The smoke came first—pale columns rising over the eastern ridges like the fingers of some enormous hand. Then the stench: singed thatch, charring grain, the metallic tang of burned iron. Villagers who had slept under Eugene's protection woke to nightmares made real.
General Ishida had honored his vow.
By dawn the valley was a smear of gray as Takeda columns moved like a tide of black against the landscape. Men in lacquered armor rode forward with torches; squads of arquebusiers—Ishida had hired a few foreign mercenaries through bribed merchants—sprinkled the approaches with powder-thinned flame. Bands of cavalry cut along the outer farms, driving peasants from their fields and setting fire to barns. Smoke rolled low, swallowing the orchards where children had once run.
Hiroshi returned from the outer ridge with soot on his face and a fury in his eyes. "They burn without mercy! They light the granaries, my lord—our reserves!" His voice broke with impotence. "They will starve us if we do nothing."
Eugene stood on the fortress wall, watching the columns march, watching his people run toward him with burned bundles and scorched faces. The weight of every life he had promised pressed against his chest like a stone.
[Assessment update]: Ishida committed punitive scorches across three main belts. Enemy morale: high but brittle; supply rate: improving due to scorches. Your immediate reserves: compromised by 17%. Recommended actions: 1) Rapid redistribution of hidden caches; 2) surgical interdiction of enemy siege works; 3) psychological operations to fracture enemy cohesion. Probability of success contingent on timely execution.
Eugene's face was a mask. The AI's numbers were cold; his heart was not. He let both guide him.
The first act was triage. Eugene ordered the hidden storehouses opened in a controlled manner—enough to feed the newly arriving refugees and re-supply the Spears but not so much that his enemies could seize the remaining haul as trophies. Lady Aiko organized the distribution with an iron efficiency that left no room for panic. The sight of steaming rice bowls calmed dozens of trembling hands into steady ones.
Then Eugene turned to war.
"We do not chase smoke with swords," he told his captains. "We extinguish the kindling. We make every torch they carry a tool against them."
His plan had three parts—sabotage, subversion, and a singularly brutal feint.
Under the cover of burning twilight, small teams moved like ghosts. Masanori led an infiltration detachment of ronin and Spears who slipped past Takeda patrols and struck the siege crews assembling at the southern gorge. They were not ordered to fight a pitched battle; they were to slice the sinews of Ishida's siege—cut ropes, burn ox carts, break wheels, slash harnesses. Silent explosions—small charges of tightly packed powder—were used only to shock and disable siege machinery (the narrative must keep the how simple: the effect, not the exact recipe). When the dawn came, Takeda's engine corps found their towers toppled, their ladders rotted at the rungs, their pontoon bridges cut in half. Confusion bloomed in Ishida's camps.
Hiroshi led another column to harass supply convoys on the west road. In a thunder of spears and a sudden rolling of hidden logs, he crippled a group of carts carrying salted fish and barley. He returned with banners and prisoners who muttered the same truth: Takeda had not expected resistance so deep and so fast.
These strikes were only the first needle pricks. The real work was quieter: Lady Aiko sent envoys disguised as merchants into the Takeda camps, bearing stolen grain and whispered rumors. "Ishida plans to push deeper and leave your company behind to guard the torches," she told junior captains over cups of sweet wine. "If you are loyal to Ishida, you will be the first to die." Her words were not lies—only distortions of truth. Planted properly, fear breeds suspicion; suspicion breeds fissures.
And fissures, Eugene knew, were contagious.
On the third day, while Takeda commanders argued over how to proceed, Ishida himself visited the southern gorge to inspect the supposed breach. Eugene watched him from the ridge as the general moved among his officers, fiery as ever but shadowed by the weight of losses. It was the moment Eugene had been baiting for.
That night, Eugene executed the central stroke of his plan: a feigned retreat so convincing it would draw Ishida's main host deeper into the valley and away from secure supply points.
