Chapter 135: Must I Die?
Outside Kaede Village, at the southern fringe of the Uesugi army's line, the moonlight cast the battlefield in a stark, silver clarity.
The scout remained kneeling before Uesugi Kenshin, his body caked in mud and his face a mask of raw panic.
Kenshin herself stood motionless. The hem of her white priest's robes lifted and fell in the night wind, and her long, silver-white hair shimmered with a cold light under the moon. She did not speak. The silence stretched on, long enough for the personal guards arrayed behind her to begin exchanging uneasy glances.
Only then did she finally lift her head, her gaze drifting toward the figure wearing the Crimson Oni Mask inside the distant barrier.
For Uesugi Kenshin, the current situation was no longer merely unfavorable. It was a death sentence.
The three thousand men deployed to the north had been routed. Naoe Kanetsugu, her trusted general, had been captured. The remnants of the Hojo clan now barred the northern passage, while the forces of Odawara and the Takeda clan's infamous Red Corps loomed behind her. To compound the disaster, five thousand Imagawa troops were, at this very moment, treading upon the sacred soil of her home, Echigo Province.
She was caught in a pincer from the north and south, her own backyard was ablaze, and the hunter had become the hunted. She had been utterly counter-encircled.
Yet, as Uesugi Kenshin stood there, her face was devoid of any expression a defeated general should wear. There was no panic, no fury, not even a flicker of anxiety.
All that remained was a peculiar, almost pristine confusion.
"I do not understand."
She spoke, her words clearly not meant for the trembling scout or her anxious guards, but for the two figures who now commanded the battlefield before her.
The gray-clad, pale-haired Oni Samurai had already stepped out from the village's barrier. The Crimson Oni Mask concealed his face as he took his position on the gentle slope just north of Kaede Village. Unseen by most, the shrine maiden in her white robes and red hakama had positioned herself under the torii gate to his rear right. She held a longbow, its arrow tipped toward the ground, but pure spiritual power was already circulating silently along the bowstring.
The two of them stood side-by-side, a silent, unbreachable wall blocking the Uesugi army's only path of retreat. And with the addition of those Hojo troops regrouping in the distance…
"You possess military strategy and a wisdom not one whit inferior to my own," Kenshin's voice remained flat, yet within that placid tone, a fissure had appeared for the first time. "But why… will you not accept it?"
"I offered you power. I offered you fame. I offered you a shortcut to shatter the limits of your monstrous form—become a Divine Artifact, and you could have instantly crossed that bottleneck."
She stared at Hikaru, and deep within her ancient-well eyes, a ghostly green light danced—the reflection of Bishamonten's divine power.
"I do not understand." Her voice was a near-whisper, heavy with genuine bewilderment. "You are clearly very strong. You are clearly very wise. You saw through my tactics and turned the tables to set this trap—your way of thinking surpasses that of anyone in this era."
"Yet you chose the slowest, most difficult, and most uncertain path."
Her brows knitted together slightly, a minute movement that appeared exceptionally jarring on her almost inhumanly perfect face. It was as if a hairline crack had suddenly marred the serene visage of a Buddha statue.
This was no taunt. It was true, unadulterated incomprehension.
Uesugi Kenshin, the living avatar of Bishamonten—she truly did not understand.
In her perception, power was power, and tools were tools. To become a Divine Artifact was not a humiliation, but a sublimation. It was like iron ore being forged into a legendary sword; its existence was not degraded but granted true meaning.
She had offered him the most logical, most efficient choice. Why refuse it? And why go to such extraordinary lengths to defy her?
Were it anyone else, Kenshin might not have even bothered to ask. But her current predicament was proof enough that the being she faced was, at least in terms of intellect, an existence that could match, or perhaps even surpass, her own. He was someone who could converse as an equal, who could meet her gaze without flinching.
Naturally, she was baffled by his refusal of her 'gift'.
Hikaru looked back at her, the purple-patterned eyes beneath the Crimson Oni Mask narrowing slightly. He knew with certainty that the woman before him was not feigning ignorance. She likely did not understand, not in the slightest.
She did not understand the human heart. She did not understand why a person—even a ghost who had already died once—would refuse the allure of greater power. She did not understand why someone would rather walk the most arduous path than accept a god's boon. She did not understand why he insisted on guarding a dilapidated shrine, a remote village, and a cold-natured shrine maiden, instead of embracing the boundless world that gods and Buddhas could provide.
She was the avatar of gods and Buddhas, and they could never comprehend the obsessions of the mortal realm. It was like the sun trying to understand why some creatures prefer the gentle light of the moon.
However, Hikaru had no need for her understanding.
"Because that is not mine."
He spoke. His voice was not loud, but under the stark moonlight, every word landed with the finality of a nail being hammered into a coffin.
"No matter how strong the power you give, it is still yours. It is a fragment of Bishamonten, a parasite of faith, an IOU held in another's name."
