Chương 39: Book 1: Chapter 12 - Things Unseen [Part 4]

The voice was Nagai's and Shimon obeyed. The Hōjō warrior ahead thrust, and Shimon stepped outside the line before cutting through the forearm. Behind him, steel struck steel with a hard metallic crack. Then the senior retainer laughed. It was not Kagawa's laughter, and the difference mattered. There was no cruelty in it and no pleasure in another man's fear. The powerful warrior sounded exhilarated, alive to a kind of work he understood completely.

Beneath the discipline of council chambers and measured commands remained a battle-hardened retainer who had spent much of his life preparing for the confusion of battle.

"Left!" Nagai called out. Shimon turned in time to catch a spear shaft against his katana. The veteran warrior's sword passed beside his shoulder and struck the spearman across the face. The young man was quickly realizing that no matter how fast his reflexes were, he could not react to something he could not see.

"Behind you!" Shimon warned in turn. The older samurai ducked without looking, trusting the warning immediately. Shimon cut over him and opened the attacking man's side beneath the raised arm. Nagai came upright, and for several exchanges the two of them fought back-to-back. The familiarity of it struck Shimon almost as hard as the violence. It was not the swords or armor.

It was the communication: movement caught at the edge of vision, short warnings, and the assumption that another person would cover the space you could not see while you dealt with what stood ahead. Team play. But, in the here and now, with much more permanent and deadly results.

"Two o'clock!" Shimon shouted reflexively. Suddenly, a Hōjō soldier rushed Nagai from the right. The senior retainer moved at once, turning the incoming blade aside. Then, Nagai drove his point into the attacker's throat. Another defender came at Shimon, and while the young samurai slipped the first cut and blocked the second, the third never arrived because the older warrior struck the man's leg from behind. Shimon finished him.

"You are useful, Ayanokouji!" the veteran retainer laughed as he recovered his guard. The Satomi line began to reform around them, and Tarō reappeared through the dust with blood streaked along one side of his helmet.

"You disappeared!" the older Kume shouted angrily. A Hōjō soldier charged before Tarō could continue with his complaint. The experienced spearman killed him with a thrust high into the chest, the tip slipping in between the lacquered plates, pulled the yari free, and then pointed the bloody weapon toward Shimon. The Hōjō counterattack did not collapse all at once, but once failure began, it spread quickly.

One group yielded ground, nearby soldiers saw the retreat, and soon the defenders were moving backward faster than their officers could force them forward. The central enclosure gates began closing too late, and Satomi troops reached them before the heavy bar settled into position. Men hacked at timber, spears thrust through the narrowing opening, and screams sounded from the other side as defenders struggled to force the doors shut. Then Kurobane pushed through the crowd.

Blood darkened the feathers around the fukuiraptor's jaws, and an arrow protruded shallowly from the leather protection over one shoulder. Kagawa leaned forward in the saddle, his remaining eye bright with the same ugly excitement Shimon had noticed earlier.

"Clear the way!" the mounted warrior bellowed. Men obeyed as Kurobane struck the half-closed gate with shoulder and chest, widening the gap enough for the surrounding Satomi soldiers to force themselves through. The one-eyed rider entered first. Tarō watched him disappear and drew a breath through his teeth.

"He is going to tell that story until he dies." The broad-shouldered Seki wiped his katana against a dead man's sleeve.

"Then we should pray for a short story." Even Heita managed a strained laugh. They followed.

The fighting ended near sunset, although Shimon never noticed the precise moment when battle became victory. The noise simply diminished until the clash of weapons behind one building ceased, the shouting faded, and finally the Hōjō banners disappeared from the highest earthwork. Satomi soldiers climbed in their place and raised the futatsu-hikiryō above the captured castle. Some defenders surrendered once the inner enclosure fell.

Others escaped through rear paths before they could be surrounded, while a few continued fighting until enough Satomi men gathered around them that courage and suicide became difficult to distinguish. Shimon remained standing in the courtyard for several moments before realizing that no one nearby was trying to kill him. And, no one was trying to kill each other. His arms had begun to tremble from exhaustion, and the inside of his armor seemed to contain every bruise he had ignored during the assault.

Dust drifted across the enclosure while smoke climbed from a damaged storehouse, and soldiers moved among the dead gathering weapons, carrying wounded companions, searching for officers, and finishing enemies whose injuries made movement impossible. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit. Outside the shattered main gate, the triceratops—the Raijū as this world liked to call dinosaurs—stood with its head lowered while several handlers examined one horn and fussed over it.

Kurobane drank noisily from a trough under the supervision of an anxious groom, and Kagawa had already begun explaining the assault upon the inner gate to anyone unable to escape him. Tarō sat upon an overturned bucket with his yari across his knees. The rough-spoken spearman was filthy, blood-spattered, and visibly exhausted, but something of his usual humor had begun returning as he watched Seki approach carrying a replacement spear acquired from an uncertain source.

