Well, that was kind of a silly one if we’re honest. I confess I had no idea how old the mangaka – Ikka Matsui – here was. But this episode got me curious so I looked him up. He was about 26 when Nippon Sangoku began serialization, which is certainly pretty young. But if you’d told me he was still in high school or at least his teens, I’d certainly have believed it. This series just has that “stuff teenage boys think is cool” vibe to it.

The Wajima Ouga character is a pretty dodgy one for me. Yeah, it’s nice that in a military fantasy a young woman is in charge of an entire country (even a ragtag one like Sei). But the way everyone reacts to her (and her own behavior at times) is really demeaning. Maybe there’s some realism to that but it definitely rubs me the wrong way. Whatever the reasons for the intense loyalty she wields (for now) she musters her army with the intent to march on Fukui and wipe out Ryumon in one fell swoop. And it’s becoming increasingly obvious that all this is really personal for her, including her business with the Dragon.

The big hook of this episode is Ryuumon’s response to having his 6,000 soldier force marched on by the main army of Sei, many times their number. He’s kind of screwed here, that’s true – he can’t call for help from Osaka because that’s exactly the pretext Taira is waiting for to strip him of command (or his life). So he puts on a kimono and parks himself on the bridge into town with full tea ceremony regalia, which certainly gets the enemy’s attention. This is the “Empty Fort Strategy” – which is a real thing, outlandish as it seems. It’s the 32nd of the “Thirty-six Stratagems” – a 6th century Chinese military text. If there’s anything this author is hot for, it’s Chinese military strategy.

The basic idea of the Empty Fort Strategy is to convince the enemy there’s an ambush when there is no ambush. It was supposedly employed against the legendary Lu Bu (this gets a mention in Three Kingdoms, which itself gets a mention here). It was also supposedly employed by Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1572 at the Battle of Mikatagahara, though this was almost certainly propaganda invented later to inflate Tokugawa’s reputation. In any event Ohga falls for it as neatly as you please, in the process not only buying the Yamato forces precious time but undermining her own authority in Sei.

Buying time is all this really does, of course. The great hope of Yamato, apparently, is Aoteru, who’s currently seeking an audience with the Emperor and has told Tsune-chan-san to be ready to leave Osaka at a moment’s notice. Him, and Moiryama – the official who got himself sentenced to exile in what it’s been obvious for a while was a grand ruse. It’s not clear yet exactly what they have in mind but it seems as if they’ve been completely successful in preventing Sei from discovering what it may be.