The purple arc of lightning slammed head-on into that stone maul.
BOOM—!
A shockwave detonated outward with the two of them at its center. The turf underfoot was torn up by the roots, dirt and shattered stone spraying in every direction, the very air within fifty feet warping into visible ripples.
Kōbe Hikaru's heels plowed two deep furrows into the earth, the sheer force driving him back three full steps.
Muramasa's blade was trembling.
Not because of any disparity in raw strength.
But because of something transmitted through that stone maul—something he had already felt once before.
Weight.
Weight beyond any physical meaning of the word.
As if it were not a hammer coming down, but an entire mountain range being pressed onto the spine of his blade.
And yet that still wasn't the most troublesome part.
In the instant of impact, the Sanskrit-inscribed seams across the surface of the stone maul suddenly blazed to life. Golden light welled up out of the grooves, forming dense swarms of characters that crawled up his blade toward his wrist like living things.
The moment those golden characters touched the bone armor—
Kōbe Hikaru felt his arm sink downward.
Pinned.
As though invisible chains had burrowed up from beneath the earth, clamping down one by one on his wrist, his elbow, his shoulder, trying to fix his entire body to this patch of ground, never to move a hair's breadth again.
Immovable.
Those two words leapt up out of Kōbe Hikaru's mind.
Immovable—Fudō Myō-ō. Historically, the god revered by the Takeda clan head, the Tiger of Kai, Takeda Shingen, and Shingen herself was regarded as an incarnation of Fudō Myō-ō.
The foremost of Buddhism's Five Wisdom Kings, the principal guardian deity of Eastern Esotericism.
Right hand grasping a sword to sever earthly desires, left hand holding a lariat to bind wicked demons, seated upon an immovable boulder, bearing the flames of Garuda upon its back.
The word "immovable" never meant that one does not move oneself.
It meant that every enemy is made unable to move at all.
This was the power of that stone maul.
Binding. Fixing in place.
A hammer that nailed its target to the spot.
At the same time, wherever those golden characters passed, a searing sensation seeped inward from the surface of the bone armor.
It was not ordinary flame.
It was a burning aimed specifically at the extraordinary—springing from the same source as the power on Kakizaki Kageie's blade before, the one that weakened yōkai aura and suppressed the supernatural—only thicker, more concentrated, and far more aggressive.
As if it meant to burn the yōkai aura out of his very flesh and bone, strand by strand.
——However.
The Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body was no mere ornament.
Kōbe Hikaru's pupils flashed a scarlet red. The thunder within him needed no deliberate guidance from him—in the very instant the binding descended, it instinctively ran wild.
Kzzzrt——!
Purple arcs of lightning burst out from beneath his skin like countless enraged serpents, spreading outward along his arm.
The thunder crashed into the golden characters.
The characters shattered, and that immovable binding was torn open by the lightning, ripped wide by force.
In a single instant, Kōbe Hikaru's body was free once more.
His heels dug into the ground and he shot forward like a cannonball.
Muramasa slashed diagonally upward from below in a reverse kesa cut, the blade wreathed in purple thunderlight, driving straight for the waist of that red-haired maiden warrior on horseback.
At the same time, bone spikes bored out from his elbow—three white bone-spears stabbing in perfect unison toward her left side, the gap laid open by the recoil of her maul's swing.
But Yamagata Masakage's reaction was not the least bit slow either.
She did not swing the maul to parry—the stone maul was too heavy; once it was thrown out, it was hard to pull back and change trajectory in time.
She simply chose a more direct method.
She let go with her right hand.
The freed right palm, sheathed in its gauntlet, slapped down directly onto the spine of Muramasa's blade.
The instant palm met blade, the golden light bloomed again, that immovable binding force conducting along the blade, trying to freeze Kōbe Hikaru's offensive.
But the thunder on Muramasa was already answering back in kind.
Gold and purple crashed against each other across the flat of the blade, the two powers shaking the air into a droning hum—and the result was plain to see: Yamagata Masakage was jolted by the thunder until she could scarcely keep hold of hand or foot, thrashing helplessly on horseback.
In that very gap, the three bone-spears had already arrived.
With not a hair's breadth to spare, Yamagata Masakage barely managed to arch her waist backward, just barely evading two of them.
But the tip of the third bone-spear pierced through the edge of her shoulder guard.
The armor plate cracked.
A wound deep enough to bare the bone appeared on the strip of skin exposed beneath the dark-silver armor.
"Oh?"
Having wrenched herself free with difficulty, Yamagata Masakage panted and glanced down.
Her expression changed.
Not anger, nor terror, but clarity—a clarity dragged up out of pure instinct.
Her mount, still reeling from the aftershock of the bone-spears, staggered back three steps, its hooves crushing the scorched earth below, retreating again and again, all but instantly backing out of the range of Kōbe Hikaru's blade.
This gave Kōbe Hikaru a slight pause, and the killing intent slowly rising in him faltered along with it.
The red-haired maiden warrior tightened her grip on the stone maul once more, but did not charge again—because she could not, and dared not. That fleeting exchange had made her realize just how powerful and troublesome her enemy was... fight on, and she would lose. She might even die.
So she pulled back decisively, not daring to press further.
She'd chickened out.
And she was watching, too.
Watching that forest of bone behind Kōbe Hikaru, the blood mist still drifting through it, those two armies forcibly cleaved apart.
Watching the battle formation of the Hōjō clan—the formation still held, but its commander...
Her gaze locked onto a figure with long, dark hair.
Hōjō Ujiyasu.
Standing right at the front of the northern battle line, having abandoned the raised platform of her main camp when she'd charged over on horseback earlier, with only a scant handful of guards at her side now.
Yamagata Masakage's eyes rolled.
