I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Chapter 682: Ryo’s Walk

”R..Ryo-sama...”

Yasumasa had gone completely still.

He was still in the posture he had been in — leaned toward Sakura, hands extended, his loosened kimono in its loosened state — and he held that position for the moment it took him to process what had happened to his door and who was standing where his door had been.

His expression had not yet decided what it was.

Nathan looked at him across the room.

His black eyes moved from Yasumasa to Sakura — the tears, the displaced kimono, the particular quality of what the room’s arrangement described — and then back to Yasumasa.

He said nothing.

He didn’t need to.

The temperature in the room had changed completely. The lamp still burned. The hammer sounds still came through the walls. Everything else had stopped.

Yasumasa straightened slowly.

Yasumasa turned around and recognition arrived in his expression immediately — the same ronin from the carriage, from the throne hall, the one who had stood in front of his father without bowing and had been looking at everything in this domain with those flat black eyes since the moment he arrived.

The fury that followed recognition was instant and total.

”You dare—” He straightened fully, his finger coming up, pointing across the room with the rigid authority of someone who had never once in his life had a door cut down around him. ”You cut my door and you walk in here? I will skin you alive for that! Do you understand who I am? I will have you—”

Nathan raised his katana slightly.

Just slightly. A partial draw — Kyōmei clearing the scabbard by a few inches, the darkness seeping immediately from the exposed steel, the black blade catching the lamplight.

Then a flash.

Black. Fast. The motion so compressed that it existed in the space between one moment and the next without occupying any of the time between them.

A wet sound followed it.

Sakura blinked.

She looked down without fully intending to and her eyes went wide — her hand came up to her mouth and stayed there, pressing hard against it. Yasumasa’s right arm was on the floor. Separated cleanly at the shoulder, still in its kimono sleeve, the fingers already going still, a spreading dark pool moving outward from it across the wooden planks.

Yasumasa stood with his mouth open.

The scream took a moment to arrive — the body registering before the mind, the pain signal traveling its full length before his voice found it — and then it arrived completely.

”Gyaaaahahh—!!”

It filled the room and probably the corridor and probably the rooms on either side. He spun once, uncontrolled, his remaining hand going to the ruin of his shoulder where the blood was coming in heavy rhythmic pulses, spattering the floor, his kimono, the wall beside him. His legs weren’t working properly. He staggered, turning, his eyes full of tears and shock and the animal desperation of a body trying to understand a catastrophic loss.

Sakura pressed her hand harder against her mouth, her whole body rigid, watching the blood move across the floor toward her feet.

Yasumasa’s legs gave out.

He went backward — directly toward Sakura, toward the bed behind her, his remaining arm flailing — and Sakura’s arms came up instinctively.

Nathan moved first.

His hand closed on Yasumasa’s kimono at the collar and stopped the backward fall completely, holding him upright with the flat ease of someone managing an object rather than a person, the weight of him held one-handed without any visible strain.

Nathan looked past him at Sakura.

”Get out of here,” he said.

Sakura was already moving — on her feet, her hands pulling her outer kimono back up her shoulders as she stepped around Yasumasa’s blood on the floor, her steps quick and unsteady, her eyes not quite focusing on anything. She reached the doorway and stepped through it into the corridor and then turned back.

The reality of what she was looking at still hadn’t fully assembled itself into something her mind could process in an orderly way.

Nathan had cut off the arm of the son of a Daimyo.

In the Daimyo’s own castle. On the first day of arrival. With the political alliance between their families built entirely on this engagement and everything that the engagement was supposed to secure — the weapons, the territory, her father’s plans, all of it resting on this specific relationship with this specific family in this specific castle.

Yasumasa was still screaming, reduced now to a lower, more sustained sound — the continuous vocalization of someone for whom pain had become the total environment.

”Pathetic princes like you are really the worst of all, aren’t you?” Nathan said, looking down at him. His voice was entirely level. ”Or are you even worth calling a prince?”

Yasumasa’s head came up through the pain, his one remaining eye contact — the fury still burning underneath the shock and the tears, the specific rage of someone who had never been spoken to this way and couldn’t process it even now.

He tried to step back.

His foot found the blood on the floor and slid and he went backward again with nothing to stop him.

