Oda Nobunaga was like a cop in the movies who only arrives at the scene after everything is already over. By the time he crossed the Kisogawa River and entered "Kawamata"—the area between the Kisogawa and Changliang Rivers—his father-in-law had already been dead for several days.
He'd brought with him over five thousand men, basically the full force that the Dan Zhengzhong family could muster on the eastern front under the pressure of the Imagawa and Matsudaira families. He'd originally hoped to take a shot at Minoh's Ogaki Castle, but with the castle already within sight, faced with Saito Yoshitada's ever-swelling force—now over twenty thousand—he froze, unwilling to start a fight he wasn't sure he could win.
This brother-in-law of his also didn't dare to beat up his new brother-in-law, even though his brother-in-law had just killed his father-in-law, and he had never anticipated his father-in-law would lose so swiftly.
