Volume 4 Chapter 103 The War God-Machine
Edited by: Kanaa-senpai
Akabashi, who was still wearing his armor, announced that the battle was about to start. But before anyone could move, a strange monk stepped forward, and because he grabbed my shoulder just as I was planning my escape, I found myself frozen in place.
”Our guest,” the monk said, “carries the god of victory inside him. He stays here with us.”
I stared at him, not understanding what was happening. Then, to my complete surprise—although perhaps it should not have been a surprise at all—the man I had thought was the leader, Akabashi himself, dropped down onto one knee, and he bowed his head low before that very monk.
So the strange monk was the real leader after all. That much was clear now.
This was the same man, after all, who had sat at the head of the table the night before, and he had casually taken a young girl’s virginity right in front of everyone—yet now he was wearing a serious expression, and with his head bowed, he was waiting for orders like a loyal soldier.
”The Osaragi clan,” the monk continued, “will hold the northwest position. The Kanazawa clan will hold the north. Hojo Moritoki—you will take the northeast. Now go. But listen carefully: under no circumstances are you to move beyond the position I have given you.”
The man I had thought was the boss nodded sharply, and after saying, “Yes, sir!” he turned around, and he walked out of the manor without looking back.
Wait, I thought. They called him Hojo. Not Akabashi.
”Someone,” the monk shouted, “fetch Nagasaki. Right now!”
Several men ran out of the manor as soon as he gave the order. In their place, a group of monks and nuns appeared; they were wearing yellow kesa robes and white tabi socks and straw sandals, and they hurried over to the monk as soon as they arrived.
”Nyodai,” the monk said, “get it ready.”
He was speaking to one of the nuns. She was small—barely as tall as Kenze, actually—and when she opened a large bundle that she was carrying, she pulled out something that looked like a metal bucket.
”When the Red Flame Balls start coming toward us,” she said, “please put this over your head, and make sure you take cover.”
As she tried to hand me the bucket, her fingers brushed against mine.
And then I understood.
I pulled my hand back, and I jumped away from her as fast as I could. The metal bucket hit the floor, making a loud clatter as it rolled across the wooden boards.
This nun. She had been reading my mind through that touch. She had to be a powerful mage, probably with as much mana as Pamela, the Elven mage whom I had met before. That touch had not been an accident at all.
I stared at her with my anger showing clearly on my face, but she only smiled in return, and after she picked up the fallen bucket, she acted as if nothing had happened.
Had she planned that all along? I wondered. None of the other monks or nuns who had come with her looked even slightly surprised.
”Nyodai,” the monk asked, “what did you find out?”
”Yes,” she replied, “just as Sugan-sama predicted. This young man has much more mana than I do.”
The monk nodded, and he looked very pleased by what she had said.
”I will not touch you again,” Nyodai said as she held the bucket out to me a second time.
I reached for it carefully, but even though I was trying to avoid her, our fingers brushed together again anyway.
Liar! I thought.
This time, I tried to read her mind in return; however, she was busy chanting sutras inside her head, and I could not get through.
Of course, I realized. She is a nun. Of course she would do that.
So I sent her a threat through my thoughts: if you keep doing this, I will attack you.
She stopped chanting immediately.
’Oh my,’ her thoughts came back to me, ‘to be held by such a fine young warrior…’
Her mind opened up, and I could feel a wave of physical desire coming from her. Even on the other side of the continent, I realized, female mages were exactly the same.
I took the bucket properly this time. It was made of silver, and it was heavier than I had expected it would be. They claimed that even if a Red Flame Ball hit you directly, you had an eight-in-ten chance of surviving if you used this bucket.
’Which means,’ I thought to myself, ‘two in ten people die. And even the ones who survive end up with some kind of permanent damage, do they not?’
When I asked her about this directly, she smiled, and without showing any guilt at all, she answered: “Yes.”
Better than nothing, I told myself.
