Chapter 734: The Shinobis Attack Minato!
In Morosuke’s domain, every man stood at his post.
It had only been a few days since Morosuke summoned them all back, calling in old loyalties and forging new ones with coin. In a place like Minato, finding mercenaries and ronin willing to sell their swords was never a difficult task. Desperation lived on every corner of that town, and desperate men were easy to buy. All it took was the right price, and they came in droves, filing into his domain one after another until the compound hummed with bodies, weapons, and restless energy.
More than three hundred men now surrounded the estate alone, posted at every gate, every wall, every shadow worth watching.
"I can’t believe there are so many of us," one of them muttered, scanning the rows of armed figures.
"That’s what Morosuke’s name does," the man beside him said with a grin. "And now that we have Chiyo, all of Minato answers to him."
"What about the Daimyo Yorimasa?"
The first man glanced over. "You haven’t heard? He’s dead."
"You’re serious?"
"As a blade. Morosuke takes the whole Domain of Yorimasa along with Minato. Everything."
A low laugh rippled between them. "Looks like we picked the right side after all."
"Oh, and I heard something else." The second man leaned in, lowering his voice as though sharing something precious. "Chiyo, the one they caught? Word is she’s actually Princess Ayame. The runaway herself."
"There’s no way."
"I saw her with my own eyes. I have never in my life seen a woman that beautiful."
The men laughed, easy and unbothered, filled with the quiet arrogance of those who believed themselves on the winning side of history.
And perhaps they were right, at least for now.
Minato had always carried the reputation of a town that belonged to no one, a place where outlaws made their own rules and power shifted like sand beneath the tide. But that familiar chaos had gone quiet. Every street corner, every alleyway, every stretch of the main road bore the presence of Morosuke’s soldiers. Hundreds within the domain, thousands spread throughout the town itself. The outlaw spirit that once gave Minato its grim kind of life had been stamped out beneath boot heels, replaced with something colder and far more deliberate.
The merchants who had once argued loudly over prices now kept their heads down. The gamblers who had filled the teahouses until dawn had retreated behind closed doors. Even the noise of the place, that low constant hum of a town that never truly slept, had grown thin.
Morosuke’s men moved through the streets as though they owned them, because now they did. They stopped whoever they pleased, took whatever caught their eye, and answered to no one but the man in the compound. The women who had served under Ayame were being hunted with particular attention, rounded up or chased from their posts, stripped of whatever protection her name had once given them.
A scream split the air in one of the narrower streets.
"Kyaa! Let go of me!!"
Two men had grabbed a young woman, each one gripping an arm, pulling her between them with wide leering smiles.
"Come along now," one of them said. "We just want a little company."
"Yeah, don’t be difficult." The other laughed, tightening his grip.
She twisted against them, her voice climbing higher with each passing second. "Please! Let me go!!"
Her screams only seemed to amuse them.
"If you stop fighting we will be gentle about it! Gahahah!"
People on the street stopped. They looked. Then they looked away.
What else could they do?
For a long time, the presence of Chiyo in Minato had meant something. Her name, her reputation, the quiet authority she carried had served as an unspoken boundary that even the roughest men tended not to cross. Women had lived in this town under a kind of fragile protection, not safety exactly, but something close enough to pass for it. Now that Ayame had been taken, that boundary had dissolved overnight.
The onlookers stood with their hands at their sides, jaws tight, eyes cast elsewhere. Fists clenched in silence. Feet that did not move.
To raise a hand against those men meant raising it against Morosuke himself, and everyone in Minato understood what that meant.
The town had not simply been occupied. It had been swallowed whole.
"Move faster!!" one of the men snarled, and before the woman could even flinch he swung his open palm across her cheek with enough force to send her crashing to the ground.
She landed hard, tears spilling before she could stop them, one hand pressed against the burning side of her face. The cobblestones bit into her knees. She did not look up.
The man standing over her smirked, rolling his neck slowly, savoring the moment the way cruel men always do when no one is around to stop them. He stretched his hand toward her.
"Maybe we finish this right here," he said, almost conversational about it, almost bored. "In front of everyone."
The woman squeezed her eyes shut. Braced herself. Waited.
Nothing came.
Instead she heard a sound, wet and sharp and final, like a blade parting something it was never meant to part. She opened her eyes.
The man’s outstretched hand lay on the ground beside her, still and separate, fingers loosely curled as though reaching for something it would never touch. A half second of silence passed before her mind could make sense of what she was seeing.