The young Fujita touched the cut across his cheek every few moments, apparently surprised to discover that he still possessed both sides of his face. The pale Heita had gone behind a wall to vomit, as was his habit. Shimon finally sheathed his katana and looked at his hands. They were dark with drying blood, some of it his and most belonging to men whose names he would never know. The System, or whatever it was, chose that quieter moment to reclaim his attention.

Somewhere in all of the chaos and blood, and most likely because of it, he had advanced in power. Congratulations, you have advanced to the next level. You have been assigned advancement points: 3 Attribute Points and 1 Skill Point. Apparently, fewer than twenty minutes had passed since the notification first appeared, although fighting through the castle had seemed long enough to occupy most of the day. He put all three Attribute points into Body.

After the loss imposed by the Closed Gate, the choice required little consideration; strength, Health, endurance, and survival remained more immediately useful than almost anything else. The Skill point went into Swords, because he felt that would help the most with his current predicament. He had also gained a single point of Mind for reasons completely unknown to him in the battle. Perhaps the mind and body were linked and all of that stuff, he thought grimly.

The changes settled through him with the familiar internal pressure. Some of the weakness left his limbs, and several sharper pains beneath the armor softened into tolerable aches. Nagai approached through the settling dust soon afterward. Fresh cuts marked the senior retainer's armor, one sleeve had darkened with blood, and he carried his helmet beneath one arm with approximately the same composure he brought into a council chamber.

"You disobeyed orders," the commanding man observed. Shimon glanced toward Kagawa.

"He ordered us."

"I know," the older man said flatly. The calm answer carried considerably more menace than shouting would have managed. Both men looked toward the one-eyed deputy, who was demonstrating his charge through the inner gate with broad sweeps of his tachi while three unfortunate listeners endured the account.

"He will receive my congratulations," Nagai remarked evenly. Shimon had learned enough about his patron's temperament to suspect that congratulations could take several forms. The veteran retainer turned back toward him.

"You fought well." Shimon bowed.

"Thank you, Nagai-sama."

"You kept your head," he stated gruffly.

"Mostly," the young man replied sardonically. A faint movement touched the older warrior's mouth.

"You also shout strange things." Shimon remembered two o'clock.

"I was confused."

"You were useful while confused," Nagai returned dryly. His eyes moved over Shimon with the same measuring attention he had shown when they first met.

"For a man who knew almost nothing of real war when we found him, you learn quickly." Shimon looked across the captured courtyard. A dead Hōjō soldier lay beside the well with one hand still wrapped around a broken spear shaft. Another corpse had been covered with a cloak, while two Satomi men carried a wounded companion toward the gate upon a door torn from its hinges.

"I am not sure that is a good thing," Shimon confessed, more to himself than to anyone else. The powerful senior retainer considered him before answering.

"Good has little to do with whether a man learns." With that, the battle-hardened commander moved away to the more difficult task of turning a captured fortification into something Lord Satomi could hold. Shimon remained behind and watched the two-line banner move above Kawamori-jō. A fortress that should never have existed in the first place, in a world and land that was, to him at least, an illusion. He had spent years winning battles before coming here.

Simulated cities, ruined factories, forests assembled from polygons, orbital stations created by designers who knew exactly where violence ought to become interesting; Shimon understood kill counts, damage numbers, rankings, round times, and the clean satisfaction of victory screens. This possessed none of their cleanliness. A man had died beside him before reaching the gate. Shimon had killed men whose names he would never learn, while Tarō, Seki, Fujita, and Heita had done the same around him.

Nagai had laughed while fighting at his back, and for several minutes Shimon had understood the exhilaration behind that laughter more clearly than he wanted to admit. He had survived a genuine battle between armies beneath real banners, fought for a river crossing and a castle that had never existed in his history because this world possessed different roads, different animals, and almost different everything. The realization should have made the victory feel more significant. Instead, Shimon mostly felt tired.

Behind him came the sound of retching, followed eventually by approaching footsteps. Heita emerged from behind the wall wiping his mouth with one sleeve, his scarred chin and already pale face looking worse than usual. Then the spiritually sensitive warrior stopped. Whatever exhaustion had occupied his expression disappeared beneath naked unease. Shimon recognized the look immediately.

"What is it?" Matsunaga did not answer at once. His eyes moved past Shimon, beyond the captured banners and the soldiers beginning to celebrate, and settled instead upon the bodies scattered throughout the enclosure. The chip stirred almost simultaneously. [UNKNOWN CARRIER SIGNAL DETECTED] Signal Strength: Low Pattern: Increasing Multiple interference points suspected Ayanokouji followed the scar-chinned warrior's gaze across the captured castle and felt the satisfaction of survival begin to curdle in his stomach.

Around them, Satomi soldiers celebrated the taking of Kawamori-jō, drinking, shouting, and calling to companions who had survived the assault. Among the dead, beyond the sight of nearly everyone present, other things had begun to gather.