I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Chapter 783: Mitsuhide’s cursed awakening

She was stronger than before.

Not by a little.

Her speed had risen sharply, and the cold around her carried a much heavier force than before. Every step she took seemed to drag winter behind it, and every swing of her lance left death in clean, merciless shapes.

Below on the path, Shiina glanced up in the middle of her own fight and let out a low whistle.

“Oh,” she said with a grin as she cut through another of Mitsuhide’s puppet like guards, “I like her already.”

Nathan allowed himself the smallest smile.

Yukihime drove her lance forward, piercing straight through one armored knight and lifting him from the ground before flinging him into two others hard enough to break bone beneath steel. She did not pause. She did not waste movement. Her beauty remained untouched even in slaughter, cold and terrible and almost unreal.

A final soldier came at her from the side, sword raised for her neck.

Yukihime tilted her head, stepped inside his reach, and struck him once with the shaft of her lance.

The impact caved in his chest.

He flew backward, rolled across the stone, and lay still.

Silence fell over that part of the shrine path for a brief moment.

Snow drifted lazily through the air.

It did not take long for the last of Mitsuhide’s soldiers to fall.

The few still standing on the shrine path never had a real chance. Yukihime moved through them like winter given form, her lance cutting pale arcs through the air while frost spread beneath her feet. One after another, the dark armored men froze, broke, or collapsed into the blood stained stone. On the lower steps, Shiina finished the ones that had tried to circle behind her, her blue blade flashing so fast it seemed to erase the space between movement and death.

When the fighting ended, only bodies remained.

The path to the shrine was strewn with corpses, armor split open, blood soaking into frost and scattered snow. For a brief moment, silence returned to the mountain.

Shiina flicked the blood from her katana and then turned toward Yukihime, approaching her with open curiosity. Her red eyes moved over the woman from head to toe, sharp and assessing, taking in the silver hair, the lance, the cold still clinging to her like a living thing.

“One of your friends, Nathan?” she asked, though the faint smile on her lips made it clear she already suspected the answer would be more interesting than that. “I did not expect you to keep someone like her by your side.”

From a single glance, Shiina could tell Yukihime was no ordinary woman. There was something dangerous about her, something old and lethal beneath her beauty, the sort of presence that did not need to announce itself to be felt.

Yukihime looked back at Shiina and narrowed her eyes slightly.

She had only been gone a few days, and already Nathan was standing beside another woman, fighting shoulder to shoulder with her in front of a shrine soaked in blood. At this point, she was beginning to feel she would have to grow used to such sights whether she liked them or not.

Nathan gave them both only a brief glance. “She is Yukihime,” he said. “One of my women.”

Yukihime’s cheeks flushed immediately hearing that.

Shiina meanwhile repeated the words as if tasting them. “One of your women.”

For the first time since they had met, she sounded genuinely caught off guard.

Nathan, however, had no intention of letting the moment linger. His gaze shifted toward the shrine doors, still open, still dark beyond the steps.

“Focus,” he said. “Mitsuhide is inside. Let us finish this.”

His hand tightened around Kyomei as he started forward.

Yukihime followed without hesitation, light and silent across the bloodied stone. A second later, Shiina chuckled softly to herself and moved after them, her earlier surprise already fading beneath the thrill of what waited ahead.

Nathan climbed the few remaining steps with care and crossed into the main hall of the shrine.

At once, he felt that something had changed.

The place had already felt wrong before, but now the wrongness had deepened into something heavier, more immediate. The first thing he noticed was the smell.

Blood.

Fresh blood.

His eyes moved across the dim hall, and what he saw made even this twisted shrine seem darker than before. The servants who had entered with Mitsuhide were all lying where they had fallen, their throats neatly cut, their blood spreading across the floor in dark pools that soaked into the ritual markings. Some still clutched the lacquered boxes they had carried. Others had collapsed beside the black ritual stakes, as if they had been killed the instant their task was done.