Just then, an old man arrived; he was wearing a samurai eboshi hat, and he had a long white beard. He knelt down before the monk as soon as he entered.
”Nagasaki,” the monk said. “Good. Build the watchtower right away. This will be a battle that decides everything.”
The old man, whose name was Nagasaki, nodded to show that he understood the order, and then he turned on his heel and left immediately.
I had no idea what kind of watchtower they were planning to build, but when I heard the phrase “a battle that decides everything,” I felt very uncomfortable about it.
I looked at the monk, and I tried to communicate with my eyes that I was an outsider and that he should let me leave.
”Our guest,” the monk repeated, and he said it in exactly the same way as before, “carries the god of victory inside him. He stays here with us.”
The monk said the same thing again, and I could not believe he was doing this to me.
To make matters worse, he looked very pointedly at the sword that was hanging at my waist. The sword that Nagamitsu had made for me. He was clearly reminding me that I owed a debt.
Oh, no. No, no, no.
Yes, Nagamitsu had given me this tachi, but the materials that were used to make it had been gifted to me. They were not borrowed. And that victory in Luzon had happened a very long time ago. The god of victory had probably left me by now.
But I already knew that this monk was never going to listen to anything I said.
While I was still thinking about all of this, a loud grinding noise filled the air, and the buildings around the courtyard started to move apart. I looked over, and I saw that one corner of the enclosure was opening up. A section of the wall slid away, and men who were wearing the same kind of clothing as Nagasaki came streaming into the courtyard.
They climbed onto the central stage, and they started to take it apart. They did not do it roughly; instead, they worked very carefully, using wooden mallets to knock the railings and benches apart piece by piece. It seemed that no nails had been used in the construction, so the stage came apart easily.
Within a few minutes, the entire stage had been reduced to pieces, and those pieces were carried away to the space underneath the eaves of the buildings. What remained were the massive foundation stones: five of them in total, with four at the corners and one in the middle.
And then, into the courtyard, came the giants that had no heads.
Golems, I realized.
Even without heads, they were twice as big as the Type 95 humanoid models that Schweilitz had built. But in the way they were shaped, they looked more like the Type 98: they had short legs, and they had arms so long that they almost touched the ground. Metal plates covered their bodies, probably as protection against the Red Flame Balls.
I could not help myself. I walked to the edge of the veranda, and I looked up at them to see how big they really were.
As the golems moved, gaps appeared between the metal plates, and I could see what was inside them. Their bodies were made of complicated, layered frame structures, and I had seen something like this before. In Takere—the trading city in the Land of the Fire Ring—they had similar structures in their material storage area. Those had been made of metal pipes, though, whereas these were made of wood, and the joints were strengthened with metal.
This raised a question, of course: what was powering these golems, and what kind of mechanisms were making them move? Most golems that I knew about ran on mana that was stored in amber, but Takere’s golems were powered directly by a mage who rode inside them. And many golems used the muscles of Orcs, which were animated by mana. But these golems—what kind of monster muscle were they using?
Before I could figure it out, the massive golems carried long wooden poles into the courtyard.
Up close, they were terrifyingly large. They had to be at least twelve meters tall. The poles that they were carrying, which would serve as handles, were over a meter in diameter, but from far away, they had just looked like long sticks.
The golems planted one of these poles upright on the central foundation stone. Then more men swarmed in, and they started putting up pillars on the four corner stones; after that, they began assembling the frame of a structure. Again, no nails were used. The sharp sound of wooden mallets hitting wood echoed through the courtyard, and the building climbed higher and higher as I watched.
Just watching them work, I lost track of time. Before I knew it, the monk was standing behind me.
”Impressive, is it not?” he said, and I could hear the pride in his voice.
”It certainly is,” I admitted, because there was no point in arguing about it.
The sheer size of the golems, and the speed and skill with which the men were putting up a structure that was as tall as a five-story building—all of this was something that Schweilitz did not have.
”Can I ask you something?” I said.
