I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Night had settled fully over Kastoria’s capital by the time the three of them made their way back through the city streets toward the castle. The market stalls had folded away their awnings, replaced by the warmer, quieter atmosphere of evening—lanterns burning at intervals along the stone paths, the distant sound of music from somewhere deeper in the entertainment district, the comfortable reduction of crowd noise to something more intimate and unhurried.

Ayaka walked with the satisfied looseness of someone whose day had gone exactly as needed. Akane moved with her customary composed grace, though there was a softness around her eyes that hadn’t been there this morning—the visible residue of a day genuinely well spent.

They had gotten what they’d needed from today. Both of them. Nathan could tell, and something about knowing that settled quietly in him.

“I still cannot believe you have that many wives, Onii-chan,” Ayaka muttered as the castle gates came into view ahead, her tone carrying the particular quality of someone who had been intermittently processing this information throughout the afternoon and kept arriving at the same mildly staggered conclusion.

“You think so?” Nathan replied without particular perturbation.

He supposed that from an outside perspective—certainly from the perspective of someone who had grown up with him in the ordinary modern world of Japan, where such things were not merely unusual but legally impossible—the number was extraordinary.

But somewhere past a certain point, the internal accounting had simply stopped feeling remarkable. Each relationship had its own weight, its own reality, its own reasons. The cumulative number had become less significant than the individual truths of which it was composed.

“I find myself more surprised by the number of children, Onii-sama,” Akane added quietly from his other side, with the thoughtful precision of someone identifying the part of the information that had actually landed hardest for her.

“Right! That’s the real thing!” Ayaka brightened suddenly, turning toward Nathan with the expression of someone who had just remembered an important grievance. “You should have brought at least one of them! They’re basically our nephews and nieces, aren’t they? We have a right to meet them!”

Her enthusiasm was entirely genuine—Ayaka had always had an instinctive warmth toward children, even when she’d have denied it strenuously to most people.

Nathan considered this honestly.

He could have, in principle. But the reality of each child’s situation made it considerably more complicated than it sounded.

Archidamus had only just been born—too young for any journey to be reasonable. Azarel, born several months prior, was technically old enough to travel, but Azariah’s protectiveness of their son was something Nathan had both profound respect for and no intention of crossing without necessity. Azarel was heir to Tenebria, grandson of the Demon King, which meant his existence carried the kind of political weight that made his safety a legitimate strategic concern rather than mere maternal anxiety.

Then there was Idena—his daughter with Medea. But bringing Idena to Kastoria meant either leaving Medea behind or bringing Medea along, and Medea’s relationship with the concept of her daughter being in any potentially unsafe environment was such that Nathan genuinely feared what she might do if something as minor as a mosquito bit Idena’s skin within Kastoria’s capital.

A diplomatic incident was the optimistic outcome of that scenario.

His other children were scattered across distances that made the journey impractical for this particular visit.

“Next time,” he said. “Or perhaps more practically—once the ceremony is finished and Haruka’s position is secured, you could both visit Tenebria’s capital yourselves.”

Ayaka’s expression transformed immediately into something bright and decided. “Yes! Absolutely yes! We’ll definitely do that! Right, Akane?” She looked at her sister with the energy of someone already planning the details.

“I’m impatient to meet them,” Akane confirmed with a genuine smile—the rare, unguarded kind she kept for moments that actually moved her. “All of them, Onii-sama.”

“If you love children that much,” Nathan said then, his tone carrying a slight smile, “you are both more than old enough to have your own. Nothing prevents either of you.”

The words were spoken lightly, with affectionate pragmatism rather than any particular agenda.

What followed was a strange, weighted silence.

It lasted several seconds longer than it should have for such an unremarkable observation.

“I mean…” Ayaka began, her voice carrying a careful quality that was quite unlike her usual directness. She looked at Nathan with an expression that was simultaneously pointed and slightly frustrated. “Finding a good man is considerably harder than finding a good woman, you know? Quality is simply rarer on one side of that equation.”

“I won’t disagree with that,” Nathan said with complete sincerity.

“Are you worried about our love lives, Onii-sama?” Akane asked, turning to look at him with quiet attention.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Nathan replied, his tone shifting almost imperceptibly—the lightness leaving it, something more serious and protective settling in its place. “You’re both precious to me. I don’t want either of you ending up with men who don’t deserve you. That concern doesn’t require explanation.”

“Then—!” Ayaka started, her voice carrying sudden energy, leaning slightly forward.

Akane’s hand closed gently around her sister’s arm.

Ayaka turned to look at her twin. Akane gave a single small, deliberate shake of her head.

Not now. Not the right moment. The meaning was entirely clear between them.

Ayaka exhaled through her nose—a short, quietly frustrated sound—and subsided. Her expression as she looked back at Nathan carried something caught between longing and mild exasperation at a situation she couldn’t quite resolve.

Was he genuinely oblivious? Or was he aware of exactly what she’d been about to say and choosing, for his own reasons, to neither invite it nor close it off?

Neither sister could tell, and that particular uncertainty was its own very specific kind of frustrating.

“Children can be complicated though,” Akane shifted the subject with smooth composure, her tone returning to something more reflective. She looked at Nathan with careful eyes. “Onii-sama—you mentioned earlier that some of your children are scattered. That there are some you haven’t even held yet.”

Nathan’s expression changed.

Not dramatically—he was too controlled for that. But the comfortable ease of the evening settled into something more complicated, more inward, less available.

“Yes,” he said simply.

