"Well, my Lord. You have your chaos," Yamagata stated dryly, appearing to have aged fifty years in the short course of the battle.
The Miura Generals screamed their orders, trying to keep their units together. The powerful soldiers struck with the weight of sledgehammers when the enemy drew close, but they were not allowed to build up any fighting momentum as the enemy came from all fronts.
Arrows chased away clouds, falling down upon Miura men, giving them hardly any time to react. The Generals ordered their men further into the fray, so that the volleys of arrows would not claim only allied lives, they would also claim the enemy’s, should they choose to continue to lose them.
The wings had it worst. They dealt with the continual charge of cavalry, whilst being held in place by the infantry. The hors.e.m.e.n would gallop through, slaughtering everyone in their path, and then they would disengage, trot a short distance away, and then build up the momentum for another execution.
Morohira held the right-wing. It was lucky that he did too. The man thrived on bloodshed. Two arrows pierced his chest, but they only made him fight harder. His soldiers had emptied their barrels and expended all their bullets just before the enemy came upon them. Then they threw their rifles away, just as they had been taught to, and their hands fell to their swords.
By necessity, that right-wing unit had adopted a circular formation for it was demanded from them that they fight on all fronts. It stopped them from being completely overwhelmed immediately, but with the way things were going, and the mounting pile of allied bodies, it would not take long.
The left-wing was in a marginally better place. Jikouji and his men had managed to blast apart the cavalrymen before they could land a single charge against them. But there was still the infantry to their front, and the arrows that came out over the top. They fought fiercely, and they would survive for a time.
The Miura centre had hardly budged. Akiko and Rin stood strongly with Yamamoto and they refused to give a single inch to the enemy. A row of peasant spearmen came at them, and the two girls set upon them like a strong wind. Akiko danced her way past ten jabbing spears and severed a head with her naginata, and then an arm, and then a leg, all in a single graceful sweep of her weapon.
Rin leapt into the air, searching for more worthy heads. She found the captain of that yari ashigaru unit, with a red ribbon on his sleeve and she threw her naginata towards him without a single shred of hesitation. The naginata was far from being a throwing weapon, but after leaving her hands, it pierced through the enemy all the same, cutting the valves of the man’s heart before he even knew what had come at him. She cracked the wooden heel of her sandal into another spearman’s face, fracturing his skull and relieving him of his weapon. She took that spear with her and blasted apart the enemy ranks like a pile of leaves, until she retrieved the naginata from the captain’s body.
Kenshin watched all the while, stroking his chin. He held up his fan and sent more men towards the centre. He intended to suffocate them before they could put up any further resistance. The bow units changed their position at the order and began to send all their arrows towards the centre, neglecting the wings.
With but a single volley of that magnitude, the centre’s fighting strength was nearly halved.
"My turn," Gengyo said, drawing his rapier, the weapon feeling odd in his hand. "On me, Yamagata, we’re going to even the odds."
He spurred his horse into a gallop and his command centre of a hundred mountain men followed. It was not the left-wing – whose chances of victory seemed very possible – or to the centre – who might well still be able to get back in the fight – but to the right-wing, where his father fought, where the battle was almost certainly lost. Where his small dispatchment of men might have the least effect, or that was the way it might have appeared.
He met the remnants of the Uesugi cavalry – some three hundred men – and he met them midcharge, catching their flank with an arrowheaded formation that he headed. They shattered through the side, killing multiple men instantly. It was only towards the centre that they found resistance.
A man came at Gengyo with his katana, screaming his blood thirst. Gengyo was forced to duck underneath the blow, knowing that his rapier did not excel in parrying such heavy strikes. Even with his hand missing, his swiftness still remained and the sword went wildly over his head. Gengyo thrust with his sword whilst leaning heavily to one side in his saddle and the sharp blade punctured neck. With a flourish, he had torn his throat to pieces.
It felt like a clumsy and awkward way to kill someone when Gengyo was so used to his old sword style. But when the next two enemies came, he began to find his rhythm. They set upon him together, knowing his head to be prized above all. The slender piece of steel outranged a katana by a rather respectable amount. Before they could even think to swing at him, he had jabbed his blade through one man’s eye and cut open a gash on the other’s thigh. It was a gauntleted fist to the throat that ended him as Gengyo still clutched the sword in the very same hand.
They broke through the other side and the Uesugi cavalry was left with but a few stragglers. Gengyo admired their work with satisfaction, turning his new blade in his hand. "Not the best weapon for horseback, but it will do," he proclaimed, before charging around behind the right-wing to assist his father with the bulk of infantry that had been settled upon him like a pile of weighty stones.
