I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Before dawn, the camp stirred in silence.

No one needed to be woken twice. The plan they had agreed on the night before had stripped all laziness out of them. Even Taku, who usually found something to complain about no matter the hour, kept his mouth shut as he checked his weapon and tightened the straps on his gear. The fire had burned down to a bed of dull red embers, and above them the sky was still dark, though a faint paling had begun at the far edge of the horizon.

Nathan stood apart from the others for a moment, looking down toward the valley. In the dim light, Death God Valley seemed less like a place and more like a wound carved into the land. The mist still clung to it, thick and low, swallowing shapes and softening edges until everything below looked unreal. Somewhere inside that darkness, Genzo was waiting. Somewhere inside, Mitsuhide was preparing to move.

The bite on Nathan’s neck throbbed with dull heat.

He touched it only once, briefly, then lowered his hand. There was no point dwelling on pain now. He had carried worse into battle before, and if the poison wanted to remind him it was still there, then it could do so while he was killing its master.

”You look like you did not sleep at all.”

Shiina’s voice came from behind him, light but quieter than usual.

Nathan glanced back. She had already drawn on her dark cloak and tied back her hair. In the half light of dawn, with the hood resting loose behind her shoulders and one hand at the hilt of her blade, she looked less playful than she usually did. Sharper. More focused.

”I slept enough,” Nathan said.

She stepped up beside him and followed his gaze into the valley. ”That means not at all, then.”

Nathan said nothing.

For a moment, they simply stood there together while the rest of the camp prepared behind them. Leather creaked, weapons shifted, feet moved over packed earth. No one raised their voice. The mood had changed too much for that.

Shigeru approached soon after, fastening the last buckle on his bracer. ”We leave now. If Mitsuhide keeps to the pattern we heard about, he should depart not long after sunrise.”

Nathan nodded once.

Shigeru looked between him and Shiina. ”You two know your route?”

”We will take the ridge path Eri and Ueda described,” Nathan replied. ”It should let us reach the shrine before the procession.”

”And if it does not?”

”Then we adapt.”

Shigeru laughed softly under his breath. ”Of course you do.”

He turned more serious the next moment. ”If you kill him, give us a signal if you can. Something the whole valley will understand.”

Shiina smiled faintly. ”You mean something dramatic.”

”I mean something useful,” Shigeru said.

Nathan answered for them both. ”If Mitsuhide dies, no one will need help understanding it.”

That earned the smallest grin from Shigeru.

One by one, the others gathered as well. Yuwa looked from Nathan to Shiina and still did not seem entirely pleased with the idea of only two people going after the daimyo, but she held back whatever argument remained. Sana stood beside her, already armed, her expression sober. Taku looked restless in the way he always did before danger. Sosuke gave Nathan a firm nod, trying to look braver than he felt. Eri and Ueda seemed tense, though both had forced themselves into readiness.

”Do not die,” Sana said.

”That was our line,” Shiina replied.

Yuwa exhaled sharply. ”This is not a joke.”

”I know,” Shiina said, and this time her voice held no teasing at all.

Shigeru looked over all of them one last time. ”Then let us move.”

They split at the edge of the trees.

Shigeru led the larger group downward first, angling toward the roads that would bring them around the valley and closer to the castle approach. Their figures disappeared one by one into the thinning dark, swallowed by mist and distance. Nathan watched them go only long enough to be sure they had started cleanly.

Then he turned toward the ridge.

Shiina fell into step beside him without a word.

The path to the shrine was narrower than Nathan had expected. It was less a true road than an old mountain trail half reclaimed by roots and stone, winding upward through sparse trees and jutting rock. Here and there, broken torii gates rose from the mist like the bones of something ancient. Some still stood upright, though cracked with age. Others leaned at odd angles or had collapsed entirely, their red paint long faded into blackened ruin.

The higher they climbed, the stranger the air became.

It was colder there, yet not cleanly cold. The chill carried a damp weight that settled into the skin and stayed there. The silence was worse than in the valley. No birds called. No leaves rustled. Even their own footsteps seemed oddly muffled, as if the mountain were absorbing sound rather than returning it.

Shiina noticed it too.

”I hate this place,” she said quietly.

Nathan kept his eyes ahead. ”You said it already.”

They passed the first of the shrine ropes not long after. It hung between two weathered stone posts, thick and ancient, but the paper seals tied to it had been burned black at the edges. Some had rotted away entirely. Others stirred very slightly in the air, though Nathan felt no wind.

A little farther on, he stopped.

Shiina glanced at him. ”What is it?”

Nathan crouched near a patch of exposed earth beside the trail. Boot prints. Several of them. Fresh.

”Scouts,” he said. ”Or shrine guards.”

Shiina lowered herself beside him and studied the ground. ”More than a few.”

”They came through not long ago.”

She looked up the path. ”Then we still have time.”

Nathan rose and continued upward, though now his hand remained nearer his weapon.

The path curved around a shoulder of rock and opened onto a ledge overlooking part of the valley below. From there, the settlement looked even more miserable in the weak morning light, a dense sprawl of roofs and stone pressed into the earth beneath the looming shape of Mitsuhide’s castle. Thin smoke rose from a few chimneys. Soldiers moved on the roads below in dark clusters.

Nathan narrowed his eyes.

