This was, of course, not the first time Kōbe Hikaru had witnessed war.
Setting aside everything he had seen and heard during his earlier days of wandering alone, there was the war between the Imagawa and the Hōjō more than half a month ago—he had watched it at close range, and indeed, had even taken part in it.
That time, the Band of Seven had slaughtered indiscriminately across the zone where the two armies clashed, manufacturing grudge-rancor.
And after Kōbe Hikaru cut down four of the Band of Seven and, immediately thereafter, swept clean the yōkai of every quarter in a single night, the course of that war shifted along with it.
On the Imagawa clan's side, the Thunder Beast was slain, the calamity within the castle was purged, and morale soared.
On the Hōjō clan's side, Gakimaru was put to death, the whole castle awoke from its nightmare, and the army's heart was steadied for a time.
By rights, the two houses should have fought all the more fiercely.
But the sudden exit of the yōkai instead caused both sides to cool down.
Once the yōkai aura suffusing the battlefield dispersed, those soldiers who had been driven to madness by grudge-rancor gradually recovered their reason as well.
The generals, their eyes red with slaughter, finally realized that to keep fighting this war would profit neither side, but only those yōkai lurking in the shadows.
And so the Imagawa and the Hōjō reached a temporary ceasefire.
Not for the sake of peace—merely to catch their breath.
But at least the flames of war in Kantō had been doused for the time being.
This was a good thing for Kōbe Hikaru and Kikyō.
With no war, there was no large-scale slaughter and no grudge-rancor.
With no grudge-rancor, the yōkai over in Kyoto lost their most important nourishment.
Kibōmaru's plan had been thrown into disarray, the better part of it ruined.
This was also why, over the past half month and more, Kaede Village had been able to maintain a rare peace.
Yet Kōbe Hikaru had never believed such peace could last for long.
Human warfare, in essence, never needed yōkai to drive it. So long as there was profit, ambition, and the contest for power, the clash of blades would never cease.
The ceasefire between the Imagawa and the Hōjō was only temporary.
And on this land there were far more than just those two powers.
Even so, the speed with which the second war arrived still took Kōbe Hikaru by surprise.
Too fast!
Musashi Province, the mountain road in the north.
A soldier was running.
He wore tattered ashigaru armor, his helmet lost long ago to who-knew-where, his disheveled hair caked with mud and blood.
His left arm hung at his side, twisted unnaturally—severed, by the look of it, hacked through by a blade.
Blood seeped from the stump, dripping down his fingers onto the mountain path beneath his feet, trailing a long, dark-red smear.
But he did not stop.
He dared not stop.
Behind him, the sound of hoofbeats drew nearer and nearer.
"Run... run..."
His lips were cracked and dry, his voice so hoarse he could scarcely form a complete word.
He was a soldier from the Hōjō clan's frontline outpost.
This morning, everything had still been normal.
The ceasefire between the Hōjō and the Imagawa was still in effect; the front line was tense, but at least there had been no exchange of blades.
Then, from the opposite direction of the Imagawa—from the north—an army came.
No declaration of war, no ultimatum, not even forward scouts.
It simply appeared, all at once, within sight of the Hōjō clan's northern defensive line.
The banner was the "Bi."
That character, he recognized.
The Dragon of Echigo.
The God of War.
Uesugi.
He had no time to look more closely.
Because that army charged far too fast.
The outpost was crushed, the defensive line breached, a hundred and more defenders scattered utterly within a quarter of an hour.
He was one of the few who had escaped, but he knew he could not get away.
Those cavalry were so very much faster than he.
"Someone... someone save me..."
Stumbling, he hauled himself over a ridge.
The view ahead opened up all at once.
A stretch of flat fields, with cooking smoke rising in the distance.
It was a village.
With the last of his strength he rushed toward it.
Kaede Village.
Beneath the torii at the village entrance, little Kaede was crouched on the ground, drawing pictures with a twig.
What she was drawing was Big Sister Kikyō and the handsome big brother Kōbe Hikaru standing side by side.
Her artistry was admittedly questionable—the big brother had been rendered as a ball of yarn, and the big sister as a crooked, lopsided triangle.
But little Kaede was quite satisfied.
She was just about to add two eyes to the big brother when she suddenly heard a sound.
Footsteps.
Very hurried, very frantic.
And heavy, ragged panting.
She lifted her head.
A man covered in blood came rushing down from the mountain road, staggering, and collapsed onto the path at the village entrance.
"Help..."
He lay sprawled on the ground, his voice so faint it was nearly inaudible.
"There's... there's an army... coming from the north..."
Kaede gave a start, dropped her twig, and turned to run.
"Big brother—!"
She rushed toward the Shrine.
But she did not need to call out.
Because Kōbe Hikaru was already standing at the village entrance.
Yōkai aura gathered, demon-qi grim and dense.
