Settlers from the East and the Eastern Situation

[Tier-Group 4: Conference Room]

"Director of Books, it has been a while."

"Well, well, if it isn't Oda Ukyō-no-suke. And how fares the situation in the East?"

It was not Oda the Famous (織田) but Oda the Lesser (小田).

"The Satake of Ōta Castle have been skirmishing with the Kasama of Kasama Castle and the Edo of Mito, while on the other hand they've been poaching the retainers of Daijō of Fuchū, the so-called 'Thirty-Three Halls of the South,' by sending them invitations to Ōta Castle. Because of it, great numbers of the eastern folk have fled this way."

"Satake, is it. In the otherworld they were the lords of Akita, so if we simply drove them off to the north, the East would surely know peace as well, but."

"Driving them off is easier said than done. The Oda haven't the strength to fight the Satake. Sending retainers to die in a pointless war is a dog's death, and waging endless war the way the Satake do only wears the people down. The ideal would be to win without losing a single soldier, as you do, Director, but…"

"The thing is, a dungeon's power only reaches within its sphere of influence, and land where people already live can't be folded into that sphere."

"Director, what about land where no one lives, an open road that people only pass along now and then, for instance? Would that be all right?"

"So long as no one is passing along it at the time, there's no problem. As I told you before, Ukyō-no-suke, we've folded the road as far as Ōta Bridge, just short of Oda Castle, into the dungeon's sphere of influence. As you know, even if it wasn't quite a proper highway, there has long been a road there."

"In that case, what if we extended the 'sphere of influence' as far as the Satake's Ōta Castle, so that when enemy soldiers march along the road, we could drop them into a pit? If we buried the commanders alone before it ever came to war, the people would suffer no casualties."

"That would be obstruction of traffic… but if it's in the East, then even supposing the Saitama Prefectural Police came over from the otherworld, it's Ibaraki Prefecture, so it'd be outside their jurisdiction…"

"Um, Director?"

"In the otherworld, the East, along with the northern tip of Sō where the Yūki clan dwell, is called Ibaraki Prefecture. Depending on the world it can be Chiba Prefecture or Utsunomiya Prefecture instead."

Of course, the sense of distance is entirely different and so on; it is by no means a one-to-one correspondence.

"The whole eastern stretch of Tsukuba County is Ibaraki County. Though in the East the war has thrown the county boundaries into confusion."

"The Satake's Ōta Castle would be in Kuji County, I believe… It's far enough that it can't be seen from this dungeon, so we have no accurate map, but it's probably around 200 ri, which puts it a bit out of reach. As things stand, even Oda Castle is too far, and the dungeon's sphere of influence reaches Ōta Bridge at the very most. And just because they're both 'Ōta' doesn't mean we can summon them over and lure them into a trap."

"So even if Oda Castle were attacked from somewhere other than the west, we'd get no help from a pit trap. Perhaps it would be worth moving the castle to the west of Ōta Bridge. And yet, it's a castle our clan has guarded for centuries; even if we abandon it for a time, we must without fail take it back."

"So you've kept guarding it all this while, for centuries."

"No, Director, it has not been 'all this while.' The castle has fallen any number of times."