in the charging path of dozens of armored horsemen.
"Your lord is right here!"
Imagawa Yoshimoto raised her folding fan and pointed it forward.
The pine and cranes painted on the fan's face flashed in the sunlight.
"I stand with you, all of you!"
The words came out stiff, even childish.
But they came out all the more fierce for it.
That was enough.
All it took was a single signal.
Even if that signal came from a girl trembling from head to toe — as long as she stood, her soldiers could stand too.
In a feudal age, if a commanding general could face the enemy alongside her soldiers and refuse to retreat before battle, that alone was enough to raise morale to its greatest possible height.
This, too, was the essence of how the will of the masses gathered into momentum—
With the leader's will as the core and the soldiers' conviction as fuel, the qi of hundreds upon thousands of men gathered together into an invisible field of force.
No extraordinary power to be seen.
Just people.
It was the sheer, overwhelming weight of countless people all turning their sights toward the same direction.
In that instant—
the hands of the forty ashigaru before the tent stopped shaking.
Their spear points leveled.
Around them, the six mounted samurai drew their reins tight. Their warhorses whinnied, hooves stamping the mud beneath them to shreds.
Farther off, the ashigaru of the second and third ranks heard their lord's voice, and the chaotic formation began to knit back together — not as neat as before, but solid enough to block the path the armored cavalry needed for a flanking maneuver.
Shibata Katsuie narrowed her eyes.
She saw the girl standing before the tent — short in stature, dressed in gaudy finery, clutching a fan.
On a battlefield, she looked like nothing more than an affectation of refinement, hopelessly out of place.
And yet she stood there, facing the oncoming charge, not retreating a single step, unshaken in the face of danger.
"Now this is interesting."
Katsuie called out, raising her great axe once more.
The next instant — the flash of the axe came down.
The bamboo spear formation of the forty ashigaru before the tent shattered the moment the axe's light passed over it. Splinters flew everywhere; the three men in the front rank were knocked flat by the shockwave.
But the rank behind filled the gap.
And shattered again.
And filled again.
Like waves crashing against a reef — one wave broken, the next rising to take its place, one after another without end.
Every shattering was accompanied by screams and the crack of broken spears.
Every refilling was accompanied by a fresh war cry.
The formation of seven thousand men, directed by that girl's folding fan, held Shibata Katsuie's advance at bay through flesh and blood alone—
For a moment.
Only a brief moment.
Then the bamboo spear formation collapsed again, and this time far more completely.
The six mounted samurai spurred their horses forward, only to be scattered in a single clash by the armored cavalry behind Katsuie.
The space before the tent stood empty.
Shibata Katsuie's black horse trampled over the shattered bamboo spears and the fallen ashigaru, her gray iron great axe raised high overhead.
Her target: Imagawa Yoshimoto.
Thirty paces, twenty paces, ten paces—
Yoshimoto's legs could no longer hold her up.
Her knees had given way completely.
But her eyes did not close. They remained open.
Teeth clenched, her whole body trembling.
She did not understand, could not comprehend, yet still refused to submit as she watched that axe rise overhead, watched the flash of its blade falling from the sky.
Then—
Boom.
The sky roared.
It could not be drums, for the drummers had already scattered.
It could not be a horn, for the signal-bearers, too, were nowhere to be seen.
It was thunder.
Under a cloudless midday sky, a bolt of lightning split down from the very center of the heavens.
It struck... the ground between Shibata Katsuie and Imagawa Yoshimoto.
The earth exploded, dirt flying everywhere, the shockwave sweeping away every last splinter of wood before the tent.
Shibata Katsuie's black horse reared with a startled whinny, its front hooves kicking high; only by yanking hard on the reins did she keep from being thrown.
In the dust left behind by the fading lightning—
something fell.
A sword.
A blade so massive it seemed impossible for any human to wield.
The blade stood nearly as tall as a man, nearly two fingers thick, pale white all over, its edge blunt and heavy — not made for cutting, but for crushing.
A crystallization of pure violence.
The great sword plunged down from the heavens, its tip driving into the mud between Shibata Katsuie and Imagawa Yoshimoto, sinking three feet into the earth with a thunderous impact, its shockwave flinging away every scattered stone and withered blade of grass for several zhang around.
Banryu.
The massive war-blade, a yokai weapon only newly born.
Through Bankotsu's Thousand-Man Slaughter and Thousand-Yokai Slaying, the ordinary steel blade had, soaked in yokai aura and death-qi, mutated and metamorphosed — heavy as a mountain.
A hand gripped the hilt.
A pale hand.
The hand's owner stepped out from the dust left by the fading lightning.
Gray robes, pale long hair, blood-red demon eyes.
Onikiri at his left hip, Yomikiri at his right, and in his right hand — Banryu.
The great sword, as tall as he was, he lifted with one hand, as easily as lifting a twig.
The talent 'Valor' activated the instant he gripped the blade, doubling his strength.
And the weight Banryu itself carried, once infused with yokai aura, rose to far more than double.
What was the true nature of the power of the gods and buddhas?
It was weight.
It was the crushing weight of concentrated faith, a weight that crushed all that was not extraordinary.
The reason Shibata Katsuie's great axe could sweep away everything before it was simply that it was heavy.
Heavy enough to crush even the air.
But—
Banryu was heavier still.
Even before it became a yokai weapon, this great sword had needed three grown, strong men just to lift it.
Now, carrying within it a vast weight of grudge-rancor, yokai power, and dread, and further doubled by the boost of the Valor talent, it was no longer the weight of one mountain.
It was the weight of ten.
The power of the gods and buddhas suppressed all that was extraordinary through the weight of faith.
But Banryu could turn that around and suppress that very weight through pure, physical, absolute mass condensed from yokai aura.
Weight against weight.
Mountain shaking mountain.
Kobe Hikaru stood between Imagawa Yoshimoto and Shibata Katsuie.
The oni mask coalesced into shape across his face.
The crimson light leaking through the mask's seams mingled with the faint dark-purple yokai aura seeping from Banryu's pale blade.
He did not look at Yoshimoto.
He looked only at Shibata Katsuie on her horse.
Beneath the half-mask, the corner of his mouth twitched slightly.
He said nothing, and yet terror already spread on every side.
Yoshimoto knelt on the ground, looking up at that gray-clad back that had suddenly appeared before her.
His pale long hair drifted faintly in the lingering aftershock of the lightning; his broad shoulders blocked her entire view.
And that great sword held in his right hand — its blade nearly level with his height, pale and heavy, like a broken stretch of wall risen straight from the earth—
was held in one hand, lightly, as though it weighed nothing at all.
Her hands were still trembling, but her heart had suddenly grown still.
Of course she recognized that back.
She remembered, too, what Taigen Sessai had once said—
that at the most dangerous moment, someone would reach out and pull her back from the brink.
She knew exactly who Taigen Sessai had meant.
And now, that person had come.
He had truly come.
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