Coastal Ambush
Thud. THOOM. Thud.
"Everyone, move! Get out of the kill zone!"
That cannon fire from over there — surely they weren't aiming to hit us? Were they deliberately herding us toward the mountain? What were they playing at?
"Something's on the mountain! Send scouts ahead first!"
"Yes, ma'am!"
Tedious as it was, we had to advance carefully, checking as we went.
Fwoom!
"Ugh!"
With numbers this large, casualties were inevitable no matter how fast we moved. Even if the shots were weak and packed with rocks instead of proper shot, a direct hit was lethal all the same.
Plate armor might have been overpowered, but only against anti-personnel weapons. Against cannons, it was useless. Through sheer rotten luck, several of the children died on the spot.
"Confirm the mountain and seize the ridgeline! Hurry!"
Luckily it wasn't a tall mountain, and the children scrambled up it eagerly. From a captured height, we could shoot from a prone position — an overwhelming advantage.
They had to be exhausted. The least I could do was encourage them!
"Hold on just a little longer and make the climb!"
"Yes, ma'am!"
We climbed, and climbed, and climbed. The lead group was halfway up when—
Rustle, rustle.
"ATTACK!"
"WAAAAGH!!!"
Damn it all! There was an ambush, just as I'd suspected! Samurai began pouring out from the summit, and from the ground behind the lead group.
"They hid themselves well! Nobody spotted them!"
"Everyone, counterattack!"
"Clear out the ambush in the middle first!"
The ridgeline enemies looked slightly less dangerous, with a fair number of trees for cover, so we decided to deal with the ones in the middle first. They had us surrounded front and back — but we'd surrounded them front and back too.
The trouble was the risk of hitting our own people, which made firing the rifles difficult.
"Die!"
"You die first!"
Japanese samurai and Daehan's Intelligence Bureau agents tangled together, axes and katanas swinging.
CLANG! CLANG-CLANG! Crunch. Shlick.
Steel rang against steel, and the wet sound of tearing flesh echoed across the mountainside near the coast as it began to run red with the blood of the Intelligence Bureau and the Japanese samurai alike.
Even plate armor has its gaps, after all. The samurai viciously sought them out, driving their blades into every seam.
"Kgh."
"GAAAGH."
One samurai thrust his sword through a gap in the armor and went down to an axe blow—
"Die, you bastard!"
—only for another to charge in right behind him and stab through a different seam. It was happening everywhere.
"Faster!"
"Run!"
It wasn't a far distance. It was right there before my eyes — a gap that should have taken less than five minutes at a sprint. Why did it stretch on so endlessly?
In the distance I could see the lead group, truly surrounded on all sides, taking blow after vicious blow as the shogunate soldiers drove blades into the seams of their armor.
Watching the children of the Intelligence Bureau fall one by one, I felt my heart tearing apart.
"KILL THEM ALL!"
By the time we arrived, a great many were already lying on the ground. But if we finished off the enemy quickly and got the holy water into them, we could still save a lot of them.
Anyone conscious enough would eat it themselves and see to it.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
The children's rifles were out of the question in this crush, but I waded in close, clearing the enemy away with my pistol.
KA-GASHING! Shlick.
And with a blade, I cut them down armor and all, advancing onward and onward.
"GYAAH! It's Kurokin!"
"It's Kurokin!"
Everywhere I looked, samurai were fleeing in terror.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
Turning your back doesn't get you away from me. As long as you're in reach, you're already dead.
Click-clack.
No time to reload in a crisis like this. I tore out each spent cylinder wholesale, swapped in a pre-loaded one, and pushed forward without end.
Praying all the while that the barrel wouldn't jam with some poor soul's remains.
"Kurokin is over here! Help!"
"That woman is their commander! Capture her, now!"
Idiots. I'm the strongest thing on this battlefield. And you think you're going to capture me? Laughable.
"That's right! I am Kurokin! Come at me, all of you!"
Come, then. Come at me. I could fight until dawn and beyond.
"GYAAAH!"
"Ughhk…"
And every second they spent on me meant one fewer of my children getting hurt over there, didn't it?
