"Buddha! That is absolutely impossible! Greedy Sanda tribesmen, the Kakizaki Clan can never agree to your later conditions!"
"Leader of the Wajin, our Great Chieftain has spoken! If you refuse, he will invite all five Ainu clans to hold a grand blood sacrifice!"
In the camp beneath Mount Ezo Fuji, the "Sanda envoy" Lu Jiaohu craned his neck and glared at the Wajin chieftain before him, the threat in his mouth undisguised.
"We will build an altar, drive your captives up onto it, and kill them all as offerings to the Great Spirit! Then the Great Chieftain will invite the five Ainu clans across the whole island, raise thousands of warriors, and march south together into Wajin land, stripping your tribe clean!..."
"Damned Sanda barbarians! I'll kill you!..."
"Come on! With the divine deer as witness, even if you chop off my head, I won't so much as furrow my brow!..."
At that moment, facing the Sanda man's very real threat, Kakizaki Mitsuhiro's face flushed crimson, and he grew furious beyond himself. He understood the weight of this threat deeply—even more clearly than the Sanda envoy who had spoken it, he knew how terrifying it was!
If the other side truly held some "blood sacrifice," killed his house's elders and retainers before countless Ezo chieftains, and then swept several thousand Ezo tribesmen south with them... then the rule and influence over the Ezo tribes that the Kakizaki Clan had spent forty years pressing down to establish would likely vanish into smoke and ash in an instant. And the Kakizaki Clan's very survival in Ezo Land would be battered by a stormy wave of life and death!
Most terrifying of all, as the prime culprit who had brought about the failure, his warrior-house reputation, Kakizaki Mitsuhiro's reputation, would be utterly destroyed.