Shiina stepped in behind Nathan and clicked her tongue. “So he slaughtered his own people without even pausing.”

“They were tools for him,” Yukihime said. “Nothing more.”

Nathan said nothing.

His eyes swept over the bodies, the opened boxes, the blood feeding the symbols etched into the floor. The dark red glow from before had grown stronger now, pulsing faintly through the chamber like a slow heartbeat. The shrine no longer looked merely desecrated.

It looked awake.

Somewhere deeper inside, beyond the ritual hall, something shifted.

Then came the sound of footsteps.

Mitsuhide emerged from the inner chamber with blood on one hand and that same faint, empty calm on his face. His pale gaze moved over the three of them as if he had expected them to come this far all along.

“You came sooner than I thought,” he said.

Nathan raised Kyomei and stepped forward, black steel catching the red pulse of the ritual light.

“And you are out of men to hide behind.”

Mitsuhide’s eyes flicked briefly toward the bodies at his feet, then back to Nathan.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “Because I no longer need them.”

The symbols on the shrine floor flared brighter.

And the air inside the hall grew suddenly cold in a way that had nothing to do with Yukihime.

The cold that spread through the hall had nothing to do with Yukihime.

It rose from the floor itself.

The blood spilling from the servants’ throats had not pooled at random. It had followed the carved channels cut into the old shrine boards and seeped into the symbols painted there earlier. Nathan saw it now with sudden clarity. The ritual lines were not merely decoration. They were pathways. Every drop of blood had been guided where Mitsuhide wanted it to go, feeding the faded mark of the split circle and the larger ring around it until the whole floor seemed to pulse with a dull crimson light.

Shiina’s eyes narrowed as she took in the bodies. “He killed them to complete it.”

“Yes,” Nathan said quietly.

Mitsuhide did not deny it. If anything, a trace of satisfaction entered his calm face.

“This shrine was never meant only for worship,” he said. His voice carried strangely in the hall, too soft and yet impossible to ignore. “Long before my family took this valley, this place belonged to older hands, to those who understood that gods were not the only things that listened when men prayed. There are powers beneath prayer. Powers beneath fear. Powers beneath death.”

He lifted his blood stained hand slightly, and the red glow across the floor shivered in response.

“My predecessors feared this place. They sealed it, renamed it, turned it into a warning and left it buried beneath superstition. But fear wastes opportunity. Once I understood what rested here, I chose not to flee from it. I chose to claim it.”

Nathan said nothing, but his grip on Kyomei tightened.

So that was it.

Mitsuhide had not simply ruled over a cursed place. He had made use of it. He had taken whatever old death rite had once been sealed here and bent it into something personal.

“You fed your own men to a dead shrine,” Nathan said.

Mitsuhide looked at her without concern. “Men die. Loyalty, fear, prayer, blood, all of them are currencies. The wise ruler spends what he must.”

Shiina gave a short, humorless laugh. “You really are rotten.”

But Mitsuhide continued as if she had not spoken.

“The shrine takes life and gives power in return. Not freely, of course. It must be awakened through sequence, symbol, and offering. Bones to remember the dead. Stakes to bind the current. Blood to open the way. Lives given willingly or unwillingly, it matters little once the rite begins. The valley itself has fed this place for years without knowing it. Fear ripens it. Suffering deepens it. Death prepares it.”

Nathan’s eyes moved across the opened lacquered boxes, the bones arranged within, the black stakes planted around the altar, the servants cut down exactly where they were needed.

Every piece had been part of the design.

“You built your strength on the misery of this valley,” he said.

Mitsuhide’s gaze returned to him. “I built order. Strength is merely the foundation beneath it.”

Nathan almost smiled, though there was no warmth in it. “Call it whatever you like. It ends today.”

Mitsuhide’s expression did not change.

“You still do not understand,” he said. “The sacrifices were not for protection. They were not for blessing. They were not even meant only to wake the shrine.”

