Location: Western Palisade construction zone, Kiyosu Castle.
Current Date/Time: Evening to Morning. Late Summer, 1559.
The sun dipped completely below the tree line, throwing long, dark shadows across the muddy water of the western moat. The loud, rhythmic rasp of the crosscut saws had finally stopped for the day, leaving the job site quiet except for the steady drone of cicadas in the trees.
Soma Kurogane stood right at the edge of the main foundation trench. The deep indigo silk of his shirt was caked with wet gray clay up to his knees, but he ignored the mess. His eyes were locked on a small clearing about thirty yards away from the main workspace.
Sitting on a low row of stone blocks was the stack of premium cedar logs. Tokichiro had spent the whole afternoon loud-mouthing to Genjo and the rest of the crew that these specific, perfect beams were the core anchor posts for the north watchtower.
“The bait is down, Gishi-sama,” Tokichiro muttered, stepping up next to him. The small foreman kept his hands still, but his eyes drifted toward the isolated timber. “The whole crew thinks those logs are the main supports.”
“It’s the only target he can take,” Soma said, his voice flat and level as his mind tracked the site layout, the blind spots from the guard towers, and the fading light. “The saboteur has to hit that wood. If he lets those logs get dropped into the mud without cutting the grain, the tower will hold and his whole plan fails.”
Soma reached deep into his sleeve and pulled out a small plastic tube he had taken from his supply trunk earlier. It was a refill capsule for his drafting pens, filled with a heavy, synthetic blue ink meant for permanent blueprints. The stuff didn’t wash out, it didn’t fade, and it was waterproof, once it got on a man’s hands, it wasn’t coming off.
“We aren’t going to catch him with armed guards, Tokichiro. The guy is too smart; he’ll hear the armor clanking through the mud before he even reaches the wood,” Soma explained. He unscrewed the cap and squeezed a thick, dark blue gel onto his fingers. “We’re just going to mark him.”
“Mark him with what, Gishi-sama?” Tokichiro asked, staring at the strange blue paste in the twilight.
“An industrial stain,” Soma stated flatly. “Before the sun goes down completely, take this liquid. Smear a thin layer across the spots where a guy would have to grip those logs to make a clean cut. Cover the exact points where the blade has to go.”
Soma handed the plastic tube to the peasant.
“When he touches the logs in the dark to line up his knife, this dye is going to stick straight to his skin. It won’t wash off with river water or lye soap. Tomorrow morning, we will just check the hands of every laborer, guard, and carpenter on the worksite. The thief is going to have a blue hand.”
Tokichiro took the tube, a sharp grin spreading across his face as the trap clicked into place. He gave a quick bow and hurried off silently toward the timber piles.
Soma stood alone in the hot mud, the damp heat soaking through his straw sandals. He looked up at the heavy framework of the wall against the dark sky. He wasn’t just checking math blueprints anymore; he was hunting a saboteur inside the castle walls.
The thick morning fog over Kiyosu Castle hadn’t cleared yet when Soma walked back to the western wall the next day. The air was a heavy gray, smelling of wet clay, fresh sawdust, and the rot from the hot moat.
The yard was already buzzing with the start of the morning shift. Dozens of men were trudging through the mud, dragging heavy hemp ropes and sharpening their iron blades on whetstones.
Soma walked toward the main staging area, keeping his pace steady.
He stopped near the large stone block where the foreman usually stood. Before he could scan the crew, a small, mud-covered figure came out from the shadow of a nearby tool shed.
Kinoshita Tokichiro hurried over with his usual low, fast hustle, his bare feet slapping softly through the wet dirt as he ran up to the engineer.
“Honored Builder,” Tokichiro muttered, keeping his voice down over the noise of the yard. He stopped two paces back; his eyes locked on Soma’s face. The small foreman was wired tight.
“Give me the status,” Soma said. He didn’t look down at the peasant, keeping his eyes on the labor force gathering near the hot trenches.
“The snake took the bait,” Tokichiro whispered, stepping in closer so the guard patrol up on the ridge wouldn’t catch the words. “I checked the dummy timber before sunrise. The premium cedar logs we left by the northern anchor point.”
Soma turned his head. “The cuts?”
“Fresh,” Tokichiro confirmed, a sharp grin breaking through the grime on his face. “Three straight cuts right across the grain. Right where the load bears down, exactly like you said. The blade went deep into the wood. The guy had to press his hands flat against the bark to find his mark in the pitch black.”
“Then the ink transferred,” Soma said, the simple physics of the trap settling cleanly in his head. This wasn’t a guessing game anymore; it was a basic visual inspection.
Soma stepped up onto the large stone block, getting his boots out of the baking mud. He looked out over the crowd, nearly a hundred men between the skilled carpenter guild and the raw ditch diggers brought in from the villages. To find his man, he couldn’t just start grabbing workers and screaming about treason. That would start a riot, clear out the job site into the fog, and bring Nobunaga’s executioners running.
