XXVII. Tip of the Spear
It was only weeks ago that you marched off to war, and yet it feels like a lifetime.
The feeling of an army at your back is not something you could easily describe to anyone who has not known it for themselves. Hundreds of warriors march in unison, their spears raised to the sky, a walking forest. The brave samurai ride alongside you, brilliant banners proclaiming their fealty to city and family both, their honor painted on cloth, demonic faceplates promising death and torment to all in their way. Their strength is your strength, your might is their might; you are one, a single mighty body animated by one breath, one will.
And you march at their front, a giant striding the earth, one of three towering over the army. Yoichi closes the march, his Falling Mountain a rampart of steel shielding hundreds of men from any surprise attack from the rear. Lady Gozen stands in the middle, a paragon bolstering the will of all warriors around her; from the shoulders of her Rising Tide stands a great gilded banner in the colors of the Heavenly Dragon who is lord over you all, and lord also over the petty bandits you hope to crush today.
And at the head of the army, your Harvest rebuilt at last, reforged into a whole new weapon, a blade of a kind unseen before on the face of earth. The sensation of it is strange, so subtly different compared to what Harvest was before. Lighter on your shoulders, heavier on your legs, her balance slightly off compared to what you'd grown used to. You do not worry about this; the march will give you plenty of time to accustom yourself to the new design of your bunraku.
You cross the fields of wheat and rice surrounding the city of Summer, and at your passing peasants stand up in their furrows and watch you in awe. Travelers upon the road move out of your way and prostrate themselves, foreheads to the dirt and muttering prayers for as long as it takes your army to pass them; as Yoichi walks before them he throws a handful of coins from the open hatch of his bunraku, and the travelers clasp their hands and shout praise.
Then you pass into the warlands, blighted by decades of conflict. You walk upon scorched black earth and amidst the remains of long-burned houses. Far from the road and the city you cross through a field of blades, where two forgotten armies met in cataclysmic combat and were almost all were lost. There are no bleached bones and broken armors here, for the dead rose from the battlefield and walked off to darker horizons; all that remains are spears and swords and tattered, erased banners sticking out of the earth, and your men know better than to loot such ill-fated tools.
The sun is setting on you, but it is better not to rest in the warlands if one can avoid it. Gozen sends word to push on ahead.
Past the warlands are the hills, crested by thick dark woods, spared the desolation of war. Here end the roads and dwell the savage kami. Two scouts on horseback ride ahead of you, looking at you inquisitively, and you nod Harvest's weeping head, authorizing them to take the head and guide you. They lead your army down rough paths of overgrown earth, the haphazard web that is common in such wilderness, connecting a few small settlements of woodsmen - dangerous and wild people, who can only live in such an environment at the sufferance of the kami, and so invariably make dark or costly deals with the spirits. Many tales are whispered of the dangers surrounding woodsmen, but they are no threat to an army.
The threat lies deeper in these hills. You would not be surprised to find any settlement you come across abandoned, as the Hidden Village absorbed them into its army of bandits and marauders.
You stop for the night in the middle of these woods, tension thick in the air. Your enemy has the advantage of home in this place, and woods are place to fear ambushes. Gozen orders a double watch as the men set up camp among the trees. You eat quietly, everyone on guard for some unseen danger, but in the end you spend the night without harm, and when you set off at dawn you are all relieved. Perhaps the enemy is not as much of a threat as you had feared.
A march through wooded hills is much slower than a march through the lowlands surrounding Summer. You make your way cautiously, following the scouts' directions. Around noon, one of them waves for you to stop, and you wave Harvest's arm in turn, the entire army coming to a disciplined halt behind you. The man motions to show you something and you open your hatch, taking a deep breath of fresh outside air before leaning down to look.
"These footsteps weren't here when we scouted this area a few days ago," the man says, waving to marks in the ground that you can hardly recognize as anything. "At least a dozen men. Left in this direction," he points to northwest, deeper in the hills.
"Then we should follow them," you say, and the man gives a sharp nod before climbing his horse again. Word is relayed to Lady Gozen, and she agrees with you and the scouts. The army is quickly on the march again, following a path of beaten earth and the directions of the light riders. It soon appears that you are following a natural road, used by humans for convenience; a kind of shallow groove between two rocky outcroppings, likely the ancient bed of a long-dry stream. This makes the troops nervous, as the road channels them in one direction and makes for a convenient ambush spot.
You have spent a long time protecting Lord Okami of Autumn, and ensuring the safety of one man through endless war has taught you many things. One of them is that expecting a surprise does not prevent it from happening. When an area makes for an ideal ambush, a competent warrior notices it, but it doesn't make the place any less ideal to the assaillant. Being forewarned is not a magical spell that negates the advantage of terrain and preparation.
