I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

The moment the soldier’s remains settled into snow, Nathan was already moving.

Whatever patience had governed their approach through the domain’s lower streets was gone now, replaced by something more direct. He walked quickly, Yukihime keeping pace at his arm, and the path narrowed as the mountain reasserted itself — buildings giving way to bare rock faces, the air thinning further, the cold sharpening into something with edges. The summit pressed down above them like a held breath.

The guards thickened as they climbed. Pairs became clusters, clusters became full patrol formations moving in rotating patterns around the stone stairway that served as the temple’s formal approach — broad steps carved directly into the mountain face, flanked by lanterns whose flames burned low and orange in the altitude wind. Nobody was getting up those stairs without being seen, questioned and likely detained.

Nathan found a jut of rock below the summit’s lip, sheltered from sight lines on three sides, and stopped there.

“This will do,” he said.

He pulled Yukihime against him and drove his heel into the ground, launching them both straight up — not arcing, not drifting, but a clean vertical burst that cleared the temple’s rear wall in seconds and deposited them silently on the flat stone behind the structure’s back face.

He released her and took stock.

The Orochi Temple was larger up close than its silhouette had suggested — a heavy, dark-timbered thing built into the mountain itself, its rear wall flush against bare rock as though the peak had simply grown around it. Stone lanterns lined the perimeter in long rows, casting just enough light to work against anyone trying to move unseen. Guards moved along every visible approach — not restlessly, not loosely, but with the calibrated spacing of men who had drilled their routes until the paths wore grooves into their thinking.

“He’ll be inside,” Nathan said, more to himself than to her.

“Should we kill them all?” Yukihime asked from beside him, her voice carrying the pleasant, untroubled tone of someone suggesting a minor household task.

Nathan looked at her sideways. “Can you do it cleanly? All of them, no noise, nothing that raises an alarm?”

“Yes,” she said simply.

“Then do it. Stay hidden while you work.” He held her gaze for a moment. “I’ll find a way inside and finish the Daimyo.”

“Gladly.” She dipped her chin with a small, bright nod.

Then Nathan stepped away, and her hand slipped from his arm, and the warmth of that contact evaporated in the cold mountain air. He didn’t look back, but behind him Yukihime stood quite still for a moment, fingers curling slightly at her side, watching him go with an expression that was equal parts resolve and something considerably softer.

Nathan activated the Stealth Cape.

His body folded out of visibility — not a shimmer, not a slow fade, just gone, the space he occupied suddenly returning nothing to the eye. He had forgotten, in the stretch of time since he’d last needed it, how cleanly the skill worked. He moved along the temple’s outer wall without sound, looping the perimeter, and the guards he passed at arm’s length showed nothing — no flinch, no pause, no hand going to a weapon. Simple foot soldiers. The skill’s ceiling was obvious, but its floor was reliable.

The temple’s entrance faced the summit drop, flanked by two stone serpent carvings whose hollow eyes caught the lantern light and held it in orange points. Nathan passed between them and through the open threshold, and the cold outside became a different kind of cold — enclosed, still, the accumulated chill of stone that never warmed.

Stairs led downward.

He descended without hesitation, one hand drawing Kyomei from its sheath as the steps curved below the surface. The mountain swallowed the outside world sound by sound — wind, the creak of lantern chains, the distant footfalls of guards — until all of it was gone and there was only his own breath and the low, particular silence of underground spaces.

The feeling came on him gradually, then all at once.

Something wrong. Not a sound or a scent or anything he could point to — just a creeping wrongness at the base of his spine, the wordless signal that experience plants in a person when they have spent enough time in dangerous places. He slowed without stopping, grip tightening on Kyomei’s handle, and chose each step with more deliberate care.

The guards had thinned to nothing. Then disappeared entirely.

At the bottom of the stairs, a tunnel opened before him — rough-cut stone walls weeping cold moisture, the darkness total except for the far end, where candlelight bled through in a dull amber glow. He could hear something as he moved toward it. Low and rhythmic, on the edge of comprehension — not quite voices, not quite silence. Prayers, perhaps, or something that wore prayers like a borrowed coat.

The tunnel opened into a chamber.

It was cavernous — far larger than the temple above suggested, as though the mountain had been hollow here long before anyone thought to build over it. Candlelight moved along the walls in unsteady rows, shadows swelling and contracting with each draft that found its way through the rock. The ceiling vanished into darkness overhead. The air tasted of incense and something older, something mineral and cold.

A figure knelt near the center of the chamber, facing an altar that occupied the far wall — a structure of stacked stone and serpent iconography, draped in offerings that had long since gone dry and colorless. The figure’s shoulders rose and fell with the slow cadence of deep prayer, robes pooled on the stone around them.

