"Ohhhhhh... so you are telling me that the direct heirs of two prominent clans were slaughtered?" Minakaze murmured, slowly drawing a long puff from his pipe. He exhaled a thick cloud of white smoke, allowing it to mingle with the heavy ribbons of burning incense rising from the brass braziers.
Seated around him at their individual, low-hung tables were five immaculately dressed men representing his primary vassal clans.
"Yes, Minakaze-dono. The grieving houses are weaponising the tragedy, placing the absolute entirety of the blame squarely upon the School," one of the elders spoke. He possessed a remarkably flat, severe face and was draped in a shimmering, dark green and black sokutai, the formal silk robes of the Imperial Court. "They are each demanding a settlement of forty thousand Ryo in blood compensation."
"Hahahaha! Forty thousand Ryo?" Minakaze erupted into a sudden, boisterous laugh, a wide smile spreading across his face, though his eyes remained entirely cold. "How brazen. That absurd sum could easily feed this entire prefecture for two consecutive years. Tell me... which specific clans had the audacity to demand such a kingly ransom?"
"It was the Ikozuma clan, and the Ma—"
Before the flat-faced elder could even finish the sentence, Minakaze sharply cut him off.
"The Ikozuma... Ha. What under the heavens are they plotting? There is absolutely no way those old foxes fail to comprehend the catastrophic weight of that amount. They are testing the School backer's boundaries."
"They might simply be attempting to save face, Minakaze-dono," a younger man among the group intervened. This was Shishetoro, the youngest of the vassal leaders, who had aggressively built his clan's wealth through the regional merchant trade rather than inherited military lineage.
"Yes... true. A clan of their standing must salvage at least that much dignity. It is a logical assumption," an older, more conservative vassal chimed in, quickly nodding his head to back Shishetoro's assessment.
"Saving face, you say? Ha. Well, their petty pride doesn't truly matter in the grand scheme of things anyway," Minakaze dismissed them with a wave of his pipe, his expression instantly shifting to business. "Tell me of the Gai clan. Since my son failed to capture the Ubume to fulfil our contract with them... do they now officially refuse to fall under my banner?"
The flat-faced elder quietly reached for his ceramic pot, pouring himself a fresh cup of steaming tea as a heavy silence filled the room. "From our latest intelligence... it would certainly seem so."
"Since matters have deteriorated to this point, I might as well subjugate them by absolute force," Minakaze spoke, his voice dropping into a cold, unyielding register. He puffed his pipe once more, the amber embers glowing fiercely in the dim room. "I had granted the Gai clan my grace, but it would seem they lack the wisdom to recognise it."
As the vassal lords nodded in grim agreement, Minakaze leaned back, his thoughts drifting to a separate, highly intriguing piece of intelligence.
'I received word that a faction had meticulously planned to assassinate the Minamoto boy during the vanguard mission... yet it failed spectacularly,' Minakaze pondered silently, his eyes narrowing through the haze of smoke. 'That is truly surprising. Did the House of Minamoto deploy elite Seiwa Genji guardians to tail the boy from the shadows? Is that how he managed to slaughter that high-level Yokai that the Fujiwara had so carefully prepared?'
He had no inkling of the cosmic horror that had actually transpired even before getting onto the sanctuary.
Elsewhere within the vast, sprawling Minakaze compound, far from the political plotting of the main hall, the Minakaze no Himari sat alone by the edge of a rushing river. She stared blankly at the swirling water ripples, the dark depths calling out to her. It was here, in the dead silence of the estate, that she routinely contemplated ending it all.
Though Mai was physically gone now, the horrific scars he had violently carved into her spirit had only continued to fester. The systemic abuse he had planted in her ran deep. Worse still was the suffocating betrayal of her own family, her father, Minakaze, who had known absolutely everything Mai was doing to her and chose to look the other way, and their late mother, who was no longer of this world to offer her any semblance of comfort.
Himari truly felt as though her existence possessed no purpose, no meaning.
That was how she had felt, at least, until a mysterious letter had slipped into her possession just months prior.
"Hang on for just a little while longer," the elegant, unfamiliar ink had read. "And I will show you a life truly worth living."
She had absolutely no idea who had sent the message or how they had bypassed the estate's heavy security to deliver it. Yet, that single, cryptic sentence had sparked a fragile ember of curiosity within her chest. It kept her breathing just long enough to see exactly whose hand had written those words.
…
Back at the Academy, a heavy, suffocating silence had settled over the grounds. A few days had passed since the survivors had returned from the vanguard mission, and the official casualty census was finally released.
The numbers were devastating. Over twenty high-ranking disciples who had gone out on the mission were confirmed dead. The nature of the slaughter was so horrific that many of the corpses were left completely deformed, their faces twisted beyond recognition, leaving families unable to even recover their physical bodies for a proper burial.
For Yorimitsu, the tragedy brought an entirely different storm. Because the specific location where the rest of his vanguard group had perished could not be found, malicious whispers began to spread like a contagion through the academy halls. Rumours claimed that Yorimitsu had cowardly abandoned his comrades the moment the fighting grew too severe, leaving them to be butchered.
However, those slanderous claims were violently shut down before they could take root. Bushido himself had stepped forward to issue a formal declaration to the academy elders, explicitly stating that Yorimitsu's intervention had been absolutely vital in the apocalyptic battle against Orochi. To argue against the words of the legendary old master was social suicide.
"Huuuuu..."
Deep within his private quarters, Yorimitsu exhaled a long, heavy breath, staring down at his hands.
'So much has transpired in such a brief window of time,' he thought, a wave of mental exhaustion washing over him. 'I already dispatched Ichiyoshi and his sister to Father. Ichiyoshi seems to have undergone a profound spiritual awakening of his own... Gabimaru explicitly informed me that something had happened on his body during my clash with Orochi.'
Yorimitsu ran a hand through his hair, letting out a sharp sigh. 'Tch... I would have vastly preferred to keep him here by my side at the academy. But now that the pieces are moving and it is time for me to aggressively push forward with my grander plans, keeping an unstable variable like him here will only invite unnecessary scrutiny and trouble. For now, sending him to the Minamoto compound is the safest play.'