Gray robes and pale hair, a crimson oni mask, blood-armor and bone-armor wreathed about him—he looked like an Asura, a fiend, and was truly an Asura's oni, cold and terrible.
Yet Kaede had long since ceased to fear him in the slightest; if anything she felt rather reassured, just as she did at the sight of Big Sister Kikyō.
He passed by little Kaede, walked to the side of the fallen soldier, and crouched down.
"The Hōjō army?"
he asked.
The soldier raised his head, saw that crimson oni mask, his pupils contracting sharply, and instinctively tried to draw back.
But he had no strength left.
"It's... it's Echigo..."
His voice came in broken fragments.
"Flying the 'Bi' banner..."
"So many men... thousands..."
"Pressing south... nothing can stop them..."
Kōbe Hikaru's eyes narrowed.
Echigo. Echigo.
The "Bi" banner.
As expected.
Though Musashi Province lay under the Hōjō clan's control, to its north lay Kōzuke Province, held by the Uesugi clan of Echigo; to its south, the Hōjō clan's home base of Sagami Province; to its west, it bordered the Kai held by the Takeda clan and the Imagawa's Suruga—it was, in effect, a land beset on all four sides by war.
And the only force that could come pressing down from the north was Echigo.
Only the Uesugi clan, who controlled Kōzuke Province and whose home base lay in Echigo.
The army of Uesugi Kenshin, the man who in this era styled himself the reincarnation of Bishamonten!
But whatever the case,
Kōbe Hikaru would never sit idle and let another destroy the brief place of stability that he had, so painstakingly, finally won in this world.
He could not allow the flames of war that the other side stirred up to disturb this hard-won peace amid an age of chaos.
Kōbe Hikaru rose to his feet and looked toward the north.
In the gathering dusk, a shifting black mass could be dimly seen upon the horizon.
That was the silhouette of an army.
Banners, armor, long spears, cavalry.
A host a thousand strong, advancing in this very direction.
And their vanguard—
had already arrived.
...
In this moment, the setting sun sank behind the mountain ridge.
In this instant.
The light between heaven and earth turned murky, neither bright nor dark, as though something had stirred it muddy.
This was the Hour of Meeting Demons.
The most dangerous moment of the entire day.
As the old tales hand down,
the yang-energy of daylight withdraws at this hour, yet the yin-energy of night has not yet fully descended; and in the seam where the two meet, the boundary between human and yōkai grows blurred as well.
And beneath the lingering glow of the dying day.
The soldier who had fled from the north had collapsed entirely.
The blood at the stump of his arm had long since congealed, but elsewhere it still seeped—a long sword-wound along his ribs, and a round hole at his back where an arrow had pierced in and been pulled out.
He lay face-down on the muddy path at the village entrance, his breathing growing shallower and shallower.
Kaede crouched beside him, her little face full of worry, reaching out a hand to help him up.
"Don't touch him."
Kōbe Hikaru's voice came from behind her.
Kaede turned to look back at him.
The gray-robed, pale-haired oni warrior stood beneath the torii, yet his crimson eyes still did not look at the soldier—they were fixed on the northern horizon.
"Big brother?"
"Go back. Call all the villagers into the barrier, and let no one come out."
Kaede looked at his expression and did not press him.
She stood up, ran a couple of steps, then stopped and glanced back at him.
"Big brother, be careful."
"Mm."
Kaede turned and ran back into the village.
Her figure vanished among the houses.
Kōbe Hikaru lowered his gaze to the soldier, who had already lost consciousness.
The ashigaru armor was in ruins, the neck-guard plate broken, and the scabbard at his waist was empty—whether the blade had been dropped during his flight or wrested away, there was no telling.
But he did not save him.
Not because he did not wish to, but also because there was no need.
The man's wounds looked grievous, yet in truth they were no real hindrance.
Now, even more so, was not the time.
Kōbe Hikaru rose to his feet.
His gaze passed over the village entrance, over the fields, and fell upon the mountain road to the north, the place where those armies were closing in.
The last glow of the setting sun spilled across those rolling hills, staining every color a dark red.
And within that dark red, he saw still more.
In this hour of the sun's westward fall, of dim and yellowed afterglow.
What he beheld was not the army alone.
Behind those cavalry, along the direction from which they had come, several wisps of black smoke rose from the distant valleys.
That smoke was no cooking smoke.
Too thick, too black—and it carried a scent familiar to him.
The residue left after yōkai aura has been driven away.
Kōbe Hikaru's eyes narrowed.
He recognized those smoking places.
They were not human villages, but settlements of yōkai.
In this world, yōkai were not all solitary wolves wandering alone.
Though most yōkai were beasts, revenants, or even mere bones that, through obsession and grudge-rancor, had drawn in the turbid yōkai aura of heaven and earth and mutated into being—possessing no clear self or reason, and most of the time unable even to communicate.
