The word hung in the air, a wisp of disbelief from the mighty Lord Izumo. "You..."
Recovering from his initial shock, the Izumo lord's face contorted with rage. His hand, which had been scrambling for his katana, balled into a fist. He was a cornered wolf, still dangerous.
"You dare?" he roared, his voice regaining its command. "You, a spineless boy leading a pack of bandits! Kill me now and face the consequences, or I will..."
"Bind him," Takeru said, his voice cutting through Lord Izumo's tirade with the chilling finality of a winter frost.
His own men froze. Jiro, who had been ready to lunge and finish the Izumo lord, turned to Takeru with a look of utter confusion. "My lord? He is the head of the serpent! We must kill him!"
"And make him a martyr?" Takeru countered without taking his eyes off the fuming Izumo lord. "So his son can rally their clan with a tale of his heroic father, slain by dishonorable raiders? His death would unite them in grief and vengeance."
He took a step forward, his spear tip level with Lord Izumo's throat. "His life, however… his life is a lesson. A living symbol of their clan's failure, paraded before their allies and rivals. His clan will tear itself apart. Some will argue to rescue him, wasting men and resources. Others, the ambitious ones, will see a vacuum of power and fight amongst themselves to fill it. He is infinitely more valuable to us alive than dead."
A flicker of understanding, followed by a wave of cold admiration, dawned on Jiro's face. He was looking at a battlefield, but his young lord was seeing the entire war. This wasn't about winning a fight; it was about dismantling an entire clan from the inside out, using their own lord as the weapon.
"You heard him," Jiro growled, turning to the other warriors.
Lord Izumo's face turned purple with rage as he finally understood Takeru's intention. "No! I will not be shamed! Kill me, you cowards! Face me in a duel!"
He lunged, not for a weapon, but toward one of his guard's fallen swords. He never made it. Jiro moved with brutal efficiency, slamming the butt of his spear into the back of the lord's knee. Izumo cried out and crumpled to the ground. Before he could recover, the Akiyama warriors were on him, binding his hands tightly with leather cords and stuffing a strip of silk into his mouth to silence him. The struggle was brief, undignified, and utterly humiliating.
Takeru stepped outside the tent into the chaos. The fire raged, and the screams of the panicked Izumo camp were music. He raised a small horn to his lips and blew a single, sharp note—the pre-arranged signal for withdrawal.
"We have the serpent's head," Takeru announced to his men. "Now we disappear. As we fall back, let them hear our voices. Let them know who did this."
The retreat was a masterfully executed extraction. They dragged their high-value prisoner through the burning, screaming camp, using the pandemonium they had created as the perfect cover. They were a phantom troop, their passing marked only by the terrifying shouts they left in their wake.
"The Mountain God claims Izumo!""Akiyama Takeru holds your lord!""The Pass was just the beginning!"
They melted back into the darkness of the forest, reaching the rendezvous point on the ridge as the other two teams arrived. The hunter's team was grinning, exhilarated by the success of the stampede. Kenji's team, their task complete, looked sobered by the great fire they had started. All of them stopped and stared when they saw the bound, gagged, and furious figure being thrown to the ground in their midst.
"Is that…?" the hunter whispered, his eyes wide.
"Lord Izumo," Jiro confirmed, a grim pride in his voice. "Our lord's prize."
The men looked at their young lord with a new kind of reverence. He had taken them into the serpent's den, and not a single man had been lost. More than that, he had returned with the serpent itself in chains. The feat was beyond belief.
The energy of the victory burned through their exhaustion, pushing them onward. They half-ran, half-stumbled through the darkness, their prisoner a stumbling weight between them. The forest was a blur of shadows and rustling leaves as they forced their legs to move, their only goal to reach the safety of their walls before the sun exposed them.
As the eastern sky began to bleed from black to a bruised purple and faint orange, the gates of the Akiyama village opened.
The villagers, who had spent the night in dreadful anticipation, rushed out to meet them. They were prepared for news of a disaster, for a handful of survivors returning from a suicidal mission.
Instead, they saw their warriors, blackened with soot and stained with blood, but standing tall, their heads held high.
And in their center, stumbling on a rope held by Jiro, was the Lord of the Izumo clan, his opulent robes torn and his face a mask of utter despair.
At the head of the column walked Akiyama Takeru. His spear rested on his uninjured shoulder, his expression as calm as the morning itself. The collective gasp of the crowd was the only sound, a sharp intake of breath that was part disbelief, part awe, and part pure, unadulterated worship.
The boy who had been sent to defend a pass had returned from the serpent's den with its head still attached, and in chains.