I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Chapter 710: Back to Minato

Nathan exhaled slowly through his nose and looked out across the summit.

The Orochi Temple groaned behind him, still settling into its own ruin — a low, grinding complaint of old timber and fractured stone, a roof beam finally surrendering and dropping somewhere in the interior with a dull, echoing crash. Dust and snow rose together in pale columns against the dark sky. The ground around him was red where the great serpentine body had come apart, the snow holding the color the way snow does, vivid and unforgiving against the white.

Loud. Considerably louder than he had intended.

A quiet assassination, he had told himself on the road below. A ghost’s entry, no trace, no echo. Well. The ghost had brought down half a temple and left a Daimyo scattered across a mountaintop in pieces. He surveyed the wreckage for a moment with the detached assessment of someone taking an honest inventory, then let it go. Yorimasa was dead. The outcome was the one that mattered.

The pain in his neck was the one that didn’t let him go.

He reached up and pulled his kimono collar aside, fingers finding the site of the bite. The skin around it had already turned, a deep bruised purple spreading outward from two puncture points like ink dropped in still water, the edges of it faintly raised and hot against his fingertips despite the freezing air. He pressed against it once, felt the sharp complaint travel up through his jaw, and released it.

His senses were dimming at their edges. Not dramatically — not yet — but the way a flame dims when the air around it begins to thin. Subtle, patient, and pointed.

Yamata no Orochi, Yorimasa had said. The name sat at the back of Nathan’s mind with the particular weight of something that should be familiar — something he had read or heard in a context that was now frustratingly just beyond reach. A mythological serpent. Eight heads. Old enough that the stories about it predated most of the stories about everything else in this world. Whatever venom it carried, it had not been selected for its gentleness.

He pulled his collar closed.

”Nathan-sama—” Yukihime appeared at his side as though she had materialized from the cold air itself, her dark eyes moving immediately to his face, then to the hand he’d pulled away from his neck. The warmth that usually lived in her expression had been replaced by something sharper and more urgent. ”Are you hurt? Let me—”

”Yorimasa is dead,” Nathan said. ”We’re leaving. Back to Minato.”

Yukihime held his gaze for a moment then let it go, the worry folding behind a composed smile.

”Gladly,” she said.

And she meant it in more ways than one. Minato meant moving forward, and moving forward meant staying at his side, and staying at his side was, at this particular point in Yukihime’s thousand-year existence, the sum total of what she wanted from the world.

She stepped toward him and lifted her arms — an expectant, slightly imperious gesture, the universal language of a person who has decided they would like to be carried and sees no reason to be subtle about it.

Nathan looked at her for a moment.

”You can fly, can’t you?” he said. ”You’re a Yokai. Even transcending one.” He said it without accusation, just the mild curiosity of someone who has belatedly noticed a relevant detail. ”You’ve always been able to.”

Yukihime’s arms lowered slowly. Her cheeks did something complicated — a brief, caught expression, somewhere between guilty and sulky/

She said nothing.

Nathan’s mouth curved, and he swept her up anyway — one arm behind her knees, the other at her back, lifting her against his chest without further discussion — and launched them both skyward.

The cold of the altitude rushed up around them as the summit fell away below, the broken temple shrinking against the mountain’s face, the blood-red snow becoming just another patch of color in the white expanse beneath his feet. Yukihime settled against his chest with a warmth in her face that the freezing air at this height did absolutely nothing to diminish, her arms finding their place around his neck, her cheek tipping toward his shoulder.

A thousand years alone. He didn’t think about it in those terms often, but when he did, it was with the quiet understanding of what it actually meant — not solitude as people usually knew it, a season or a year or a decade of empty rooms, but a millennium of existing in a world that couldn’t touch her and couldn’t be touched in return. Every person she had reached for, frozen. Every warmth, extinguished before it could reach her.

He held her a little more securely and said nothing. It didn’t need saying.

Below them, the first soldiers reached the temple’s base — tiny figures spilling out from the lower domain in response to the noise, spreading across the summit approaches with the urgent, directionless energy of people responding to something they don’t yet understand. Nathan watched them for a moment from altitude, tracked their movements, then turned his eyes forward toward the dark valley below and the distant lights of Minato somewhere beyond it.

Less subtle than planned. The Daimyo was still dead, and the territory would still fall into the uncertainty that followed a lord’s sudden absence. That part had gone correctly even if the method had been noisier than intended.

What hadn’t gone correctly was the burn spreading slowly from the two marks on his neck.

He became aware of it again now that the fight’s immediate demands had released their hold on his attention — a deep, spreading ache radiating outward from the bite site, moving down through his shoulder and up along his jaw with the steady patience of something that knew it had time. His senses at the periphery were duller than they should have been. His focus, normally absolute, required more effort to hold in place. The Curses of Pandora had already been drawing steadily at his reserves through the fight; layered beneath that debt, the venom was taking its own quiet toll, and the combination was not comfortable.

