The middle scroll opens with a march. Jimmu leaves Himuka in the south, moves east by sea and land, is beaten back at one landing and turns to approach from another direction, and finally enters the Yamato basin with a giant crow going before him. The kami are still present, still intervening, still sending signs, but the action has moved to a map that a reader in 712 could recognise, and the opponents are chieftains with places and names rather than deities.
That is the scroll's real subject: the change of register. It runs to Ojin, and along the way the material becomes less cosmological and more political. The reign of Sujin brings plague and the establishment of cults to appease it. Yamato Takeru is sent out repeatedly against the edges of the realm, kills by disguise and trickery as often as by arms, is given a sword taken from the serpent's tail in the first scroll, and dies far from home, his spirit leaving as a white bird. The expedition attributed to Empress Jingu carries the claim of authority over territory across the strait.
None of this is annalistic in the way the Chinese histories the court admired were annalistic. There are no reign dates in the Kojiki, no year by year entries. The compilers had those materials, and the Nihon Shoki produced eight years later uses them. The middle scroll instead keeps the shape of a story being told, which is one reason it was long regarded at court as the lesser of the two chronicles.