I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

The conversation with Genzo had taken more out of him than he wanted to admit.

Not emotionally — that kind of tired he could manage, had been managing it for long enough that it had become background noise. But physically, the simple act of sitting upright for an extended period, thinking clearly, negotiating the terms of something that mattered — his body had been filing complaints about it since the halfway point and was now submitting them in writing. The poison hadn’t roared back with the same violence as before, but it had made its presence known in the way a persistent, patient thing did. A slow burn at the neck. A heaviness in the limbs that had nothing to do with normal fatigue. A reminder, steady and unignorable, that the ceasefire Ujitake had arranged was exactly that — a ceasefire, not a peace.

He needed rest and thankfully Genzo provided him and Yukihime a home as he was going to stay for a moment here.

He was grateful for the house regardless.

It was small and spare, the way most things in this village were — practical without being unkind, a room with clean mats laid across the floor and a bed prepared near the far wall with the quiet efficiency of people who anticipated needs without being asked. Nathan crossed the threshold, took in the dimensions of it in a single glance, and sat down against the wall rather than the bed, letting the solid surface take his weight. He exhaled out then tired.

Tomorrow he would begin. Genzo’s techniques. The foundation work he’d been neglecting in favor of the easier reach toward power that wasn’t entirely his own. But that was tomorrow, and tomorrow could wait its turn.

Yukihime settled beside him before he’d even finished exhaling, folding herself down onto the mat with the fluid, unhurried grace that seemed to characterize everything she did. Close enough that her shoulder nearly touched his. She leaned toward him slightly, black eyes searching his face with concern.

“Are you okay, Nathan-sama?”

He looked at her. The concern in her eyes was unguarded in a way that still caught him slightly off-guard when he saw it — Yukihime, who had introduced herself to the world with ice and distance and the sovereign self-containment of someone who had been alone long enough to stop expecting otherwise.

He reached out and touched her cheek. Gently. The cold of her skin against his palm was familiar now, no longer startling.

She went still for a moment — and then something in her softened, quietly, like frost yielding to the first suggestion of warmth. A small smile found her lips.

“You stayed with me,” he said. “The entire week.”

“Of course I did.” She said it simply, as though any alternative had never occurred to her.

A smile pulled at the corner of his mouth. He thought, not for the first time, about the moment he’d offered her a place at his side — the practical calculation behind it, the assessment of what she could do and how useful that would be. He wasn’t sure exactly when the ledger had stopped mattering. Somewhere between then and now she had stopped being an asset and started being something that didn’t have a clean category — part of the strange, sprawling, improbable collection of people he’d gathered around himself in a world that wasn’t even his own. Family, for lack of a better word. His family had always been unconventional.

“We need to find a solution for the poison, Nathan-sama,” she said, her voice quieter now.

“We will.” He said. “I don’t die easily. Ask anyone who’s tried.”

She laughed — barely, just a breath of it — and leaned her head against his shoulder.

“We are staying here a little longer,” he said, his hand resting at ease near her. “There are Daimyos to deal with and a region to free before we move north.”

“For you,” Yukihime replied, with a calm so complete it was genuinely unsettling, “I would kill everyone in Kastoria.”

“Just my enemies,” Nathan said. “That’s sufficient.”

“Of course, Nathan-sama,” she agreed, as pleasantly as if he’d made a reasonable suggestion about dinner.

He was quiet for a moment. Then— “After we deal with the capital, with the prince and everything attached to him — I’ll introduce you to the others. My women. The rest of what passes for my family in this world.”

The temperature in the room dropped by a precise and measurable degree.

He felt it without looking at her — that particular stillness that came over Yukihime when something touched a nerve she hadn’t fully acknowledged having. Her expression, when he glanced at it, had gone carefully neutral in the way that meant the opposite of neutral underneath.

He moved his hand to her hair.

The frost didn’t spread further. She pressed herself closer against his side instead, her head returning to his shoulder.

“Here,” she said quietly, “you are only mine.”

Nathan didn’t argue the point. He simply let her stay where she was, her cold presence at his side, the room around them quiet and still.

Food arrived sometime later — brought without announcement, left at the entrance by hands that understood discretion — and they ate together. When it was done Nathan moved to the bed, and Yukihime followed as naturally as though the decision had been made long before either of them made it, settling beside him in the dark with the soft, steady cold of her presence against his side.

Sleep came faster than he expected.

For once, it came without dreams.

Then at night he suddenly woke up.

His eyes opened to the dark ceiling, and he lay there for a moment taking stock of the familiar inventory. The burn at his neck. The dull, radiating ache still lodged somewhere deep in his chest. Both present, both manageable, both doing exactly what the poison always did in the small hours — reminding him it hadn’t gone anywhere.

He turned his head.

Yukihime lay beside him, one arm draped across him with an ease that had nothing self-conscious about it, her silver hair spread across the pillow in loose, pale cascades. Her breathing was light and steady. In sleep she looked different — not softer exactly, but quieter, the vigilance she carried through every waking hour set aside for once, her face entirely at rest. He wondered, looking at her, whether she had slept at all in the seven days he’d been gone from the world. Whether she had simply sat in that chair beside the bed and refused, hour after hour, to close her eyes.

He believed she probably had.

Carefully, without disturbing the arm across him, Nathan slipped free and rose. He moved through the dark room and out of the house without making a sound, the night air of the forest village meeting him at the threshold — cool and deep-scented.

