I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

“So be it,” he said.

He released the dark magic.

The darkness answered him completely.

It did not gather slowly or build with ceremony. It arrived all at once, pouring out of him like something that had been waiting behind a door held shut by will alone, black particles swirling across his skin and clothing and rising off his shoulders in slow churning coils. The light around him changed. Not dimmed exactly, but altered, as though the air nearest to him had decided to keep its distance.

Kyomei drank it in. The blade darkened past its usual black until it seemed less like a physical object and more like an absence cut into the shape of a sword.

“Finally,” Morosuke muttered, and the satisfaction in his voice was genuine, the satisfaction of a man who had been waiting to fight the real version of his enemy and had grown tired of the warmup.

Nathan said nothing. He closed his hand around Kyomei’s handle and let the darkness seep the rest of the way into the blade, and the ground beneath his feet trembled with the pressure of two opposing forces occupying the same air. Morosuke’s red heat pressed outward. Nathan’s darkness pressed back. Where they met between the two men the atmosphere simply suffered.

Then they both moved.

The street emptied of them in the same instant.

Morosuke felt time stretch the way it does when the necklace pushes his body past its ordinary limits, every detail sharpening, his large katana already swinging through the arc that should have opened Nathan from shoulder to hip. He was certain of the angle. Certain of the timing.

He blinked.

Nathan was not there.

He moved his eyes and found him already at his right side, having covered the distance with something that did not resemble movement so much as relocation, and Nathan’s leg was already swinging.

The kick connected with Morosuke’s side with a sound like a boulder meeting a castle wall.

The impact cracked through Morosuke’s reinforced body in a way that surprised even him, a deep fracturing sensation beneath the thick muscle and the red energy armoring his skin, and before he could process it he was moving, not by choice, launched sideways at a speed that turned the street into a blur around him. He hit the first house and went through it, the wall dissolving around his bulk as though it had been built from packed snow rather than timber and plaster. The second house went the same way. The third. He gouged a long furrow through the earth as he finally scraped to a halt, debris raining down around him, dust rising in a thick curtain.

He planted his foot and pushed himself upright.

His face split into a wide grin.

“That’s what I want!!”

Nathan was already coming.

He crossed the distance in a dark flash, figure barely visible inside the black energy wrapped around him, closing on Morosuke with the directness of a thrown blade. Morosuke read the approach and stepped forward to meet it, the pearls at his throat blazing hot, and then he was simply elsewhere, vanished from where he had been standing with a speed that cost Nathan the half beat he needed.

The arm came from nowhere.

It connected with Nathan’s throat, forearm driving hard across the windpipe, and Nathan grunted, the sound compressed and rough, and was immediately airborne again, shot backward with his throat burning and his breath stolen. He tore through walls the same way Morosuke had, the houses along the street contributing their timber and plaster to the ongoing destruction of the block, and when he finally hit the ground his sandals scraped long lines across the broken stone before he steadied himself.

He spat blood. Felt his throat working to reopen around the bruising.

Morosuke was already moving before Nathan had finished landing.

Nathan watched him come with narrowed eyes, dark and level, and raised Kyomei.

“Celestial Rank Dark Magic.”

His voice came out slightly hoarse, roughened by the hit to his throat, but the words carried weight regardless. The darkness that had been coiling around the blade responded instantly, accelerating, condensing, wrapping the katana in a swirling mass that spun tighter and tighter until the blade itself trembled with what it was containing. The air around the sword went cold enough to see.

Morosuke’s enormous form closed the last of the distance in an instant, katana burning red and trailing heat, and he swung with everything the Kijin power had given him.

“Useless!!”

Nathan swung back.

The two blades met and the world between them went dark.

Blood scattered across the broken street. The detonation that followed the contact rolled outward in every direction, shaking the remaining standing structures down to their foundations.

Morosuke’s eyes went wide.

His vision drowned in darkness first, total and absolute, and when it cleared he understood what had happened before the pain arrived to confirm it. His right arm was gone at the shoulder, tumbling away through the air, his katana clattering across the stones somewhere behind him, and the absence of it registered as shock before it registered as anything else.

Nathan materialized beside him in the same breath and drove his fist into Morosuke’s cheek.

The first strike moved him but did not finish it. Nathan felt the resistance, that enormous body still holding against him even diminished, and pushed harder, pouring more into the second surge of force behind the punch. The crack that followed was structural. Morosuke’s cheek caved, his massive frame lifting entirely from the ground, and he was sent skyward with a trajectory that bent the surrounding air around it.

