I woke up the next morning to find a blue box in front of my vision. It was a new message from my system interface, the first one I'd seen in the decade since my heated conversation with the fox woman.

[Congratulations on completing the achievement "I'm in the army now!"

Reward: 3 attribute points, 1 perk point, 1 system-generated weapon.

Collect your reward now!]

The text in the reward collection link was greyed out, but I couldn't help myself. When I reached up and tried to collect a reward, I was regaled with the same sad trombone sound effect that had grown all too familiar to my ears. At the same time, the text of the message faded away, replaced with a new taunt.

[Those are the rewards you would have received had you accepted Inari's blessing! There's still time to apologize.]

I grumbled and reached for the box again. That woman's smirk was still clear in my mind after all these years. There was no way she'd be satisfied with a mere apology. At least the button to close the thing worked properly.

As it happened, I didn't have much time to dwell on the matter. Shortly after breakfast, Lord Ota announced that we were to take our next meal on the road. He had only stopped back at his primary stronghold for a day to join up with the army his vassals had been mustering. If I hadn't been sitting outside his castle, I would have missed him. Rumor had it that he could have gathered up a few more men if he'd been willing to wait, but our daimyo wasn't one to sit back and let the enemy come to him.

I might have been lost in the marching crowd if not for Shibadai Katsuie. The famed sword saint must have seen some potential in me after our mock battle, as he sought me out and insisted that I march next to him. The first little while was rather awkward. I'd only ever learned enough etiquette to be polite with casual friends and extremely deferential to the nobility. I could only guess how I was supposed to address a respected superior from my own somewhat-respected position.

Fortunately, my conversation partner noticed that I was stumbling over my tongue every time I tried to address him. He took pity on me by suggesting that I simply call him by first name. It seemed that once you're a living legend there was no need to stand on formality. I was naturally quite grateful, and from that point on the small talk related to the local geography and expected weather flowed quite smoothly.

After I'd exhausted my store of conversational pleasantries, we continued walking in a companionable silence. I mean, I assumed it was companionable. To be honest, once it was clear that I didn't need to keep talking, I had devoted most of my attention to a sort of walking meditation, trying to eke out a bit more of my magical potential. I was about to face real combat against people who had enjoyed professional training in magical use. It was no time to slack off.

The sun had passed the high point in the sky and was well on the way to the horizon when Katsuie brought up a topic that demanded my whole attention.

"Do you understand how human armies generally wage war?"

Had he studied the tactics and strategies of Europe as well as Yashima? I didn't know why he would expect me to know such things. I had only recently traveled beyond the boundaries of the tiny village where I had been born for the first time. Even with the knowledge of my previous life to draw on I only really knew the basics of the basics, the kind of things that would generalize from a video game to the real world.

"Killing the other guy before they can kill you," I said, shaking my head. "That's about it."

"I suppose that's a reasonable goal," he said, "though it is worth paying some attention to the details."

For the next hour, he laid out the nuts and bolts of combined arms tactics for modern armies. Relatively “modern” armies, I mean.

I'd had my own thoughts on the matter, based on my own imagination, supplemented by my memories of popular media from my previous life. Considering how strong somebody like Katsuie was reputed to be, I had half expected him to lead from the front and kill all who dared to face him. After all, if Lord Ota somehow had access to a working tank, he wouldn't let it rust in a garage. He'd want it out front, demoralizing his enemies.

On the other hand, the demoralization problem ran both ways. Despite his abilities, Katsuie was only human in the end. If he were confronted with more opponents then he could handle at once and swarmed under, then the Ota armies would suffer a devastating loss of morale. I couldn't imagine a commander wanting to risk something like that, no matter how satisfying it would be to settle wars with fights between individual champions instead of entire armies.

All in all, I could only make guesses as to how magical swordsmen would fit into the usual tactics of pike and shot. I was lucky to have somebody like Katsuie who was willing to teach me the basics.

One thing that surprised me was that the current day tactics weren't quite on the level of pike and shot that I remembered reading about in wikipedia. Instead, spears were still the predominant weapon. Archers and musketeers were grouped together and mostly used for skirmishing. Swordsmen rounded out the soldiers used in Lord Ota's army.

A battle would start with the missile weapon users out in front. They would shoot at the approaching enemy army until they drew within melee range, at which point the skirmishers would pull back to the sides. The main event in any battle was the clash of spears. Sometimes a battle would be decided right then and there, if one side had an overwhelming advantage in the number or skill of their spearmen.

Absent a decisive result, the swordsmen would get a chance to play their part. They would begin the battle seeded into the mass of spearmen. Once the spears were all tangled up, the more agile swordsmen would go to work hacking away at the enemy formation. One side or the other would gain an advantage, which would tend to snowball until the losing army fled the field.

The role of sword saints in all this? Well, sometimes they were mixed in with the larger formation as well, to act as trump cards once the battle came down to sword blades. Otherwise, the sword saints would be held out and deployed as a unit. They could run faster than ordinary men, which made them ideal both to fortify shaky areas in our own lines or to break through shaky areas in the enemy lines. In the event of victory, sword saints also had a lot of bloody work to do in chasing down the enemy and turning defeat into rout.

"Like heavy cavalry!" I said.

Katsuie looked at me with a raised eyebrow. I coughed, slightly embarrassed. Of course, there was no reason to think that a village girl like me would know the first thing about cavalry.

"At least," I said, "it sounds like what cavalry does in the stories."

Actually, swordsmen should even be better at the job. For one thing, we didn't need horses. Which meant we also didn't have to worry about feeding any horses, easing the logistical burden. Magic, unlike muscle power, might also allow for some unreasonable feats like charging up a hill where the poor horsemen would have to dismount to fight.

"Of course, what I have described is the typical order of battle," Katsuie said. "I expect the coming fight to be far from typical."

I nodded. We were marching under the personal command of Lord Ota himself. Even if I hadn't had expectations based on the history from my past life, he had a well-earned reputation within the province as an unconventional military thinker. He also had a string of victories to his name. While I would much rather be watching from the sidelines, if I had to fight then I was much happier to be fighting under Lord Ota than I would be to face him on the other side of the battlefield.

My own plans for the battle focused solely on ensuring my own survival. Ideally I would be able to lurk on the fringes and perhaps find an easy fight that would let me show off a bit. My ultimate goal, after all, was to accumulate enough military merit that Lord Ota would consider me a good choice for an administrative post. It was unfortunate that in this era open warfare was seen as such an all-important endeavor, but at least I could draw on magic to tilt the playing field in my favor.