Story:

It was at this precise moment—sensing blood, or perhaps simply incapable of resisting—that the Violet Witch leaned into the conversational breach, smiling with the specific serenity of a witch about to tease the most powerful general in the country.

"Kenshin-san," she said sweetly, eyes glittering.

"Tell me. Is that rice really so amazingly yum? All five bowls of it?"

Behind her, Kicho struck her sister sharply between the shoulder blades—a sisterly blow precisely calibrated to halt the mocking of the top strategist of Yamato before it caused an international incident between Echigo, Mino, and two foreign magical realms.

But Kenshin—

Kenshin did not catch the hidden meaning at all. Not one grain of it.

The warlord's chopsticks stopped. Her head turned. And she fixed the Violet Witch with eyes suddenly sparkling—wide, bright, blazing with the light of a woman who had waited her entire life for this exact question at this exact moment.

"You." Kenshin pointed at Violet with her chopsticks, rice-gravely. "Foreigner. You have a good taste."

She set down her bowl with the reverence of a priest setting down a holy scripture, suddenly animated like a general presenting her grand campaign.

"This is the autumn rice of Echigo. First harvest of the northern valleys, cut at the proper moon, dried in the mountain wind. The secret—" she raised one finger,

"—is in the water. You must cook it at exactly one-point-five portion of water to rice. One-point-five. Any more and it drowns. Any less and it starves. My cooks took three years to learn it. Three! Years!"

She gestured at the five bowls with something approaching love. "The plain lords of the south eat their rice like wet sand and call it a meal. This—is what an army deserves before battle. A soldier who eats well dies harder to kill. This is strategy."

"...Strategy," repeated Nobunaga faintly.

"Logistics," corrected Kenshin gravely, and picked the bowl back up.

Violet was so regretted to have opened the Pandora box herself...