I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Chapter 737: Ryo VS Morosuke Kijin Form! (2)

Nathan did not step back. He shifted his weight forward onto his front foot, adjusted his grip on Kyomei, and watched the darkness bleed quietly from the blade’s edge in answer to what was burning across the room from him.

The transformation did not stop where Nathan expected it to.

Morosuke kept growing.

The man who had already been large became something else entirely, the process ugly and visceral to witness, his body expanding past any proportion a human frame was meant to reach. He cleared six feet above, then seven, his head drawing close enough to the ceiling that the old timber groaned in protest. The muscles that had been thick before became obscene, coiling and layering over each other beneath skin that had deepened from flesh to something closer to burning coal, red as heated iron fresh from the forge. The veins across his arms and chest looked carved rather than natural, dark lines pressed hard against that reddened skin, pulsing in rhythm with the necklace that blazed at the center of it all.

Then the horn came.

It pushed out slowly from the middle of his forehead, bone white against the red, curving slightly as it rose, and when it was done Morosuke looked nothing like before. He looked like something pulled from a story told to frightened children, the kind of story meant to explain why certain men should never be allowed to want too much. The heat coming off his body was immediate and physical, pressing against Nathan’s skin like standing too close to a forge, the air between them shimmering and warping as though the room itself was flinching away from what he had become.

Nathan felt it in his chest before he felt it anywhere else.

A Demi-God’s weight. Contained, barely, in the shape of a man.

Morosuke looked down at him, and for the first time in the encounter he smiled with something that reached his eyes.

He moved.

The speed was wrong for something that size. It violated the expectation that mass and velocity trade against each other, that anything so large must also be slow enough to read. Morosuke crossed the room in a fraction of a breath and Nathan got his guard up by instinct alone, Kyomei braced across his forearms, and the impact that followed drove him backward three full steps across the floor despite everything he put into holding ground. The heat of the contact burned even through the resistance, and the red energy that detonated at the point of collision shook the walls and brought dust cascading from the rafters in long pale curtains.

Nathan reset immediately, circling, reading.

The ceiling was still low. The room was still confined. Those advantages had not disappeared, but Morosuke’s transformed body had rendered them considerably less useful. He barely needed to duck now. The space that had felt tight before barely inconvenienced him.

BADAM!!

BADOOOM!!

They exchanged twice more in quick succession, Nathan working angles, redirecting rather than absorbing, using Hanzo’s lessons the way they were meant to be used. He was landing touches, small and precise, Kyomei finding the gaps between those enormous guard positions. Under normal circumstances it would have been enough.

Morosuke barely acknowledged them.

Then he swung his arm, not the katana, his arm, a wide sweeping backhand that came in lower than it should have and faster than Nathan had budgeted for. Nathan read it a half beat late, got Kyomei up to profit from the contact rather than simply take it, and the redirection worked, technically. The curse blade bit into the forearm and drew something dark that might have been blood in another context.

But the force behind it was simply too much.

It caught him anyway. Even glancing, even redirected, the blow carried the weight of something that should not have been possible from a human body, and Nathan left the floor immediately, Kyomei still in his grip, the room blurring past him and then the wall arriving with a percussion that drove the air from his lungs in a single hard gasp. He went through it, stone and plaster spraying outward around him, and through the next wall, and through the one beyond that, each impact a new conversation with the castle’s structure, the building reluctantly making room for him as he tore through it.

Then open air again.

He cleared the outer wall entirely and the sky opened up above him, wide and pale and indifferent, the ground of Morosuke’s domain shrinking below him as momentum carried him further out, over the walls, beyond the compound, out above the street beyond the gates where Yukihime’s blizzard had done its quiet work.

He was still climbing, the arc of the throw not yet finished with him.

Then a shadow fell across him from above.

Morosuke was already there.

Nathan groaned seeing that.

He had covered the distance between the broken wall and the open air above Nathan with a speed that made the shadow steps Nathan had trained look polite by comparison, and he hung above him for just a moment, that enormous red form blocking out the pale sky, the horn catching the light, the necklace blazing like something dying.

He brought both hands down together.

Nathan brought his arm again to shield himself.