”If it is something that I can answer,” the monk replied.
I knew that this might be a state secret, but I asked anyway.
”Those golems,” I said. “Are they controlled by riders who sit inside them?”
That was my guess, based on the frame structure that I had seen inside them.
The monk tilted his head, and I wondered if I had accidentally asked about something that I should not have.
”Golems?” he said. “Do you mean these War God-Machines?”
Ah, I realized. Of course. In this era, in the Land of Shura, they did not call them golems. They had a different name for them.
I nodded several times to show that yes, that was what I meant.
”One pilot,” the monk said, “and four mana-supply riders.”
So one rider could not power the machine alone, I realized. They needed four extra people to supply mana. That made sense, considering how big these machines were.
”And,” I continued, “do they run on Orc muscle?”
I wondered if I was wrong again.
”Muscle?” the monk repeated. “Most of it is Toad-Salamander muscle.”
Toad-Salamander. I had heard that name somewhere before.
”That is the poison-spitter,” Kenze said from behind me, “that drains mana from the people it attacks.”
Her comment helped me remember. Yes—in the Duke’s territorial capital, an Amazoness soldier had cut me with a knife that was coated in that very poison. And that was not all. At the Magic Academy, the former Professor Pauman had mentioned using those same monsters as a power source for magic ships.
The monk explained that they used the leg and tail muscles from adult Toad-Salamanders, which were over fifteen meters long, and which were found in the Tone River, the Arakawa, and Lake Kasumigaura, to power the War God-Machines. For the arms, they used Bear-Forest-Cats, and for the fingers, they used the Three-Eyed Boar.
Even the Type 95 that Schweilitz had built only used Orc muscle. This was a completely different level of engineering.
”And the threads that carry the mana,” I said. “Are they made from Man-Eating Spider silk?”
”Threads that carry mana?” the monk replied. “We do not have any Man-Eating Spiders here. We use the tentacle vine instead.”
The tentacle vine was a plant that spread along the ground and through water; its stems grew round, octopus-head-like organs and leaves that gave out a sticky digestive fluid. It caught insects and small animals and even fish, and then it digested them for food. The people here cut the vine, dried it, and then beat the fibers out of it to use as mana-conducting thread.
The differences between the magic tools of the West and the East, I realized, were very large.
After listening to all of this, I looked again at the War God-Machines and at the half-built watchtower. Men were working at heights of over ten meters without any safety ropes, and just watching them made me feel uncomfortable. Their efforts paid off, though, because by the afternoon, the tall watchtower was finished. A walkway had been built partway up, which the riders could use to get inside the massive War God-Machines.
Once the tower was finished, people started coming out from inside the buildings.
”They are all monks and nuns, are they not?” I said.
When I said this out loud, Nyodai explained that you could not become a monk or a nun unless you had a certain amount of mana. In other words, you had to be a mage.
”We are going up,” the monk announced.
He started climbing the ladder that had been built into the tower, and as soon as he reached the bottom of it, he called back to us.
”Nagamitsu. You too.”
I tried to refuse by saying that I did not like heights, but Kenze, who loved them, grabbed me by the arm, and she forced me to climb up with her. There were landings where we could rest along the way, but if you made one wrong step, you would fall straight down to the ground. And because a strong winter wind was blowing from the west, the higher we climbed, the louder the creaking became, and the more the tower swayed back and forth.
Please, I thought to myself. I can handle combat, but I do not want to die in a building that is collapsing around me.
Of course, they dragged me all the way to the top, where the observation deck was. The view was fantastic, but the whole structure was swaying noisily around us. Some people had it worse than me, though: the signalmen. They were stationed above the observation deck, on the roof, and they were tied to the central pole while they waved large flags. They were standing on a roofless deck that had no handrails, and if the wind caught them before they had tied themselves down, they would fall straight to the ground. That was absolutely not a job for me.
