After Asahina Taisuke and Yakai Chiyomoto agreed to seek reinforcents together, they felt they couldn’t just sit here stupidly waiting for help. Otherwise, when the reinforcents finally arrived, they’d really have no face left. So they decided to keep attacking—or at least make it look like they were still attacking.
But launching a frontal assault on a stronghold was just too hard. If the defenders had tough fighting spirit, the difficulty doubled. They didn’t want to throw flesh and blood against concrete again, but the siege thods in Japan of this era were limited to only a few: "fire attack," "water attack," "underground tunneling," or "bribing insider traitors to open the gates."
Fire attack was clearly impossible. The enemy wasn’t so ordinary clan holed up in a wooden fence. Whether you shot in a rain of fire arrows or doused it in oil and lit it up, at most you’d just burn so arrow screens or bamboo sheds—stuff that didn’t matter at all. It wouldn’t shake them in the slightest.
Water attack wouldn’t work either. There was a river nearby, sure, but even if you damd it up and unleashed a flood, it wouldn’t reach the enemy’s fortress. Even if it sohow did, how high a flood would it take to drown a high-walled castle like theirs?
As for bribing insiders, just forget it. They didn’t even know whom to bribe. Facing such a big group on the other side, all their inquiries had gotten them was one Samurai’s na—and that was Harano himself. No way he’d open the gates himself for a bribe.
If they could bribe him, might as well just ask him to get lost and be done—why bother with all this ss?
In the end, after all their discussions, they had zero new ideas. All they could do was try "underground attack"—digging a trench all the way to see if they could collapse the enemy’s wall, or at least pile up a dirt ramp against the wall to charge up it.
Of course, they made that decision, but didn’t pin much hope on the tactic. Success seed highly unlikely; they just didn’t want to sit idle.
Besides, it’s not like it was their fault they couldn’t co up with a better plan. Before large caliber artillery appeared on the battlefield, anybody would get a splitting headache trying to take a fortress. Even the Mongols had cracked their heads against the tough stone cities of Song China, and their Great Khan had died at one. The Imagawa family and Matsudaira family combined couldn’t even match a single Mongol’s nose hair in military power—maybe, if one squinted, they were on par with a single nose hair of a Mongol. Facing Harano was just agony.
It wouldn’t be fair to say they were fools. This was just an impossible situation.
After a day spent resting in camp, they forced the Chita clans’ rabble Ashigaru to start digging. First, cutting a trench crosswise to pile up earth and screen the camp, then step by step advancing trenches toward the enemy’s walls, all the way up to the base.
When Harano found out, he wasn’t in a rush. The distance was still pretty far, so he couldn’t easily interfere. Besides, if the enemy wanted to do earthworks, all the better. On the sheep-wall near the "Stone City," he opened a small gate—the "Stone City" was just built for grabbing territory, never ant for daily living, so it had only a tiny rear door, barely usable.
So, next to "Stone City," he made another gate in the sheep-wall, letting the construction team go out that way to build a new sheep-wall pressed right up against the castle wall. Once that was done, he could even think about adding an inner barbican between the two layers of walls.
While he was at it, he planned to dig a few deep trenches in front of the fortress, precast concrete in them to spice up the enemy’s fun—let them really dig to their heart’s content.
Asahina Taisuke and Yakai Chiyomoto, of course, didn’t want to allow that. So they kept pushing the Chita clans to work on earthworks, and at the sa ti sent small squads to interfere. This threw both sides back into the initial battle mode—Imagawa and Matsudaira sent in snipers with arrows, while Harano’s Iron Gunners took the high ground with a serious range and angle advantage, firing in groups of five or ten and focusing fire on the enemy’s junior Samurai.
After watching for two days, Yakai Chiyomoto felt numb. He finally understood why Asahina Taisuke hadn’t been able to stop the wall-building before. Every ti his side killed or wounded one enemy worker, he’d lose three or four in return—and those were his best junior Samurai and Lang Faction n. There was no way he could keep trading at that rate.
As for Asahina Taisuke, he was even more numb. He realized the enemy’s workers now wore armor when they ca out, and they’d copied his own bamboo and wooden screens, making a pile of them. By day, they dragged them out as cover; by night, they dragged them back in. Even if the attackers managed to burn so, the enemy didn’t care—a new batch would appear the next morning. The exchange ratio was even worse now than before.
They still couldn’t stop the enemy from building new defenses, and could only watch helplessly as the enemy popped up another short sheep-wall in front of the fort. Even the sheep-walls on both wings were getting reinforced, with more towers added. anwhile, their own trenches had only advanced a few dozen ters—still not into the enemy’s kill zone. The defenders couldn’t even be bothered to notice them.
They really couldn’t be bothered, barely even firing off a token harassnt volley. It was downright insulting.
For a mont, both of them wanted to slap themselves silly. This "underground attack" tactic was truly idiotic—an absolute brain-dead move. The other guy had built a solid fortress in just over a month in the middle of nowhere, coming up with a ludicrously effective, bona fide defense system—clearly a "superstar fortress builder." Maybe even the nation’s top castle-builder. And here they were, trying to out-dig him at his own ga—had they lost their minds?
They were even more baffled as to why Oda Nobunaga sent a "superstar fortress builder" like him to the Chita Peninsula. Wouldn’t it be better to deploy him to the Bai Chuan Pass front line?
With his "turning mud to stone" magic, he could probably have flattened the Bai Chuan river by now, all the while building those bizarrely tough Rock Fortresses—maybe even fortifying all the way into Sankei Province.
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