Sara. His daughter with Amelia and Karen—his daughter with Aisha, born into circumstances he hadn’t been present for, living a life whose daily texture he couldn’t picture because he had never seen it.

He hadn’t held either of them.

The reason was practical and strategically sound when examined in the cold light of planning: stepping into the Light Empire’s capital now—with the protective presence of the Light Gods watching over it like vigilant sentinels—would reveal his survival immediately. Everything he had built around the assumption of his death, every plan that depended on his enemies believing him gone, would unravel at once.

The Light Gods would see the change in the divine fabric the moment he crossed into their sanctioned territory. There was no disguising that.

With Aisha and Karen, the calculus was different but no simpler. He could perhaps find a way to reach Aisha. But reaching Aisha meant proximity to Amelia. And telling Amelia he was alive—

He couldn’t. Not yet.

Not because he feared her reaction, or feared anything about the encounter itself. But because he had a plan. A specific, carefully constructed plan that required certain people to continue believing certain things for it to function. Amelia’s knowledge of his survival would change her behavior in ways that would inevitably reach the wrong ears at the wrong moment.

The fewer people who knew, the better the plan would eventually work.

He had accepted that reasoning when he’d made the decision. He still accepted it now.

It didn’t make the image of two daughters he’d never held feel any less like a weight that lived somewhere below rational calculation, in a place that logic didn’t fully reach.

But that was the price he needed to pay.

He had made that calculation clearly and without sentimentality when the plan had first taken shape in his mind, and he had revisited it enough times since to know it held. Keeping his survival hidden from Amelia meant Sara didn’t know her father was alive. Keeping it hidden from Aisha meant Karen grew up without that knowledge either.

Every instinct he had resisted that reality.

But instinct wasn’t the same as wisdom, and he had learned that distinction through enough costly mistakes to have genuine respect for it now.

If Amelia knew he lived, she would react—because she was Amelia, and she was constitutionally incapable of receiving information of that magnitude and simply sitting quietly with it. Her reaction would change her behavior, however carefully she tried to conceal it. Changed behavior reached people. People talked. The wrong ears were always listening, and the Gods of Light were patient observers who noticed inconsistencies in the humans they watched over.

If his survival reached the Light Gods before he was ready—before the plan had reached the point where exposure no longer mattered because the outcome was already determined—then everything built on that foundation would collapse at once.

Sara and Karen, kept in ignorance, couldn’t accidentally reveal what they didn’t know. Couldn’t behave differently around people who were watching for exactly those kinds of differences.

A small and defined amount of time sacrificed. A specific period of absence, painful and deliberately chosen, in exchange for a future where he could actually be present for his children without the constant threat of divine forces who wanted him destroyed hovering over everything.

That was the trade. He had accepted it. He accepted it still.

“I have too many enemies to deal with simultaneously,” Nathan said as they passed through the castle’s outer gate into the lamplit interior courtyard, his voice carrying the measured weight of someone articulating something they had thought about long and carefully. “Managing them requires making certain difficult decisions. Keeping my children from knowing I’m alive is one of those decisions—made specifically to keep them safe from the consequences of being connected to me. As long as the Gods of Light believe I’m not a threat, Sara and Karen are simply children. The moment those Gods learn otherwise, they become leverage.”

Ayaka and Akane walked beside him in silence, and neither spoke immediately. The comfortable warmth of the evening had shifted into something more serious, the lightness of their shared afternoon receding as the full weight of what Nathan was describing settled over them.

Perhaps they hadn’t fully understood until this moment what it actually meant—not in the abstract sense of knowing he had enemies, but in the concrete sense of what living inside that reality required of him daily.

“But Onii-sama,” Akane said after a moment, her voice careful and precise, “if Kastoria commits military forces to attacking the Light Empire alongside Tenebria, we will be drawn into that conflict regardless. That consequence doesn’t change based on whether Ayaka and I personally participate in the campaign.”

It was a sharp observation, delivered without accusation. Simply true.

“Possibly,” Nathan acknowledged. “But there’s a meaningful difference between Kastoria being a supporting party in a war that Tenebria is leading and the Heroes of Kastoria being present on the battlefield itself.” He paused briefly. “The Light Empire’s attention—and more importantly the Light Gods’ attention—has been fixed on Tenebria and on me specifically since long before any of this began. Their hatred of demons isn’t recent and it isn’t divided. It’s singular and it’s old.”

He said it without bitterness, as simple established fact.

“Their focus will remain on Tenebria. On me. Kastoria’s army provides weight and strategic value, but it doesn’t become the target. You, specifically—if you were present on that battlefield—would become a variable I couldn’t fully control. And I don’t accept variables I can’t control when it comes to people I care about.”

The logic was clean and the feeling underneath it was equally clear, and neither sister could argue against either.

Akane lowered her eyes slightly—not in defeat, but in the particular quiet of someone genuinely absorbing what they’ve been told and letting it land properly.

Ayaka said nothing, which was itself significant. When Ayaka had no immediate words, the thing that had silenced her had done real work.

The three of them continued through the castle’s inner corridors without speaking, the sounds of the building settling around them—distant voices, the soft footfalls of night guards completing their rounds, the occasional flicker of a torch in a wall bracket responding to some imperceptible draft.

It was the comfortable silence of people who didn’t need to fill space with words to feel connected. They had spent enough of the day in each other’s company that quiet now felt like continuation rather than distance.

They reached the branching corridor where their paths divided—Nathan’s guest quarters in one direction, the Heroes’ residential wing in another.

And after some goodnights words they parted ways going to their respective rooms.