The Sengoku Festival (An Oda Nobuna No Yabou fanfic)

Chapter 36

The sun rose up over the camp and as I glanced at the White Handed new armor, I was impressed since he had done it himself. The white hands stood stark against the black armor and as he stood with his new naginata and pair of blades on his side, I was quite pleased with his look as he wore a pure white mask that had a red hand on it.

And with him now also in charge, my men could now split our ashigaru numbers of 100 quite evenly with 25 ashigaru between the Green Oni, Noble Ronin, and the White and Blue Handed. That left the 60 archers with me and the 40 horsemen still with the Yellow Handed and all in all, that was a pretty good thing since that meant that if one of us went down we at least had another person to take over for their commander.

And with the proposition of taking on a city itself already, that was very likely.

Still, I watched as the men all woke up from their relative peaceful slumbers as my officers, including new officer, were all gathering the men, supplies, and camp up, I walked over to where the other leaders were meeting up as we would be planning on how we would approach the first city, Naragata. It was a more traditional Fortress from what people had said, with the city built around the castle as the castle was built upon a hill with the steep embankments called musha-gaeshi that would make climbing up a rather painful and possibly costly experience.

But, from what the plan had been was to simply surround it and force the defenders to come out and fact them in honorable, glorious combat or starve them out and have them admit defeat in shame. Both would be time, resource, and even manpower consuming to keep them up but if we managed to capture it we would be able to have a good defensive position to strike at the next city.

But while we got going towards getting everyone on the march again, Dosan suddenly appeared next to me and I almost jumped but managed to keep myself from jumping as he said, "Good morning, my Ronin friend. How are you?"

"I am well. What brings you over to my encampment?" I asked him as I helped toss some rice into a cart with my men.

"The Tokugawa clan has fallen. They were brought low by both bandits running rampant in their territory and the Takeda hammering them. This leaves the Usuegi and the Date in which we fight the only clans left." He told me.

"Tokugawa fell? Hmm, has the Takeda taken all of their land?"

"The Lions Chosen and then General Yoshiharu will be going with his tactician and info gathering ninja to take what lands they can and cull the bandit warlords likely waging open war across the towns and more." Said Dosan.

"Then I think we need to get a move on and capture these castles before they take all the fun away." I said to him.

"You make it seem like it'll be taken in a day." Said Dosan.

"It won't be taken in a day.... but we can make it be taken in days instead of months.." I told him.

The March would take a couple of hours before the whole army was walking down the road, through the forests and some fields as we were headed straight for where the city of Naragata as though we figured that the enemy could attempt to stop us before then. But as we marched forward still for the next couple of hours, now showed up to stop us and the only thing that did stop us was a fork in the road.

It appeared almost out of nowhere but when it did appear, the column all stopped and with me being somewhere in the middle, had to quickly make my way with the Winged Ronin to the front as Dosan also appeared and as we stood with Nagahide and Katsuie at the fork in the road. Katsuie was looking at her map as we all wanted to get moving to the city as soon as possible but as I glanced at the map, we had a slight decision on our hands since one way would city of Nagarata.