BADAM!!!

”Nguuh!”

The impact when it came drove Nathan straight down, all that monstrous strength concentrated into a single downward slam, and the ground did not give him any more consideration than the walls had. He hit it and the earth cracked outward from the point of contact in jagged lines, dust and broken stone erupting upward around him, the shockwave rolling outward across the empty street in every direction.

Nathan lay at the bottom of a shallow crater, staring up at the sky.

Morosuke landed beside it heavily, the ground shuddering under the weight of him, and looked down.

”You are not strong enough to stop me, Ronin.”

Morosuke’s voice had dropped to something that resonated in the street rather than simply filling it, a sound with mass behind it, the way thunder has mass. He looked down at Nathan in the crater.

Then the screaming started.

The people of Minato who had still been in the streets, the ones who had not yet fled from the earlier chaos, now found themselves face to face with something their minds were not built to quietly accept. They ran. They screamed. They collided with each other in doorways and alleyways, voices climbing over each other in a single rising wall of terror.

”A monster!!”

”It’s an Oni! An Oni! Run!!”

”Get away from it!!”

Morosuke turned his head toward the crowd. His red eyes moved across the scattered mass of people without particular interest, the way a man looks at something he is about to brush aside. He raised his large katana in his left hand, the blade looking almost modest in that enormous grip, and swung it outward toward them.

The air itself split open.

The force that left the blade’s arc was not a cut so much as a detonation, a concentrated wave of pressure that tore through the street and took more than twenty people apart before any of them understood what was happening. There was a single enormous crack of displaced air and then the space where they had been standing was simply red and still.

Morosuke’s lips pulled back.

”This,” he said, his voice almost gentle with satisfaction, ”is the power of Kijin.”

He turned back to Nathan, still embedded in the broken earth, and raised one enormous foot above him.

”Even you,” he said, ”can do nothing against it.”

He brought it down.

Nathan was already gone.

He rolled clear in the fraction of a second between intention and impact, and Morosuke’s foot met the ground instead, driving into the crater and deepening it catastrophically, cracks spider webbing outward from the point of impact across the entire width of the street, the stone groaning and splitting in long jagged lines that ran in every direction at once.

Nathan landed in a low crouch several feet away and rose slowly.

A line of blood ran down from his forehead, tracing the edge of his jaw and dripping from his chin onto the ruined street below. He did not wipe it. He looked at Morosuke with those flat cold eyes and reassessed quietly.

This was no longer the fight he had walked into the castle expecting. Morosuke had become a genuine threat, not the kind that could be managed with good footwork and sharp technique alone. Holding back now was not discipline. It was a liability.

”What are you staring at, Ronin!!”

Morosuke came at him again, and this time it was the fist that led, the right fist, the arm that Nathan had taken at the wrist in their first encounter. It had grown back. The flesh was wrong where it had rejoined, darker than the rest, the lines of it unnatural, but it moved and it was fast and it was enormous, and it came straight for Nathan’s face with the force of something dropped from a great height.

Nathan raised his left hand and caught it.

The collision was powerful.

The shockwave detonated outward from his palm in every direction simultaneously, and Nathan’s feet left the ground as he was driven backward, sliding across the broken street for a hundred meters, his heels carving twin furrows through stone and earth as Morosuke pressed forward trying to drive through the catch and finish it. The buildings lining the street took the overflow of the shockwave badly. Walls buckled. Windows ceased to exist. One facade peeled away entirely and collapsed inward on itself in a slow avalanche of timber and plaster.

And then they stopped.

Nathan’s hand, smaller by every measure, wrapped around Morosuke’s enormous red fist in a grip that had gone white at the knuckles. The skin across his hand was split and bleeding, bruised deep in the places where the impact had concentrated most brutally, and the arm behind it trembled with the effort of holding what it was holding.

But it was holding.

Morosuke looked down at the grip with something that shifted almost imperceptibly in his expression. Not worry. Something just short of it.

”Have you finally decided to fight seriously?” he said.

Nathan looked up at him. The blood from his forehead had reached his jaw. His eyes were the same temperature they always were, which was no temperature at all.

”So be it,” he said.

He released the dark magic.