Now that beard was half torn away, the visible skin beneath bloody and purple with bruising. His left eye was swollen completely shut, the right weeping blood from a cut that ran from eyebrow to cheek. His fine silk robes, which would have cost more than a farmer’s yearly earnings, hung in tatters. Through the gaps, I could see his torso—once powerful, now a map of cuts and bruises. Someone had carved something into his chest, though the blood made it hard to read. His left arm hung at an unnatural angle.
But it was the way he moved that truly showed his breaking.
Each breath was a shallow gasp, his massive frame shrinking with every exhale. He tried to push himself up with his good arm, but it trembled and gave out, dropping him back into the mud.
He tried again and failed again.
His mighty strength, the power that had once let him draw a bow no other man could pull, had fled like water from a broken pot.
I dismounted to stand over him.
“Daiki-san,” I said, my voice pleasant despite using an honorific far below the man’s station. My shadow fell across his face, and he flinched. “I had not expected to find you here. Should you not be cowering in the south, hiding behind your high walls and higher pretenses?”
He managed to get to his knees, though the effort painted fresh blood across his lips. His good eye found mine, and despite everything, despite the mud and blood and broken bones, I saw defiance there.
The arrogance of decades of rule died hard.
“I came . . .” He paused, spat blood and what might have been a tooth. “I came to defend my people.”
“Your people?” I laughed, the sound carrying across the assembled soldiers. “Look around you, Daiki. Do you see your people?”
I gestured at the city behind him, where smoke still rose and screams still echoed. “Your walls aremywalls now. Your soldiers are dead or have fled—many are probably halfway to the mountains by now, spreading word of how the great Toshi Daiki failed them. Your precious swan has been plucked, roasted, and eaten.”
He tried to straighten, to find some shadow of his former dignity, but his broken body betrayed him. “You think . . . you think you have won? You ignorant mountain bitch . . . you doom us all.”
I backhanded him casually, feeling his cheekbone crack beneath my armored glove. He toppled sideways but struggled back to his knees, blood now flowing freely.
“The Empire,” he gasped, “isn’t held together by swords and fear. There are older bonds, deeper truths. The Akira line . . . they are not just rulers. Youknowthey are—”
“Spare me the child’s tale.” I drew mykatanaslowly, letting him hear every inch of steel sliding against its sheath. The blade sang its freedom, catching sunlight along its edge. “You have a choice, Daiki: Die with what honor remains to you, or die like the coward you have always been.”
I pulled mywakizashifrom my belt—shorter than akatana, the traditional blade forseppuku, an honorable death—andtossed it at his feet. It landed in the mud between us, its wrapped handle somehow still clean despite the filth around it.
He stared at it.
His good eye tracked from the blade to my face, back to the blade.
His working hand reached for it, fingers stretching, then stopped inches away.
His whole body shook—in fear or pain or simple muscle failure, I couldn’t tell.
“I . . .” His hand started forward again, then stopped again. “The realm . . . Eiko-sama, you do not understand what you do—”
“Too long,” I said, raising mykatana. “Coward it is.”
His eyes went wide with desperate urgency. “Wait! Eiko! The tether—mahou—you must not break—the Emperor’s line—”
My blade descended in a perfect arc, the cut I had practiced ten thousand times until it felt as natural as breathing. Steel met flesh at the junction of neck and shoulder, passing through muscle, bone, and sinew with barely a whisper of resistance. His head separated cleanly, spinning once in the air before landing face-up in the mud, that one good eye still wide with whatever warning he’d died trying to give.
His body remained upright for a heartbeat, as if his spirit hadn’t quite realized it was free, then it slumped forward, blood fountaining from the stump of his neck, turning the mud around him into a dark mirror.
I wiped my blade on what remained of Daiki’s robes. “Have his head preserved in salt,” I commanded. “Send it to the capital with our fastest riders. Let them know the price of resistance. The body . . .” I looked at the cooling meat that had once been one of the Empire’s great lords. “Feed it to the dogs. Or the crows. Whatever’s hungry.”
“Hai,Daimyo!”
I remounted and rode through the gates into my conquered city. The streets were a maze of destruction—doors smashed, windows shattered, bodies sprawled in doorways and alleys. A few fires still burned, my soldiers working to contain them before they could spread to anything valuable. The air tasted of ash and copper.
I looked back to where Daiki’s headless corpse was being dragged away, leaving a dark trail in the mud. His final words echoed in my mind despite my dismissal.
