Story:

But seeing the incoming ninja dash toward him, Nobunaga also smiled.

A wicked laugh rose in him—and it was worse than Miu's. Deeper, older, hungrier—the laugh of a man who had spent thirty years making himself the most assassination-targeted lord in all of Yamato, and had turned the surviving into a hobby.

In his battlefields, in his camps, in his very bedchamber, countless ninjas had come for his life across three decades.

None had returned alive.

"Slow?" Nobunaga said, wicked grin blazing. "Little girl, I've been killing your kind since before you were whelped."

In absolute confidence—not arrogance, but the settled certainty of a man on his home ground—he drew his modified katana Heshikiri in a single motion, raising it overhead—and slashed down across the dashing Miu in one full overhead chop, so fast the red air split along the blade's path.

The fearsome battle aura surrounding Oda Nobunaga—all of it, the entire veteran's furnace of him—focused into the Heshikiri's falling edge, the katana roaring with concentrated crimson light as it fell.

Time compressed between them.

The world narrowed to two streaks of color crossing the ruined square—violet-black falling, red-gold rising—the ninja's reverse blades beginning their lethal inward hook, the samurai's mountain-splitting chop completing its descent—

Dust erupted in a ring.

And beneath the drowned red sky of the broken shrine, two smiles—one wicked, one wicked worse—met at the crossing point of their blades, each waiting to see whose technique would bleed first.