“Tokichiro,” Soma called out, throwing his voice so it carried across the yard. His face went flat and professional. “Shut down the current shift. Get Genjo and the trench leaders. Line up every man on the site along the main ditch.”
Tokichiro blinked, caught off guard by the sudden public move. “A line, Gishi-sama? Halting the saws is going to set the crew back.”
“The work doesn’t move until I finish a safety inspection,” Soma declared, raising his voice so it reached Genjo, who was currently sorting out the saw teams by the logging piles. “These interlocking joints don’t leave any room for error. I’m seeing sloppy tool handling and exhausted men on the hauling lines. If this crew wrecks their hands, the whole deadline is dead. Everyone lines up. Now.”
The massive carpenter chief let out a rough grunt. Genjo hated losing the hours, but after seeing the math behind the new joint yesterday, he wasn’t about to argue with the supervisor. With a heavy wave of his thick arm, Genjo barked the order down the line.
“You heard the Builder!” Genjo roared, his voice cutting through the damp fog like a hammer blow. “Drop the iron! Drop the ropes! Line up by the mud! If your hands are too soft to hold the wood, the Honored Guest will send you back to the rice fields!”
The racket on the worksite ground to an abrupt, uneasy halt. The men shuffled through the heavy muck, forming a long, ragged line parallel to the deep foundation trench. They stood with their heads down, the heavy morning humidity clinging to their bare, sweating chests.
Soma stepped down from the stone block, his straw sandals sinking back into the sludge. He began to walk slowly down the line, inspecting them with the cold precision of a supervisor checking a material delivery.
He didn’t look at their faces. He didn’t care about their expressions or their nervous sweat. He was looking entirely at the literal condition of their skin.
“Hold your hands out. Palms up,” Soma told the first man in the line, a young laborer caked in mud. The boy thrust his shaking hands forward. Soma glanced at the raw blisters and packed gray clay. It was normal friction wear. He moved to the next man.
Soma approached Genjo. The massive chief crossed his thick arms over his scarred chest, refusing to immediately present his hands.
“I’ve swung an axe for forty years, Builder,” Genjo growled, the smell of stale rice wine and pine sap rolling off him. “My grip doesn’t fail.”
“The inspection applies to every man on the site, Genjo,” Soma replied, his tone flat and level. He stopped right in front of the chief. “Palms up. Or I’ll assume the guild can’t follow basic site regulations.”
Genjo’s jaw tightened, but he uncrossed his arms. He thrust his massive, calloused hands forward. They were covered in old scars, thick wood splinters, and a heavy layer of dark sawdust, but the skin was entirely normal. There were no blue marks. Soma gave a short nod and moved down the line.
The process was slow, methodical, and tense. Soma checked thirty men. Then forty. Callouses, missing fingers, and deep splinters showed on every man’s skin, but the blue ink was missing.
He reached the middle of the trench-digging crew. These were the lowest-tier laborers, dressed in thin rags, whose only job was to haul the rotting timber out of the stagnant water.
Palms up,” Soma told a quiet worker who was standing with his head down, his gray shirt soaked through with muddy water.
The man hesitated for a beat. That small delay stood out instantly against the quick, frightened compliance of the other laborers. Slowly, he lifted his hands, keeping his fingers curled inward to hide the center of his palms.
Soma looked down.
His chest tightened, but he didn’t move a muscle. Smeared across the mud-caked skin of the man’s fingers, right on the pads of the thumb, index finger, and across the main palm lines was a bright, unmistakable streak of synthetic blue ink.
It was the exact permanent blueprint dye from his trunk.
“Straighten your fingers,” Soma said, keeping his voice quiet and level. He didn’t take a step back or call the guards yet. He kept his posture relaxed, hiding the realization behind a standard supervisor’s face.
The worker swallowed, his throat moving hard. He forced his fingers open, showing the full stain. The blue dye was embedded deep in his skin, completely untouched by the river water he’d been working in.
“It’s just juice from crushed berries, Honored Builder,” the man stammered, his voice jumping to a high, scared pitch. He tried to pull his hands back, rubbing his palms against his rough shirt. “I found them in the brush by the latrines. The dye from my shirt must have bled into the water while I was pulling the ropes.”
“Your clothes are plain, undyed hemp,” Soma said flatly, cutting through the excuse. “And berries don’t neatly stain the exact pressure points you need to grip a chisel.”
The worker’s eyes widened. The scared peasant act dropped instantly, his gaze turning sharp and cold. He realized the engineer wasn’t guessing, the stranger had a way to track him that he couldn’t see.
“Tokichiro,” Soma called out, his voice remaining perfectly calm so the rest of the crew didn’t catch the shift.
