Mount & Blade: Warband in the Sengoku period of Japan

Tadatsugu stood behind the wooden fence of Torigasaki Castle Honmaru, his eyes fixed on the troop on the main road outside the castle. He gripped the bamboo bow tightly in his hand, so tightly that the skin on the back of his dark fingers turned somewhat pale.

Tadatsugu felt his breathing become rapid and his throat dry. He raised his hand to his chest, stretched his neck to calm his breathing, swallowed, and noticed out of the corner of his eye that the old samurai beside him was watching him. Tadatsugu forced a smile at him, and only after the old samurai looked away did Tadatsugu let out a long sigh of relief.

This was Tadatsugu's first time participating in such a battle. At this time last year, he was a hunter in a small village in the mountains to the southeast. In winter, he fought with hunters from Tono in the east because of a deer. He fought three hunters against one, but with his excellent archery skills and a hunting fork, he successfully killed the three outsiders. As a result, his name was heard by the lord, and he received a samurai sword as a reward from the lord and moved into Toritanaki Castle.

Recently, things have been quite unsettled in Toriyazaki Castle. News from the Shiba clan in the north has been causing the lord great anxiety. A few days ago, he even summoned his entire clan and the samurai, including Tadatsugu, to announce that the Shiba clan might be attacking.

At first, Tadatsugu was quite worried. He had heard that the Shiba clan was a larger and more powerful territory than the lord's. If they were to attack, how many people would they need to send? However, when the Shiba clan's army actually appeared on the distant horizon, Tadatsugu breathed a sigh of relief.

With his keen eyesight as a hunter, Tadashi quickly determined the number of the enemy, which was at most two or three hundred. Although the samurai leading them on horseback was unusually tall, Tadashi was not afraid of such a small number.

Torigawa Castle is home to over eighty samurai from the Hiranuki clan and four hundred and fifty foot soldiers, as well as over thirty samurai and over one hundred foot soldiers from the He clan in the south. In total, there are over seven hundred people. With a strong castle like Torigawa Castle to rely on, what can these three hundred people do against them?

However, when the people opposite him finished their rest and got into position, putting on their armor, Tadashi's heart started to panic again: God, what did he see? Those samurai... there were hundreds of samurai, all wearing black armor that covered their entire bodies!

Tadatsugu could not believe his eyes. Such a completely iron armor, without a single bamboo or leather strip, was something only the lord and a few local officials around him would wear in Toriyazaki Castle!

Although Tadashi was a hunter, he wasn't completely ignorant. The iron material he used to hunt the spearhead cost him a bear skin and four deer skins. How many bear skins would it take to make such a set of armor!

Watching the samurai phalanx advancing slowly in the distance, neatly arrayed and clad in bright pink kimonos and pure black armor, Tadatsugu's breathing quickened again, his heart pounding. He reached up and touched the quiver at his waist; every arrow inside was one he had painstakingly crafted himself… But could those thin arrowheads pierce their black armor? Tadatsugu didn't know; his only thought was to pray.

The enemy's magnificent square formation quickly entered the pre-measured distance of one hundred tatami mats outside the castle (one tatami mat is one tatami mat long, about 1.8 to 2 meters in the Sengoku period). At the command of the archer general, Tadatsugu and the archer foot soldiers around him raised their bamboo bows.

More than a hundred bamboo bows were drawn together, the slight sounds of the bow arms deforming merging into a teeth-grinding creak, and then, with a short shout from the bow general, a hundred arrows flew into the air with a whoosh.

The Ou region is mountainous and densely forested, and it has no shortage of hunters. Most of the archers of the Hiranuki clan were skilled hunters. Although these more than one hundred arrows were launched, their accuracy was quite good, and the landing points were almost entirely concentrated on that hundred-man square formation.

However, the faint tinkling sound carried back from afar, and Tadashi's eyes widened in surprise.

The hundred-man formation simply lowered their heads slightly, as if what was falling from the sky was not hundreds of arrows, but a gentle drizzle. They did not slow their pace in the slightest, letting the arrows hit them... without any effect.

Tadatsugu had lost the ability to think; he just numbly drew his bow and nocked his arrow repeatedly until the formation reached the gate of the Ninomaru and the citadel lost its firing angle, at which point he stopped.

There were only some broken arrows on the dirt road, and not a single fallen corpse.

Tadatsugu watched in a daze as the foot soldiers and samurai of Ninomaru surged toward the gate with spears in hand. Only then did his mind clear up a bit. Thank goodness, thank goodness, we still have the trenches, the walls, and the sturdy wooden gate of Ninomaru to keep them out.

However, what happened next made Tadashi frown with worry.

The foot soldiers holding spears struggled to push them through the gaps in the wooden fence by the door, but when they pulled them back, only half of the spears remained!

Tadatsugu's pupils widened in shock once again. These foot soldiers were not holding bamboo spears, but genuine somnambu (a type of ancient Chinese sword) made of hardwood wrapped with hemp rope and then painted. Normally, a somnambu would be impossible to cut with a tachi!

Moreover, and more importantly, when those spears were thrust out, there were absolutely no screams of mortally wounded or dying people coming from outside.

Instead, the foot soldiers cried out in alarm, "Demons! Demons! They can't break through! They can't break through! They're impervious to swords and spears! Ahhh!!!"

Before Tadashi could figure out what was going on, a loud noise from the other side of the door caught his attention again.

Thump, thump, thump, thump! A series of knocks came from behind the door. Was a samurai banging on the door? No, that didn't seem right; wooden stakes wouldn't make such a continuous sound. This was… "Crack!"