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"OORAH!" Morohira bellowed, finding a second wind and arousing his men. When he heard hooves coming from their rear, he already knew who they belonged to. He was surrounded by more dead men than living, but those that could stand kept battling with a fierceness. If the enemy dared to make it near them, they would be torn apart.
With an impact as loud as a bellow of thunder, Gengyo tore through the Uesugi infantry that had managed to work their way around to Morohira’s rear. He cut them down with ease from his saddle, each strike filled with enough weight to blast through bone and cast limbs into the air.
Their single action of relief transformed the state of the right-wing in a few short moments. When those men – few as they now were – had but a single direction they needed to fight in, their resistance became that of a solid stone wall. Not only were they holding the enemy back, but a tension was rising, and it would soon burst and they would breakthrough.
Gengyo hacked down the last few remaining men and wordlessly brought his mount free of the melee. His men followed. From across the field, he saw Kenshin lift his fan of war, and bring it down, pointing directly towards him. The bowmen listened to his command. They shuffled their feet and nocked their arrows and unleashed a dark cloud of concentrated projectiles that would not even allow sunlight to pass.
It was a challenge that Kenshin had sent him, and one that Gengyo refused to back down from. He put his heel to the side of stallion all the same, and drove the beast forwards, into that cloud of death.
Before they fell upon him, he managed to use his sword to swipe a large many from the air, but a determined few made it past his guard and punctured his torso, making him sag in his saddle. "Guh..." he complained softly. An arrow in the shoulder of his useless arm. Another through his back, barely missing his lung. And then a third through his thigh.
He dared not look behind him, for he feared that there might not be a single man left. He could not even pause to consider it, for he knew it would take the venom out of his own attack, and render his sacrifice meaningless.
Morohira’s right-wing was outnumbered ten to one. His men were more dead than alive. The enemy continued to push against them like a mountain of meat and that weight was beyond fatiguing. It was that enemy’s flank that Gengyo targeted, not knowing there were merely ten men behind him.
Kenshin saw his intentions and acknowledged them with a shake of his head. His bowmen drew back their strings to release another arrow, but he held up his hand to stop them. The enemy was defeated, and their numbers few, any arrows fired whilst they were engaged in melee would only harm themselves more. "A valiant effort, Miura Tadakata, but alas against careful strategy your wild style of battling does not work."
He understood how the man in front of him was able to best Shingen. He knew that his old enemy, the Tiger of Kai, would never have been able to resist a battle on even terms, a sharp and testing conflict.
Akiko managed to look over to where she knew her husband to be, after having the briefest of respites. She saw him riding, all but alone, at an enemy that numbered well into the thousands. Her heart softened and sank, and she almost lost the hard will to battle, fearing so intently for him.
She and Rin had thrown everything they could at the enemy in the centre. But it was like punching water – whatever they cut down would be replaced in a few short moments. There was little hope of victory.
"Come on you bastards! Fight, damn it! These are mortal men! Cut them to pieces with the claws of demons!" Morohira screamed, bordering on madness. He remembered a time when their anger alone had carried them through impossible circ.u.mstances. He sought to arise the fighting spirit in his own men as his son had managed to do all that time ago.
It seemed to work, as the men screamed, filling themselves with an energy that did not exist, convincing themselves of a second wind. In truth, they had simply shut down part of their minds.
When Gengyo met with the enemy, rapier in hand, two forces collided with it at once. One, his small group that he arrow-headed, and the other was the small army of demons that Morohira had awakened.
Gengyo hit that fleshy mass of men expecting them to part at his charge, but it felt like driving a car into a wall. He was thrown from his saddle, high into the air, landing awkwardly on his side. His ears rung and his vision blurred. Dusty dirt filled his mouth and the air no longer ran cleanly to his lungs. He coughed, flat on his stomach, hardly able to move.
A man – be it ally or enemy – stepped hard on his legs, fighting to hold on to his last hopes of living. Gengyo scrunched his face up from the pain, unable to think as he usually might. He stumbled to his feet dizzily, and almost fell down again. The arrow in his thigh was bothersome, so he grasped it tightly and removed it, tearing free a lump of his own flesh in his efforts.
He saw his rapier lying in the mud nearby. Its silver guard glistened in the sun, fashioned like the wings of a bird. The very steel itself had been imbued with a red in parts – a labour of love that Takeshi had spent weeks upon. Gengyo coiled his last fingers around its leather grip. "A master swordsman makes the world his weapon," he told himself quietly.
When a bellowing Uesugi man made it to him, Gengyo cut his head clean off.
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