If our enemy was holed up in a temple complex, then it shouldn't be too hard to root them out. My students weren't the type to get squeamish about attacking a religious site. While the walls might be sturdy, I doubted they would be up to the standard of purpose-built fortifications.
"If they stay in their fortress, we'll need to take it quickly," I said. "I'll leave it to you to make the initial preparations."
One thing I absolutely did not want was to get bogged down into a siege. I had thrown together my army out of barely trained peasants. It was the limit of our nigh-nonexistent logistics capability to see everybody fed long enough to pass through the wilderness and reach our neighboring province. Even that required supplementation by way of hunting and, most likely, outright stealing food from the civilians in the province we were invading. Trying to keep everybody fed and healthy through an entire siege would be a nightmare.
The idea of living off the land could be attractive for an army that was largely looking to engage in raiding or, not to put too fine a point on it, slaughtering their enemies. Taking food from the mouths of your enemy's people and using it to feed your own soldier was, on this view, a clear win-win situation.
However, I wasn't charging across the border to harass some implacable foreign enemy. This was a battle between two different provinces within the same country. Ultimately, the goal was to bring the people of the province we were invading under the rule of Lord Ota. Obviously, there was going to be some coercion involved in doing that, but the overall process would be a lot harder if I built up a wellspring of hatred by slaughtering a bunch of innocent civilians over the course of taking out Lord Ota's real opponents.
I also suspected, or perhaps more accurately, hoped, that fortifications built according to the available level of technology wouldn't be capable of turning aside a determined assault by a force of sword saints. The rapid movement, ability to scale walls, and sheer striking power embodied in a single sword saint would present a huge problem for anybody trying to build an impregnable fortress.
On the other hand, there had to be a reason people kept building forts. They were an expensive undertaking. Nobody would bother with the costs of construction if they were completely useless. Maybe there just weren't that many sword saints around, so a fort that could only hold against ordinary soldiers was usually enough. In that case, we could just blitz right on through the walls.
I wasn't going to test out that theory personally, of course. My students had at least reached the basic level of competency required to scale a wall, kill the defenders, and throw open the gates. They also enjoyed fighting. I, on the other hand, enjoyed my own continued survival. Thus, both of us would be happy with my students going first, ideally to take the fortress, but at the very least forcing the enemy to reveal any anti-sword saint trump cards in their possession. I was hardly going to pass up such an obvious win-win arrangement.
The rest of the discussion with Hideyoshi was spent rehashing old questions. No, we couldn't march any faster. Yes, we were, relatively speaking, making good time. No, we didn't really know what the enemy army looked like. I hated to march in blind like this, but it wasn't like I could call up a satellite photo to get an idea of what laid ahead of me.
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Maybe once I had too much money and time on my hands I could try to scrape enough silk together to make a hot air balloon. Until then, I'd be stuck slogging forward one day's march at a time, relying on ground-based scouts who couldn't range more than a day or so ahead of the rest of us. It was a far cry from the information overload I had enjoyed in my previous life's military commands, which had all taken the form of one video game or another.
It took three days of marching through mountain valleys before we reached what would be the highest point on our journey. From here on, we would be marching downhill. It was hard to pinpoint the boundary between provinces given the primitive maps that we had available, but it was generally understood that the mountains divided one side from the other. Having reached the high point and started marching down, we could be considered to be on enemy territory.
Of course, it looked exactly the same as friendly territory. We were in the mountains that defined the central region of the largest island of Yashima. Our line of march had been through mountain valleys, avoiding the highest peaks, but it had still been a grueling uphill trek. I was proud of my troops for making it through with a minimum of complaints and dropouts, even if the trip was taking longer than I would have preferred.
The mountains around us were high enough to have snow cover their peaks year round. We were lucky that we never needed to travel quite that high up. We were instead cutting our way through light forests that dotted the mountain valleys. There was a decent amount of game to be had, as well as plenty of fresh water. It might have been a different matter for an army of tens of thousands, but for our little group, it was a downright hospitable path. It probably helped that all of my recruits had grown up in the villages planted in the foothills around the mountains, so they were fairly accustomed to this sort of terrain.
As we started moving more downhill, I began to take more precautions. A pair of my students was assigned to each of our flanks, with the instructions to blunt any sudden attacks that should fall upon us from the sides. I also asked that for volunteers from among our peasant troops who were familiar with the mountains to help out our scouts. It was too much to hope that we would be able to launch a surprise attack at the end of the march, but I wanted to at least delay our discovery for as long as possible.
The scouts did their work, as far as I could tell, with great enthusiasm. Despite that, though, they didn't catch a single enemy spy. I was always a little suspicious of good news, but this was reasonably within my expectations.
We were marching through deserted wilderness. Nobody lived here who would see us and send a report to the enemy. What was more, our force had been raised locally within the last six weeks or so. In the modern era, that would have been plenty of time for the army to become a trending topic on social media and then become old news. In this day and age, it meant that practically speaking we would come out of nowhere and strike before any news of our existence reached enemy ears. Any enemy spies would be keeping an eye on the movement of Lord Ota's main army, not the activities of a single teacher and her squad of sword saint trainees.
Even so, we would never achieve tactical surprise. Once we reached even lightly settled areas, the news of our passing would become part of the local rumor mill. But I did think we could manage to present a strategic surprise. The enemy would have a chance to prepare in the few days before battle, but he wouldn't have a chance to send for reinforcements to join him from distant provinces. Considering that we were fighting only one arm of a cult that had its temple fortresses scattered across four or five different provinces, that would be a big help.
Stamping out the cult throughout Yashima was a task that I'd be happy to leave for Lord Ota. I just wanted to notch an easy victory to build up my resume so that I could ultimately transfer into the administrative post of my choice.