He circled to the back of the house where the tree line pressed close and the shadows were thickest, finding the isolated corner between the wall and the dark, and stopped.

For a moment he simply stood there. Then—

“Are you here?”

He asked it into the empty air in front of him.

The glow came softly at first — warm and deep, the specific gold of something that had never needed to try very hard to illuminate its surroundings. And then Amaterasu was simply there, the way divinity sometimes was, present between one breath and the next as though the space between moments had been sufficient for the journey.

She looked at him in that way she had — measuring, fond, and something else beneath both that she never quite named.

“As expected,” she said, “you’ve found yourself in quite a remarkable amount of trouble, Nate.”

“Should I be offended you didn’t come sooner?” he asked, the smile arriving before he’d decided on it.

One elegant brow arched upward. “How would you know whether I did or not?”

The smile settled into something quieter. No — he wouldn’t know. That was exactly her point. He had never had any real way of knowing how closely she watched, from wherever it was she watched from, and the fact that she was here now rather than earlier said nothing conclusive about where she’d been in the days between.

Her gaze moved past him then — toward the house, through the wall as though it presented no more obstacle than thin air — and something in her expression shifted.

“She is reliable,” Amaterasu said simply. “You chose well.”

“Do you know something about her?” Nathan asked.

The Goddess only smiled. “Who knows.”

He didn’t push. He already understood enough about Yukihime to know that the answer didn’t need to come from Amaterasu — whatever made her unique, whatever had kept her frozen and alone for a thousand years before he’d walked into that cold, had been visible from the beginning to anyone who knew how to look.

Amaterasu stepped closer. She raised her hand and touched his face — fingers against his jaw, the warmth of her palm almost startling against his skin — and her expression did something it rarely did in his presence. It opened. The composure of a Goddess thinned out just enough to let the concern underneath it show plainly.

“Yamata no Orochi,” she said quietly. “I had hoped never to see its traces on anyone again.”

“It seems I have a talent for finding exactly the wrong things,” Nathan said.

“You do.” She didn’t soften it. “The replicate should have killed you. That it didn’t is—” She paused, considering. “It is you. It has always been you.”

“Am I going to die again?” He said it lightly, the way he’d learned to say things that mattered — holding them at arm’s length through tone so they couldn’t settle too heavily.

Her eyes narrowed.

“Not easily,” she said. “Not while I am watching.”

“Then tell me there’s an antidote.”

“There is.” She lowered her hand slowly. “But it requires a sample of the poison drawn directly from one of the heads of the Yamata no Orochi itself.”

Nathan went still. “You’re saying it still exists.”

“My brother killed it,” she said. “But Susanoo kept one of its heads. A trophy, knowing him.” The word carried the particular weight of long familiarity — the complicated, loaded shorthand of siblings separated by everything except origin. “It is in the north. In the Raijin-no-Kuni.”

The Land of the Thunder God.

The name surfaced from something Kaguya had told him when she briefed him about the Samurais clans. One of the three great domains of the north. One of the great Samurai clans, ruling over territory that carried a God’s name because it had once, in some meaningful sense, belonged to one.

Susanoo’s lands, in everything but the most recent Chapter of their history.

“My brother—” Amaterasu’s voice shifted almost imperceptibly. She looked away from him, something tightening in her expression. “He will know I am coming. He will not make it easy. He and I—” She pressed her lips together briefly. “He will not simply open the door.”

Nathan watched her. The frustration she was holding — directed inward rather than outward, the particular helplessness of someone whose own relationships were the obstacle between them and the thing they needed — sat on her face in a way she probably didn’t realize was as visible as it was.

He reached out and touched her cheek. Gently. The same gesture he’d given Yukihime not an hour ago, and carrying the same instinct behind it — the impulse to meet distress with something simple and warm and present.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “We’ll find a way.”

“Nathan—”

“I hold the poison until we can reach the north. Once we’re there, we get what we need and we build the antidote.” He said it plainly, without heroics. A problem with a solution, however inconveniently located. “It’s not elegant but it works.”

She looked at him for a long moment. The concern didn’t leave her face, but something behind it shifted — accepting what she couldn’t change about him, maybe, the way people did when they recognized that a certain stubbornness was load-bearing.

“You are a very suicidal man,” she said.

“So I’ve been told.”

And then she leaned forward and kissed him.

It was soft, and certain, and it carried with it the warmth of something vast — not overwhelming, not consuming, but present in the way the sun was present on the first clear morning after a long cold stretch of grey. He kissed her back, and felt it move through him like light moving through water, reaching into the dark places where the poison had made its home and drawing back the edges of it. The burn at his neck receded. The deep, gnawing ache in his chest pulled back from its outermost reaches. Not gone — she hadn’t claimed she could remove it, and he hadn’t asked her to — but quieted, pressed back from the surface into something more manageable. His body felt more like his own than it had since Minato.

She pulled back slowly.

The warmth lingered on his lips and in his chest and along every nerve the poison had been working on, a clean gold quiet that sat over the remaining discomfort like a hand placed over a wound.

“Be careful,” she said.

She was already dissolving at the edges — the glow reabsorbing into the dark between the trees, presence unwinding back into whatever vast distance she normally occupied. But not before he caught it — the faint rose that had found her cheeks in the last moment before she went, hurried away with her composure before she let him examine it.

Nathan stood in the dark for a moment after she was gone.

He smiled a little before heading back to resuming sleeping besides a deep asleep Yukihime.