I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Nathan stared at Mitsuhide as darkness and blood crackled around his body.

The pressure pouring from him had changed completely. It no longer felt like the power of a skilled lord using a twisted ritual. It felt closer to Nathan’s own, the heavy, suffocating aura of something standing at the edge of demigod territory. There was more than raw strength in it. There was corruption, hunger, and a violent will that did not belong to an ordinary man.

And worst of all, it felt familiar.

For a brief instant, Nathan was reminded of Morosuke, of the moment he had shed his humanity and become that monstrous thing, a Kijin. The path here had been different, but the result was too similar to ignore. Mitsuhide had used the sacrifices, the shrine, and his own blood to force a pact into existence. He had crossed into the same cursed state through another door.

The problem was that he was stronger than Morosuke had ever been.

Much stronger.

Nathan could not afford to let him settle into this power.

He tightened his grip on Kyomei, dark energy spilling from the black blade as he shot forward without hesitation.

Mitsuhide did not move from his place.

He only watched Nathan rush him, then raised one hand.

At once, a black spike formed in his grasp, forged from condensed darkness and blood. It came together in an instant, long and jagged like a spear pulled from a nightmare. A heartbeat later it crashed against Kyomei with a violent shriek of metal and power.

Nathan pushed harder.

Darkness surged from his sword, Mitsuhide’s blood black weapon answered in kind, and the clash between them exploded outward in a brutal shockwave that tore through the ritual hall. The floor cracked. The walls groaned. Splinters flew from the old pillars as the force rippled through the shrine.

Then pain shot through Nathan’s leg.

Something burst up from the floor and pierced clean through his calf.

He grunted sharply and forced himself backward at once, landing several steps away. Blood ran down his leg, warm and fast, and when he looked he saw a narrow spike of blackened blood jutting from the boards where he had stood.

Mitsuhide gave him no time to recover.

He lifted his weapon again, and all around him more blood dark constructs formed in the air, spears, blades, jagged projectiles twisting into shape before hurling toward Nathan at terrifying speed.

But before they could reach him, winter answered.

The incoming weapons froze solid in midair.

A breath later they shattered into white dust and crimson fragments as Yukihime appeared in front of Nathan, silver hair sweeping behind her, spear raised, cold radiating from her like a storm given human shape.

Then another flash struck from the side.

Shiina moved.

Her body vanished into a streak of blue, and the next instant she was beside Mitsuhide, her katana cutting through the air with blinding speed. Mitsuhide barely managed to turn his spike in time. The clash rang through the shrine like thunder, blue light and black red force erupting where their weapons met.

The impact hurled both of them apart.

The shrine trembled harder. Cracks shot up the pillars and raced across the ceiling. Dust rained down in thin streams. The whole structure now looked moments from collapse.

”Nathan sama!”

Yukihime had already turned back toward him. Her voice carried a rare edge of alarm as she saw the blood running down his calf.

That alarm became anger almost at once.

Her eyes sharpened with a cold fury, and she faced Mitsuhide again before rushing him with her lance.

Nathan did not stop her.

Instead, he looked down at his wounded leg.

The flesh around the puncture was already darkening.

That was the real danger.

It was not just a wound. The Kijin taint within Mitsuhide’s power was trying to spread through him, to stain his flesh and drag his body into corruption. Nathan felt it creeping under the skin, invasive and foul.

But he carried something stronger.

Dark energy flowed from his hand and into the wound, devouring the invading force before it could spread farther. The bleeding slowed. The darkness around the puncture recoiled, then stopped advancing.

Nathan exhaled once and lifted his gaze.

Ahead of him, Mitsuhide was now fighting both Yukihime and Shiina at once.

The sight was enough to sharpen anyone’s senses.

The black aura pouring from Mitsuhide no longer behaved like a simple field of power. It moved, lashed, formed shapes, and attacked from every angle at once. Spikes erupted from the ground. Weapons formed in midair. Tendrils of blood black force snapped toward throat, chest, and limbs with murderous precision.

Yukihime met them with ice and snow, walls of frost rising before her, shards of frozen light spinning from her lance to intercept the incoming strikes.

But Shiina was the more terrifying sight.

Nathan watched her blur through the storm with impossible speed, her katana flashing again and again until the air itself seemed cut apart. Blue arcs of power split the black weapons before they could fully form. She twisted through openings that barely existed, light on her feet and merciless with every answer. There was no hesitation in her movements, only the cold joy of someone facing a true challenge at last.

Nathan did not waste another second.

He poured more of his dark power into Kyomei. The cursed blade answered eagerly, black aura spilling along its edge like smoke mixed with liquid shadow. The air around it warped under the pressure.

