KATANAGATARI 1
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That evening, Shichika and Togame left Triad Shrine behind. The Kuromiko responded to the death of Meisai far more calmly than Togame had expected─you could even say coolly. Perhaps this should have come as no surprise, but faced with the loss of the guiding force behind Triad Shrine as they knew it, the girls appeared to have no interest in what might happen to them. This was no different for the Kuromiko whom Meisai had tasked with the aftermath─but for the single comment, a kind of a reflection, whereby she hinted at her thoughts: “So it has finally come to this.” Togame had no way of knowing what this was supposed to mean or why it had been voiced at all.
“Okay, what’s next?” Shichika asked Togame─walking beside her down the thousand steps.
“…Next?”
“You know…on the Sword Hunt.”
“Ah─now that we have the Legion, along with the Leveler and the Razor, we have three of the Twelve Possessed─I think it’s time we paid a visit to Owari. Three swords should make for a good present.”
“Huh.”
“It will be necessary for me to explain you to my superior─to be honest, I hired you without prior approval. But your track record speaks for itself. It’s a done deal.”
“Track record, huh. Three swords in three months─guess it does speak for itself. The hunt is going quicker than I thought─when I heard the Old Shogun failed to collect the Twelve Possessed for all his might, I couldn’t imagine what that meant for us, but since we only have nine more to go, I’d say it’s doable.”
“Don’t get comfortable. We live in a peaceful world. The current owners of the swords are not to be compared to those who owned them back in the Old Shogun’s days. As a ruler and sovereign, he was tyrannical. Schemes like mine operate on the opposite end of the spectrum. Remember, we have the luxury of profiting from his mistakes.”
“Makes sense.”
“Not another arrogant word out of your mouth, you understand? Doing something someone else has failed to do is no excuse to brag.”
“I understand. I just got a little excited, okay? Don’t be so nagging. So what happens at Owari? Will we meet the Shogun?”
“You idiot.” It was rare for Shichika to be so inquisitive, but Togame chopped his question in two. “I doubt the two of us will enjoy an audience with His Excellency until we have secured all twelve of the swords.”
“Oh.”
“Do you want to meet His Excellency?”
“No, I don’t care.”
I don’t care─with those words, Shichika stopped that conversation short. Obviously all he had wanted to know was whether Togame was going to meet the Shogun, but since she would not touch upon this, he felt it was not his place to intrude.
Not yet.
“Anyway─what kind of place is Owari? Is it like Kyoto?”
“Similar in scale, but Owari is not as flowery1 as the capital. Kyoto is like a carnival, all year round─and Owari is, well, a working city. More serious and solemn.”
“Oh.”
“The way that things have been arranged, it looks like we’ll be reaching Owari Castle before all thousand pieces of the Legion have been delivered─but we’ll make do.”
“Yeah, but…” Shichika looked back over his shoulder─and, recalling the shrine’s premises, brimming with a thousand swords, he asked, “Are you gonna be okay?”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, that was kind of a rash thing to promise─safeguarding the futures of a thousand women. Can you do that when this shrine is─”
“I was merely exercising my abilities,” Togame said. “If the Yanari Bakufu cannot accommodate another thousand women, it has no right to its reputation.”
“Okay…” muttered Shichika, not really getting it. But as a sword, this was perhaps not something he needed to get─or profited from getting.
“Not such a bad deal for the bakufu, insofar as it would establish intimate relations with Izumo, which is otherwise autonomous. Now that it’s lost the Legion─Triad Shrine will likely abandon its status as a fortress, but this would only mean returning to what it was before things changed.”
“Before things changed.”
“Before the katana─changed everything.”
“Then maybe Meisai should have tried that from the beginning. Instead of being all greedy and trying to win the Leveler and the Razor.”
Being all greedy, she had perished─
“She was far from greedy─but since she was ultimately the owner, Meisai could never free herself entirely from the venom of the Shikizaki blades. We were forced to pry them from her cold, dead hands.”
“Yeah…but what would you have done?”