Anime+
The Elusive Samurai
Tokiyuki Houjou is eight years old and terrible at everything a future shogun should be good at. Swords, bows, sitting still through lessons: all hopeless. What he can do is vanish. He dodges his tutors, finds gaps nobody else notices, and treats the whole thing like a game. Then Takauji Ashikaga turns on his clan, and in one bloody night the Kamakura shogunate is gone. Tokiyuki survives because hiding is what he does. Everyone else dies. Guilt nearly finishes what the coup started. Before he can follow his family, a priest named Yorishige Suwa grabs him and throws him onto a battlefield. Yorishige claims he has seen the future, and in it this scared boy becomes a hero. Easy to say when enemy soldiers are closing in. Tokiyuki runs. He hides. And somewhere in the panic, the old game starts to feel different, because now losing means dying. Assassins are already hunting him on the new ruler's orders. Yorishige promises allies, real ones, but first Tokiyuki has to stay alive long enough to meet them. He will not win his family's revenge with a blade. He will do it by slipping away, again and again, until the men who took everything cannot find him. Can a boy whose only skill is disappearing ever take back a throne?
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