WHAM.
"Kgh."
No wound, but pain and sheer physical impact were another matter. Being light as a feather only went so far.
"What?! But I cut you!"
You cut my clothes, not my body. I'm not like you.
Shlick!
"…"
Maybe it was the decapitation. No scream at all — just a fountain of blood surging upward.
Blood sprayed across my head, my face, my clothes, my whole body, but before I knew it the filth on my skin and hair had vanished, leaving only clothing drenched scarlet.
Somehow, without willing it, a smile curled at the corner of my mouth.
"HIIIIIK! An oni!"
"It's a demon!"
"She's not human!"
"SPARE ME!"
That frightened, are we? And these were the men who strutted about calling themselves warriors. What cowards.
"Finish the cleanup!"
"Some of you start treating the wounded!"
Somewhere along the way we must have wiped out the Kamakura shogunate force, because the order to secure the battlefield rang out.
Some of the enemy were gleefully making a run for it—
BANG! RATATATATANG! BANG! BANG!
—but my children had rifles. Daehan's children began pouring gunfire into the fleeing enemy.
The shogunate soldiers ran for their lives, gunshots hammering into their backs.
Bastards. We'd been far too complacent. We should have swept the landing zone thoroughly — or stayed well out at sea and come ashore in the morning.
"Sweep the perimeter, then move to the ridgeline!"
"Squads finished with the wounded, move up first!"
Shouts from the mid-level commanders rose all around.
"Miss!"
"Oh, over here."
"Are you all right?"
"Me? I'm fine."
"Ahem. Hem. You should, ah… change your clothes."
"Huh?"
I'd thought I'd merely gotten blood spattered on me, but my clothes had been shredded to rags, and everything underneath was showing. How many times had I been cut, exactly?
And how, in all that, had my undergarments managed to hold on?
"Right. I should change. Finish up quickly and find us somewhere to rest."
"Yes, ma'am! Don't worry about a thing."
No need to go far — I slipped behind a large tree nearby and changed. My undergarments looked intact enough, but they were soaked through with blood, so they'd have to go too.
Thank goodness for the endless wardrobe in my Subspace. I could pick and choose. For the fighting, I changed into knee-length culottes — practical and comfortable. The long skirt I'd worn today had been getting in the way.
Tap-tap, tap-tap.
When I came back, barracks were going up here and there — nothing grand, just poles driven into the ground with ropes strung between the trees and canvas stretched over them to break the wind.
"You've all worked hard."
"And you as well, miss."
"What are the losses?"
"Ninety-one dead… and two hundred twelve who won't be coming home whole…"
"Three hundred three… Hoo…"
Most of those would be from the lead group, caught in the middle of the ambush.
Had they all worn their plate armor and fought in formation, face to face, hardly anyone would have been hurt. But surrounded as they'd been, the enemy had been able to drive weapons into the gaps in their armor.
One ambush, and three hundred three casualties out of two thousand. The children being sent home would likely be carrying serious permanent injuries.
I'd already sent tens of thousands of children off in the two great wars we'd fought — but never before had I watched so many die and bleed out right before my own eyes.
"For now, everyone rest and tend their wounds. Tomorrow we'll summon ships, send the wounded home, scout ahead, and advance."
"Yes, ma'am. We'll need to be thorough about it."
The children — and I — had fallen short. The enemy had left behind more than twenty times our casualties, and still…
It was just as they say, I suppose: whether ten fingers break or twenty, the thorn lodged in your own hand hurts more.
"Ha…"
I turned around, trying to pull myself together, and thought — what on earth was all this happening on a hill barely bigger than the spring behind a village back lot?
"We'll organize the camp now, ma'am."
"Good. If anyone wants to rest out of their armor, make sure there's cover first."
Sleeping unarmored at night left us worryingly exposed, I realized. With their superior numbers, they could rotate units through the night and keep us from sleeping — a proper night raid, and we'd be in real trouble.
Once welding takes off, I'll have to build landing craft somehow. Honestly, it might be better to just rest aboard the ships and shuttle back and forth.
