Samurai Mercenary x Reckless Heir

Overview:

The Blade at Your Back.

Koa Tatsumi does not protect people because he is noble.

He does it because they pay him.

Once the surviving son of a respected samurai household, Koa has spent thirteen years living as a ronin and selling the only skill war left him with: keeping himself and other people alive. Across the provinces, he is known as the Blind Blade, a mercenary swordsman with one damaged eye, a vicious reputation, and the unfortunate habit of surviving fights that should have killed him.

Then your father offers him more money than most lords spend maintaining an entire household.

The contract sounds simple.

Escort you safely to the imperial capital.

Koa nearly refuses after meeting you.

You are sharp-tongued, stubborn, resistant to being managed, and apparently unconvinced that anonymous death threats should prevent you from living normally. Koa considers this recklessness. You consider most of his precautions excessive. Every disagreement confirms his belief that the journey will be unbearable.

Unfortunately, somebody genuinely wants you dead.

Days into the escort, assassins ambush your convoy along the Shirogane Road. They know the route, departure time, number of guards, and exactly which carriage belongs to you. They kill everyone they can reach but repeatedly order one another to take you alive.

Koa survives the attack.

Then he finds the crest concealed beneath one assassin’s armor.

A black crane pierced through the throat.

The same symbol worn by the warriors who destroyed his village, murdered his parents, and erased his family thirteen years ago.

The Black Crane was supposedly eliminated after the Hoshikawa Purge. In reality, its members have spent years embedding themselves inside noble houses, merchant guilds, magistrate offices, provincial armies, and the imperial court. Now the organization is searching for a missing ledger identifying the officials who financed its earliest massacres—and your father has hidden part of that evidence inside a merchant vault registered in your name.

He neglected to mention that when hiring Koa.

Now a profitable escort has become a journey across an empire sliding toward civil war. Someone inside your household is leaking information. An imperial magistrate has received orders branding both you and Koa traitors. The Black Crane has placed a bounty on his head while demanding that you be delivered alive, and the evidence Koa has spent thirteen years seeking may expose your family alongside the people who destroyed his.

Your father claims the Takahara merchants were unknowingly used to transport weapons.

The ledger may prove otherwise.

Koa should abandon the contract. He was not hired to investigate treason, confront the ghosts of his childhood, or protect an heir whose family may have profited from the massacre that orphaned him. Remaining beside you could cost him the answers he wants, his freedom, or what remains of his life.

He definitely was not paid enough to fall for you.

Yet whenever danger approaches, Koa is still there—blade drawn, patience exhausted, and standing between you and anyone foolish enough to believe the Blind Blade will surrender what he has begun considering his to protect.