He was still standing. Still flying. Still functional. The Demigod blood in him was the only reason any of those things were currently true, metabolizing the toxin with a stubbornness that pure mortal physiology would not have survived. But it was not neutralizing it. It was delaying it.

He needed it treated.

Nathan pushed the discomfort to the back of his mind, where he kept the things he had decided to deal with later, and drove forward through the cold dark air — Minato’s lights somewhere ahead, Yukihime warm against his chest, and the venom of the Yamata no Orochi burning patiently at his neck.

Half an hour of cold open sky, and then Minato’s lights came up beneath them — the town’s familiar disorder spreading across the valley floor, lantern-glow bleeding through paper screens, the distant sound of voices and commerce drifting upward even at this hour. Nathan dropped altitude gradually, coming in from the mountain side, and touched down at the edge of the main street without ceremony.

He set Yukihime on her feet and they walked.

He felt the recognition move through the town before anyone said anything — a ripple, the way ripples move through water when something disturbs the center. Heads turned. Conversations paused mid-sentence. The Ronin with the black eyes who had walked into Morosuke’s castle and walked back out again. Word had moved fast through Minato, the way word always moves in towns built on information and the trade of it, and now here he was again, back from the mountains with a hooded companion and the unhurried stride of someone returning from an errand rather than an assassination.

He nudged Yukihime’s hood further forward as they walked. She complied without complaint, but even so — the line of her jaw beneath the shadow of the hood, the particular way she moved, the pale hands at her sides — people looked. They couldn’t help themselves. They stared at the shape of her the way people stare at something beautiful they can’t fully see, the imagination working harder than direct sight ever could.

Nathan pushed through the inn’s door.

The warmth of the interior settled over him — wood smoke, cooking smells, the low murmur of evening patrons — and the room’s attention swung toward him collectively, the way a compass swings toward north.

”Ryo-sama!”

Mitsuri was already moving toward him from across the room, bright-eyed and quick, her smile arriving a half-step before she did. She glanced once at the hooded figure at his shoulder with undisguised curiosity, then back at Nathan.

”Get Ayame,” he said. ”The Daimyo Yorimasa is dead.”

The words landed in the room the way a stone lands in still water.

Mitsuri’s smile froze on her face. Around her, the nearest conversations simply stopped — cups held halfway to mouths, chopsticks suspended, heads turning with the slow mechanical quality of people whose minds are running several seconds behind their ears. The Daimyo Yorimasa. Dead. Said in the same tone one might use to report a change in the weather.

After the things they had heard about what this Ronin had done to Morosuke in his own fortress, it wasn’t disbelieved. That was almost the more unsettling part.

”Are you going to call her?” Nathan said, looking at Mitsuri, who had gone quite still.

”Y — yes! Of course, yes!” She snapped back into motion immediately, nodding with the full commitment of someone overcorrecting for having briefly stopped existing. ”Please wait inside, Ryo-sama, I’ll find her right away!”

Nathan was already heading for the stairs.

Yukihime followed him up, and the room below craned and shuffled in collective, futile effort to catch a glimpse beneath her hood as she ascended. Nobody succeeded. She didn’t offer them anything.

The room was exactly as he’d left it.

Nathan slid the door shut behind them and crossed to the mat and sat down, and the sigh that came out of him when he did was not something he had planned or performed — it came from somewhere deeper than that, the sound of a body that had been told for several hours that it was fine and was now, in the quiet, presenting its actual invoice.

The burn at his neck pulsed with his heartbeat. His limbs were heavy in the particular way that came not just from exertion but from the body diverting everything it had toward a fight happening at the cellular level. The Curses of Pandora had left their usual hollow ache behind his eyes. He was genuinely exhausted.

Yukihime let her travel cloak fall from her shoulders and knelt before him on the mat, folding herself onto her knees.

She looked at him with those dark eyes. Reading him the way she always did, quietly and accurately.

”You’re exhausted, Nathan-sama.”

”I carried you the entire way from the mountain,” he replied. ”So yes.”

The faint curve at the corner of her mouth said she knew perfectly well that wasn’t the whole answer. ”Then let me help you recover,” she said.

”And how exactly do you intend to do that?” Nathan asked, meeting her gaze.

Yukihime held it. Then she reached up both hands to the collar of her kimono and drew it slowly off her shoulders, the pale silk parting to reveal skin that was the white of fresh snow and somehow warmer than anything that color had any right to be — luminous and flawless, untouched by time or cold or the thousand years of solitude that had shaped everything else about her.