Fūrinkazan.
Four characters churned across the crimson banner, as though they meant to burn their way out of the very cloth.
The place where that banner rose was to the rear of the Imagawa clan's formation—atop the ridgeline of the hills to the west.
What it meant, everyone present understood.
The Imagawa clan's line of retreat had been severed.
"Takeda——!"
Imagawa Yoshimoto's smile froze. On that delicate, pretty face, the excitement drained away, replaced by an exceedingly rare gravity.
She whirled around, the hem of her jūnihitoe sweeping an arc across the ground.
Her gaze passed over the tail of her own formation and shot toward the west.
Along the ridgeline of the hills, the silhouettes of cavalry were pouring out.
Not many.
Perhaps three or four hundred riders.
But those horses were clearly a size larger than the warhorses of the Imagawa and Hōjō clans. Their bodies were draped in iron breastplates and face-guards, and the riders' armor was just as heavy, glinting a dull, dark iron color in the setting sun.
Heavy cavalry.
The signature of the Takeda clan of Kai.
The most terrifying shock troops of this age—the Takeda Red Guard.
Heavy cavalry in an age of cold steel; across the entire realm today, only Kai possessed such a force.
Few in number,
yet absolutely a weapon for seizing victory by surprise!
"Impossible..."
Imagawa Yoshimoto clenched her teeth.
The Takeda clan's main force was supposed to be locked in a standoff along the border on the far side of Kai and Suruga. Before setting out she had confirmed the intelligence—Takeda Shingen had shown no sign of mobilizing troops.
So where had these three or four hundred riders sprung from?
"My lady! The rear is under attack!"
A messenger came scrambling and tumbling up before her.
"Enemy cavalry has broken into the rearguard line—our rear guard is collapsing!"
Imagawa Yoshimoto's face darkened completely.
She wasn't afraid of a head-on clash.
Even now, the Imagawa clan still had two thousand troops, while the Takeda had only come with three or four hundred.
But the problem was—she was not on her own territory now.
She was an isolated force that had marched into Hōjō lands. There was no fortress at her back to fall back to, no reinforcements to summon.
And ahead, Hōjō Ujiyasu's fifteen hundred still watched like tigers eyeing their prey.
Beset front and rear.
This was the very situation she least wanted to face.
"All forces, about-face! Block the rear first!"
Imagawa Yoshimoto's voice rose sharply, that usual languid, leisurely idleness vanishing without a trace.
"Cavalry, intercept! Infantry, form ranks—"
Before she could finish—
BOOM—!
A tremendous roar came from the rear line.
Not the muffled thud of clashing hooves, but a far more violent sound.
As if something had been smashed into the earth.
Imagawa Yoshimoto turned to look.
She saw, at the very center of the Takeda cavalry's ranks, a single rider break free of the formation.
It was a woman.
A maiden warrior.
She rode an enormous horse black from head to hoof, its body bearing no armor—because the horse itself was like a moving fortress, its muscles bulging in a way no living creature should.
The woman astride it was equally astonishing.
She wore a suit of deep-red armor—not the ōyoroi or dōmaru common to this age, but some more form-fitting, more flowing design.
The curve of the breastplate hugged the full outline of her chest tightly; the waist-guard narrowed, then flared open again at the line of her hips, the plates at her thighs parting with her riding posture to reveal the insides of her upper legs sheathed in chainmail.
That figure—
Outrageous.
There was no other word for it.
Purely, overwhelmingly, impossibly-to-look-away outrageous.
Her hair was deep red, bound behind her head into a thick, sturdy ponytail that whipped wildly with the motion of her charge.
Her face was young, perhaps seventeen or eighteen, her features carrying a touch of wildness, the corners of her mouth naturally upturned as though she were forever smiling.
But that smile was anything but gentle.
It was the smile of a predator that had spotted its prey.
Her right hand gripped a short-handled great hammer.
The head of that hammer was not cast from metal, but—stone.
To be precise, it was a block of rock ground into a sphere, its surface carved with Sanskrit script, a dark glow seeping out from between the crevices.