Meanwhile, the Kamakura shogunate had poured genuine effort into preparing this ambush.
Having long since realized that cannon fire and long-range engagements were hopeless, they had begun readying a surprise attack at the earliest opportunity.
Dig into the mountainside, lie in wait, then wrap around the enemy and strike from front and rear. They'd reasoned that the invaders would struggle to use their ranged weapons in such a situation — and the plan had worked perfectly.
"What?!"
"We have failed…"
"…Hah."
Nagatoki, head of the Hōjō clan — the most powerful family of the age — felt as though he might faint at the news his servant brought.
He had picked and chosen the finest warriors among the samurai and sent five thousand of them, and nearly the entire force had been annihilated. Even those who crawled back were not in their right minds, raving about ghosts and demons — oni, they said.
"What of the enemy?"
"They are resting for the moment… but it appears they suffered almost no losses…"
The shogunate had been counting the ships coming and going from early on, tallying the invaders' numbers. Judging the force at roughly fifteen hundred to two thousand, they'd concluded that a melee was winnable — and committed a full five thousand men to the ambush. The result was despair.
"Wh… what do we do?"
"…"
Nagatoki was so far gone he was asking his own servant for advice. In his heart of hearts, he wanted to throw away his lordship and everything else, grab the family fortune, and flee.
"Should we surrender, even now?"
"Would the name of Hōjō survive it, my lord?"
"Ah…"
Even the servant reasoned that at the very least, the entire family would be taken hostage — or beheaded.
All the things they had done flashed through Nagatoki's mind in an instant. Poisoning their ambush strikes. Digging traps. The sort of deeds that, were he in their place, he could never imagine sparing anyone for.
"Prepare for a fight to the death!"
"Do you mean that?"
"We will fight to the last man!"
"UWOOOH! I will follow you to the end, my lord!"
Moved to tears, the servant began spreading Nagatoki's words far and wide, exaggerating them with every telling.
And so the shogunate's morale soared.
But in the inner councils of the Hōjō clan, a far more important meeting was underway.
"It seems the shogunate will end as it stands."
"Father!"
"There is no way to stop them. You know this."
Some might say, just run away — but abandoning one's stronghold meant abandoning one's power along with it. Who would follow a shogunate drained of strength? They would only move to seize what remained.
"There is one way, is there not?"
"Hm? There is still a way?"
No matter how he turned it over, Nagatoki could see no path besides fighting. What was his son talking about?
"It all comes down to money in the end, does it not?"
"Does it?"
"Suppose we gather every coin we can and try to buy them off. How does that sound?"
"Hah… do you have any idea how deep in debt we are?"
"Then surely the Emperor must contribute funds as well, no?"
"I beg your pardon?"
The Hōjō clan had their own sense of grievance. True, they held the real power of the realm — but hadn't the money itself ultimately been borrowed from the Imperial house?
"Even so, do you think they'll listen to us?"
"Then we go and beg. On our knees if we must…"
"Damn it all…"
For the Japanese, kneeling before another and begging for money was an act of profound humiliation.
"In exchange — if we frame it as us sacrificing ourselves for the sake of the samurai, we might at least win their hearts, don't you think?"
"So we salvage something out of this after all."
Hearing his son's reasoning, Nagatoki had the strange feeling that he had lost — yet somehow not lost.
As though they had, in fact, won something after all.
"Tomorrow, I will carry the white flag myself."
"You'll go in person?"
"Whether I die this way or that way, I die either way. Would I not get better results going myself?"
Nagatoki planned to perform a tearful display before the assembled samurai who had gathered for tomorrow's last stand, and then step forward with the white flag in hand.
There was truly nothing left. Whatever it took, he had to calm the invaders without further sacrifice.
Only by preserving the samurai to some degree could he protect his family's power.
"We'll need gifts, won't we?"
"For now, we'll muster the samurai and gather up every piece of gold and silver we can find."
"Good. I leave it in your hands while I'm out tomorrow."
Where on earth had gold and silver been hiding all this time? If it existed, why had they never once thought of repaying their debts? He could not fathom these people to save his life.