Story:

Yoshiaki, emerging trembling from beneath the table, patting his crested sleeves, clearly had no clue what to do and, worse, no idea that having no clue was visible to everyone.

Michiru-sama glanced at her useless Shogun—one flat, withering, unreadable beat of a look—and then turned to Nobunaga.

"Nobunaga-kyo," she said, and her voice was imperial steel now, none of the plum-wine sweetness remaining.

"The royal court requests—I should say, commands, though between us it is a request—your aid. Investigate the root cause of this evil earthquake. Find it, and stop this crisis. Yamato has suffered evil enough."

Nobunaga bowed his head. "It will be done, Tenno-sama."

And privately—only privately, in the deepest vault of his heart, the part of him that was still a man and not a weapon—Oda Nobunaga offered a small, guilty prayer of thanks to whatever malicious power had just torn a hole in the eastern sky.

Because for the entire banquet he had been waiting, sake cup after sake cup, for Michiru-sama to raise the topic of his marrying into the royal family in front of his wives, and the earthquake had, with impeccable timing, detonated that conversation before it could be born.

A reprieve. Temporary, certainly. But a reprieve.

Perhaps the evil in the east, he thought, rising, is not entirely without utility.