An immense, overpowering pressure radiated from her as well.
This pressure, Kōbe Hikaru knew well.
It was the same kind of thing as the power carried by that maiden warrior called Kakizaki Kageie.
But thicker.
Thicker by more than a single order of magnitude.
"Out of the way——!"
The red-haired woman bellowed.
That voice sounded like nothing that could ever come from a human throat, for it carried a resonance that rattled the eardrums.
And then, she swung the hammer.
BOOM!
The hammerhead slammed into the ground.
A shockwave, using the earth as its medium, spread out in all directions, hurling the Imagawa ashigaru within several yards—armor and all—flying through the air.
The soil churned, and the ground itself split and cracked apart.
The aftershock of that single blow even carried to the bone forest ahead, making the earth beneath Kōbe Hikaru's feet tremble faintly.
"What is that thing..."
Imagawa Yoshimoto's face went white.
This creature before her was not Takeda Shingen.
She knew Takeda Shingen.
Takeda Shingen had not come in person; it was one of her subordinates who had come.
But this subordinate was no ordinary one.
"My lord! That is one of the Takeda Four Guardian Kings..."
The retainer at her side spoke with a trembling voice: "Yamagata Masakage!"
Yamagata Masakage.
Commander of the Takeda clan's Red Guard cavalry.
The maiden warrior called the 'Raging Bull of Takeda.' In the rumors of Kai, this one was of boundless strength—said to be able to bend the iron bar of a castle gate with her bare hands.
But rumors, in the end, were only rumors.
Having never seen it with one's own eyes, no one would take it seriously.
Now, having seen it, it was another matter entirely.
Imagawa Yoshimoto understood clearly—among those few 'abnormal' existences under Takeda Shingen's command, this Yamagata Masakage before her was, without a doubt, one of them!
The red-haired maiden warrior spurred her horse into the Imagawa formation, the hammer rising and falling, each strike smashing the surrounding ground into spiderweb cracks.
The Imagawa ashigaru were flung about like scraps of paper.
Cavalry tried to intercept her, but that black giant of a horse did not slow in the slightest, plowing straight through two warhorses, flesh and blood scattering.
Yamagata Masakage's charge path was crystal clear.
She was not killing at random.
She was going straight for Imagawa Yoshimoto.
Crushing every obstacle in her way, she bore down in a straight line toward that great banner bearing the Imagawa clan crest.
"Stop her!"
Imagawa Yoshimoto took a step back, and the armored samurai around her immediately closed in.
These samurai were clad head to toe in armor, belonging to the standard high-ranking samurai class—the close guard of the lord of Suruga province, elite by any measure. But gathered together, before Yamagata Masakage they could not last even a single exchange.
One swing.
Two samurai went flying.
Another swing.
Three long spears shattered into splinters, and even their iron spearheads were smashed and snapped in two.
The red-haired woman sat astride her horse, looking down at Imagawa Yoshimoto from on high, those eyes brimming with battle-lust, the smile at the corner of her mouth growing wider and wider.
"Found you—the Imagawa's commander!"
She raised the hammer.
Imagawa Yoshimoto's pupils contracted.
Kōbe Hikaru, however, only felt speechless, at a loss for words, cursing his rotten luck.
Because, at this very moment, he happened to be standing right between the two of them.
In the eyes of that battle-maddened Takeda fierce general, this fellow wearing an oni mask, reeking of demonic aura from head to toe, was obviously a bodyguard summoned by Imagawa Yoshimoto.
And so her target included him as well.
This one strike would sweep him up along with the rest.
But he did not retreat.
Not to save Imagawa Yoshimoto.
Not only because this attack had already locked onto him.
But also because—
[Conquerable Target Detected]
Another one.
After the Uesugi clan's Bishamonten, did the Takeda clan too have one of these—these so-called divine vessels?
Interesting.
Kōbe Hikaru's hand pressed against the hilt of his blade.
Since it had come knocking at his door,
then let me see whether this so-called Fudō Myō-ō can move at all.
[Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body], full open.
Purple arcs of lightning burst in an instant, colliding head-on with that crimson flame.
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