Nakamura's Dilemma
Nakamura had worries of his own.
While sailors were repelling Columbus in the far-off waters off the Eastern Continent, things were just as busy for Haneul back in Japan.
As expected of the islands — gold and silver poured out of the ground everywhere you looked, and Haneul had been kept busy scraping it all up.
Food was plentiful and jobs were abundant, so the population had grown noticeably, which meant there was no shortage of labor.
"Then let's do some civil engineering!"
At Haneul's delighted decree, the fortress walls were reinforced as well, and a colossal, impregnable fortress city was rising into being.
"Heh heh heh heh."
"A vault absolutely stuffed with gold and silver — who wouldn't be happy staring at that?"
"...Miss?"
"Heh heh heh."
"Miss!"
"Huh? Oh, you scared me."
"Why do you love gold and silver so much?"
"Don't you know?"
Then why...? Honestly, I don't know either! I just look at it and it makes me happy, okay?
"But I heard that all of this country's great gold and silver mines have already been mined out by Daehan?"
"That's right. Iwami, Sado, and Toi — three of them, gobbled right up."
"Then where on earth is all that gold and silver coming from?"
"This place just spews it out whenever it feels like it?"
It was hard to explain the perks of a volcanic archipelago or hydrothermal ore deposits... All I really knew was the general idea that gold and silver turned up a lot in places with heavy volcanic activity.
"Oh, what does that even mean? Just say gold and silver come out of the water."
"Wha—?"
How did she figure that out? Intuition?
"Anyway, as long as you hold onto this place, it'll keep spitting out money and handing it to us, so don't stress about it."
"Then why not just occupy it outright?"
I just don't like the people here, that's all?
"Too many earthquakes and volcanoes and whatnot. Can't be bothered."
"Fair enough, the ground really does shake a lot here."
More or less once every month or two, an earthquake would roll through...
"So anyway, no tall buildings. Tell them to build sturdy wooden houses."
"They already know better than we do, you know."
Granted, the only tall things around here were the harbor walls.
That aside, I wonder if our Nakamura is handling his siege all right.
Nakamura was gradually preparing to go to war. He needed land.
The Naniwa region where he currently resided was territory slated to be handed over to Daehan in due time. Which meant, in the end, that he was living under someone else's roof.
"We strike the south first."
"Sir!"
"The weapons from Daehan arrived without trouble, I trust?"
"Yes, sir! Training is complete as well."
He hadn't been granted the things Daehan called pistols, but after some pleading and pleading again, he had received cannons and something called a musket.
Negotiator-2 — a name Haneul had hastily invented on the spot, too embarrassed to say the real one out loud.
It was a weapon on an entirely different plane from the matchlock guns used in Ming or Vietnam.
It fired by striking a flint to spark the powder — a truly astonishing weapon.
"We arranged for a sufficient supply of gunpowder, yes?"
"Yes. They said overly potent powder could cause the muskets or cannons to burst, so they calibrate and send us an appropriate grade."
"What in the world do they fight with?"
Even what he was receiving now was superb compared to what any rival could field. And yet they claimed their own weapons were too dangerous to hand over — that something inferior was the most they could offer?
"The rumor alone about the pistols those bodyguards carry is terrifying, is it not? Twelve of them crushed two hundred men without a single scratch..."
"Ah... I heard that story too!"
Thinking it over again, Nakamura felt a chill run down his spine. Hadn't there even been a moment when he'd considered turning on them?
A mere twelve had faced down two hundred. And inside that fortress there were, at a conservative guess, at least ten thousand people.
"How do you suppose we could get our hands on their weapons?"
"It appears no foreign power possesses anything at their level. When we ask around, the only reaction is bafflement — people ask what on earth we're talking about."
In truth, he had been so curious, so desperate to own one, that he had secretly stolen a musket and some ammunition and taken them apart — only to be told it was utterly hopeless to replicate them.
