Pain was the first reality. A brutal, searing lance through his left shoulder that pulsed in time with a frantic heartbeat that wasn't his own. The second reality was the smell: a thick, coppery tang of blood mixed with wet earth and the sharp scent of pine.
He blinked, mud and grit scraping against his eyelids. This wasn't the sterile white of a hospital room. This wasn't the twisted metal of a car wreck. Above him, a canopy of dark green pine boughs swayed against a slate-grey sky, the air heavy with mist and smoke. Around him was chaos.
Guttural shouts, the shrill clang of iron on iron, the wet thud of something heavy hitting something soft. A high, thin scream was cut abruptly short. For a moment, the sounds were just noise, a terrifying symphony of violence. Then, something shifted in his mind. The sounds twisted, reshaped by a phantom tongue, and resolved into meaning.
Old Japanese.
A language he had only ever read in meticulously translated manuscripts slammed into his comprehension with the force of a mother tongue.
"Hold the line, you dogs! For the honor of Akiyama!"
"They're through! The Izumo are through the western flank!"
His body, not his own, tried to push itself up. The armor he wore was crude—small iron plates laced together with leather straps over a rough tunic. It was heavy, unfamiliar, and the source of the biting pain in his shoulder where a lacquered plate had been crudely smashed inward.
A lightning strike behind the eyes. A torrent of alien memories, not watched but lived, crashed into him. The life of another—his life—unspooled in a dizzying, nauseating rush.
Akiyama Takeru, age eighteen, heir to the Akiyama clan. A minor power in the Yamato region, holders of the Kiyotaki Pass. A clan known for its resilience, now on the brink of extinction. Takeru himself was known for… very little. A quiet, dutiful son, unremarkable in either martial skill or intellect.
The battle raging around him wasn't a historical documentary. It was the final, desperate defense of that very pass. And they were losing. Badly.
His 21st-century mind, the mind of a historian who had dedicated his life to studying the statecraft and military campaigns of this exact period, reeled. The shock was a physical blow, but his analytical instincts, honed over years of academic rigor, kicked in as a defense mechanism. He wasn't just a terrified boy named Takeru. He was a strategist, and he was seeing a tactical slaughter unfold from a first-person perspective.
He forced himself to his knees, ignoring the screaming agony in his shoulder. His gaze swept across the narrow pass. His people, the Akiyama warriors, were a disorganized mob. Their shield wall was a fractured mess, their movements born of desperation, not discipline. Their spears were too short, their armor inconsistent. They were being systematically dismantled by the Izumo clan's superior numbers and equipment.
"A simple pincer movement," he muttered, the strange-yet-familiar words feeling thick in his mouth. "And they walked right into it."
"Takeru-sama!" A grizzled man with a face like a weathered oak stumbled to his side, deflecting a wild spear thrust meant for him. Grief and desperation were etched into every line of the man's face. "You are alive! Thanks to the kami!"
The memories supplied a name: Jiro. His father's most trusted retainer. A man who had taught Takeru how to hold a spear, and despaired at his lack of talent.
"We must fall back, my lord! The pass is lost! We can save your father and retreat to the village!" Jiro yelled, his voice cracking.
Fall back? His mind raced, overlaying the tactical map from the memories with the cold, hard reality before him. Retreating from this position, with no disciplined rear guard, wasn't a retreat. It was a rout. They would be cut down from behind before they went a hundred paces. The village, stripped of its defenders, would be next. Annihilation. The end of the Akiyama clan. The end of him.
The historian in him was screaming at the tactical illiteracy. The man trapped inside was screaming in terror. But the part of him that was now Akiyama Takeru felt a surge of desperate, primal loyalty to the terrified men fighting and dying around him.
His eyes darted upwards, past the combatants, to the steep, pine-choked slopes of the pass. The ground was littered with loose rock and scree from the spring thaw. Heavy deadfall pines, ancient and thick, lay scattered among them, held in place by little more than soil and luck.
An idea—a simple, brutal principle from a future textbook—flashed in his mind. Not a complex Napoleonic tactic, but something far more basic. Potential energy.
The quiet, unremarkable boy was gone, burned away by the shock of two lives colliding. The historian, the strategist, took his place. He grabbed Jiro's arm, his grip surprisingly strong. His eyes, no longer wide with fear, were sharp and focused.
"There is no retreat," Takeru said, his voice level and cold, utterly devoid of the panic that had seized him moments before. It was a voice Jiro had never heard.
Jiro stared, bewildered. "But, my lord, we are broken! We have no hope!"
Takeru's gaze was fixed on the slope above the thickest concentration of Izumo warriors, who were now pushing through the center of the Akiyama line. He saw the key—the precise point where the slope was most unstable.
He turned to Jiro, his expression so intense it was frightening.
"Get me ten men. The strongest you have. And all the rope they can carry."
Jiro's mouth fell open. "For what, my lord? To flee over the mountain?"
Takeru shook his head, a grim, terrifying smile touching his lips for the first time.
"No," he commanded, pointing a trembling but determined finger. "To bring the mountain down upon them."