I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Chapter 703: The Snow Woman

”The way out,” he said. ”Tell me.”

The Yamamba’s gaze shifted — not toward him, but toward the blade in his hand, and what lingered on it. The darkness had retreated, pulled back behind whatever door Nathan kept it locked behind, but the traces of it remained the way smoke remains after a flame is killed. Her expression changed as she looked at it, something moving through those ancient eyes that was not quite readable but was unmistakably deep.

”What kind of monster,” she said slowly, ”uses something so evil as that?”

Nathan said nothing.

There was an irony to it that he did not bother pointing out. A creature that had haunted a god-touched road for centuries, that had consumed every living thing that wandered into her mist, looking at him with the expression of something morally offended. It would almost have been funny in different circumstances.

What he did not say, and would not say, was that she was not entirely wrong. He had no control over those things — not real control, not the kind that came from mastery. He could open the door and he could close it, and the window of time between those two actions was brutally short before the curses stopped caring about the distinction between what they were aimed at and what was aiming them. Two years of carrying them had given him exactly that much and no more. Even Pandora, who had held them for longer than most gods had existed, had never fully commanded them. The idea that Nathan might do so in any meaningful timeframe was not something he entertained.

He kept all of that behind his expression, which gave nothing away.

”Do you want to see them again?” he asked.

The Yamamba made herself smaller. It was subtle but unmistakable — a contraction of the shoulders, a drawing inward, the instinctive posture of something recalibrating its understanding of the situation it was in.

”I know you know every path in this place,” Nathan added, his voice flat and carrying no warmth. ”So don’t try to tell me otherwise, and don’t try to walk me into something worse than where I already am. You understand me?”

A long, deep grunt escaped her, the sound of something ancient being compelled against its nature. But she turned. Her feet shifted against the ground and she moved forward, and Nathan took a step to follow.

She stopped.

Froze completely, mid-step, with the abruptness of something that had run into an invisible wall. Nathan halted as well, frowning, his eyes moving from the back of her head to the space ahead of them. Something had changed in the mist — not visibly, not in any way he could point to immediately, but the quality of the air was different, and the silence had taken on a new texture.

”What is it?” he asked.

She didn’t answer.

Then he saw them.

They came drifting through the white first — small and spinning, almost delicate, entirely wrong for the place. Snowflakes. They appeared singly at the edges of his vision and then multiplied quickly, threading through the mist and turning the air around him brittle and glittering. The temperature dropped several degrees in the span of seconds, fast enough to feel it as a physical thing, the cold arriving not gradually but all at once, as though something had reached out and turned a mechanism.

Nathan’s eyes narrowed. ”Snow.”

Not natural. Nothing about this was natural. The mist alone had been god-made, and now something was layering onto it, folding itself into the existing wrongness of the place and amplifying it.

He moved toward the Yamamba.

She turned her head as he approached — slowly, mechanically, with the jerky deliberateness of something that had already lost control of its own body. Her face came around to face him and what he saw on it stopped him mid-step. The pallor that had already been there was gone, replaced with something beyond it, a white that was not a color anymore but an absence. Ice was forming in her eyes — literally crystallizing across them, threading outward from the center, fine and spreading and irreversible.

Her mouth opened.

”S — save me —”

She exploded.

Not violently, not loudly. She simply came apart into thousands of snowflakes in a single instant, there and then not there, the ancient Yokai of the Kiro no Komichi reduced to a brief flurry that dispersed immediately into the mist around her. No sound. No struggle. She had been alive one moment and dissolved the next, and whatever she had been trying to say had gone with her.

Nathan stood very still.

The cold deepened.

It came from everywhere and nowhere, pressing inward from all directions as the snowflakes thickened into something heavier and more purposeful, the mist and the blizzard combining into a single smothering wall of white. The temperature was dropping fast now — not the ambient cold that had been present since he entered the path, but something active and intensifying, each second meaningfully colder than the one before. For an ordinary person it would have been over already. The air itself had become an instrument.

He felt something he had not expected to feel.

Cold.

Not the idea of cold, not the intellectual recognition of low temperature, but the actual physical sensation of it — spreading across his forearms, prickling along the back of his neck, raising the fine hairs on his skin. He looked down at his arms. Goosebumps. His hands were beginning to tremble, barely, just enough to notice.