Especially the springs — no one had the faintest idea how they were made, and no one could explain exactly how the ammunition managed to fire itself.
"Whew... Then let us be content with what we have and give it our utmost."
"Yes, sir! We will leave nothing to chance in our preparations."
Nakamura's first destination was the broad plain south of Naniwa.
It was a little underhanded, but he had decided to make use of Daehan.
The plain had only a single approach — its northern edge — and Daehan blocked it, meaning the land formed a natural, heaven-blessed fortress.
With the harvest in, Nakamura marched to war in the autumn of that year.
"The cotton garments from Daehan arrived in good order?"
"Yes, sir. They were quite generous."
With Daehan at his back, everything was in abundance. Only when he thought of it all as debts to be repaid did his heart grow a little heavy.
"Whew... We move out."
"Sir!"
Crossing the drawbridge on the southern wall, Nakamura's army marched forth gleaming.
Sharpened spearheads; soldiers clad in lamellar armor forged from iron plates supplied by Daehan. And the musketeers who could be called true elite began their advance in immaculate order.
"This winter will be a long one."
"But never a cold one, my lord."
The cotton garments Daehan sent were warm to an absurd degree — worn in winter, one hardly needed a heated room at all. That they had shipped enough to outfit every single soldier was almost magical.
And that wasn't all. Provisions of every kind would be landed from ships at regular intervals. Even now, vessels were surely trailing along the distant coast.
"It is reassuring — and bitter, all at once."
"Do you fear becoming their puppet, my lord?"
"Am I not already?"
Nakamura was, in truth, tormented by the question of whether he was already being manipulated by Daehan.
But when he looked back and considered it again, seeing how dramatically his people's lives had improved, he could not bring himself to believe he had done wrong.
"Still — puppet or not, so be it. I need only watch my people thriving, after barely a few short years."
He resolved to fix his eyes on that one thing alone.
"Yes, my lord. That is precisely what I wished to tell you. Hearing of the common folk beyond our borders starving to death by the thousands... it grieves me beyond words."
Ito Genji, his most trusted retainer, seemed to share his conviction completely.
"They are unmistakably the ones making our lives prosperous, so we fix our eyes on that and press forward."
"Yes, my lord!"
With their resolve thus hardened, the two men continued the march.
Two daimyo held the southern lands, and the first target was Tajimi's domain, on the lakeshore to the southwest.
There were several ambushes on the road to the castle, but Nakamura repelled them all safely and arrived within sight of the distant keep.
"Pitch the camp swiftly and take full rest. The assault begins tomorrow."
The march had been neither especially rapid nor overburdened with baggage, so Nakamura decided a single day's rest would suffice.
Land-grabbing in Japan was a simple business indeed: take the castle before your eyes, execute all the nobles, and you were done.
"That castle is... rather gaudy, isn't it."
"And the people we passed on the way here were naked and starving..."
Nakamura had seen far too many corpses of those who had starved to death along the road. Worst of all was the image of a woman who had died clutching her child to her breast — it wrung his heart without mercy.
Did Daehan truly have no one who starved?
Impossible. Even the laborers at the port were ordinary commoners, they said.
How I envy Daehan.
Nakamura had been mulling it over: if he could never escape Daehan's orbit anyway, why not settle for being its second — a fixture in its shadow?
"We will take that place and make it our seat."
"Yes. It is close to the coast as well — most favorable for us."
In the worst case, they could receive Daehan's aid through the coast — that was what pleased them.
"They have rested amply while we have marched all this way. Tonight is the most dangerous hour. Order full vigilance through the evening."
One truth, unchanging through all the ages: the best moment to ambush an invading army is the very first night after its march ends.
And sure enough, that very evening—
"WAAAAH! ATTACK!"
"CHARGE!"
"KILL EVERYTHING THAT MOVES!"
Tajimi's army came howling out of the dark — and whether they had prepared in advance or not, their armor and faces were slathered head to toe in black lacquer as they hurled themselves at the camp.
