Necessary Corruption 21 (Patreon)

AU elements incoming.
Word Count: 1.4k ish

-VB-

Necessary Corruption
Chapter 21

-VB-

Helping out my new friend Lady Dokigoro-san turned out to be easier said than done.

Why?

Because I apparently had less control over my own narcotics trade than I thought, and when I came to meet with Lord Dokigoro over a trade deal, his men told me that he had died from overdosing, leaving only Lady Dokigoro and her bastard half-brother, San.

And this was where her rival house and her half-brother’s maternal family decided would be the perfect time to intervene and push their little bastard on the seat of power.

Yeah, I wasn’t having that.

“The easiest method would still be to kill your half-brother,” I commented coldly and casually while Lady Dokigoro and I sat for tea.

She glared at me. This was only the third time I mentioned it, but she found my words offensive and abrasive.

Also, said toddler half-brother was current in her arms.

“No.”

I shrugged. “Still, I have no interest in wiping out your rival family. It would set a very bad precedent, you understand?”

“Then how can you help me?” she asked me curtly.

The young woman with huge knockers wasn’t as polite as she had been when she first met me in the Land of Waves. Maybe it was the death of her father in combination with my cold calculative plans that rejected, but she’s grown a little colder.

I didn’t care much about that. She was my access to the Land of Wind, and I would have it by the end of this venture, one way or another.

“Your rival family, the Clan of Suminara, are wealthier than you, stronger than you, employ more samurai than you, have ninjas in their retinues, and even have a connection to the relatives of the Wind Daimyo. You realize that this is a very untenable situation if decisive actions are not taken?”

She narrowed her eyes, and then closed them as she nodded.

“I am all for a plan that does not require my half-brother’s death or exile. He is family.”

I respected that. She valued family more than power, but if she was going to be stubborn, then couldn’t she be at least smart about it? Merely repeating her goals gave me nothing to work with.

“What are you willing to expend to protect your power and your family?” I asked her instead. “The lands of the Dokigoro Nobility, as my own agents have surveyed, are not rich but are not poor.”

She looked down.

“... Half.”

“I’m sorry?”

She looked back up. “I promised you access to Land of Wind through me, but I know that the situation is deeply unfavorable to me. I know that you cannot work with so little. So in exchange for seeing through my current crisis, I will offer you half of everything I have.”

I set my tea cup down. “That is a very dangerous promise to make, Lady Dokigoro, especially if you write that down.”

“And I am desperate,” she hissed out. “The Suminara will definitely not let me be. They will not let my brother be. I wouldn’t be off my mark when I tell you now that my brother may simply disappear before reaching his majority and the Suminara family coming into possession my family’s lands through esoteric inheritance laws.”

She wasn’t wrong.

The Land of Wind was odd.

See, Sunagakure was not the only Hidden Ninja Village in this land. The Land of Wind was vast, and not all of it was a desert. On top of that, it was not a unified land like the Land of Rivers and the Land of Fire.

Yes, I was calling the Land of Rivers “unified,” despite how ridiculous that claim might be, because at the very least, the Land of Rivers had one daimyo whose authority the land’s nobles, ninjas, samurai, and peasants recognized.

The same could not be said about the Land of Wind.

See, the Land of Wind had three daimyos: the legitimate but weak Wind Daimyo, the self-proclaimed daimyo of Southern Wind, and the lord of barren warlords to the west.

The Hidden Sand Village and the Wind Daimyo controlled the northern and eastern fringes of the Land of Wind. This was not the most prosperous area of the Wind Country. The inlet at the southeastern corner of the Land of Wind had some agricultural centers, some manufacturing centers, and some political clout as the location of the Land of Wind’s most ancient cities and capital since time immemorial.

But more than five-sevenths of the country lived in the south along the coast and the west, where a vast network of rivers, lakes, and oasis dominated the otherwise barren and desert landscapes. When the Land of Wind had been unified before the rise of the Hidden Villages, life was great here.

The rise of the Hidden Villages, however, ruined that, because while politically supported villages like the Hidden Sand Village sought legitimacy for their work and thus became part of the political hierarchy of the Land of Wind, there were others in the fringes of this small empire who only wanted wealth. They were the origins of the Warlords of the West, who all now served under a dubiously S-ranked pseudo ninja “Lord of the Warlords of the Barrens.” All according to public information there was about the west in this small port town’s library within Dokigoro’s family lands in the southeastern fringe that was very close to the Land of Rivers.

On top of the uncontrolled Hidden Villages to the west, the nobles of the southern coast rebelled when the 57th Wind Daimyo (the current 59th Wind Daimyo’s paternal grandfather) raised taxes to fund the Hidden Sand Village, who took less than a tenth of the southern coast’s requests.

The Hidden Sand Village, throughout it all, couldn’t do shit because their population, even if every single housewife, toddler, and infirm elderly were employed, was simply not enough to cover the vast distances of the Land of Wind.

For comparison, the combined acreage of the Land of Fire, the Land of Rivers, the Land of Rain, the Land of Grass, the Land of Canyons, and the Land of Rice was smaller than the Land of Wind, and said country had less than a tenth of the population of all of those countries combined. The Hidden Sand Village also had less than a tenth of all of the combined population of the Hidden Villages in the aforementioned list.

It was, as my noble upbringing and education might point out, a failing of the Land of Wind’s geography.

It was just too fucking big.

The current Wind Daimyo, disgusted by the constant failings, offered more work to other Hidden Villages, which…

You know, you gotta pay your mercenaries well if you want them to continue to work for you.

But I digressed with my line of thought.

What did all of that have to do with the state of Dokigoro and its rival, the Suminara?

Simple: related to the Wind Daimyo’s relatives as they might be, the Wind Daimyo would not do anything should the Suminara engage in stupid actions and earn stupid rewards.

I would merely have to cause the Suminara to act first.

Perhaps a falsified report on the ever-weakening economy of the Dokigoro’s ports or even making the Dokigoro themselves seem weak militarily?

So many options…

“Then we shall wait for the Dokigoro to act first,” I lied with a huff. “This situation is untenable as it is, so we must find an opportunity where it arises; making an opportunity may be foolish now.”

Dokigoro Mira nodded hesitantly.

Oh, and another fact about the weak Land of Wind’s current condition.

There was a chance that they might not even be able to fight back if I decided to outright conquer a province or two.

Perhaps later.

Yes, perhaps later…

-VB-

“What is your will, master?”

I didn’t turn around. My ever faithful retinues sat awaiting my orders.

“Infiltrate the Suminara. Make their head feel aggressive and powerful and make the Dokigoro appear weak in their eyes,” I ordered. “Details are up to all of you but cooperate with each other. You are all my fingers and hands, not individual agents. Understood?”

“HAI!”

“Go.”

What would I ever do without these precious men and women?