I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

The space beside him was empty when Nathan opened his eyes. The blanket on Hanzo’s side had been folded back with that particular neatness she applied to everything, as though even leaving a bed was something she did deliberately. He stared at the ceiling for a moment, listening to the muffled sounds rising from the tavern floor below, the scrape of chairs, low voices, someone laughing at something that probably wasn’t that funny.

He didn’t have to think hard about where she’d gone. The Shinobis. She would have been up before dawn to go ask whether Genzo had made contact, whether any word had come through their network. Nathan almost hoped he had. It wouldn’t mean reworking the whole plan, yes, but it would also mean Genzo was breathing, which made him useful instead of just absent.

For now though, there was nothing to do but wait.

He pushed himself up, ran a hand through his hair, and got dressed. The stairs creaked under him on the way down, and the tavern opened up below like a painting of the exact kind of morning he’d been expecting — low light through shuttered windows, the smell of rice and something fried and the particular warm-sourness of sake that had been poured too early in the day.

”Hey! Over here!”

Shigeru’s group had claimed two tables pushed together near the far wall. Yuwa was already waving at him before he’d fully turned his head.

He crossed the room and pulled out the empty chair. Yuwa patted the seat next to her with a grin that suggested she was exactly as much of a morning person as she was every other hour of the day.

”You know,” she said, once he’d sat down, ”it would be a lot easier if you just told us your name. We can’t keep pointing at you like you’re a landmark.”

”I agree,” Sana said from across the table, nodding with the kind of earnestness that was hard to argue with.

Nathan turned it over for a second. Ryo was out. That name had taken on a life of its own — it rang through every port in the South, passed between merchants and soldiers and probably a few people who had very specific reasons to want to find the man attached to it. The irony wasn’t lost on him that he’d chosen it specifically to avoid drawing attention, and it had become more recognizable than his real name ever was.

”Nathan,” he said.

The table went quiet for exactly one beat.

”Na... than?” Shigeru repeated it slowly, like he was testing the weight of each syllable. ”That’s an unusual name.”

Heads nodded around the table.

”It must come from the other side of your blood,” Sana said, and the others murmured agreement, because it wasn’t exactly a secret — anyone with eyes could see Nathan didn’t carry pure Kastorian features.

He said nothing.

Taku, one of the two men in the group, let out a short laugh. ”Looks like you found a sore spot, Sana.”

”I — I’m sorry.” Sana pulled her cup toward her with both hands, looking genuinely mortified. In Kastoria, being half-blood wasn’t just a social inconvenience. The belief in blood purity ran deep enough that people built entire lives around it, deciding who deserved what based on how clean their lineage looked on paper. She’d clearly assumed she’d just prodded at something ugly in his past.

Nathan looked at her. Then he looked around the table, at the easy way they sat together, the complete lack of discomfort any of them showed toward him.

”You don’t seem to care much,” he said. ”About that sort of thing.”

Shigeru laughed, low and genuine. ”Everyone at this table has something they’d rather not put in a formal introduction. Trust me.” He leaned back in his chair. ”We stopped caring about things that shallow a long time ago. You shouldn’t be ashamed of what you are.”

”Well said, Shige!”

”Hear, hear!”

Cups went up around the table, sake sloshed, and three of them drank with the enthusiasm of people who had entirely forgotten what hour it was.

Nathan watched them without comment. He had opinions about drinking sake before the sun had fully decided to commit to the day, especially when they’d been at it the night before, but he kept those to himself. They were not his people to manage.

What he did feel, sitting there in the noise of it, was something closer to relief than he’d expected. Good people were rarer than most assumed, and he’d been wrong about this group from the start. If Hanzo hadn’t stepped in the first night, he would have handled them the way he handled most complications — quickly, quietly, and permanently. That was a thought he didn’t linger on, but it sat there at the edge of his mind while Yuwa refilled her cup and Sana laughed at something Taku said, and the morning moved forward without him having to do anything at all.

It was hard to reconcile what he saw with what they were. Mercenaries worked for coin and went home to empty rooms — that was the arrangement, clean and transactional. But whatever Shigeru’s group had built between themselves was something else, something that had clearly grown out of the wreckage each of them had carried into it.

Maybe that was exactly why it worked.

