Rōnin

Akira had seen impressive places before. He had been to many beautiful and imposing castles back in Japan. He had defended the walls of some from rival warlords and their armies. But never before had he feasted his eyes upon such a glory as The Deep, Capital city of the Bat Clans.

He saw only the front gates at this time, as they were still at least five leagues away, and they made up an enormous part of the mountainside. It was set into an large mountain range, and the largest mountain at the front of the range was where the gates were located. He saw that it was carved out of the mountain itself, the gates were two heavy ebony doors, reinforced tenfold with iron and reaching about a quarter Ri in height. (Ri were traditional Japanese units of measurement. Just above two miles.)

The gates were set into solid stone walls that were completely smooth from the ground to the battlements. And behind the battlements was what appeared to be another wall, and another after that. The first wall was tallest from base to top, the next two were only about one Ri in height from the top of the previous wall. Upon these battlements he saw very large artillary, particularly trebuchets and ballistae. The ballistae had six arms each, adding to the force it would put behind each bolt fired. The trebuchets were unlike anything he had ever seen in Japan, it consisted of a base with two A-frames holding a long arm between them. On the shorter end of the arm was a counterweight, to put force behind the shot to be flung from the sling on the other end.

As he and the small militia he was marching with, headed by Luna, approached the gates they began to open. He saw as they entered that the gates weren’t just two doors reinforced with iron, there were five sets of gates each pair getting heavier and thicker as they went in. He saw quite quickly why they called it The Deep once he was inside. The entire city spanned endless Ri in all directions, up and down too. It wasn’t very decorative, no statues and no signs of showing wealth anywhere, but if he had to choose a place to live it would be here.

The city was made of polished stone, with excessively large braziers everywhere to light the place, as well as what appeared to be a system of mirrors set to send light throughout the city even if the braziers were down. The gargantuan pillars that held up the hollowed out mountain had rings of fire lit in troughs around the pillar itself at steady intervals giving the entire entry chamber light.

The entry chamber itself was also fortified. On all sides of the room were more battlements upon which were set only ballistae and large cauldrons for boiling oil. There were three gates, one on each wall, and all of them harder to breach than the last set of gates just to get there. He also noted that there was no apparent way to get to the main battlements outside from that chamber, to make sure that they could still be held even if the main gates were breached. So the entry chamber was also a place to crowd enemy soldiers and slaughter them without mercy, smart. He would hate to be someone besieging this city.

He was let through with some degree of suspicion, one he could easily excuse. When they left the entry hall through the door right across from the main gates, Akira could only gaze upon the city with awe. What he saw was an enormous cavern filled with carved buildings and roads built up above the ground to let them travel through. A great aqueduct went through the city and left water in large pools at steady intervals where all of the citizens were fetching water as though from a well.

After marching for a bit longer they passed the forges, and heavens above they were a sight to behold. The furnaces were large and octogonal, about two Ri high and half as wide with excessive amounts of fire and black smoke rising from each one. He could hear the large hammers falling with tremendous force, and several times he’d see a large iron block fall down from carved inlets to strike a piece of metal, then be raised back up again slowly while a smith took the metal and did finer shaping. There were hundreds of these for farther than he could see.

“Impressive is it not?” Luna said from behind him.

“Very.” Was his only answer.

Farther up he also saw several billows sucking smoke in and blowing it out through large pipes that lead out of the mountain, or to another place for a different use. The billows, just like everything else there, was excessively large and was run on hydropower. Or rather, a waterwheel.

He followed Luna and her troops into what appeared to be barracks. He couldn’t tell by looking at it from the outside, but once inside he found that it was filled with stone bunks carved into the wall. Three bunks per space, four spaces per room. And in each room on either side of the doorway were three armor stands, six in all.

The stone bunks weren’t solid rock, only their frame. They each had a simple mattress, pillow and blanket neatly set upon the bunk. That way if ever they were needed they could be used and no one would sleep uncomfortably. Luna told him that he would be staying there for a few nights while she looked for an open home for him to live in. She left him there, and he began to remove his armor and place it on a stand. Once the armor was off he put his daisho into his belt, or rather obi, and left the building to stare out at the colossal city. He hadn’t even seen the main keep yet, and he already knew that one would need an army vast beyond imagining to take this city.