Story:

The instant the reception room's door slid shut behind Nobunaga's footsteps, Michiru-sama's imperial serenity collapsed like a stage set after the curtain falls.

She did not glide. She scrambled—silk layers rustling in panicked cascades—and clapped her hands toward the inner corridor.

"Xia-chan!! They were horrible!!"

In came her personal bodyguard through the side door: a woman whose silver hair fell past her waist like moonlight on black water, her gorgeous body line draped in a guard's fitted uniform, the lower half of her face veiled as always.

Xia's eyes took in the scene—the abandoned calligraphy brush, the empress mid-tantrum, the wavy mouth already forming—and she let out a big, long, bone-deep sigh that had carried the weight of a whole year of service.

Michiru-sama flung herself forward and jumped—jumped, the sovereign of the realm, ten thousand years of imperial dignity—as though the floor had become lava, and crashed into Xia's arms.

"Tell me everything," Xia said flatly, catching her sovereign by reflex.

"He refused me, Xia-chan! Refused! Me!! To my face! With that smiling face! And then he said—" her voice pitched into scandalized falsetto, "—he said he is 'controlled at home and loves it'!! What kind of man says that?!"

Xia let out another big sigh.

Behind the veil, her mind ran through the calculations she and Michiru-sama had spent days and nights building before the Oda ever occupied Kyoto.

The political situation had been ruthlessly simple: the imperial court was powerless and poorer than a provincial temple's donation box. The Miyoshi would devour them, the Ashikaga were decorative at best.

The only asset the realm possessed that any warlord would actually pay for was status—and the only chip the court held that outweighed all gold and grain was the emperor-consort seat, with Michiru-sama herself as the prize.