Jaewon agreed with a slight inclination of his head and rode ahead to join Seung. Kira smiled at him as he passed before meeting her brother’s indignant gaze.
“I thought you used to like him,” Kira said with a reproachful look.
“I do like him, which is why he’s not dead yet,” Kwan retorted. “And he’d better not touch you again before your betrothal is announced.”
Kira huffed. “I didn’t say anything about a betrothal.”
“Well then he’d better not touch you again or there will be a betrothal. That or a funeral. I will be happy with either outcome.”
The journey to their battle position was uneventful. They passed two forts and a few villages. All of them abandoned, all of them completely destroyed by the Yamato. Fear crept into Kira. The last time they had come upon abandoned villages, they’d been attacked by an army of demon-possessed humans. She worried that this would be the case again.
Kira spent the rest of the journey getting to know Captain Ha and the Dragon Fighters better. They reminisced about Shin Bo Hyun and told stories about his exploits.
“He talked about you a lot,” Captain Ha said. “How you were the most amazing woman he’d ever met. And how he hoped that one day you’d forgive him all the wrongs he had done.”
Kira swallowed the lump in her throat. “I did,” she said. “I came to think of him as a friend.”
She let out a small sad laugh. “I used to hate him so much when we were younger,” she said. “He was always trying to get me in trouble. Or so I thought. But now I realize, it was just his way of being around me.” She wiped away a tear that had leaked out of the corner of her eye. “I’m learning about perspective, you know? How you never really know the answer to something unless you can look at it from all the different sides. I wish I’d had some more time with him. I wish I’d told him that I forgave him for everything.”
Captain Ha looked up to the skies. “I’m sure he knows now,” she said.
They reached their destination in the early afternoon of the third day. The warm spring weather had been perfect for journeying. Reconnaissance showed them that they were not the first division to arrive. The scouts came back with four thousand members of the rebel forces from the Fifth Division, General Kim’s command. Most of the soldiers looked shaken up. Whispers of demons and inhumanity swept the troops. Kira, Kwan, and Taejo, along with the rest of their party, made their way to Kyoung’s side to discover what had happened.
They set up camp below a long, wide ridge that circled and overlooked the plains outside Nosong. Kyoung ordered Kwan and Kira to follow him, leaving the rest to stay in the quickly forming tent that would make up their command center. Kwan and Kira followed their brother up the ridge to peer at the enemy lines.
The plains of Nosong were filled with legions of Kudara and Yamato soldiers. There were at least fifty thousand men, of which Kira had no idea how many were demons and half-breeds. A soldier, in the red and black Kudara uniform, rode back and forth holding a long spear. What looked like a head was mounted on the end of the spear.
“Who is that?” Kira asked.
“General Kim,” her brother answered. “Apparently he arrived before any of the other divisions. He decided he wanted to attack immediately. His unit leaders warned him it would be suicide, but he didn’t listen. The guerrilla units refused to join him. He led a vanguard of five thousand men into Nosong before anyone could stop him. They were slaughtered.”
It was a sobering reality. As much as Kira disliked the old general, it was wrong to see his head treated with such little respect. In the field before the Yamato camp, there was a large mound that was as wide as a small hut and nearly as tall as a tree.
“What is that mound over there?” she asked.
“The Yamato have made a mountain out of the cutoff heads of the men they killed,” Kyoung continued. “They call them their trophies. Those were all General Kim’s men.”
Sickened, Kira had to look away.
“I wonder why they didn’t possess them?”
“Maybe there are more bodies than demons,” Kwan said.
“Or maybe they are trying to demoralize our men,” Kyoung responded. “It worked on the rebel forces.”
That made more sense to Kira. It was in keeping with how cruel the daimyo was that he would do something so evil and disturbing. Even from the distance, they saw the living cloud of flies that surrounded the macabre scene. She noticed that the Kudara camp seemed a good distance from the gruesome memorial. Perhaps not all of them approved of the daimyo’s ways.
Returning to the command tent, Kyoung reported back to the others on what they had seen.
“If anything, you must use this to embolden our soldiers even more,” Major Pak said. “To warn them that these are the stakes for us all.”