I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Chapter 724: Nathan’s conditions and Genzo’s offer

”I’ll help you get rid of the remaining Daimyos.”

Genzo didn’t smile. He didn’t nod with visible relief. He simply held Nathan’s gaze for a beat longer, as though confirming the words weren’t said in haste or anger, then inclined his head once — the barest acknowledgment of an agreement sealed.

”But I have conditions.”

Genzo nodded once. ”I’m listening.”

”When the South is clear — when we’re done — you bring your shinobis to the capital. All of them. To protect the throne and Ayame.”

Genzo was quiet for a moment, not hesitating so much as measuring his words before they left him. ”I cannot empty the South entirely. Whatever we build here once the Daimyos are gone will need hands to maintain it, people to ensure it doesn’t simply collapse back into the same shape we pulled it out of. Some of my people must stay.” He met Nathan’s gaze evenly. ”But that doesn’t mean the capital goes unprotected.”

Nathan’s eyes narrowed. ”So what — a handful of shinobis and gratitude? That’s your offer?”

”I will go to the capital myself,” Genzo said. ”Permanently. And I will bring enough men to watch over it properly — not a token presence, not a gesture. Enough to matter.” His voice carried no inflation in it, no salesmanship. He said it the way he said most things, as simple statement of intent. ”The capital will be protected. You have my word on that.”

Nathan studied him. He let the silence stretch long enough to be deliberate, reading the stillness in Genzo’s face, searching the edges of it for anything that moved the wrong way. There was nothing. The man wasn’t performing conviction — he simply had it.

”One more thing,” Nathan said.

”Ask.”

”Your unbreakable vow.” Nathan’s voice dropped a degree, colder and more precise. ”That you will never, under any circumstance betray Kaguya..”

Something shifted in Genzo’s expression. Not resistance. More like the careful acknowledgment of a weight being placed on the table that he’d already been prepared to carry.

”As long as Kaguya-sama does not move against us, we will not move against her,” he said. ”We have no desire to repeat what happened before. We lost enough to that. We will protect the capital and Ayame-sama — but in exchange, we will ask for what we lost. Our standing. Our protection. Respect for what we are and what we do.”

The history of it sat beneath the words without needing to be spoken aloud — their reputation fractured down the middle, half the country despising them for what they’d done under the old king’s orders and the other half understanding what those orders had actually been, and all of it unresolved, hanging over the village like smoke that hadn’t cleared.

”That’s reasonable,” Nathan said. ”Your privileges will be restored. Your people will be recognized. As long as you don’t give Kaguya cause to doubt you, you won’t have anything to fear from her.”

He said it with the quiet authority of someone who had enough standing with the Goddess in question to make such assurances mean something. Which was, Genzo reflected, an extraordinary thing in itself.

He looked at Nathan carefully. Had been looking at him carefully for most of this conversation, if he was honest — had been doing it since the moment this dark-haired outsider had walked into the dojo and matched him blow for blow with a cursed blade and an iron will and a body already being eaten alive from the inside. Someone who spoke of Kaguya not with reverence or fear but with the familiar shorthand of a man watching out for someone he actually knew. Someone who had a woman like that — he allowed himself one brief glance at Yukihime standing silent and glacially watchful behind Nathan’s shoulder — standing at his back without question or condition, her entire presence radiating the particular danger of something that had chosen its allegiance and intended to keep it.

Who was this man?

The question sat in Genzo’s mind with no answer forthcoming, and he suspected that if he asked it directly he’d receive nothing useful in return. Some things revealed themselves in time or not at all.

A low sound pulled him back — barely audible, bitten off almost before it began. Nathan had shifted in his seat, one hand moving to the bandaging at his neck, and the line of his jaw had tightened in a way that had nothing to do with the conversation. The burn was making itself known again. Not as catastrophically as before, not the full drowning weight of a week ago — but present, insistent, a reminder that the poison hadn’t agreed to the terms of Ujitake’s suppression without reservations.

Nathan’s expression smoothed back out within seconds, the discomfort locked behind something more deliberate. He lowered his hand and brought his eyes back to Genzo’s.

”Now,” he said, his voice entirely even. ”Tell me you have a plan for the remaining Daimyos. Not an intention — a plan. Names, positions, how many men, and where they’re weakest.” He leaned forward slightly. ”We’re not doing this blind.”

”Patience is necessary,” Genzo said. ”We move when the time is right.”

”We move now,” Nathan replied flatly.

Genzo looked at him with the kind of measured patience that wasn’t indulgence — it was simply a man waiting for reason to land. ”You can barely walk across a room without the poison reminding you it’s there. You want to attack a fortified stronghold in that condition?”

”I alone may be sufficient to exterminate every enemy, Ryo-sama.” Yukihime’s voice came from behind Nathan, carrying the scornful lightness of someone stating something they considered self-evident. ”You need not strain yourself.”