Nathan launched himself upward after him, closing fast, Kyomei already raised for the downward stroke.

Morosuke saw it coming.

His remaining arm swung his leg instead, a desperate mid air kick with everything the necklace had left to give him, and Nathan read it too late. He was already committed to the angle. He wrenched his sword arm back and threw his other arm across his body to catch it instead.

The impact was catastrophic regardless.

He hit the nearest wall at full speed and kept going, the house simply ceasing to exist around the point of contact, and when the motion finally stopped he was embedded in the interior, beams across his shoulders, plaster dust settling over him like snow. His hair had come loose in the collision, the tie giving way, black strands falling forward across his face and over his shoulders.

He breathed once. Tasted blood at the back of his throat and spat it onto the ruined floor.

Outside, something massive hit the ground.

Morosuke had landed thirty meters away and was already rising, that enormous red body shedding debris the way a surfacing stone sheds water. The missing arm had not slowed him as much as it should have. The necklace pulsed steadily at his chest, compensating, feeding heat and momentum back into him faster than the damage could accumulate. He turned toward Nathan and the grin was still there, stretched wide and savage, carved into that Oni face like something permanent.

“COME RYOO!!!”

Nathan didn’t say a word and ran immediately.

They ran at each other.

BADOOOM!!

The collision when it came shook the street from one end to the other, a shockwave that radiated outward in a visible ring, dust and loose stone and broken timber all leaping from the ground simultaneously in every direction. The houses nearest to the impact point lost their remaining walls. A well in the middle of the road cracked apart. The ground itself split in a long uneven line running between them like a scar.

Nathan took a cut across the ribs from Morosuke’s follow through, shallow but real, and felt the heat of the red energy burning at the edges of the wound as it was made. He answered with a diagonal stroke that opened a line across Morosuke’s chest, the darkness from Kyomei eating into the red reinforcing the skin and leaving something raw and black edged behind it. Morosuke snarled and drove his knee upward. Nathan caught it against his hip and redirected, using the momentum to spin past him, reversing his grip and bringing the pommel back hard into the base of Morosuke’s spine.

The crack echoed off what was left of the surrounding buildings.

“Guuuhnn!!!!”

Morosuke staggered forward two steps and wheeled around, swinging wide with his remaining arm, and Nathan ducked beneath it and came up inside the arc, driving his elbow into the already damaged cheek. The bone there gave a little more. Morosuke’s head snapped sideways and he responded by simply lowering his shoulder and driving forward, using his mass as a weapon, and Nathan was caught by the rush and crushed backward through another wall, the two of them tearing through it together and emerging into the narrow alley beyond in a shower of splintered wood.

Nathan got his feet under him first and pushed off the ground hard, launching himself upward and coming back down with Kyomei leading, driving the blade toward Morosuke’s shoulder. Morosuke threw himself aside and the sword bit into the earth instead, the dark energy around the blade detonating against the ground and sending a geyser of broken stone skyward between them. The shockwave caught Morosuke across the side and threw him into the alley wall, the entire facade crumbling inward around the impact.

They came apart, both breathing harder now, and circled in the ruined alley.

Cuts had opened across Nathan’s forearms and one along his jawline, blood running freely and dripping from his chin onto the dark fabric at his chest. His ribs ached where the heat wound burned. But the darkness around him had not diminished. If anything it had grown, the black energy moving faster now, no longer coiling slowly but churning, spinning outward from his body in tight aggressive spirals that shed fragments of shadow into the air around him like sparks shed from a grinding wheel.

Morosuke had the worse of it. A deep cut ran from his collarbone toward his sternum, black edged and refusing to close the way his other wounds had been closing. His chest heaved. The red light around him still blazed but it flickered now at the edges, the consistency of it less certain than it had been. He was receiving more than he was giving, and somewhere beneath the Kijin power and the fury and the satisfaction of finally fighting the real version of his enemy, some part of Morosuke was beginning to understand that.

He rushed again and Nathan met him head on, exchanging a rapid sequence of strikes so fast the individual movements ceased to be distinguishable from the outside, just sound and force and the constant percussion of steel meeting energy meeting flesh, each impact sending another pulse outward through the ruined street. A nearby building that had been leaning gave up entirely and collapsed with a long slow groan. Somewhere further down the road a fire had started in the wreckage, orange light mixing with the red of Morosuke’s aura and the deep churning black pouring off Nathan.