But there were also some rather special yōkai who, in the course of their mutation, had first mutated their own brains and evolved their own consciousness.
They were not powerful—indeed, in terms of sheer strength, they were even weaker than ordinary lesser yōkai—yet they were clever.
And they better understood how to band together.
Though few in number, such low-ranking yōkai would often gather of their own accord, forming communal dwellings much like human villages.
By day, such places hid deep in the mountain forests, suppressed by pure-energy and hard to perceive.
Only at the Hour of Meeting Demons, when the yin-energy spread, would they emerge from beneath the daytime scenery.
Like a thin membrane laid over the normal world, peeled back by the last trace of the setting sun's light.
Kōbe Hikaru had encountered such places before.
He had even gone inside one.
That was not long after he had crossed over, while he was still wandering here and there.
He had once blundered into one such yōkai settlement, home to a dozen or so low-ranking yōkai.
There was a little yōkai selling tofu, a spider-spirit weaving cloth, even a one-eyed nyūdō running a fortune-telling stall at the crossroads.
Like a human marketplace—a true demon market.
They saw him and gave a start.
He saw them and gave a start as well.
But in the end, all was peaceful between them.
When it came down to it, Kōbe Hikaru did not stand entirely on the side of humanity; it was only that humans could generally communicate, while yōkai capable of communication were exceedingly few. Most yōkai, gravely affected by their yōkai aura, could only fight the moment they met another—and this held true whether the other was human or yōkai.
When it came down to it,
what he had ever set himself against was never some race, but the individual within it.
Slaying men, slaying oni—it was always the same.
One, two, three.
Within his field of vision, there were three such places.
Across a range of twenty li, only three very small lesser-yōkai settlements.
But at this moment, that army from Echigo, sweeping from north to south, seemed also—along its path—to be clearing away every existence that bore yōkai aura.
And right now they were—
heading straight for Kaede Village.
The hoofbeats drew nearer and nearer.
The foremost cavalry had already crossed the last ridge and appeared at the edge of the fields.
They were close.
Iron armor glinted in the dying sun, banners unfurled in the wind.
A great banner, blue characters on a white field.
That "Bi" character was clearer now.
Bishamonten.
With this word, this name, Kōbe Hikaru could of course be no stranger—though what he was more familiar with was its other appellation.
That was also,
one of the Four Heavenly Kings of Buddhism, the guardian deity of the north.
The god who governed war and treasure.
And as said before, if he remembered correctly, in the records of later ages, in this era there was a man who styled himself the incarnation of Bishamonten.
That man was bound up intimately with the origin of these armies.
He was the lord standing behind them, the sovereign of the Echigo region.
The head of the Uesugi clan.
The man called the God of War—Uesugi Kenshin.
And beneath that banner, the ranks of cavalry were spreading out, enveloping from both flanks, sealing off the exits of Kaede Village one by one.
It was, by all appearances, no mere passing-through.
Nor a blundering-in.
It was an encirclement.
A purposeful encirclement.
They had... sensed it—the yōkai aura here.
They had sensed the presence of Kōbe Hikaru!
Kōbe Hikaru stood at the village entrance, his gray robes snapping in the evening wind.
The crimson oni mask had already covered his face, and his pale long hair streamed up behind him.
His left hand rested on the hilt of Muramasa, his right hung at his side, fingertips now and then leaping with a thread of violet electric arc.
The cavalry halted.
Not out of hesitation.
But because—someone blocked the way ahead.
A single person.
A single yōkai.
Barring the path before an army of thousands.
From the center of the cavalry formation, a single rider broke forth.
It was a woman.
Young—seventeen or eighteen, by the look of her.
She wore a suit of dark-silver armor, light yet exquisite, the curve of the breastplate fitted to her form.
A head of long, silver-gray hair spilled out over the armor, blown back by the evening wind.
In her hand she gripped a tachi, its scabbard carved with Sanskrit script.
Her features were delicate and fair, yet between her brows there lay a keen severity.
Not the opulence of an Imagawa Yoshimoto, nor the unwillingness-to-submit of a Hōjō Ujiyasu.
But a pure, honed sharpness.
Like a blade drawn from its sheath.
Her gaze fell upon Kōbe Hikaru.
"Yōkai."
She spoke.
Her voice was clear and bright, neither high nor low, yet immensely penetrating.
"In the name of Bishamonten."
She raised the tachi in her hand, its tip pointed at Kōbe Hikaru.
"Be purged."
Purge the yōkai, is it?
Kōbe Hikaru said nothing.
He merely stood there, looking at this woman, looking at the thousand fully armed soldiers behind her.
Upon the armor of those soldiers, the same Sanskrit sigils were carved.
This was no ordinary army; it seemed, rather, to be an army raised in the name of "purging yōkai."
And their target—
was never merely the yōkai settlements along the way.
It was him as well.
The yōkai of Kaede Village.
Kōbe Hikaru.
"Interesting."
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