Nathan stepped into the chamber.

“Are you here to kill me?”

The voice came without hesitation, without alarm, without even the small physical startle of a person surprised. The figure simply spoke into the candlelit air as though the question had been waiting there for some time and Nathan had finally arrived to answer it.

Nathan stopped.

He wasn’t surprised the man had sensed him — the Stealth Cape was a C-rank skill. Against trained soldiers moving on routine, it was more than sufficient. Against someone sitting alone in a dark temple who had apparently been expecting company, it was a formality at best. He deactivated it without ceremony, his outline returning to the dim light of the chamber, and raised Kyomei to a ready position.

“You’re a problem that needs removing,” Nathan said. “So yes.”

The figure rose from its knees and turned, and the candlelight found his face.

Yorimasa was slender — thinner than a man of his station usually carried himself, as though the flesh had been pared back to exactly what was needed and no more. His robes were fine but worn soft with use. His face was composed, almost pleasant, and might have been unremarkable except for his mouth, which stretched a fraction too wide across his face — just enough to register as wrong before the eye could decide exactly why, like something drawn by someone who had been told what a human face looked like but had never quite seen one.

He smiled with that mouth.

“Did Ayame send you?”

Nathan didn’t answer. His eyes moved through the chamber instead — along the walls, the ceiling, the altar, the corners where the candlelight didn’t reach. Taking inventory. The wrongness he had felt on the stairs had not gone away. If anything, now that he stood in the room, it was louder.

He brought his attention back to Yorimasa. The Daimyo stood watching him with a patience that matched nothing about this situation — no fear, no bluster, no hand reaching for any weapon. Just a man standing in his underground temple with too-wide a mouth and the expression of someone who already knew how the next few minutes were going to go.

Nathan wasn’t sure yet whether that confidence was delusion or information.

The silence stretched for exactly as long as Yorimasa’s smile did.

Then Nathan moved.

He crossed the chamber in a fraction of a second, Kyomei already swinging in a clean horizontal arc aimed at the Daimyo’s neck — fast enough that the candle flames along the walls bent in his wake, fast enough that there should have been no answer to it. For one suspended instant as the blade cut through the air where Yorimasa’s head had been, Nathan thought it was done.

It wasn’t.

Yorimasa had simply… ducked. Not stumbled, not thrown himself aside in desperate survival reflex. He had folded downward beneath the blade’s path with a fluid, unhurried motion, like water parting around a stone, and now straightened back to standing — but straightening wasn’t quite the right word for what his body did. The motion moved through him in the wrong sequence, joints finding extension in an order that no human spine accommodated, a slow uncoiling that took just long enough to register before it completed and he stood upright again, smiling.

Nathan had already landed several paces back, Kyomei raised, eyes narrow.

Not speed. He had cleared that much immediately. It hadn’t been reflexes or anticipation that saved the man. Something else had moved him, something that didn’t originate in the same architecture that governed how people normally occupied their bodies.

“My,” Yorimasa said pleasantly, tilting his head. The candlelight caught his too-wide mouth and did nothing flattering with it. “That was quite fast. You’d be the one who walked through Morosuke’s castle at Minato, then?”

Nathan said nothing.

Yorimasa’s chuckle came from somewhere low in his chest — a sliding, hissing thing that didn’t sound entirely like laughter — and then the aura hit.

It erupted from him without warning, a deep, sickly green that didn’t so much radiate as pour, flooding outward from his body in waves that pressed against the walls and set the candle flames twisting into shapes they shouldn’t have made. The smell of it reached Nathan a half-second later — damp stone and rot and something serpentine, ancient and deeply unpleasant, the kind of presence that the body registers as wrong before the mind catches up. The chamber felt suddenly smaller. The shadows in the corners thickened.

Nathan’s jaw tightened slightly. His footing didn’t shift.

“You will need considerably more than whatever you brought to Minato,” Yorimasa said, his voice smooth beneath the roiling green pressure, “if you intend to leave this room with my head.”

Nathan lifted Kyomei.

The blade answered the chamber in its own way — the cursed edge darkening as though drinking the candlelight, the eerie, resonant aura that clung to it like a second shadow rising to meet the room’s atmosphere. Something in the air between the two of them changed, two opposing pressures finding each other.

Yorimasa’s eyes dropped to the blade. Something moved through his expression — not fear, but recognition, and a recalculation happening quickly behind his eyes.

“A cursed blade,” he said, almost to himself.

“Fitting,” Nathan said, “for killing something like you. Don’t you think?”

Yorimasa’s smile returned, wider than before, stretching that already-wrong mouth toward something that no longer bothered pretending to be pleasant. “If you can.”

They moved at the same instant.