The foreman was right there, his eyes locking onto the bright blue marks. He didn’t gasp or hesitate; he just gave a short nod, recognizing the trap had worked perfectly.
“This laborer has bad blisters that are going to ruin his grip on the timber,” Soma announced loudly to the line of men. He turned to the two ashigaru guards standing on the mud bank. “We’re reassigning him. Take him down to the isolated cedar shed by the moat so we can dress his hands and give him a secondary detail.”
The man’s muscles tensed, his weight shifting as if he was about to bolt, but the two armored guards were already moving in with their spears lowered. Tokichiro grabbed the spy’s arm with a surprisingly tight grip.
“Come on, laborer,” Tokichiro muttered, his voice dropping into a low, dangerous warning. “The Honored Builder is going to take a look at those hands away from the rest of the crew.”
The inside of the cedar supply shed was small, windowless, and packed with thick, baking heat. Standing right by the muddy moat, the storage space smelled of dry wood shavings, heavy hemp rope, and old iron tools left out in the humidity.
Tokichiro shoved the worker into the middle of the dirt floor. The man stumbled, his bare feet kicking up a small cloud of dust before he steadied himself. The two armored guards stepped right into the entryway, crossing their long spear shafts to block the only exit.
Soma walked in behind them, keeping his pace steady. He crossed his arms, forcing his back straight to hide the rush of nerves. He wasn’t looking at a regular worker anymore; he was looking at a massive liability that had to be handled before it ruined the entire construction schedule.
“The dye on your hands doesn’t lie,” Soma said, his voice flat. He stepped up to the man, eyeing his tight stance.
The scared peasant act was completely gone. The worker stood with his shoulders squared and his jaw locked, staring back with raw hostility.
“You cut into the foundation timber so the wood would rot out faster from the moisture,” Soma said. “I want the numbers. How many main support beams did you ruin down in the western ditch?”
The spy glared at him, tracking Soma’s clean, unscarred hands and the expensive indigo silk robe. With a harsh grunt, the man spat a thick glob of spit onto the dirt, right by the toe of Soma’s straw sandal.
“I don’t answer to a soft noble,” the spy sneered, his voice dropping the shaky country accent he’d used out in the mud. His dialect was rough and clipped, nothing like the local Owari workers. “You wear the Warlord’s silk, but you don’t have the stomach for a real fight. You caught me with some trick in the water. But I’ll die before I tell you a damn thing.”
“You don’t understand how this ends for you,” Soma countered, ignoring the spit on the floor. He kept his focus entirely on the facts. “You’re caught. The people who paid you to cut that wood are going to cut their losses the second they realize the wall isn’t going to fall. Give me the exact locations of the ruined timber and the name of your contact, and I’ll make sure you walk out of this room alive.”
Before Soma could answer, the door frame rattled. The heavy wood slammed back against the wall with a loud bang, throwing the entry wide open. The two guards dropped straight to the ground, pinning their helmets in the dirt.
Oda Nobunaga stepped through the door. He wore a gray robe, left unfastened over his broad, scarred chest.
Soma’s pulse spiked. He braced his core, trying to keep his footing as the warlord stepped into the center of the room.
“You’re sneaking around my site in the dark, Ghost, and you think I’m not tracking the mud?” Nobunaga growled. The low vibration of his voice hummed right through the dirt floor into Soma’s knees. He didn’t even glance at the spy; his wide eyes were locked straight onto Soma. “You held those papers to your chest last night and lied to my face about ‘timber quality.’ You talked your way out of the corner like a smooth clerk.”
“It was a cover story, Lord Nobunaga,” Soma said, his voice straining before he flattened it out into his usual supervisor’s tone. He gave a short bow, his mind working fast to handle the warlord crowding him. “I needed to secure the site. If I told you a beam was cut without finding the culprit, you would have executed the whole crew. The labor supply would have bottomed out, and the wall would still be broken.”
Nobunaga let out a low rumble of a laugh. He stepped closer, crowding into Soma’s personal space until the heat off his chest hit Soma’s neck. He reached out with a rough, heavy hand, grabbed the spy by the back of his collar, and yanked him forward into the light coming through the door.
“You used a strange ink to catch a thief,” Nobunaga murmured, his thumb rubbing the bright blue dye ground into the spy’s calloused palm. He studied the mark with a cold, intense interest. “You mark my enemies without drawing a blade. It’s quiet, effective work. But you make a mistake trying to talk logic to a rogue dog.”
The warlord let go of the man’s neck. In the same motion, his hand dropped to his sash.
The blade hissed as it cleared the scabbard, a flash of steel cutting through the dim shadows. The shift from a quiet check to direct violence took less than a second.