”The procession is already forming.”

Shiina stepped closer to see. Far below, at the base of the castle road, movement had begun. Lines of armed men were assembling in ordered ranks. Between them, servants and attendants hurried back and forth. Even from this distance, it was easy to tell something formal was taking place.

”So he really is coming,” she murmured.

”He is.”

They left the overlook and climbed the final stretch in silence.

The shrine revealed itself slowly.

First came more broken gates, then the stone lanterns Eri had mentioned, dark and cold on either side of the path. Beyond them stood a broad courtyard of cracked stone, partly swallowed by moss and creeping roots. At the far end rose the shrine itself, built into the mountain face, its wooden structure old enough to feel older than memory. Time had warped its beams and stained its roof, but something else had touched it too. The sacred rope over the entrance was blackened like the others. The carved guardian faces at the steps had been chipped away, their features ruined beyond recognition. Thin strips of mist drifted across the courtyard and vanished against the shrine walls.

Nathan stepped into the open and felt it at once.

The place was wrong.

Not merely tainted. Not merely abandoned. Wrong in the way a battlefield was wrong after too many bodies had bled into the same ground. Something had soaked into this shrine over a very long time, something that had not left when the prayers stopped.

Shiina’s usual calm shifted a little. She looked around with narrowed eyes, alert and uneasy.

”There is no one here.”

”There was,” Nathan said.

He pointed toward the side of the courtyard. A set of braziers stood ready beside the steps, each one freshly filled. Nearby lay several folded ritual cloths, a bucket of water, and a lacquered tray covered in white paper.

Preparation.

Someone expected a ceremony.

Nathan walked slowly across the courtyard, taking in every detail. Near the base of the shrine steps he found another symbol carved into the stone, the same split circle he had seen near the lower prison entrance in the valley. Here, though, it was complete and deeply cut, not worn nearly smooth by time.

Shiina came to stand beside him. ”Same mark.”

”Yes.”

”Shigeru said it might be tied to death rites.”

Nathan studied it for a moment longer. ”To passage. To offerings. To binding.”

She looked at him. ”That sounds unpleasant.”

”It is.”

They climbed the shrine steps together.

Inside, the main hall was dim, silent, and colder than the air outside. The old altar at the far end had been altered. Nathan saw it immediately. A once sacred space had been twisted into something else. The floor before the altar had been painted with dark rings and careful lines that had nothing to do with prayer. Chains had been fixed into the pillars. Bowls of ash sat in the corners. The scent lingering there was not incense.

It was dried blood.

Shiina let out a very quiet breath. ”So that is what he uses this place for.”

Nathan did not answer, not really aware still what he was doing.

But Mitsuhide was not merely cruel.

He understood enough of what he was touching to make use of it.

Nathan turned toward the side doors. ”We do not wait in the hall itself.”

Shiina nodded. ”Too obvious.”

They circled behind the shrine and found a place among the rocks and twisted pines overlooking both the courtyard and the lower approach. From there they could see the path winding down the mountain, and no one climbing it would reach the shrine without passing directly beneath them.

Time stretched.

The sun rose higher, though the light never seemed to warm the mountain. Below, the valley slowly became more active. Nathan watched movement increase on the roads leading out from the castle. He counted soldiers by habit, measuring the size of the escort, the pace of its climb, the spacing between the front and rear lines.

Shiina, lying on one elbow beside him in the grass and stone, watched him from the corner of her eye.

”You really are calmer when you are about to kill someone,” she said.

”I am calm now.”

”That is exactly what I mean.”

Nathan ignored that.

At last, the sound reached them first.

Boots on stone.

Armor shifting.

Voices, distant and ordered.

The procession had begun its climb.

Nathan’s gaze fixed on the lower path. Through breaks in the trees and the old gates, dark figures emerged in steady formation. First came six mounted outriders who dismounted before the final rise. Then a line of soldiers on foot. Behind them came attendants bearing lacquered boxes and long wrapped objects Nathan could not yet identify.

And then Mitsuhide appeared.

Even at a distance, he was impossible to mistake.

He rode a black horse up the mountain path as if the whole valley existed only to carry him where he pleased. His armor was dark, elegant, and severe, touched with deep red at the cords. A cloak hung from his shoulders, moving in slow folds behind him. He was not young, but there was strength in the way he sat a saddle and in the absolute confidence of his posture. This was a man who had spent long years being obeyed.

Shiina’s voice dropped almost to a whisper.

”So that is him.”

Nathan said nothing.

Because something else had just entered the procession behind Mitsuhide.

Four soldiers were dragging a prisoner up the path.

Nathan’s eyes hardened.

Genzo.

For the first time since they had reached the shrine, all thought became very simple.

He really hoped and wished Genzo would be still in the prison and not the one meant to be sacrificed.

Shiina saw the change in him at once. ”Is that Genzo?”

”Yes.”

”Well,” she said, her own hand closing around the hilt of her blade, ”that certainly ruins any quiet plan.”

Nathan kept watching the approaching procession, his pulse steady, his mind already moving ahead of it. Mitsuhide had brought Genzo to the shrine himself. Whatever he meant to do here, it was happening now.

Below them, the procession passed under the last broken gate and entered the final stretch of the path.

Nathan rose to a crouch and observed carefully.