After a muffled thud, a piece of dark metal broke through the door panel next to the latch, then retracted. To the astonishment of the foot soldiers behind the door, the hole rapidly widened, quickly becoming a large enough hole to break through the latch and destroy the door.

Outside the city gate, Chen Daoyuan smiled as he looked at the astonished expression on Bei Xin'ai's face.

"What kind of axe is this?!"

What other kind of axe could it be? A specially made 1% manganese steel axe, of course.

The tactic of using a giant axe to break down a door didn't exist in Japan's Sengoku period, for the same old reason: materials.

If you were to use traditional Japanese iron to make something like a heavy-duty fire axe, firstly, the cost would skyrocket. Secondly, tamahagane is a material specifically designed for Japanese swords, and axes made from it would be very ineffective at chopping hard objects. It might be okay for chopping firewood, but when it comes to chopping a specially hardened wooden door like this, the blade would become dull after only a few strikes.

However, the 1% manganese steel that Chen Daoyuan specially formulated was different. This material with extremely excellent toughness was made for the manufacture of heavy tools.

In the hands of ten selected, strong warriors used ten large axes to carve two large holes in the two-inch-thick wooden door in just three or four minutes, successfully removing the door latch and not even giving the guards behind the door time to move sandbags to block the door.

Without the bolts, the two large doors opened easily, and the warriors in black armor and pink robes charged in, wielding their three-day swords, like a flood that instantly swept away the guards at the gate.

Almost instantly, the hesitant-colored jinbaori was stained purplish-black. The battle was a complete one-sided massacre. The swords of the Hiranuki samurai almost invariably shattered and broke. The Shiba samurai, forced back half a step by the blows, stepped forward and raised his sword. The leather and bamboo armor only provided a slightly stiff feel, and only the few pieces of iron armor could stop him to some extent, but it wasn't a big problem. With a flick of his wrist, the sword-shaped tip of the Sanri-tō easily pierced through the gaps in the armor plates...

Soon, the samurai trampled through the large pool of blood at the castle gate, fought their way through the second gate, and rushed towards the entrance of the main gate.

However, this time the ten great axes failed to achieve their goal again. The gate to the citadel opened by itself from the inside, and a group of people knelt down behind it...

Toriyazaki Castle, a famous castle in Hiranuki County, Oshu, resisted for a quarter of an hour.

By nightfall, Toriyazaki Castle had completely fallen under Chen Daoyuan's control. In the middle of the night, Shiba Quan Gao, having received the news, rushed over from Takasui-ji Castle.

"Brother Dogen, how about we make Torigasaki Castle your residence from now on?" Shiba Kenko was no longer the round-faced old man who always had a calm expression. Under the candlelight, the old man's face was radiant, and he could not hide his joy.

Chen Daoyuan did not immediately agree, but instead asked, "How did the Imperial Guard deal with this Hiedsugu clan member?"

"The head of the Hiekara clan has already committed seppuku. His son will be transferred to Yajin, near Takasui-ji Castle. The Hiekara family happens to have a legitimate daughter. I've arranged for Senjin to marry her as a concubine. After she gives birth to a child in two years, that child will inherit the Hiekara family name... After all, it's a prominent local clan personally bestowed by the founding ancestor. It's not good to let their family line end directly."

Chen Daoyuan remained noncommittal; he was merely curious. He skipped the topic and asked, "If Toriyazaki Castle were granted to me, would the elders of my household have any objections?"

Spokenko's smile held a deeper meaning: "No, Brother Dogen, you don't need to worry about that. By the way, I wonder if you still have any energy left?"

Chen Daoyuan knew what he meant: "As soon as it's light, I'll muster my troops and set off. Since the He family has sent troops to help the Bai Guan family, let's just deal with them as well."

Spoken nodded: "Very good, very good... By the way, Brother Daoyuan, how many of those black armors have been made so far?"

Chen Daoyuan replied, "The armor plates are made very quickly. In a few more days, we'll have enough plates for about a thousand suits of armor. Oh, and if we take away the hundred suits we're currently wearing, there are still enough plates in the warehouse at Mikahoshi to make nine hundred suits of armor. The problem now is that we don't have enough people to weave them together. The leather underlay also needs to be made by hand."

The manganese steel lamellar armor worn by the samurai was not the three-layered structure of Chen Daoyuan's armor. Instead, it was a simpler, integrated style of leather armor with steel plates. Nowadays, manganese steel plates are easy to produce. With the aid of hydraulic machinery, it's simply a matter of cutting, punching, shaping, heat-treating, and lightly polishing the forged manganese steel plates before blackening them with grease and then painting them with black paint. At the workshop, Kojiro can produce 20,000 to 30,000 plates a day. The difficulty lies in how to weave thousands of plates onto leather armor to form a complete suit of iron armor.

The hundreds of women at Mikabori did nothing else all day and spent six or seven days weaving just a hundred pieces of armor for Chen Daoyuan and his party. The rest would take even longer because the stock of ready-made leather armor was exhausted. If they started from scratch with leather armor, the production time for each piece of armor would be even longer.

After Chen Daoyuan finished explaining the difficulties, Spo Quangao's excitement remained undiminished. He patted Chen Daoyuan's shoulder and said, "It's alright. I'll send you some more cobblers and leather. After the autumn harvest, I want that brat from the Nanbu family to know that I, Spo Quangao, am just old, not dead... Hehe, Prince Chen Daoyuan, after you've dealt with the Nanbu family for me, you'll officially become a member of my Spo clan, okay?"

Chen Daoyuan did not understand the deeper meaning in Sibo Quangao's words, and simply bowed slightly, saying, "Then thank you very much, sir."