”Something catching your eye?” Yuwa asked, watching him watch them.

”I was wondering what these embarrassing pasts of yours actually look like,” Nathan said.

She laughed. ”Curious, are you? Of course you are.”

Shigeru glanced around the table with an easy smile. ”Well? Anyone here embarrassed enough to stay quiet?”

Sana set her cup down first. ”I’ll go. I’m from a samurai clan — nothing enormous, but well known enough. They arranged a marriage for me. The man was old, fat, and thoroughly disgusting, so I packed what I could carry and left before the ceremony.” She said it matter-of-factly, the way people talk about weather.

Taku tilted his bottle back before speaking. ”Samurai clan for me too. My father decided I wasn’t strong enough and threw me out. Worst man I’ve ever known, and I’ve known some genuinely terrible people since.” He didn’t sound bitter about it so much as done with it.

The others went in turn. Nathan listened without interrupting. The stories varied in their details — broken families, betrayals, doors closed permanently behind them — but the shape of each one was familiar. Not embarrassing, whatever Sana had called it. Dark was closer. The kind of past that either breaks a person or strips away everything that was never really theirs to begin with.

”And then we all found Shigeru,” Sana said, wrapping it up, ”and built this group. A group of losers.”

”Losers who became one of the best and most trusted mercenary outfits in the South,” Yuwa corrected, raising her cup. ”Don’t undersell us, Sana.”

The table erupted, cups lifted, sake spilling over the rims of a few, nobody caring. They were genuinely happy — not performing it, not drinking toward it, just already there. Nathan looked at their faces and understood that what they’d arrived at together meant more to them than whatever they’d left behind.

He thought, briefly and without meaning to, about what might have been different if he’d walked away after his mother died. Just gone. Somewhere, anywhere.

But gone where, exactly? There had been nowhere. His father was the only door left open, and he’d walked through it not because he wanted to but because the alternative was nothing. And through that ugly, grinding path he had somehow found Ayaka, Akane, Sienna, Siara — bonds that cost him more than most things he’d paid for. And those two other half-siblings, born from that celebrated actress, who had moved through his life briefly and coldly and left marks he hadn’t asked for. Not good ones. But marks nonetheless.

He didn’t follow the thought any further.

”Right then, Nathan,” Shigeru said, pushing back his chair and standing. ”If you want to know more about the competition, we need to move. First bouts could run this afternoon, and registration won’t stay open forever.”

Nathan considered it for a moment, then stood.

The others filed out behind him, already half-drunk and entirely unbothered by this fact.

”You still won’t tell me what you’re actually here for?” Shigeru asked as they stepped into the street, his tone light, almost amused.

”No,” Nathan said.

Shigeru sighed the sigh of a man who had asked the same question several times and expected to keep getting the same answer. ”I could help, you know. Whatever it is.”

Nathan didn’t respond. He doubted Shigeru was imagining that the enterprise in question involved dismantling the Daimyo Norihiro from the inside.

The festival had swallowed the street whole. Bodies pressed in from every direction, voices layered over each other, banners snapping in the wind above food stalls that smelled of grilled meat and sweet rice. Nathan moved through it reading the crowd the way he always did — gaps, obstructions, faces that turned the wrong way.

He didn’t see the soldier until they’d already walked into each other. The man stumbled back two full steps, nearly going down.

”You bastard!” He shot forward and grabbed a fistful of Nathan’s clothes.

Nathan looked at him. Just looked at him, steady and flat, the kind of look that had nothing urgent in it at all, which somehow made it worse.

Shigeru was already there, smoothly inserting himself between the two with a smile so practiced it could have been painted on. ”Easy, sir. It’s crowded, people are bumping into each other everywhere today. No offence meant, I’m sure.” He lifted the soldier’s hand away from Nathan’s collar with gentle, unhurried fingers.

The soldier held Nathan’s gaze for another second, decided something, and walked away without another word.

”That was terrifying,” Sana said quietly.

”Right?” Yuwa glanced at Nathan from the side, measuring him. ”I genuinely thought he was going to kill that man in the middle of a public street.”

Nobody said anything to contradict her.

”Come on,” Shigeru said, laughing as though none of it had happened, and led them forward into the crowd.