I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Nathan turned forward again and walked.

The groaning continued, never stopping entirely, shifting in direction and distance in a way that suggested either multiple sources or a single one that moved without sound. Beneath it, threading through it like something woven into the fabric of the path itself, was another sound — subtler, rhythmic, almost like breathing. Too slow for a living thing, too deliberate for wind. It pulsed from the ground itself, or seemed to, a low vibration he felt more in his feet than heard with his ears.

The mist thickened further.

He could no longer see his own hand at arm’s length. He brought Kyomei closer to his body, not from fear of losing the blade but because the space was closing in ways he could not fully account for, and a wide guard in near-zero visibility was an invitation to have the weapon caught on something. He moved with the blade close and his awareness extended, every sense he had working to compensate for what his eyes could no longer provide.

The path dipped.

He caught it just in time — a slight downward grade that shifted his weight forward unexpectedly, the ground angling in a way the flatness behind him had not prepared him for. He slowed further, feeling ahead with each step. The descent was shallow but it was real, and as he followed it downward the mist changed color at the edges of his perception. Something pale moved through it, not white like the mist itself but a different white, faintly luminescent, there and gone so quickly he almost convinced himself he had imagined it.

He did not think he had imagined it.

Another groan rolled through the dark, close this time, close enough that he felt it in his sternum before he heard it. He stopped and held himself completely still. The sound was not ahead. It was below him somehow, beneath the ground, a grief so deep it had burrowed into the earth and stayed there.

Kyomei felt warm in his hand.

He noticed it then — a faint heat in the blade, not the warmth of his own grip, something coming from within the metal itself, subtle but there. He did not know what it meant. He had not expected it. He kept it noted, kept moving.

The mist pressed closer, and somewhere in the white and the cold and the groaning dark, something was beginning to stir.

Nathan stopped moving.

He closed his eyes, shutting out the white — it had been useless anyway, more hindrance than help, filling his vision with nothing but formless pale noise. Without it, the rest of him sharpened. He stilled his breathing and let the other senses spread outward, feeling into the space around him the way a hand feels across a surface in the dark.

And then he understood.

They were everywhere. Surrounding him completely, close on all sides, the pressure of them detectable not through sound alone but through something more primitive — a wrongness in the air, a tension in the mist itself, the way the groaning had shifted from ambient to directional in a dozen places at once. Whatever these things were, they had been patient. They had been waiting for him to stop.

He barely had time to register it before they moved.

They came from all directions simultaneously — low, fast, scuttling across the ground with a lurching, animal speed that suggested bodies built wrong, joints bent in directions that had no business bending. He caught the first impression of them in the half-second before impact: humanoid shapes, pale as bone, faces split open around mouths too wide and too full of teeth, fingers ending in curved black nails long enough to open a man from collar to hip. Their skin looked torn, their lips sliced at the corners into permanent, ragged grins. They were not merely ugly. They were wrong in the way that some things are wrong, deeply and completely, as though something had tried to build a person from memory and gotten most of it horrifyingly right.

Nathan was already moving.

Kyomei carved a wide arc before the first one reached him, and he felt the resistance of flesh and the release of something dark and wet in the air. He pushed forward without stopping, eyes still shut, reading the space through sound and pressure and the displacement of mist where bodies moved through it. Two came at him from the left — he dropped low and let them collide with nothing, then rose and caught one on the backswing. Another lunged from behind. He twisted at the last instant and it skimmed past him, nails dragging across his shoulder and opening three burning lines through his clothing and skin.

He kept moving.

The problem was the noise. It was layered and constant, rising from all around in overlapping waves — shrieks and groans woven together into something that made it nearly impossible to isolate individual sounds or track separate threats. It was not accidental. The mist was already deadening his senses, wrapping them in cotton, softening edges that needed to be sharp, and the cacophony these things produced only compounded it. They were hunting in concert, or something close to it, driving his perception into uselessness the way wolves cut a deer away from the herd.

Spatter!!!

He was landing cuts, clean ones when he could manage them, sloppy ones when he couldn’t. But for every one he put down another pressed forward, and the mist gave them cover he couldn’t account for. A set of nails found his forearm. Something caught the side of his face — a glancing blow, shallow but stinging. He felt the warm trickle along his jaw. Another reached his thigh, dragging deep enough to make the leg briefly unreliable beneath him.

None of it stopped him. But all of it accumulated.