"AMBUSH!"
"ENEMIES!"
They had prepared for a night raid, of course — but the one who strikes first always holds the advantage. Nakamura's soldiers were falling helplessly, one after another.
BOOM!
"GYAAAAAH!"
"What was that?!"
"HIIIIIK!"
Then the first of the cannons, hastily readied, began firing canister shot.
Load a cannon with canister and fire it at close range, and men simply erased — like pencil marks rubbed off a page.
If the comrade sprinting beside you suddenly became nothing but a pair of legs, what thoughts would fill your head?
"HIIIIIK!"
"RUN!"
"WHAT IS THAT THING?!"
This went beyond losing the will to fight — it was outright panic. Nothing about taking an arrow could compare. It was a different universe entirely.
BOOM!
"Guh—!"
"Ghhk..."
"..."
The raiders had fought hard and true — but Nakamura, anticipating a night attack and readying canister shot beforehand, began to seize the upper hand.
The moment an enemy so much as showed himself against the glow of the campfires, the cannons roared.
"So this is the true power of the cannon..."
Nakamura had already been awed by the rifles Daehan fielded, but firing the cannons himself, he understood: this was a weapon from another dimension.
"Though it is... terribly gruesome, my lord."
A graze was enough to take off a limb; a direct hit removed flesh by the fistful. Corpses lay scattered in every direction. It felt less like artillery than like someone shooting corpses.
"Tell yourself it is for your people."
"Yes, my lord..."
Before long, the raid was winding down.
"Uuurk!"
"Bleugh..."
Quite a few of the soldiers clearing the field were vomiting. There were simply too many dismembered bodies...
The longer they lingered, the more it felt like they would be toyed with by raid after raid — so at dawn the next day, Nakamura's army began the siege in earnest.
The cannons opened up at full liberty from long range. Powder and cannonballs were arriving by ship, unloaded without end.
And the port where those ships landed was a mere hour's distance from here. The supply line flowed on and on without end.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
"Castles really are useless, aren't they?"
Watching the castle crumble under the cannonade, Nakamura concluded the thing was not worth much as it stood.
"Yes. They seem far too weak against artillery."
His aide shared the thought. The wooden superstructure burst apart in single blasts, and while the stone base held out somewhat longer, it too could not last.
"Now I understand why Daehan builds its castles the way it does..."
"Yes. When we return, I shall study them in detail."
The two men had once wondered, watching castles being raised in Daehan, why they were built so low and so sloped. Now they were beginning to grasp it.
"They have surely tested and refined their designs through countless experiences. There can be no harm in copying them."
So, quite naturally, Nakamura was becoming a follower of Daehan.
CRUMBLE—
Far away, the castle was more than half destroyed — and whether the enemy judged it hopeless, they came surging out in a desperate charge instead.
"The enemy couldn't wait and broke out of the gate."
"I'll have the men ready."
The musketeers already deployed in the front line opened fire.
BANG! RAT-TAT-TAT!
Each shot demanded a long reload, but standing in three ranks and firing in rotation, they could keep a steady volley going long enough for the smoke to clear between shots.
Watching enemy soldiers topple like rice-stalks being cut, never even closing the distance, Nakamura felt his skin crawl.
"Good heavens... How insignificant must we look to Daehan? The very thought terrifies me..."
"Yes... They must wield something far beyond even this."
Just looking at those muskets, he could not muster even the faintest thought of resisting.
BOOM!
The moment the enemy spilled fully out of the castle, the cannons nested among the musketeers — loaded with canister — began to roar.
This time the range was long, giving the shot ample distance to fan out wide.
Enemy soldiers fell in entire heaps, scythed down in fan-shaped sweeps. It was slaughter in all but name.
One wondered whether the spearmen would ever have any work to do at all.
"We must expand the musket corps."
"Yes, my lord. I will secure the manpower."
With the battle unfolding far too easily, Nakamura's thoughts only sank deeper.