You took this lesson to heart, for you paid its price more than once. And so as you lead the group down the natural road, following the tracks left by the Hidden Village's men, you are both on your guard, and resigned to accept what fate befalls you.
The rope was hidden by the dry underbrush that grows over the road. Your foremost scout's horse trips it, and the great groaning sound in the branches gives you just time enough to look at its source and lift your arm halfway through a defensive stance - but the crippling weakness of heavy-frame bunraku is their slowness, and the spiked tree-trunk hammers Harvest straight in the chest.
You shout in pain and surprise as the blow sends you reeling, knocking your head out of your view-mount. The impact splinters the wood of your flank plate, and the spear-sharp tip of the trunk stares you in the eye through the broken armor. A moment after you hear the rustling of snapping strings and the whistling of arrows, and spit out a curse. You blindly move your armor's hand to the tree sticking out of your flank - it comes easily in your terrible grip - and hurl it in the direction you know to be the outcropping on the left side of the road. There is a thunderous sound as trees shatter, the sound of arrows abates for a moment, and you place your forehead into the harness again, looking through the maiden-face's eyes.
Your two scouts have fallen to arrows, and their bleeding horses are wheenying madly as they try to find an escape. Behind you, men are brandishing their spears to thwart an assault, but the enemy is not charging their ranks. Arrows rain from the trees, and worse things too, contraptions previously hidden in the canopy; more tree-trunks on ropes, great nets, scattered bundles of jars that explode on reaching the ranks and spread some kind of foul liquid…
You've never seen an ambush of that kind. No one would spend so much resources and effort crafting such complicated traps, not when any good scout should be able to spot them in advance and render them useless. How were they hidden?
You don't have time to answer that. Men are dying.
"Tomoe!" Shouts Lady Gozen behind you, her overlong katana sweeping projectiles out of the air to shield her men. "You have the height advantage!"
Of course. You and Yoichi have the tallest bunraku, but he is far at the rear and you are near the heart of the ambush. You tense your body, turn on your heels, and reach for the edge of the mound next to you. Your body strains in agony as you heft Harvest's immense weight over the edge and stand up. You are not sure you could have achieved this without the lighter frame of this Verdant Spring armor, and you don't know if Lady Gozen will manage the same with her smaller frame - no time to think of that. You pull the naginata off your back and stare ahead of you.
You are surprised to realize the enemy started to retreat the instant you rose before them. A glance at your surroundings reveals much fewer troops than you had expected, a couple dozen men on this side of the road against your hundreds. Without the traps, this ambush would have been a crushing defeat for them. A single bunraku is enough to make them flee. You smile ruefully and step forward, swiping your blade in front of you - three young trees fall to the ground and the bandits cry out.
You only have a second to catch the gleam of ochre metal and the outline of a bird's mask. The man falls upon your shoulder, and the last thing you see through Harvest's eyes are hands filled with what looks like dark mud coming down on your bunraku's eyes. Then you are blind.
Hissing in anger you remove your head from the view-mount and raise mighty hands to swat at your own armor's face, but you are blind and the enemy is too agile, dodging as he skitters like some great insect over your puppet's body. The only view you have is through the hole in your chest, a small glimpse of dark woods, and…
You spot a hand again, then the light of a spark, and then the smoke bomb is inside your pilot's seat and you lose your breath. Coughing out your lungs you pull the pedal to open the hatch and sweep around to try and dislodge the enemy, raising your armored hands to shield you from arrow fire. Three missiles hit your bunraku, but they fail to deal any damage. Your eyes are watery with tears but you cannot quickly unstrap your arms from the command-strings; with one foot you try to kick the smoking fuse out of the hatch but only manage to make it roll to the edge, where it gets stuck against the opening of the lowered hatch.
You catch glimpses of him through the smoke and tears, crouching on the ground, hunched over and darting this way and that on all four like some kind of animal. His face is as unreadable as that of his companions, but his bird-mask is not serene like the others'; it is grinning.
The Copper Mockingbird.
[ ] You can't fight in this state. Retreat towards your troops. (x0.5)
[ ] Pursue him as best you can, trying to squash him.
[ ] Ignore him. Smash your way to the ambushing troops to force them to retreat and protect the army.
"x0.5" indicates that a vote for this option only counts as half a vote. In this case, this is because Tomoe's "Ghost in the Flesh" trait makes her more inclined towards reckless assault at the cost of her own safety rather than towards safe, defensive choices. She's not a berserking maniac though, so that choice is still available to her, just weighted differently.