Then the screaming started.
The man staggered backward, clutching the ruin of his wrist, a sound tearing out of him that did not sound entirely human. His companion spun around, hand flying to his sword, eyes sweeping the street in every direction at once.
He did not find what he was looking for in time.
His head left his shoulders before the sword cleared the scabbard.
The first man was still screaming when the same silence took him.
For a long moment nobody moved. Nobody breathed. The street stood frozen in that particular stillness that only follows something the mind refuses to immediately accept.
Then two figures stepped out from the shadow between the buildings.
Black from collar to boot. No markings. No sound. They stood over the bodies for exactly as long as it took to confirm the work was done, and then they were simply gone, folding back into the dark as though the dark had exhaled them and drawn them back in.
"Shinobis!!"
The word broke from someone in the crowd like a stone through glass, and suddenly the street was alive again with noise and movement and the sharp electric charge of something shifting.
It was not just that street.
All across Minato the same thing was happening. Morosuke’s men stationed at crossroads and alleyways and market corners were dropping one by one, silently and without warning, as though the town itself had turned against them. A patrol of four vanished around a corner and did not come back. A guard posted at a rooftop was found face down on the street below. Two men arguing over dice looked up to find themselves suddenly alone, their companions simply absent, with nothing left behind but a faint smear of dark on the wall.
The Shinobis were not numerous, or at least they did not appear to be, but the way they moved made counting them impossible. They were everywhere and nowhere, cutting through Morosuke’s forces not like an army advancing but like water finding the cracks in stone, patient and inevitable and utterly without mercy.
The people of Minato had always feared the Shinobis. That fear was old and deep and reasonable. But fear is a complicated thing, and watching those same Shinobis dismantle the men who had spent days terrorizing them, stealing from them, dragging their women through the streets, something in the crowd began to change. Voices rose. Cautious at first, then louder, then open and unashamed, calling out from doorways and upper windows and the edges of alleys.
The Shinobis did not acknowledge it. They simply moved forward.
Deeper into Minato. Closer to the castle.
Some had already arrived.
Morosuke’s men at the gates had been told to watch for trouble, and so far trouble had not come. The gates stood repaired and solid, the courtyard beyond them quiet. The guards kept their posts with the relaxed posture of men who had begun to believe the warning was precautionary, that the worst had already passed, that they were the winning side and winning sides did not need to be afraid.
The pressure arrived before any of them could name what they were feeling.
It settled over the courtyard like a sudden change in weather, something in the air going tight and heavy, and every man there turned toward the gates at the same moment without entirely knowing why.
The gates answered the question.
Something struck them from the outside and they did not simply break. They exploded outward in a shower of timber and iron, splinters scattering across the courtyard like shrapnel, the boom of it rolling through the compound and off every wall.
Dust and smoke filled the archway.
The guards scrambled, weapons drawn, voices overlapping in a chorus of alarm.
"The enemy is here!!"
"Get into formation!!"
"Hold your ground!!"
And then through the smoke, three figures walked in.
The first carried himself with the particular quiet of someone who had nothing left to prove. Full black, black hair, features that carried something foreign in their sharpness, a black katana at his side that seemed to absorb the light around it rather than reflect it. The men who had been briefed recognized him before his face fully cleared the haze.
"It’s him! The Black Ronin! Ryo!!"
Morosuke had described him carefully. Had warned them. Had made very clear that if they saw this man they were not to hesitate, not to underestimate him, not to make the mistake of thinking numbers would be enough. Looking at him now, standing in the wreckage of their gate without a word or a hurry in him, several of the guards understood for the first time exactly why Morosuke had bothered to warn them at all.
To his left walked a woman in black, composed and still as a shadow given form. A Shinobi without question. Hanzo.
And to his right walked a woman who made half the courtyard forget, for just a moment, that they were supposed to be soldiers.
She was extraordinary. The kind of beautiful that does not ask for attention so much as simply command it without effort, the kind that lands like a blow before the eye has finished moving. Men who had been reaching for their weapons found their hands slowing. Men who had been shouting went quiet. She stood beside the Black Ronin with a cold look directed right toward them only making her even more beautiful.
Yukihime.
She rivaled Ayame herself. Some might have argued the point. Looking at her now, most of them were not sure they could.
Nathan narrowed his eyes looking at them.
This time, he wouldn’t think about consequences.