Nathan took a blow to the shoulder that would have caved lesser bones. He rolled with it, bled off most of the force, and drove Kyomei upward in a tight short stroke that caught Morosuke beneath the ribs. The darkness detonated inward on contact rather than outward, a concentrated implosion of black energy that punched through the red armoring Morosuke’s skin and hit the meat beneath it directly.

Morosuke’s body buckled at the middle for the first time.

He caught himself. Straightened. Raised his arm.

But his eyes had gone to Nathan’s face.

The darkness spinning off Nathan had accelerated past what it had been even moments ago, the spirals tight and violent, shedding black light rather than absorbing it, and it had reached his eyes. The flat cold black that Nathan’s eyes always carried had begun to change, something bleeding into them from somewhere deeper, a color that did not belong in a human face. Gold. Not warm gold. The burning merciless gold of something feral and very old, flickering at first, then steadying, then blazing with a consistency that lit the shadows on Nathan’s face from within.

Demonic gold.

Morosuke looked at those eyes and something in his chest did something it had not done since long before the necklace had ever hung around his neck.

It stuttered.

His lips parted slightly. Not words. Just the involuntary breath of a man whose body has recognized something his pride has not yet agreed to acknowledge.

The darkness around Nathan kept spinning, faster and faster still.

Nathan pulled Kyomei back.

The motion was slow and perfect, almost ceremonial, drawing the blade back to his side with a stillness that stood in complete contrast to everything the last several minutes had been. The darkness spinning off him did not slow. It accelerated, the spirals pulling tighter and tighter around his body until the air nearest to him was simply black, a churning skin of shadow that shed no light and permitted none.

Morosuke stood across from him with his arm raised and his body still burning red, and he looked at Nathan’s eyes.

The gold looked back at him.

Vertical slits. Burning and ancient and utterly without mercy, lit from somewhere so far inside Nathan that the human face around them seemed almost incidental. They were not the eyes of a ronin but something much more freighting.

Morosuke froze.

Nathan immediately then tapped into the share of the Pandora’s Box he had summoning the curses.

It did not announce itself. There was no light, no sound that preceded it, no warning of any kind. The curses simply arrived, pouring out of the darkness around him in a torrent that had no clear origin point, shapes that were almost faces and almost not, hollow and screaming without sound, mouths open in expressions that had no name in any human language. Dozens of them. Then more. Countless dark forms raging around Nathan in a storm that bent the shadows of every nearby object toward him as though gravity itself had taken his side.

The screaming was something felt rather than heard, pressing against the inside of the skull, against the back of the eyes, against the oldest and most honest parts of the mind that know what danger looks like before the thinking parts of the brain have finished their assessment.

Morosuke felt fear upon seeing that, real fear.

He released the red energy in a desperate surge, everything the necklace had left, a full detonation of Kijin power blasting outward from his body in every direction at once, enough force to level what remained of the surrounding block.

The curses swallowed it whole.

The red energy hit the edge of that screaming darkness and simply ceased, absorbed without resistance, without sound, without leaving any evidence that it had ever existed. The necklace at Morosuke’s chest flickered. Then dimmed. The horn at his forehead was still there but the blazing certainty that had surrounded him since the transformation began was guttering at its edges now, the fuel it had been burning through finally showing its limits.

Morosuke did the only thing left available to him.

He launched himself upward, leaving the ground in a single explosive jump, putting air and distance between himself and that screaming dark storm below, buying himself the half second he needed to think, to reassess, to find an angle that still existed.

He looked down.

Nathan was gone.

The street below was empty except for the curses still raging through the wreckage, and Morosuke turned in the air, scanning fast, reading every direction at once.

Then a shadow fell across him from above.

He looked up slowly.

Nathan hung in the air above him, impossibly still inside that storm of hollow screaming faces, his loose black hair suspended around him as though the ordinary rules of falling did not apply here. Kyomei blazed in his grip, the blade coated entirely in the curses, darkness and screaming light fused along the edge until it was difficult to say where the sword ended and the curse began. Those gold eyes looked down at Morosuke utterly cold.

Morosuke’s lips moved.

“Monster…” he started, the word coming out unfinished, the rest of it dying somewhere between his throat and the air.

BADOOOOM!!

Kyomei sang through the arc with the sound of something tearing reality rather than flesh, the curses screaming at maximum pitch as the blade connected, and it cut through Morosuke’s body with a cleanness that was almost incomprehensible given the scale of the impact, parting him at the waist as though the Kijin reinforcement and the red power and the gift of the most powerful Daimyo in the land had never existed at all.

They hit the ground together.

BADOOOM!!