The crimson light across the floor brightened, and the blood around the corpses began to tremble.

Nathan’s eyes sharpened.

Mitsuhide slowly opened his stained hand.

The blood on the floor lifted.

Not all at once, but in threads. Thin dark strands rising from the ritual lines, from beneath the dead servants, from the grooves in the altar steps. They floated upward like red smoke and curled toward him, gathering around his body in pulsing streams.

Shiina’s smirk disappeared. “That is his weapon.”

“Yes,” Nathan said.

Now he understood the purpose fully.

The sacrifices had not only awakened the shrine. They had created a reservoir for Mitsuhide to draw from. Human life, stripped down into raw force through ritual, then shaped into power he could wield. It was not elegant divine magic, nor the disciplined force of trained sorcery. It was older, fouler, more primal. A battle art made from death itself.

Mitsuhide spread his arms slightly, and the streams of blood twisted around him like living ribbons.

“This shrine lets me pull death into form,” he said. “The life taken here does not vanish. It lingers for a while in the threshold between body and silence. Through the rite, I seize that threshold. I make use of it before it fades.”

The red currents thickened around his arms, his shoulders, his chest. At places they darkened until they looked less like blood and more like hardened crimson glass.

“Armor,” Yukihime said softly.

“No,” Nathan replied, watching closely. “More than armor.”

He could feel the pressure building in the hall now, pushing against the skin, crawling over the senses. This was not just defensive power. The shrine was converting death into something closer to manifested force. Strength. Protection. Perhaps even regeneration if the rite was deep enough.

Mitsuhide stepped forward once, and the floor beneath him cracked.

“The dead serve me one final time,” he said. “Their bodies opened the gate. Their blood gives me shape. Their deaths become the blade with which I kill those who stand before me.”

Shiina clicked her tongue. “You talk too much for a man using corpses as fuel.”

Yet even she had shifted her stance. Her hand rested more firmly on her katana now, all lightness gone from her body.

Nathan kept his eyes fixed on Mitsuhide and spoke without looking away. “Do not rush him. Let him finish showing it.”

Shiina glanced at him. “You want to watch him become more dangerous?”

“I want to know what we are killing.”

That answer earned the faintest curve of Yukihime’s lips. She understood.

Mitsuhide did not seem offended by their caution. If anything, he welcomed it.

“There is a final step,” he said.

He lifted one of the black ritual stakes from beside the altar and drove its point into his own palm without hesitation.

The sound was wet and sharp in the silent hall.

Blood ran down the shaft at once.

But instead of falling, it was absorbed into the carvings etched along the black wood, and every symbol on the stake lit up one after another. Then the entire shrine shook.

A deep sound rolled through the mountain beneath them.

Not thunder.

Not an earthquake.

Something older.

The altar behind Mitsuhide split down the middle, and from the darkness within it poured a shadow so dense it seemed almost liquid. It climbed around his legs and merged with the red currents already surrounding him, black and crimson weaving together until Nathan could no longer tell where blood ended and whatever slept beneath the shrine began.

Yukihime’s eyes hardened. “He is binding himself to it.”

“Yes,” Nathan said, narrowing his eyes.

It was the final exchange. The sacrifices awakened the shrine, but his own blood is what granted him the right to wield it directly.

Which meant his coming transformation would not be illusion.

It would be embodiment.

Mitsuhide’s breathing deepened. The blood and shadow wrapped tighter around his body, pressing against flesh and armor alike, sinking into him and rising back out in thicker layers. His veins darkened beneath his pale skin. The whites of his eyes began to stain red.

“The shrine devours weakness,” he said, though his voice no longer sounded entirely his own. “It strips away the smallness of flesh. It lets the ruler stand as what he should be. Not man. Not priest. Not lord.”

The air grew heavier.

The dead servants at his feet twitched once, then lay still again as the last of their blood left them.

Nathan lowered his center of gravity and brought Kyomei fully before him.

“Let’s end this.”