He noticed.

He had sealed Khione’s power away — had done so the moment he took the name Ryo and committed to move without divine inheritance as a crutch and avoid Susanoo’s gaze. But the inheritance that came with that blood was not only power. It was resistance. It was the deep cellular memory of someone whose divine parent had been made of winter, and even suppressed, even locked behind the same discipline that kept him from reaching for ice or frost in a fight, that resistance should have been there beneath everything else. Passive. Ambient. Simply present.

And something was cold enough to get through it.

”I thought the old woman was the most dangerous thing on this road,” Nathan said quietly.

The blizzard did not respond. The mist did not thin. But he was certain — with the same bone-level certainty that had served him in the dark before — that something was in there, watching him, and had been for at least as long as the snow had been falling.

The spikes came without warning.

Hundreds of them, erupting from the white in every direction simultaneously, long and sharp and dense, the ice compressed to a hardness that made them something closer to steel than frozen water. They converged on him from every angle and Nathan was already moving — Kyomei sweeping in wide arcs, shattering the nearest ones into clouds of crystalline dust, his feet carrying him sideways and then forward and then back as more materialized to replace every one he destroyed. The sound of it was constant, the crack and burst of ice meeting the blade, fragments scattering across the ground and into the mist.

But they did not stop. For each wave he cleared, another arrived — thicker now, the individual spikes longer and wider, some of them the diameter of tree trunks driving in from above, and the spaces between them narrowing with each successive volley. He was being herded as much as attacked, the angles of the assault shifting in ways that limited his movement more than they pressed for a direct hit.

One caught him.

It came in low and fast from behind while he was committed to a swing in the opposite direction, and the impact drove into his lower back like a battering ram, hard enough to lift him off his feet and slam him forward into the snow-covered ground. He hit and rolled, training taking over, absorbing the momentum and converting it back into motion, coming back upright within two seconds.

But two seconds was enough for more to pour in.

He cut and moved, cut and moved, keeping his footing on ground that was becoming increasingly treacherous as ice layered over the path beneath him. The assault was relentless in a way that told him something important — it was not just power, it was patience. Whatever was generating this had no urgency. It could do this indefinitely. It was not trying to overwhelm him in a single moment. It was wearing him down, eroding his options, waiting.

He needed to find it.

He could not fight what he couldn’t locate, and every second he spent reacting to the projectiles was a second he was not searching. He pushed his senses outward through the snow and mist, feeling for a center, a source, a point of origin beneath the omni-directional assault.

It was in there somewhere, and it had just killed the Yamamba in a single breath.

BADOOOM!!

Nathan’s eyes widened — not wide, not the expression of someone losing composure, but the involuntary fraction of surprise that crossed even the most controlled faces when the scale of something exceeded expectation. The projectiles were everywhere. Not dozens. Not hundreds. Thousands, filling the air in every direction like a solid wall of intent, every angle covered, every possible movement already accounted for.

He made his decision in the same instant.

”Celestial Rank Dark Magic.”

The darkness answered before the words had finished leaving his mouth, flooding out from Kyomei in dense, spreading sheets, and Nathan swept the blade in a full arc around himself.

”Dark Prison.”

The dark closed around him like walls being built at impossible speed, layer upon layer of compressed shadow forming a shell in every direction — above, below, at every side — thick enough that the world outside it ceased to exist entirely. For one suspended moment there was only silence inside.

Then everything hit at once.

The sound was not a sound so much as a physical event — a concussive roar that came from all directions simultaneously as thousands of ice weapons collided with the outer surface of the prison and detonated against it. The ground beneath Nathan’s feet bucked. The air inside the shell compressed and shook. He was already reinforcing the walls, pushing more darkness into the structure, reading the pressure and responding to each new impact as it came, keeping the whole thing together through sheer directed will.

It held.

But then he felt it.

Cold. Threading through the dark like water finding cracks in stone — not breaking through with force but seeping, patient, working along the seams of his magic with something that should not have been able to touch dark magic at all. It reached through the prison walls and pressed against him, and the chill he felt was not the ambient cold of the blizzard outside. It was targeted. It was intelligent. It was working its way inward with a clear destination in mind.