Genzo exhaled slowly through his nose. ”I don’t doubt your strength. But strength alone won’t be enough. Not for this.”

”I killed Yorimasa,” Nathan said. ”Should I be frightened of what’s left?”

”You killed him,” Genzo agreed. ”And look at where you woke up.” He let that sit for a moment, not cruelly, just plainly. ”You nearly died. You would have died, without whatever it is inside you that refused to let that poison finish its work. Don’t mistake surviving something for having handled it cleanly.”

Nathan said nothing.

He knew, if he was honest, exactly what had kept him alive. The foundation his body had been built on — the innate resilience that came from being what he was, from the power of the Goddesses bound to him, and underneath all of it the Curses of Pandora running through him like a second skeleton. Strip any one of those away and Yorimasa’s bite would have been a death sentence delivered the moment it broke skin. He hadn’t survived through skill or preparation. He’d survived through constitution, and that was a different thing entirely.

”You still haven’t answered my question,” Nathan said. ”We outnumber them. You have an entire village of trained shinobis. Why haven’t you moved?”

”Because killing a Daimyo is not a clean act.” For the first time in the conversation, something edged into Genzo’s voice — not frustration exactly, but the weight of experience. ”It has consequences that ripple outward. Every remaining Daimyo will know what happened to Yorimasa by now. Norihiro is already reassessing, already tightening his walls, already accelerating whatever timeline he’d been keeping to himself. You didn’t just kill one man — you pulled a thread, and now the whole thing is moving faster.” He held Nathan’s gaze. ”The countdown has started. Which means we cannot afford to be reckless.”

”So we act fast,” Nathan said.

”We act smart,” Genzo replied, with a firmness that closed the gap between the two. ”And fast. Both. In that order.”

Nathan’s fists tightened in his lap.

”And in your current condition—” Genzo continued, quieter now, ”—you cannot fight at full capacity. You know that. If you rush this and fall apart in the middle of it, you won’t just endanger yourself. You’ll drag everyone around you into the wreckage.” His eyes moved briefly to Yukihime before returning to Nathan. ”Including her.”

The room was very quiet for a moment.

Nathan didn’t answer that. There was nothing to answer. It was the one argument that had actual weight to it — not his own life, which he had a fairly well-established habit of treating as secondary — but hers. The thought of Yukihime caught in a disaster he’d manufactured through impatience sat differently than any risk to himself.

”So I wait here doing nothing?” he said at last. ”Hoping the poison decides to leave on its own?”

”I don’t know whether that poison will ever leave,” Genzo said, and he said it with the directness of a man who understood that softening it would be a form of disrespect. ”I don’t know if you walk out of this alive on the other side of all of it. But what I do know is that if we want to take Norihiro down — truly take him down, not wound him and give him time to recover — we have one window. The Shogun festival. Two weeks from now. Held in Norihiro’s own domain.” He paused. ”There will be no better moment than that to get inside.”

Two weeks.

Nathan turned it over. It wasn’t a lifetime. It wasn’t even particularly long. But every day between now and then sat on the scale against what the poison was quietly doing inside him, and the balance of it wasn’t something he could look at for too long without it becoming irritating.

”During those two weeks,” Genzo said, shifting his tone slightly — something more considered entering it, ”I would train you.”

Nathan’s eyes moved back to him. ”What?”

”Your power is genuine. Your instincts are sharp — sharper than most, honestly. But you lean on what you’ve been given.” Genzo spoke without judgment, simply naming what he’d observed with the clinical clarity of someone who had spent his life reading fighters. ”The divine power, the curses, the sword — you reach for those first. Always. And because of that, your own body, your own foundation — it’s been left behind. Underleveraged. Maybe even neglected.”

Nathan didn’t deny it. He’d felt it himself, in the moments between techniques — in the fight against Morosuke, in the brief awkward silences in a bout where if he hadn’t had all these powers he wouldn’t have known quite what to do with his hands. The powers had carried him so far that he’d stopped developing what existed underneath them.

”You saw how I moved,” Genzo continued. ”You couldn’t track it at first. You adapted eventually — through instinct, which speaks well of you — but you had no framework for it. No foundation to build the adaptation on. Wouldn’t you rather have that? Strength that belongs entirely to you, that no one can take away, that doesn’t depend on anything outside your own body and mind?”

Nathan looked at Genzo for a long moment.

The answer was obvious. It had always been obvious. He’d known for a while now that he was building a structure with a weak ground floor and compensating for it with everything stacked on top — and that worked until it didn’t, and when it stopped working the collapse was total. Two weeks. Two weeks to address what years of leaning on borrowed power had quietly left undone.

He nodded. Slowly, but without hesitation.

Genzo inclined his head in return, something that might have been satisfaction settling into his expression.

”Then we begin tomorrow,” he said. ”Rest today. Actually rest.”

Nathan picked up the cold tea and drank it without comment.