I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

“Daimyo Yorimasa.”

“Yorimasa,” Nathan repeated, letting the name settle.

Ayame gave a slow nod.

“One of the Four Daimyos. He controls the Hebi-Yama Domain — you can see the mountain from Minato if you know where to look. That large peak to the east.” She paused. “I assumed you had noticed it.”

Nathan gave a brief nod. He had seen the mountain. The silhouette of it had loomed over the city’s skyline since the moment he arrived, dark and imposing against the pale sky. He simply had not thought much of it. A mountain was a mountain. The idea that a domain sat carved into its rock had not crossed his mind.

He filed the information away and moved past it. What mattered now was the irritation crawling steadily beneath his skin.

“What exactly does he want with the women here?” he asked. “Why target them?”

Ayame’s expression remained composed, but something colder settled into her eyes. “Because of me,” she said plainly. “It is that simple. Yorimasa has developed something of an obsession — a deeply unpleasant one. I refused him, and men like him do not take refusal well. He cannot reach me directly, so he reaches through my women instead, harassing them, hurting them, applying pressure until he imagines I will simply give in out of exhaustion.” A short pause. “He will not stop. That is the nature of it.”

Nathan studied her. “Does he know who you really are?”

“He does,” she said, without hesitation. “He has known for some time.” Her gaze drifted slightly, as though measuring something distant. “He hasn’t breathed a word of it to Norihiro, and that is the one intelligent thing he has done in all of this. He knows what would happen if Norihiro found out. Norihiro would want me as a wife — not out of any feeling, but because my blood ties to the royal line would give him a legal foothold for his ambitions in the north and the capital. The moment Norihiro learns I am alive and reachable, he will send everything he has into Minato to drag me out.” Her voice remained even, but the weight behind it was unmistakable. “Yorimasa knows all of this, and he holds it over me like a blade. Either way, whether I stay or go, my women will keep suffering for it.”

A silence fell over the room.

Nathan stood still, turning everything she had said over in his mind. He had come here with a simple enough plan — find Chiyo, find Ayame, compel her to leave for the capital one way or another. He had even entertained, briefly, the considerably less elegant option of dragging her out if it came to it. But her words had closed that door. She was not simply being stubborn. She was bound here by something real.

“I’ll kill him,” Nathan said.

The room went quiet in a different way.

For a moment, no one moved. Then, one by one, the women around the chamber exchanged glances — wide-eyed, disbelieving, uncertain whether they had heard him correctly. He had said it the way someone might say they intended to step outside for air. Flat, unhurried, almost bored. He had just announced his intention to kill one of the Four Daimyos of Southern Kastoria, men so untouchable that even the most reckless criminals in Minato spoke their names carefully — and he had done it without so much as blinking.

Ayame, however, did not look away.

She felt the corners of her mouth pull upward before she could stop them. Something shifted in the way she was watching him, a quiet recalibration, the kind that happened when a person turned out to be considerably more interesting than expected. He was calm. Not the calm of someone performing confidence, but the calm of someone for whom this was not a remarkable statement. He had already cut down Nobusuke. Then Morosuke. And now he was extending that same tired, unhurried certainty toward a Daimyo.

Had she known what he had done to Daimyo Sadamasa — what had truly happened between them — she would have been shaken far more deeply.

“Are you being serious?” she asked, studying him.

Nathan’s eyes found hers. The look in them was cold and entirely without theater. “You want him gone,” he said. “So I’ll remove him. And when it’s done, you’ll come with me to the capital.” He turned toward the exit as though the matter were already settled.

“You cannot simply walk up to his mountain,” Ayame said, her voice sharpening. “He will see you coming long before you reach him — and if he catches even a rumor of what happened to Morosuke, he will not wait to find out more. He will run straight to Norihiro, and everything I have been protecting will unravel in a single night.”

Nathan stopped. He turned back toward her, irritation surfacing clearly now.

“Explain.”