She was thinking—what exactly was her mission?
Mm.
Her lord seemed to have said... reinforce the Hōjō, drive back the Imagawa? And if that couldn't be done, then rescue Hōjō Ujiyasu?
In any case, it was not to fight to the death here against some yōkai of unknown origin and absurd strength.
"I'm no match for you, my lord... but this will do just fine!"
She murmured it under her breath, as if speaking to Kōbe Hikaru, and as if speaking to herself.
Then she moved.
Absurdly fast.
That horse was built roughly like a rhinoceros; by all rights it should not have been capable of such speed—but it ran at exactly that speed, as if the ground beneath its feet were actively bearing it up.
—The other side of Fudō Myō-ō's power.
Not only to bind the enemy.
But to make one's own footing steadier, one's own strides more solid.
Upon the immovable boulder, not a step given.
And when the boulder itself begins to move—who could ever stand against a walking mountain?
Kōbe Hikaru reacted with lightning speed, the Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body driving his toes off the ground as he gave chase—but after only two steps he stopped, and gave up the pursuit.
Because he saw Yamagata Masakage's target, and her intent.
"Wait—what are you going to—"
Hōjō Ujiyasu didn't get to finish.
An arm clad in crimson-red armor reached over and scooped her up off the ground like a bundle of straw, tucking her straight under its arm.
Hōjō Ujiyasu's long hair scattered in an instant, her armor grinding against the other woman's iron arm with a shrill, screeching sound.
Her feet left the ground.
She had been hauled up bodily.
The actual ruler of Musashi Province and Sagami Province, the woman in the Kantō who hated taking risks more than anyone, now dangled with all four limbs in the air, like a kitten hoisted up by the scruff of its neck in its mother's mouth.
"Full retreat——!"
Yamagata Masakage's voice thundered across the battlefield.
She didn't so much as glance back.
The great black horse gave a whinny and charged at full gallop toward the western hills.
Behind her, three or four hundred Takeda Red Guard cavalry wheeled their mounts around in perfect unison, falling in behind their commander with flawless discipline.
The sound of iron hooves pounding the earth swelled and then swiftly faded, near to far, leaving behind nothing but churned-up soil and slowly dispersing dust.
From within the dust, Hōjō Ujiyasu's shouts drifted faintly out.
"Put me down! I am the head of the Hōjō clan! You wretched woman——your lord and I are allies!"
"Hold still. You'll bounce right off."
"You damned woman, who in the world sent you here?!"
"Takeda Red Guard, Yamagata Masakage, here on my lord's orders to reinforce you. Stop struggling—fall off and your face hits the dirt first."
"I never asked you to come——"
"Your northern outpost's already been punched clean through by Echigo. You think you're in any position to be picky right now?"
The voices grew fainter and fainter, until at last they vanished entirely beyond the far side of the western hills.
···
The battlefield fell quiet—even quiet to the point of being a little overdone.
The soldiers of both armies looked at one another blankly.
The Hōjō army's commander had been snatched away by her own allied reinforcements; the Imagawa army's rear line had been skewered clean through.
And the yōkai in the crimson-red oni mask, standing between the two armies... was staring at that dissipating cloud of dust to the west with a thoroughly dumbfounded look.
To be honest, Kōbe Hikaru hadn't quite come back to his senses either.
He'd prepared the thunder, prepared the forest of bone, prepared the whole grand spectacle of a hundred yōkai holding the line.
And the result: the Takeda's people showed up, threw one punch, decided they couldn't win, then turned around and hauled Hōjō Ujiyasu off like a parcel.
The whole affair took less than the time it takes a stick of incense to burn.
"This..."
The Sakagami Ketsura in his arms was the first to weigh in: "The way she came in was even rougher than you, y'know."
Kōbe Hikaru ignored her, his gaze falling to the other side.
The south.
The Imagawa army's ranks.
A sound was coming from over there.
Very soft.
But on the silent battlefield it was uncommonly clear.
It was laughter.
Laughter that could not be suppressed, nearly out of control.
Imagawa Yoshimoto sat astride her horse, one hand covering her mouth, the other pressed to her belly, her shoulders quaking again and again.
The layer upon layer of her jūnihitoe robes swayed endlessly with her trembling, the golden butterfly ornaments in her hair tinkling and chiming.
"Hahahahaha—"
At last she couldn't hold it in, and burst into peals of laughter.
"That fool Hōjō Ujiyasu, hauled off tucked under someone's arm—hahahaha—"
"The look on her face... it was just... hahahahaha——"
The attendants at her side went pale with fright, wanting to steady her yet not daring to touch her.
Imagawa Yoshimoto laughed until she was rocking back and forth, nearly toppling from her horse.
But she couldn't have cared less.
She laughed for a solid quarter of an hour.
Kōbe Hikaru withdrew his gaze; he was in no mood right now to share in the merriment of this lord of Suruga Province.
Because his attention, at this moment, was entirely fixed on another matter.
The panel.
In the instant of that clash just now, a translucent panel had already popped up.
[Conquerable target detected]
[???]
[Quality: ???]
[Current favourability: 0]
[Assessment: Within her body dwells a power that is neither human nor yōkai—thick, concrete, and vivid. That limitless power possesses the attributes of sealing and suppression, aimed specifically against all things extraordinary—but she has recognized the gulf between herself and you, has no wish to make an enemy of you, and only wants to flee.]
Kōbe Hikaru: "..."
Another one.
Another maiden warrior bearing a 'divine artifact.'
So it was with the Uesugi, and so it was with the Takeda.
Which is to say.
The maiden warriors of this world, of this era—are they all truly incarnations of gods and buddhas descended into the mortal realm, come bearing their divine artifacts, taking human form?
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