Even though we were up there, no major battle broke out that day. What I could see during the daylight hours was the Izumo—the ship that had brought us here—and it was anchored far out at sea, probably because Fredys had ordered it to stay there.
I could also see the shogunate’s defenses: eight large War God-Machines were positioned to guard this location and seven other mountain passes that served as gateways into Kamakura. Smaller ones, which were about four meters tall, were deployed with three per camp and thirty in each of three camps, and only five were stationed at the main camp where we were. Each camp had about five thousand soldiers.
Once the sun had set, I was finally allowed to come down from the heights, and that night, while we were eating dinner, we received reports from all of the different fronts. Some soldiers had gotten into a fight and killed each other. A patrol boat had overturned in the high winds, and three men had drowned. And then there was the report that hit me the hardest: at the Keshōzaka pass, one of the groups of wandering shrine maidens who had faced us the night before had been ambushed after they crossed the pass, and almost all of them had been shot with arrows and killed.
Kanazawa had sent small War God-Machines to respond, but the enemy forces had pulled back quickly. Kanazawa said that they had probably been trying to build a fortress.
All of those women had died for that? The unfairness of it was almost too much to bear.
The next morning, before the sky had fully gotten light, the Osaragi clan clashed with the enemy near Inamuragasaki, and they came out victorious: they had taken the head of an enemy general. But then the real trouble started. The fighting moved to Kofukuzaka Pass, which was located behind Tsurugaoka Hachimangu from where we were.
Akabashi—whose real name, I had learned, was Hojo Moritoki—was supposed to be holding the northeast, and from where we were, the northeast was almost due north. We could barely see the pass from where we stood. Akabashi had mounted a large War God-Machine, and he had taken ten small ones and two thousand infantry with him; then he had crossed the pass, and he had pushed far into enemy territory, even though he had been ordered not to advance beyond his position.
The distance was short, but once they had crossed the ridge, we could not see the fighting anymore. We could still hear the thundering of their charge, though, and we could see the clouds of dust that they were kicking up. The sounds grew more distant, and the dust clouds slowly faded away.
The monk sent messengers to order Kanazawa to pull back and to strengthen the defenses, but Akabashi had apparently pushed very far forward by that point. That night, Akabashi and his troops did not return to the camp.
—
Summary:
Akabashi (Red Bridge), revealed as Hojo Moritoki, takes orders from the mysterious monk Sugan-sama while the protagonist is forcibly detained for his mana abilities. The protagonist observes the construction of War God-Machines and a watchtower using advanced wood joinery and monster components, learning about Eastern magical engineering. A night report reveals the brutal deaths of shrine maidens at Keshōzaka, and the following day Akabashi (Red Bridge) disobeys orders to advance, resulting in his troops’ disappearance.
—
Trivia:
The protagonist defeated the Amazoness soldier in the Duke’s territorial capital using a blade coated with Toad-Salamander poison.
Professor Pauman at the Magic Academy researched Toad-Salamanders as power sources for magic ships.
Kenze is physically small enough to be used as a height comparison for Nyodai and enjoys high places.
The tentacle vine is a carnivorous plant that digests prey using secreted fluids and grows both on land and underwater.
Schweilitz’s Type 95 and Type 98 golems differ in proportions and construction materials from the War God-Machines of the Land of Shura.
Nagamitsu is a swordsmith who provided the protagonist’s tachi, and the protagonist considers the materials a gift not a loan.
The osaragi clan takes an enemy general’s head at Inamuragasaki during the morning battle.
Notes:
• Hojo Moritoki – The true name of Red Bridge. A samurai commander serving under Sugan-sama’s authority. Takes orders from the monk with formal deference.
• Moritoki – Also known as Red Bridge. The shikken of Kamakura who defied orders and led a sortie across Kofukuro-zaka. Died by seppuku after losing many soldiers. A Hojo branch family member from the Red Bridge lineage.
