Story:

Everyone was drawn to the increasingly loud argument near the pile of the Torii remains—mikos turning their heads mid-bandage, wounded girls propping themselves up on their elbows to watch, the whole battered square slowly rotating toward the sound like flowers toward a very stormy sun.

At the center: Shrine Master Kannagi Chitose, leaning against a broken pillar, one hand pressed to her internally wounded side, refusing treatment, refusing rest, and putting up an angry face that could have warded off a lesser demon all by itself—arguing nose to nose with Oda Nobunaga.

"—and I am telling you, Maou of the Sixth Heaven—!" Chitose's voice cracked across the square like her own suppression lightning.

"—that even if the Yamato Shrine has been reduced to a pile by the vampires—EVEN SO—we do not need YOUR help! We did not ask for it! We did not want it! And we certainly did not need it delivered by the most dangerous warlord this country has produced in a century! You did not come here out of benevolence, Oda Nobunaga.

"You came here with intent! Malicious intent! This mountain will remember what the Maou's 'help' costs!"

Nobunaga did not retreat one step. He crossed his arms, Heshikiri still smoking faintly on his shoulder, and fought back with relish—he had been waiting half his life for this argument, and the ruined shrine was as good a stage as any.

"Malicious is it!" he barked. "Listen to yourself, Shrine Master! This is precisely the problem with the Yamato Shrine—narrow-minded!"

"Centuries of sitting on this mountain hoarding the leyline like a dragon on rotting gold, using religion to leash the people, dictating to kings and peasants alike what they may build, what they may trade, what they may dream—and you have the audacity to call me the hindrance?! The shrine's dead hand is half the reason the central government collapsed! Where were your wards when the realm shattered into a hundred warring provinces?"