Though his wife and children had been spared execution, they would still be thrown into the boiling oil alongside him. Worse still, the special mission borne by his son, Momonosuke, would go unfulfilled. Grief welled up within Oden.
If Kaido had been presiding over the scene, Oden might have been able to use the mutual respect between supreme warriors to minimize the casualties. But sitting smugly in the seat of honor was that ungrateful petty villain, Kurozumi Orochi.
Oden Kozuki looked at the equally miserable state of his seven retainers and knew that man's heart held nothing but hatred and the arrogance of a petty man drunk on success. Getting him to show mercy was simply impossible.
So Oden smiled as well. Since death was the only path left anyway, he would face it calmly together with his wife, children, and retainers!
But at that moment, Oden's expression suddenly froze. Then he raised his head and looked around with faint unease.
Seeing this, one of the escorts raised his whip to lash Oden, but his eyes abruptly widened. "Th-that... what is that?"
A long pole, perhaps more than ten meters in length, shot through the air and landed beneath the platform where Kurozumi Orochi sat. It instantly unfolded like a carpet being spread out.
Kurozumi Orochi had been smugly enjoying the wretched, bedraggled sight of Oden and his group when his vision suddenly went dark and he lost consciousness. His body, still reeking of sleaze even after becoming shogun, rolled off his seat like a giant ball and fell through a door that had suddenly appeared in that "carpet."
"Enemy attack!" Even the dullest people understood what had happened after seeing this scene, but no matter how quickly they reacted, they could not move faster than Shimotsuki Ushimaru and the