Nathan released his kimono.

He flew out of the doorway in a short, controlled arc — not thrown with any particular force, simply released at the correct angle — and crossed the corridor and hit the opposite wall with a solid impact, the wood cracking slightly behind him, and then collapsed into a heap at its base, his remaining arm folding under him, the blood from his shoulder continuing its work on the corridor floor in a spreading irregular shape.

Sakura flinched violently at the impact.

She was standing two feet away and the body had passed close enough that she felt the displaced air.

She looked at the heap of Yasumasa against the wall — still moving, still making sounds, the rage and pain running together in his expression into something almost unrecognizable — and then at Nathan stepping through the remains of the doorway into the corridor.

”R...Ryo-sama,” she managed.

The words came out thin. Her voice was doing something she wasn’t entirely controlling.

Nathan glanced at her.

”I will deal with what happened,” he said. ”Stay here.”

”But—” She hesitated. The concern arrived fully formed and immediate — whatever Yasumasa had been trying to do to her, whatever he deserved, Nathan had cut the arm off the Daimyo’s son in the Daimyo’s own castle and that was the kind of thing that ended with a head separated from a body in a courtyard at dawn. It didn’t matter how powerful he was. It didn’t matter what Yasumasa had done. The politics of this place would demand a response that no sword skill could simply walk away from. ”You could be killed for this—”

”Stay here,” Nathan repeated.

He said it with the particular quality of someone who has said a thing once already and is saying it again as a courtesy rather than a necessity. His black eyes held hers for one moment — flat, certain, entirely unbothered by any of the implications she was laying out — and then moved away.

”...Yes,” Sakura said.

Nathan reached down.

His hand found the back of Yasumasa’s kimono collar and closed around it and he straightened, lifting him off the corridor floor with the same one-handed ease he’d used before, Yasumasa’s legs dragging beneath him, his remaining hand scrabbling weakly at Nathan’s grip and finding nothing useful there.

He began walking.

Yasumasa trailed behind him along the corridor floor — his blood marking the path behind them in a continuous red line along the wooden planks, the drag of his body producing a low continuous sound against the floor, his screaming reduced now to a broken, grinding moan interrupted by wet gasping as the shock deepened its work on him.

Nathan walked at a normal pace.

He was calm in the way that he was calm after these things — not the performed calm of someone suppressing something but the genuine baseline of a person for whom this was simply the appropriate next step in a sequence that had presented itself. He had not come to this castle intending to cut anyone’s arm off. He had come to observe, to gather information quietly, to leave without announcement and continue south to Minato.

That plan had encountered Yasumasa.

And Yasumasa had made his intentions toward Sakura entirely explicit in a room with a closed door and a threat held over a servant’s life, and Nathan had three remaining threads of restraint and the Prince had consumed all three of them inside of sixty seconds.

So now he was going to do what he did best.

The Daimyo would answer his questions directly. No craftsmen in the forge street, no soldiers in stables — the source itself, sitting in its chair in its hall, about to have a considerably less comfortable evening than it had planned.

He adjusted his grip on Yasumasa’s collar and turned at the corridor’s end toward the main hall.

The blood line followed faithfully behind him.

Behind him, in the corridor outside the ruined doorway, Sakura stood with her hand still pressed to her mouth and watched him go — the dark-haired ronin dragging the Daimyo’s son through the castle’s own corridors toward whatever came next, entirely unhurried, as though the situation were proceeding exactly as intended.

Her brain was still trying very hard to catch up.

Yasumasa screaming carried.

He had been trying to muffle it — some last remnant of pride working against the pain, producing a strangled, grinding sound rather than the full-throated screaming of before — but as Nathan dragged him through the main corridor intersection the sound reached the guards stationed at the far end before anything else did.

Two of them came around the corner first.

They saw Nathan walking toward them at a normal pace with Kyōmei in his right hand and the Daimyo’s son being dragged along the floor behind him leaving a continuous red line, and they stopped.

The stop lasted approximately two seconds.

It was the specific frozen pause of men whose eyes had sent information to their brains that their brains were declining to immediately accept — the absurdity of the image working against the urgency that the image demanded, the two responses colliding and producing a brief paralysis.