Nathan felt the corner of his mouth move.

Not a smile born from pleasure, but from something rarer — genuine surprise meeting genuine respect, the involuntary response of a person who encounters something they did not expect to be as good as it is. Whatever was out there, it was reaching inside his dark magic. It was finding the spaces between the dark and threading cold into them, planning to get inside him the same way frost gets inside stone — slowly, invisibly, until the moment the stone simply splits.

He had to admit. That was impressive.

But if he dropped the prison, the storm waiting outside would reduce him to something decorative in seconds.

His hand tightened on Kyomei’s hilt.

He had one option left on the table that he hadn’t touched. Amaterasu’s fire would burn through this entirely — the snow, the mist, all of it — but Susanoo’s eyes were everywhere in the south, and the moment that divine flame appeared, the question of whether the storm god felt his sister’s power moving through a cursed mountain pass was not a risk Nathan was interested in taking. Not for this.

He did not need it anyway.

He exhaled slowly through his nose.

”Divine Rank Dark Magic.”

He knew what the label meant and what it didn’t. He was a demigod, not a god, and no technique he produced reached true divine rank in the absolute sense of the term — what it meant in practice was that he was pushing the dark magic as close to its ceiling as his nature could reach, burning through reserves that would leave him feeling it later, wringing every last measure of power from what was genuinely his.

He brought Kyomei back and swept it in a full, unbroken circle within the prison, one continuous rotation, the darkness gathering around the blade like a current gathering before a drain.

”Black Tempest.”

The prison did not simply fall. It exploded outward.

The darkness didn’t just push — it consumed. It moved in every direction at once with the force of something that had been compressed and was now violently disagreeing with that compression, rolling over the blizzard, rolling through the mist, swallowing snow and ice weapons and the shrieking white cold of the air itself. Every particle of snow the Black Tempest reached it absorbed. Every spike, every blade, every frozen edge of the storm vanished into the dark as though it had never existed. The ground beneath Nathan’s feet turned black as the darkness spread outward from the point he stood, bleeding into the earth and moving far in every direction, a circle of consumed space expanding into the mist.

The blizzard died.

The sound of it died.

The cold thinned back to something ordinary in the space immediately surrounding him.

And then Nathan saw it.

In the rolling dark — where the Black Tempest was still spreading and absorbing and swallowing everything it touched — something was wrong. The darkness was not flowing correctly. In one area, not large, the dark was being deflected, curling away from a point in the mist as though it had found an object that refused to be consumed, the tendrils of shadow splitting and moving around it like a river splits around a stone. Something was there. Something the darkness could not simply take.

Nathan’s smirk came slowly.

”Found you.”

He pulled the Black Tempest back in — drawing it with a single sweeping motion of Kyomei, collapsing the darkness back toward the blade and into himself, reabsorbing it. The space it had occupied returned to its natural state, and as the dark withdrew it peeled the remaining snow from the air around that point like skin being pulled from beneath — the snowflakes cracking and fracturing and falling still.

And she was revealed.

She stood perhaps twenty feet from him, perfectly still, as though she had been standing there for some time and saw no reason to change that now. The snow around her feet had settled. Her white kimono fell in clean lines to the ground, the fabric immaculate despite the storm that had just been extinguished, its silver-white embroidery barely distinguishable from the fabric itself. Her hair was the same shade — a deep, luminous white edged with silver — gathered and tied before falling in a long line down her back. Her skin was white in the way that snow is white, not pale but genuinely colorless, as though warmth had never been part of her composition.

Her eyes were black, and they held no particular emotion in the way that deep cold holds no particular emotion — simply present, simply complete.

Her lips carried a faint bluish tint, the color of skin that has forgotten warmth, and they were curved into a smile that managed to be simultaneously beautiful and deeply wrong. It was the smile of something that had learned what a smile was supposed to communicate and had reproduced it perfectly without understanding the warmth that was meant to sit behind it.

Her fingers were long. Her nails — both hands and bare feet visible below the kimono’s hem — were the same absolute black as her eyes, catching no light, returning nothing.

She looked at Nathan, and the smile did not move, and the cold that had retreated gathered again slowly at the edges of the space between them.