“Morosuke answered to the Daimyos. Word of his death will travel, and when it does, Yorimasa will start asking questions. If he hears about a wandering ronin in Minato matching the description of the man who killed Morosuke, he won’t stay to fight — he will disappear. And a man who disappears to Norihiro’s side, carrying my secret with him, is far more dangerous than one sitting in a keep.” She held his gaze steadily. “You will not get a second chance at him once he runs.”

Nathan looked at her for a moment, then walked back toward the center of the room.

“Then what do you suggest?” he said.

Ayame’s smile returned. “You go to him on his ground, inside his own city, before the news reaches him and before he has any reason to expect a threat. That way, there is nowhere to retreat to and no time to make decisions.” She glanced toward one of the women standing nearby. “Bring the map.”

The woman moved immediately, producing a folded document and spreading it across the table. Nathan stepped forward.

The map was detailed — Minato’s layout was familiar enough, but beyond the city’s northern edge, the terrain climbed steeply. The mountain dominated the upper half of the parchment, and at its base, tucked against the rock, a settlement was marked with precise, careful lines.

Nathan’s eyes moved across it in silence.

Ayame stood at his side, close enough that he could have reached out without effort, her eyes tracing the same routes his were.

“Hebi-Yama,” she said quietly. “The Snake Mountain. His city sits at its foot, beyond it. One road in, one road out, unless you know the paths that don’t appear on maps.”

“Are there other paths?” Nathan asked, his eyes still moving across the map.

“Several,” Ayame said, leaning slightly over the parchment. “But Yorimasa is a cautious man — more cautious than most give him credit for. He keeps guards rotating on nearly every road that feeds into the domain, watching for anything that looks out of place.” Her finger traced one of the longer routes curving around the mountain’s base. “If you travel with a caravan headed his way, you blend in with the flow of merchants and laborers. More bodies means less scrutiny, and the journey is faster than going alone on foot.”

Nathan had already stopped listening.

His attention had snagged on something else entirely — a thin line marked in white near the mountain’s western face, cutting sharply between two ridges. It was drawn differently from the other roads, shorter, more direct, and conspicuously unadorned with the kind of detail that suggested anyone had bothered to map it properly. It looked less like a road and more like a gap someone had noticed once and then decided never to speak of again.

He pressed his finger to it. “What about this one?”

Ayame’s expression shifted the moment she saw where he was pointing. “You cannot take that path,” she said. “No one takes the Kiro no Komichi.”

“No one takes it,” Nathan said, glancing up at her. “Not even Yorimasa’s patrols?”

“No.”

“Then it’s the best route,” he said simply, looking back at the map.

“You’re not understanding me.” Ayame’s voice lost its composed edge. “That path is not simply difficult or poorly maintained. Everyone who has entered it has died. Every single one of them. It is not a road anymore — it is a graveyard that keeps its dead.” Her eyes held his with unusual gravity. “The Yamamba lives there.”

The word settled over the room like a cold draft through an open door. Around them, several of the women drew visibly inward — shoulders pulling close, hands tightening, a few faces turning away as if even the name itself carried something they didn’t want to touch.

“Yamamba,” Nathan repeated.

“A Yokai,” Ayame said. “One of the most dangerous in existence. She is not like the spirits you may have crossed paths with before. She is older than the mountain, and she is not tame, and she does not negotiate.” She kept her gaze steady on him, but there was something behind it — a genuine unease she wasn’t entirely hiding. “That path belongs to her. It has for longer than anyone in this city can remember.”

Nathan thought briefly of Rena’s companions — the creatures that had drifted at the edges of firelight, strange and unsettling in their own right. They had been dangerous in their way. But the reaction in this room told him clearly enough that whatever lived on the Kiro no Komichi was a different matter altogether.

He turned away from the map.

“I’ll take that path,” he said.

For a moment, Ayame simply stared at him.

“Do you have a death wish?”

The words came out before she could dress them in composure. She caught herself almost immediately, but the shock had already broken through.

Nathan glanced back at her, unhurried. The look on his face was the same it had been since he entered the room, flat, measured, unmoved.

“I don’t die,” he said.

And then he turned and walked toward the exit as though the conversation had reached its natural conclusion.