He ran, carving a path forward rather than simply defending ground, feeling the firmness of the road beneath his feet and trusting it to lead somewhere. The groaning intensified behind him as more of them gave chase, their sounds multiplying, converging, the whole mass of them pressing like a tide. He was faster than they were individually, he could feel that much, but the mist was equalizing it, slowing his instincts, thickening the space between stimulus and response in ways he could not fully compensate for.

Then something else shifted in the air.

It was not like the others. It was larger — he felt it before he could hear it, a displacement of pressure so significant it registered almost as physical weight moving through the mist toward him. Fast. Direct. Big enough that the smaller ones scattered from its path.

Nathan’s eyes snapped upward even though they were still closed.

He threw himself backward.

The thing passed through the space where he had been standing close enough that the air moved across his face. But the smaller Yokai had been directly behind him and they came up instinctively — too many of them, leaping from multiple angles, converging fast. Nathan’s hand shot out and caught the hilt of Kyomei in both hands, reversing his grip.

He had wanted to avoid this.

The dark magic that lived inside him was not clean power — it was power bought at a price that never stopped compounding. It contained what Pandora’s curse had left in him, the rot and the hunger of it, and the only thing preventing it from consuming him from the inside out was the constant effort of keeping it confined. Releasing it, even partially, was always a negotiation with something that did not negotiate in good faith.

But there were too many of them, and the mist was winning, and he had no more hands to spend.

He let it out.

Darkness moved through Kyomei like ink dropped in water — spreading fast, filling the blade from hilt to tip, and the cursed black steel received it the way it was always meant to. A natural pairing. A darkness recognizing its own kind. He swung down with both hands and poured everything into it.

The sound was not a sound so much as a pressure — a concussive force that started at the blade and rolled outward in a wave, crashing down into the mass of Yokai below him and driving them into the earth with a violence that shook the ground like a giant’s footfall.

BADOOOM!!

The impact traveled through the soles of his feet, up through his legs, rattling his back teeth. The smaller creatures barely had time to react. The darkness swallowed them whole, compressed them, and left the path beneath his feet cracked and scattered with stillness.

Nathan landed in a crouch and held it, fighting the pull — the magic wanted more, always wanted more, pressing against the walls he kept it behind, testing the mortar between the stones. He locked it down, contained it, stood up.

The larger one was still alive.

He could feel it. Somewhere in the mist, circling now, recalibrating. Whatever it was, it had seen enough to be cautious, which meant it was smarter than the others. That made it more dangerous, not less.

Nathan’s ears were nearly useless. The mist had seen to that — his hearing felt stuffed with wool, sounds arriving flat and directionless, stripped of the spatial information that made them useful. His eyes were still closed and still worthless. His smell found nothing but damp cold and something faintly rotten underneath it. He was down to the last layer of perception, the one that existed beneath all the others, the one that had no proper name but that had saved his life more times than he could count.

Instinct.

He let everything else go quiet inside him. Breath slow. Body loose. Kyomei held low in both hands, dark still faintly coiling along the edge of the blade, waiting.

He stood there in the white and the cold and the groaning nothing, and he waited.

A breath.

Not heard — felt. A subtle shift in the density of the mist to his right, a fluctuation so minor that any other person alive would have called it imagination. Nathan did not hear the breath. He felt it in the way the air moved, in the way the cold thinned by a fraction where something was expelling warmth.

He stepped left.

He swung vertical.

BADOOOM.

The wave of darkness left Kyomei in a straight vertical line, fast and absolute, and it found the creature mid-lunge. The blade passed through it cleanly — not through mist, not through empty air, but through mass and resistance, the drag of something real. The larger Yokai split apart, the two halves of it separating and falling away to either side, and hit the ground with a weight that sent tremors through the earth.

Silence rushed in.

The groaning had stopped. The mist did not clear, but the quality of it changed — the pressure lifted slightly, the cold became ordinary cold again, the darkness behind his eyelids ceased to feel inhabited. Nathan stayed still a moment longer, waiting to see if anything else rose to fill the space.

Nothing did.

He opened his eyes, slowly. The mist remained thick and white and directionless around him, the path barely distinguishable from the ground on either side. Blood ran along his forearm in a thin line. His shoulder burned where the nails had caught him. He could feel several other places that would ache properly in the morning.

He exhaled, controlled and quiet, and pressed the darkness back inside.

But then he heard an eerie snicker ringing behind him that sounded like an old woman.

Nathan knew immediately what it meant.

One of Ayame’s women warned about the legends and that old eerie snicker sounded much like what would belong to that extremely danger evil Yokai.

The Yamamba.