Then they rushed.

Nathan released Yasumasa’s collar.

The Prince hit the floor and stayed there, his remaining hand bracing weakly, his head down, too far gone in shock and blood loss to do anything useful with the freedom.

Nathan met the first soldier before he had completed his rush — inside the reach of the man’s extended blade, where the sword was useless and the body was entirely available — and Kyōmei moved in a short arc that found the gap between the armor’s shoulder plate and neck guard with the precise accuracy of a blade that had been doing this for five centuries and remembered every joint it had ever found.

The soldier folded.

The second came from the right, angling for Nathan’s blind side, blade already in its downward arc. Nathan stepped into it rather than away — the cut passing behind him as he moved inside it — and brought Kyōmei across in a horizontal sweep that opened the armor at the midsection where the chest plate met the waist guard.

Two down.

Three more arrived from the side corridor at a run, drawn by the sounds, their boots loud on the wooden floor. Nathan turned to face them and the darkness seeped from Kyōmei in longer threads now — the blade fed, warm, the tremor of it running through the hilt into his palm with a pleased insistence that sat underneath the pain of the curse without disturbing it.

He went through them without slowing.

Each swing was precise and without excess — not the broad aggressive sweeps he used with the demonic sword but the compressed, committed cuts Kyōmei preferred, finding the spaces that armor left and using them completely. The corridor filled briefly with the sounds of the brief exchange and then those sounds stopped and Nathan was the only one standing.

He turned back to Yasumasa.

The Prince had managed to push himself partially upright against the wall with his remaining arm, his kimono soaked through now, his face the color of old paper. He was looking at Nathan across the corridor’s aftermath with eyes that had passed through terror into something beyond it — the specific stillness of a person who had used up their capacity for acute fear and arrived at a numb, floating state where the information continued to arrive but the responses to it had temporarily stopped functioning.

Nathan picked up his collar again and kept walking.

The next soldier came from around the corner ahead at a run, sword already drawn, shouting something that was either a warning or a battle cry and served as neither. Nathan let him come, stepped aside at the last moment, and drove Kyōmei into the gap between the man’s breastplate and his side with a single clean thrust.

The soldier stopped moving.

Nathan held him upright by the blade for a moment.

”Where is your Daimyo?” he asked.

The man’s eyes were already going distant. He coughed — a wet, deep sound — and blood came with it, running down his chin.

”Throne,” he managed. ”Throne room—”

Nathan pulled Kyōmei back and let him down.

He turned and walked.

The blood on the blade caught the corridor lamplight as he moved — not the black of the curse but the red of the evening’s work, running down the steel in slow lines, dripping at the tip. The darkness seeped through it in the way it always did, patient and constant.

Yasumasa’s dragging footsteps continued their sound behind him.

The throne room doors came into view.

Two guards flanked them — standing in full armor, hands already on their hilts, having heard enough of what had been happening in the corridors to be ready but not having yet received orders that told them what ready was supposed to look like in this specific situation.

They saw Nathan.

They saw Yasumasa.

They drew and moved.

Nathan gripped Kyōmei hard.

The darkness that had been seeping from the blade in threads gathered — not dramatically, not with any announcement, simply with the quality of something concentrating — and when he swung it the blade moved through the air with a sound that was less a cut and more an absence of resistance, as though the space the two guards occupied had decided to cooperate.

Both men dropped.

Cleanly. Completely. Their upper halves and lower halves arriving at the floor in separate moments, the armor that had been protecting them having encountered something that treated its thickness as a suggestion rather than a fact.

Nathan stepped over them.

Yasumasa had seen it.

From his dragged position — head lolling, barely upright, the blood loss and shock having reduced him to a passenger in whatever was happening — he had seen the two guards rush and he had seen what Kyōmei did to them and something in his face went entirely still.

Not fear.

He was past the register where fear lived.

The pain of his missing arm had disappeared somewhere in the last minute. He couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t feel much. The corridor and the bodies and the dark-haired man holding his collar were all reaching him at a distance now, like things happening on the other side of thick glass.

Nathan reached the throne room doors.

He let Kyōmei hang at his side.

Then he drew his leg back and kicked.

The doors came open.