"What I want," he continued, his tone an ironclad resolve, "must be something I earned myself."
"Every change, every step forward, must be my own."
He raised a hand, splaying his five fingers before slowly clenching them into a fist. Yao Qi circulated silently between his digits, and faint purple patterns flickered to life in his palm.
"Only this kind of power is truly mine. It cannot be taken away. It cannot be seized." His voice dropped, filled with a chilling certainty. "Even if one day I am shattered to pieces, as long as a single bone remains, this power will still exist."
True strength was power that returned to oneself, and that was the only correct path.
Uesugi Kenshin stared at his clenched fist.
She watched it for a long, long time.
The confusion in her ancient-well eyes did not dissipate.
Instead, it deepened.
"I still don't understand," she said again. Her tone hadn't changed, but the very act of repeating herself was, for her, an extremely rare sign of wavering.
"The power of a Divine Artifact comes from faith. Faith comes from the human heart, and the human heart is endless. Such power is more eternal than your own body," she argued, her logic irrefutable in her own mind. "Conversely, the path you have chosen—the path of a yokai's evolution—is fraught with uncertainty. Your progress could stagnate at any moment. You could break at any moment."
"This is truly… very irrational."
Something else had crept into her voice.
…Bewilderment.
An existence who had been suffused with the logic of faith since birth, who had never experienced 'deprivation' or 'struggle,' had encountered something she could not explain for the first time.
"Your choice has no rationality whatsoever," she concluded, as if placing a final, definitive period at the end of an unsolvable equation.
Kikyo had listened to this entire exchange from the side, her expression unreadable. Now, without a word, she raised her bow.
An arrow was nocked to the string.
White spiritual power, clear and intensely bright, condensed at its tip.
"It doesn't matter whether you understand or not," Kikyo's voice was as cold and clear as ever. "You only need to know one thing—"
"He will not become anything of yours."
Uesugi Kenshin's confusion was severed in that instant.
She looked at Kikyo.
She looked at the arrow, pulsing with the power of the strongest of shrine maidens.
Then, her gaze shifted past the arrow, to the Oni Samurai standing behind it. His eyes were squinted slightly against the moonlight, his face hidden by the Crimson Oni Mask.
Two people.
Blocking her path back to Echigo.
In the distance, the Hojo clan's soldiers had already reformed their ranks. Though there were only a thousand of them, it was more than enough to stall for time.
Uesugi Kenshin's gaze swept across the board.
In front of her stood an Oni Samurai and a shrine maiden.
Behind her, the Hojo clan's soldiers.
Far away, five thousand men of the Imagawa clan were trampling the fields of her homeland.
Although her five hundred personal guards remained, their morale had been shattered by the relentless stream of bad news. They were utterly bewildered, their fighting spirit broken.
She had to break through.
"You cannot leave."
Hikaru's voice drifted from beneath the mask, unhurried and steady.
"You might be able to break through the Hojo clan's blockade, but you cannot break through the combined force of myself and Kikyo."
"Your five hundred personal guards are indeed formidable when empowered by your Momentum of Faith—but that momentum has fractured under these continuous blows. You should be able to feel it yourself."
"And I," he stated simply, "will not let you leave."
Whether or not he could kill Uesugi Kenshin on the spot was uncertain, but Hikaru knew he had to inflict a devastating blow upon her here and now.
The shrine maiden's arrow trembled slightly on the bowstring, humming with contained power. Kikyo's eyes were like chips of ice. She was experiencing a rare, deep anger.
She was angry at the war this woman had started in the name of gods and Buddhas.
She was angry at the threat made against the village just moments before.
And she was even angrier at the relentless pressure being exerted on Hikaru, the man she loved.
As a shrine maiden, Kikyo rarely felt the urge to kill toward any being on the human side of the conflict.
But now, she did.
Uesugi Kenshin finally fell silent.
A true, absolute silence.
It was not the silence of someone formulating a countermeasure—she had already considered them all, and none would work. It was not the silence of weighing pros and cons—the scales were broken; all the 'pros' stood with the two people on the other side.
It was the silence that follows the dawning, inescapable realization of a fact.
She had lost.
She hadn't lost in terms of martial power. If one considered only individual combat strength, she was no weaker than the Oni Samurai opposite her, nor did she truly fear the so-called strongest shrine maiden—after all, she was not a yokai.
She had lost on the 'board.'
From the moment the Imagawa clan's fleet set sail a month ago, her defeat had been sealed. It was just that she was only realizing it now.
Or rather—it was only at this moment that the incarnation of Bishamonten was forced to admit that a mundane choice, one she had looked down upon as irrational and foolish—
—had utterly defeated her.
Uesugi Kenshin lowered her head.
Her long, silvery-white hair fell forward, obscuring half of her face. Between the strands, those eyes like ancient wells flickered with a gloomy, defeated light.
And then—
She smiled. A strange, hollow curve of her lips.
"It seems that today, I am surely going to die. Is that right?"
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