I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

When Nathan returned to the tent, he relayed what he had found out about Shigeru and the group in a few clean sentences. Hanzo listened without interrupting. She had already read them as something closer to professionals with a code than genuine threats, and having that confirmed out loud settled something in her that she had been keeping carefully managed since the road.

She had been the one urging restraint all evening. It was worth noting, privately, that the restraint had paid off.

Neither of them said anything more about it and they let the night pass in watchful quiet, taking turns with sleep and stillness until the dark outside began to soften at its edges and the birds in the treeline started finding their voices.

They were up before anyone else in the camp. Moving through the early grey light without noise, checking the horses, tightening straps and adjusting packs. The rest of Shigeru’s group was still wrapped in their bedrolls when Nathan and Hanzo walked their horses out of the clearing and onto the road, and that was more or less intentional. Starting the day ahead of the group and putting some quiet distance between them seemed like the cleaner arrangement.

The road had other ideas. Within twenty minutes the sound of hooves behind them announced that Shigeru’s group had risen faster than expected, and shortly after that the mercenaries had caught up entirely and folded back around them. There was no particular discussion about it. They simply traveled together again, as though the night’s events had settled something between the two parties that nobody needed to name out loud.

Minami-Kyoto was half a day’s ride away, close enough that stopping again made no sense. They kept moving.

The soldiers they passed on the road were more frequent now, the checkpoints tighter and more deliberate than anything they had encountered the day before. But each time a group of armed men stepped into the road with that particular posture of official suspicion, Shigeru was already at the front of the formation, relaxed and familiar, with the easy manner of someone who knew exactly how to talk to soldiers without giving them anything to work with. It smoothed the way every single time. Questions that might have stretched into something uncomfortable were answered and dissolved before they could develop, and the group was waved through without incident.

Nathan watched this play out and said nothing, but he noticed. The cover of a legitimate mercenary group moving toward a festival was worth considerably more than he had initially calculated.

They rode through the morning and into the early afternoon, the landscape gradually changing around them as the road improved beneath the horses’ hooves, the packed earth giving way to something more deliberate and maintained, the kind of surface that speaks to consistent money and consistent attention. The traffic on the road thickened steadily as well, travelers and merchants and groups of all kinds converging from different directions toward the same destination, until the road felt less like a road and more like a current pulling everything in one direction.

”The road to Minami-Kyoto,” Hanzo said quietly, almost to herself.

It was not hard to tell when they had found it. The paving was unmistakable, broad and even and well kept, lined with enough foot traffic and cart wheels to suggest it had been busy for days already. People moved along it in both directions, though considerably more were heading the same way Nathan and his group were than coming back.

They followed it for another hour before the city revealed itself.

It appeared first as a suggestion on the horizon, a dark line that gradually resolved into something more defined as the road curved and the land flattened ahead of them. Then the walls came into full view and Nathan found himself looking at them for a longer moment than he had intended.

Large was not quite the right word for it. The walls that enclosed Minami-Kyoto were substantial in the way that spoke of serious intent, built by people who were not interested in the appearance of security but in the reality of it. The city behind them spread wide and dense, its rooftops and towers visible above the battlements, the whole thing carrying a weight and permanence that made every other settlement he had passed through in this country feel provisional by comparison. Sadamasa’s domain, Yorimasa’s territory, even Minato at its most imposing, all of it looked modest against this.

He understood now why people called it the Capital of the South.

”Finally,” Yuwa said from somewhere in the group, drawing the word out with theatrical satisfaction. ”Minami-Kyoto. It has been a while.”

A chorus of responses came back at her from various directions.

”First time for me.”

”Same, never been.”

”Honestly same.”

”So who here has actually been before?”

Yuwa looked around at the show of hands, or rather the lack of them. ”Seriously? It’s just me, Shige, and Sana who have been here before?”

”You, Sana, and me,” Shigeru confirmed from the front, his voice easy enough on the surface.

”Shigeru!” One of the men turned in his saddle. ”You have been here before and you never mentioned it?”

Shigeru was quiet for a moment. ”I was born here,” he said simply.

That landed with a weight that stopped the conversation cold for a beat.

”The hell do you mean you were born here and never told any of us?” someone demanded. ”And why did you leave? Look at the size of this place.”

”Money,” Shigeru said. ”Not everything worth leaving behind is small. Big cities have their own problems.” He said it lightly enough, but there was something else in the line of his jaw and the way his eyes had settled on the walls ahead, something harder and older than the words themselves.

Yuwa caught it. She pulled her horse alongside his and looked at him quietly for a moment.

”You alright, Shige?”

He turned and gave her a smile that was genuine if not entirely uncomplicated. ”I’m fine. Don’t worry.”

