Story:

Akechi Mitsuhide entered the reception chamber, knelt, and did not smile at all.

"My lord. I must speak plainly. This is not a thing worth celebrating."

"Mitsuhide—"

"Hear me out. The senior clergy of Tennoji—slaughtered. The religious party will make a martyr's festival of this. Every temple in the land will ring its bell against us. Daimyo who sat neutral will now have a holy pretext to oppose the Oda clan. My lord, I urged negotiation precisely to prevent—"

"And I recall," Nobunaga cut in, quiet now, the festival warmth drained from his voice, "that I instructed you to worry less."

"It is because I worry, my lord, that I am worth anything at all."

Nobunaga studied his general. Mitsuhide was right—he knew it, in the cold ledger part of his mind that never stopped balancing.

Politically, the monks had been worth more breathing than dead. But the other part of him, the larger part, kept seeing Kicho's face as she had recounted it—the lifetime of being called monstrous, of nobles wrinkling their noses at her fairy blood, of Yamato whispering that she had made him a Demon Lord.

His wife had wept no tears over those monks. Neither, then, would he.

"My wife was a great help to this campaign, Mitsuhide. I will not hear her accused twice in one day. Leave me."

For a moment, Mitsuhide did not move. Then he bowed, low and slow—and as he straightened, something in his bearing had already traveled somewhere far from this room.

"My lord. Before I go—I request temporary leave from the Oda clan's service."