• Hojo – An unsettling, aggressive male warrior from a fallen clan and ambassador/lord of the Land of Shura, this “Berserker” commands Imai and the Izumo. Dressed in sumo referee-inspired garb with a gauntlet, knee guards, and hip-mounted longsword, he has an intense, unblinking gaze. Linked to the Hojo clan, he speaks in imperious, clipped Kamakura-period Japanese. Driven by honor and trauma from his family’s slaughter, he views lethal violence as jest, yet shows restraint before outbursts.
• Ho – Ho is the family name of Oliver, a 17-year-old deck crew member and comrade of the protagonist. As a member of the military unit that defended Garao Village, the young man was ultimately murdered during a night watch, slaughtered alongside Marx-san.
• Nagasaki – An elderly man in a samurai eboshi hat with a long white beard. Called by Sugan-sama to construct the watchtower. A builder or engineer of some skill.
• Nyodai – One of two nuns at Tōshōji Temple. Participates in holding Kenze hostage. Presses her palms together in a bow when addressed.
• Kenze – Kenze is a muscular, brown-skinned Amazoness and former Tashkurgan operative turned research student. An observant, teasing guardian with dragon tattoos, she wears gauntlet-like armor and fights with formal precision. Formerly bonded with Earnest and now a rebel leader on the Izumo, she works with Tatyana, rooms with Larry—whom she prioritizes above all—and is currently nursing an egg while declining in health.
• Pamela – A loli elf mage and the protagonist’s companion. Uses pseudo-archaic Japanese with playful undertones. Acts as the protagonist’s lover and telepathic partner. Mischievous and quick to play along with schemes. Carries magical abilities. Loli elf mage and Earnest’s master. Sharp-tongued and practical. Uses telepathy and mana techniques. Acts as Earnest’s caretaker and disciplinarian. Observes the provisions gathered. Reacts with disappointment to the estimated duration. Knows the protagonist’s usual cautious nature and expresses surprise at his boldness.
• Pam – An escort to the protagonist who is observant and loyal.
• Sugan – A lay monk with a shaved head and dirty robes, whose clean, youthful face suggests deliberate roughness. Despite his scruffy appearance, he possesses ultimate authority and connections to high-ranking officials. Calm, calculating, and speaking with folk wisdom, he knows of Amazonesses, the Boltechino, and the protagonist’s capabilities, refusing to let them leave due to their “god of victory.”
• Schweilitz – This kingdom, featuring towering academy spires and a full military arsenal of Royal Army troops, forces the protagonist to return. Ruled by a king involved in a hostage exchange, this political power holds a captive feared for execution. It also ordered the confirmation of Princess Rosa’s corpse, driving a scheme that the Queen has caught onto.
• Mac – A component of the royal lineage, Mac-Morrow.
• Pauman – An arrogant, deceased Academy professor and former Magic Tool Lab head killed in the Haritz Rebellion. Known for his exploitative nature and controversial history with female students, he mentored, conditioned, and sexually used Katarina. His past magic ship project contrasts with the protagonist’s, and his course load was inherited by Larry, Eida, and the protagonist after his death.
• Fredys – A battle-hardened former slave and Izumo’s deck crew foreman, she serves as a pragmatic, sharp-witted squad leader. Related to the Ullmans and living with Roland, she acts as a loyal voice of reason to the Acting Captain. After Earnest’s capture, she assumed command, now focused on navigating the Izumo toward Luzon and overseeing critical rescue operations following the devastating Whale Eater attack.
• Izumo – The iron-hulled primary vessel, named and personified as a character herself, who loyally carries the protagonist and his crew throughout their journey.
• Al – Alberto (Al), a massive red‑haired man recently wed to Mary, lives near the Dish Basin. He’s a companion of Hans, helping intimidate and rally elders as a villager and leader.
• Red Bridge – A high-ranking warrior who initially appeared as the leader of the household. Actually subordinate to Sugan-sama. Commands forces in the northeast. Despite orders not to advance, leads a charge into enemy territory and does not return.
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Edited by Kanaa-senpai.
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