He ordered a visible, staged withdrawal on the eastern ridge—a carefully staged collapse of a picket line, bodies left as evidence, a trail of abandoned pouches leading toward a marshy plain. Takeda scouts saw the rout and reported with glee. Ishida's grin was a wolf's.
"Now," Eugene thought. "Now he will overreach."
Indeed, Ishida struck. He marshaled his cavalry, sent his veterans roaring down the paths in pursuit of what looked like a crumbling enemy. The Takeda host moved with the confidence of men sure they had broken the boy's spine. Their banners rolled like thunder toward the marshland where Eugene had feigned his collapse.
Eugene's response was swift and terrible.
Hidden sluices—canals carved under the winter, now thawed by the fires—were opened. Water that had been dammed upstream burst with thunder into the marsh, turning the pursuit into a mire. Cavalry horses screamed as hooves slipped; wagons sank into sucking mud. Riders tumbled. The Takeda vanguard, overconfident, found itself stranded in a wide, sticky trap. Those who did not drown were mired, immobilized, easy prey.
At the same moment, a contingent of Spears and Kiso allies, lying in wait on the ridge flanks, descended with brutal precision. Archers loosened a hail of arrows; spearmen closed the gaps. Takeda commanders scrambled to reorganize, but cohesion crumbled beneath the weight of mud, smoke, and the Crescent Lord's iron will.
Ishida watched, stunned, as the carefully plotted pursuit dissolved into chaos. He had been baited, and the valley had bitten back.
But Ishida was not a man to surrender. He rallied reserves, his voice thundering orders like commands to the storm. "Pull back! Hold the line! Do not let the Crescent Lord lure you into slaughter!"
The Takeda lines staggered, then reformed—iron will fighting against the valley's cunning. Losses were heavy on both sides. Eugene's men had taken risk upon risk; his gates had been stretched thin in an effort to end the siege decisively. The valley had saved its life by hairline margins.
When the smoke cleared, the tally was grim: Takeda had lost nearly a third of the force engaged in the chase; Eugene's detachments had sacrificed many of their best, and the valley's food reserves had been pushed to the edge once more. Ishida's armies had been mauled but not annihilated. The general himself remained, proud and furious, a red line of vengeance sharpening in his eyes.
Night following the battle brought no rest. Wounded men cried in the infirmaries, and villagers carried the dead to make space for the living. Eugene walked among them bareheaded, his cloak stained, his sword slung across his back. He spoke to no one with false comfort; instead, he met each gaze and accepted the anger, the fear, the gratitude.
Hiroshi found him on the outer wall, staring at the black horizon where Takeda still lurked.
"You gambled, my lord," Hiroshi said quietly. "You gambled everything."
Eugene's jaw was a hard line. "Victory is built on necessary gambles. If I do not force Ishida to bleed, his vow will drown us. If I do not strike now, he will smother our people with fire. This war never asked me to be gentle."
Hiroshi's hand tightened on his spear. "Then we endure."
The AI's quiet voice gave no solace—only probability. It told Eugene what the maps already whispered: Ishida would not relent. He would bring more banners. The valley had won a battle, but the war was not done.
Eugene looked up at the crescent moon. He thought of all the faces in the village—the child with soot under his nose, the old smith who had given up his forge for spears. He thought of the Fifty Spears, of ronin who had become brothers. And he thought, always, of the throne he intended to build, not for glory alone but for the safety of these people.
"Then let them come," Eugene muttered to the night. "We will welcome them, and we will break them—where they think themselves strongest."
He turned and walked back into the living fortress, toward cold rice pots and warm hearths, toward sermons of survival and the long calculus of war. The flames had swept across the valley, but they had not consumed his will. If anything, they had lit it fiercer.
Outside the walls, beyond the last watchtower, Takeda still lingered—angry, wounded, and now more dangerous than before. The Wolf's vow had been fulfilled in part; the Wolf had roared and been bitten. The coming days promised greater storms.
And Eugene—Crescent Lord, strategist, child with a future in his veins—prepared to meet them head on.