Nathan had moved up beside Hanzo during this exchange without thinking about it, his attention drifting between the city walls and the road ahead.

”From here we are careful about everything,” Hanzo said, her voice dropping low enough that it was only for him. She had been building toward this reminder since the previous day, and the sight of those walls had made it feel more urgent rather than less. Minato had been a city without real law, a place where chaos was deliberately maintained and where a man with enough force could move through it like water. This was not that. This was Norihiro’s seat, fortified and controlled and filled with people who answered to him. The rules here were different in every way that mattered.

Nathan nodded.

He hadn’t intentions to start fighting around like he had done in Minato.

The gates of Minami-Kyoto were an event in themselves. Even from the back of the queue that had formed along the paved road, the scale of them was enough to communicate exactly what kind of city was waiting on the other side. They were tall and reinforced and attended by a number of guards who were doing their jobs with the particular attentiveness of men who had been told the festival was not an excuse to let standards slip.

Shigeru handled it the same way he had handled every checkpoint on the road, moving to the front with an easy confidence that suggested he had nothing to hide and no particular interest in being made to wait. Nathan caught pieces of the exchange from where he stood, enough to follow the shape of it. Shigeru named his group, described their business with the festival, and at some point produced an emblem from somewhere inside his kimono, something official enough to carry weight with the guards, who looked at it and then looked at the group assembled behind him and eventually waved them through without further ceremony.

Nathan filed that away without comment.

Inside the gates the city opened up and immediately made its size felt. The streets were wide and laid out, nothing like the winding and improvised arrangements of smaller towns that had grown without a plan behind them. The buildings were substantial, the crowds thick and purposeful. The festival had drawn people from considerable distances and it showed in the variety of faces and accents pressing through the main thoroughfare.

The horses were a different matter.

A gate official redirected the group almost immediately after entry, his tone polite but carrying no room for negotiation. Horses belonged in the stables. Carriages were permitted on the streets with the right documentation, but individual mounts wandering the city during a festival period would create a kind of chaos that nobody was interested in managing. It was a reasonable policy given the density of people already moving through every visible street. They followed Shigeru’s group to the nearest stable, a large and well organized facility near the gate district that was already doing considerable business, and handed the horses over to attendants who seemed entirely unbothered by the volume of animals coming through their doors today.

With the horses settled there was no particular reason for the two groups to stay attached to each other. The natural point of separation had arrived on its own.

”Where are you planning to stay?” Shigeru asked, turning toward Nathan with an expression that already seemed to anticipate the answer it was going to get.

Nathan looked at him.

Shigeru read the look and accepted it with something between a smile and a shrug. ”Fair enough.” He straightened and tucked his thumbs into his belt. ”We will be around the festival grounds for most of it, since that is why we came. If you find yourself needing anything or have questions about the city, you know where to look.”

”Don’t hesitate,” Sana added from beside him, her smile carrying the same warmth it had carried since the road, directed specifically at Nathan in a way that was not particularly subtle.

”We are grateful for your help getting inside,” Hanzo said, addressing Shigeru directly with a sincerity that was unambiguous. His group had done them a genuine service, more than they had needed to, and Hanzo was not the kind of person who let that pass without acknowledgment. Without the cover of the mercenary emblem and Shigeru’s easy authority at the checkpoints, getting into Minami-Kyoto without drawing the wrong kind of attention would have been considerably more complicated.

Shigeru waved a hand as he turned away, the gesture easy and dismissive in the way of someone who didn’t need the thanks but appreciated it anyway. His group fell into step behind him and they moved off into the crowd, absorbed by the city within half a minute.

Hanzo turned toward Nathan once they were gone.

”I need to find my uncle,” she said. ”He should be somewhere in the city already.”

”Go ahead,” Nathan said.

”You will be careful?” Hanzo asked concerned.

”I will stay out of trouble,” Nathan said. ”No fights. Not here.”

He meant it. The situation in Minato had been loud, and loud had served a purpose there. This was Norihiro’s seat, fortified and watched and filled with people whose first loyalty was to the man Nathan had come to remove. The shinobis had spent years developing methods for exactly this kind of environment, and there was a reason those methods relied on patience and invisibility rather than force. He had gathered enough attention across the past weeks to last him a while. What came next needed to be quiet, precise, and invisible for as long as possible.

Hanzo held his gaze for one more moment and then nodded, apparently satisfied with what she found there. Then she simply stepped sideways into a gap in the crowd and disappeared, as completely and naturally as if she had never been standing there at all.

Nathan stood at the edge of the main street and looked out at Minami-Kyoto spreading away from him in every direction, taking in the scale of it, the noise and the movement and the layered complexity of a city that had been built to matter.

Then he started walking.