The Sengoku Festival (An Oda Nobuna No Yabou fanfic)

Chapter 42

The Oda army slowly made their way within the walls of the city of Shiramamoto as the dead from within were being dumped outside the walls to be burned as I watched from the walls with my officers.

Within the actual castle keep had been the remains of whoever had been in the city.... and they had all be ronin and bandits it seemed. This conclusion to the siege had left me a bit shocked and disturbed as that meant only a few things but it was my belief that these Bandits had done the only thing they thought would help: exterminate the populace. It was horrific, slaughtering an entire populace just to survive for a few more days? I shook my head as the city was slowly being reinforced by the troops as well as new defenses being erected to make up for the sorta destroyed city walls around it.

As I began to walk down from the walls, I heard the Blue Handed ask me, "Do you think we'll have a fight now that we took the city finally?"

"Possible... but we need supplies before we just sit here and wait for another army to take over or someone to come bring us food." I told him bluntly.

As we were going down the stairs from the walls, suddenly Yoshiharu appeared with some samurai at his side as I then asked him, "What can I do for you, General?"

"Well, first a congratulations on taking the city... you did it quite swiftly I must admit.... but as you know, we have few supplies and with the entire population slaughtered... we do need some supplies...." said Yoshiharu.

"So, with a heavy heart, I must order you and your men to head out towards friendly territory and requisition supplies for us with the Winged Ronin before returning to us..."

I looked towards the Winged Ronin as we both exchanged a silent word between one another before I then said, "We'll get our men ready to start marching out then..."

The plan was that the Winged Ronin and I would head down to the Oda-held city of Watamoto to gather the most supplies at as well as some of the surrounding villages near to the city, which would hopefully speed up how much supplies we could gather and then return with. The only good news was that between the Winged Ronin and me we had enough men to keep wandering bandits and ronin from getting too ambitious and trying to raid the supplies going through the roads. While I was looking to somewhat recruit some more men to help bolster my ranks that were depleted as well as hopefully expand upon them, it would be likely hard given an army was just raised and many villages needed those men for their militia garrisons.

Still, any bit of manpower would be appreciated and needed in order to keep any sense of unity momentum going, with more men would mean more supplies, equipment, and payments needed for them but would allow us to get into bigger fights to get some of that from them naturally.

Needless to say, as soon as we could, we were getting our men on the march to hit up Watamoto as soon as possible as well as the villages around it planned, with myself telling my officers and allies to be swift about the purchases as well as making sure if they grabbed any recruits to have them train in what deficits we had, prioritizing the spearmen and archers over gunners and cavalry simply for the fact they were cheaper on equipment expenditures. Needless to say, while this left the Yellow Handed sort of out to dry on recruits potentially, the Blue-Handed, Noble, and Joey would be fine with getting the rest and whomever else they found useful for the Yellow Handed hopefully would be sent to him without issue.

It would be a few days journey to Watamoto and the supply grabbing would likely take a few days before coming back, so the round trip is around at most two weeks in total and worse case should something happen would be 3 weeks in total. But I was hoping for nothing bad happening at all, not at least until we had found ourselves back to Shiramamoto where we could rejoin up with General Yoshiharu's forces to help fend off whatever was coming for us at that time. But hopefully we could avoid such a thing happening entirely.