Nobunaga didn’t ask a single question. He grabbed the spy’s blue-stained hand, slamming it flat against a heavy cedar support post. Using his full weight, the warlord drove the sharp tantō straight down through the center of the man’s palm, burying the iron deep into the solid wood.
The timber gave a loud thud.
Soma’s stomach twisted violently at the sight. His modern background had never prepared him for the raw, physical reality of a Sengoku interrogation. He ground his teeth together, locking the nausea down and keeping his arms pinned to his sides. He forced himself to look straight ahead, refusing to flinch or look away from the blood pooling on the floor.
The spy let out a sharp, agonizing scream that filled the small shed. His knees gave out, his entire weight hanging from the knife pinning his hand to the timber. Dark, thick blood welled up around the steel and dripped rapidly onto the dirt.
Soma’s breath stopped. His mind went completely blank for a second. In his world, discipline meant a fired contractor or a canceled project agreement. Here, it was iron through bone.
“The Saito,” Nobunaga growled, his voice dropping to a dead level. He leaned into the screaming man, pinning him against the post. He gripped the hilt of the knife and twisted it an inch. “Where is the camp on the northern ridge?”
“The old shrine! The shrine in Inuyama!” the spy shrieked, his pride vanishing instantly under the pain. Blood ran down his blue-stained fingers. “The ruined shrine past the river bend! That’s where the silver changes hands!”
Nobunaga didn’t ask for names or troop counts. He had the exact location he needed. He dropped his grip, dismissing the screaming worker entirely as if he were just broken scrap wood on the floor.
He pulled the knife free with a sharp tug, wiping the blade clean as his eyes cut toward Soma. He doesn’t throw up, and he doesn’t break down over a dead rat, Nobunaga noted, tracking the engineer’s tight, white-knuckled fists. The blood hits him hard, but his foundation holds. The Ghost has the stomach for this line of work.
In the same continuous arc, he drove the blade upward, sinking it cleanly into the soft tissue just beneath the spy’s jawline. The steel severed the artery perfectly. The spy’s scream died in a wet, bloody gurgle. Nobunaga stepped back, letting the body collapse heavily into the dirt.
Soma stared at the pooling blood, the rigid, calculating stillness of his face finally fracturing. The bloodless, methodical extraction of information he had planned in his head was violently erased by the reality of a slaughtered corpse.
“He still had the names of his handlers, My Lord!” Soma choked out, his voice laced with fierce, frustrated anger rather than terror. “We needed his contacts to root out the rest of the network!”
“I do not need to know the name of the dog that bites my heel, Ghost,” Nobunaga stated coldly, casually wiping the bloody steel of the tantō on the dead man’s kosode. “I only need to know where the den of snakes is, so I can burn it to the ash.”
Nobunaga sheathed the dagger with a sharp, echoing snap. The Warlord turned slowly, his waraji straw boots crunching against the blood-soaked dirt. He locked his dilated eyes entirely on Soma.
He closed the distance in two heavy strides, invading the Soma’s personal space until his massive chest nearly brushed the Aizome indigo silk.
The Warlord did not wipe the blood away. He dragged his heavy, blood-slicked hand directly onto the expensive fabric, leaving a dark, permanent stain across Soma’s chest, a brutal, physical brand claiming the flesh beneath the silk. He did not strike Soma; he left his large, heavy palm perfectly flat against the center of Soma’s chest.
The tactile contact was blunt and absolute. The heat from the Warlord’s skin bled directly through the premium silk, pinning the engineer firmly against the rough cedar wall of the shed. The dark blood smeared wetly into the indigo fabric.
Soma ground his back teeth together, furious at his body’s treason. He clenched his hands into rigid fists at his sides, actively fighting the heavy surge of blood. He refused to yield or whimper, using his silence as a sheer act of masculine resistance against the Demon King’s gravity.
“You use your alien ink to mark my enemies, Ghost,” Nobunaga murmured, leaning down until his lips nearly brushed the shell of Soma’s ear. The scent of agarwood was completely suffocating now, mixed heavily with the copper tang of fresh blood. “You catch a spy in the dark without halting the saws of my worksite. It is a terrifying efficiency. It is the math of a demon.”
Soma’s jaw locked. He forced his dark eyes to meet the Warlord’s gaze. Nobunaga’s heavy palm rested directly over his hammering heart, tracking the frantic, erratic rhythm vibrating against his ribs.
“But do not ever hide your math from me again,” Nobunaga growled. His voice dropped into a low, reverberating threat that traveled directly into Soma’s sternum. The Warlord squeezed his bloody fingers against the silk, pressing the crimson handprint deeper over Soma’s heart, before sliding his hand slowly upward. In one quick motion, Nobunaga drove the blade upward under the man’s jaw, cutting the artery cleanly. The spy’s scream stopped in a wet rattle, and Nobunaga stepped back, letting the body hit the dirt floor.