Then Nathan drove his foot into the ground and launched himself forward at full speed.

Both Yukihime and Shiina saw him coming.

Without needing a word, they broke away.

Mitsuhide turned toward him at once, and all the weapons and writhing darkness that had been attacking them shifted toward Nathan instead. Dozens of blood black spikes, blades, and tendrils converged from every direction.

Nathan raised Kyomei high.

”Celestial Dark Magic,” he said, his voice low and deadly.

Then he brought the blade down.

The shrine exploded with darkness.

A colossal wave of black power tore forward from Kyomei and swallowed everything in its path. Mitsuhide’s defenses met it for only an instant before breaking apart. His blood forged weapons shattered. The writhing aura around him split under the force.

Then the strike hit him directly.

The impact blasted Mitsuhide backward with overwhelming violence. He tore through the top of the altar, smashed through the ruined wall behind it, and was thrown out of the shrine in a storm of splintered wood, broken stone, and black red energy.

Nathan moved at once.

He rushed through the destroyed wall and out into the cold morning air.

Outside, Mitsuhide’s body lay in the dirt among shattered stone and scattered debris, half buried beneath what remained of the wall.

For one brief moment, it looked done.

Then the darkness and blood around him stirred.

They began to knit him back together.

Nathan watched as the black red force crawled over Mitsuhide’s wounds and pulled them shut, flesh mending where it should have remained broken. A second later Mitsuhide rose slowly to his feet, straightening with eerie calm despite the devastation Nathan had just dealt him.

His eyes settled on Nathan.

There was recognition in them now.

Not only recognition.

Understanding.

”You came to kill me as well,” Mitsuhide said, his voice quieter now, heavier somehow. ”Just like Yorimasa.”

Nathan’s eyes narrowed.

Mitsuhide lifted his chin slightly, studying him with that same empty, unreadable face.

”Black Ronin?”

”You did not leave much choice,” Nathan said.

Mitsuhide looked at him for a moment, then asked, almost mildly, ”Did Norihiro send you to kill me?”

A small smile touched his lips, cold and faintly mocking.

”That man always did know how to move others with words.”

”No,” Nathan replied at once, cutting through the thought before it could linger. His voice was flat and absolute. ”I am here because I want you dead.”

For the first time, something in Mitsuhide’s gaze shifted.

Then his body changed.

The flesh along his shoulders and arms bulged outward with a sickening force, as though something far larger were pushing its way through him from within. Darkness poured over his body in thick waves, swallowing his human outline. Blood followed it, running and twisting through the black mass like veins made visible. His shape expanded higher and wider, bones cracking, muscles swelling, the entire form rising until what stood before them was no longer a man but a towering giant nearly five meters tall, wrapped in a monstrous shell of blood and shadow.

The air around him grew heavier at once.

His face had not vanished entirely, but it had become something warped and terrible, stretched into a cruel imitation of what he had been. Black horns of hardened darkness curved back from his head. His arms were too long, his hands ending in talons formed from congealed blood. Every breath from him sounded like a furnace burning behind a wall of flesh.

”Then try it, Ronin,” Mitsuhide said.

His voice no longer sounded human. It rang through the ruined shrine grounds like something dragged up from a grave and given speech by force.

”So he is finally serious,” Shiina murmured as she stepped up beside Nathan, her blue blade already humming faintly in her grip.

Yukihime took position on his other side, silver hair stirring in the cold air, her lance angled forward. She said nothing, but the snow gathering at her feet thickened.

Nathan kept his eyes on Mitsuhide’s new form. ”Do not let that darkness touch you,” he said. ”Not even for a moment.”

Then he moved.

Dark power burst from him in full, no longer restrained. It spread over his body like living armor, black and dense, wrapping his limbs, his chest, his shoulders, until he looked half swallowed by his own magic. Kyomei pulsed in his hand as if answering the surge, its cursed aura thickening until the space around the blade seemed to tremble.

Beside him, Shiina smirked.

”That was the plan anyway.”

She drove her foot into the ground and vanished.

A beautiful blue light flared around her body as she rushed forward, swift enough to blur the eye. The glow wrapped around her like a second skin, part protection and part power, and wherever she moved, the air seemed to split around the speed of her advance.

Yukihime followed a heartbeat later.

She did not rush with the same explosive violence as Shiina, but with a colder grace, gliding over the ruined ground while a trail of frost spread in her wake. As a transcendent yokai, Mitsuhide’s corrupted darkness would have a harder time threatening her than it would most others, but even so, she gave it the respect a foul power deserved.

Nathan came straight down the center.

All three of them struck at once.

Shiina flashed toward Mitsuhide’s left side, her katana cutting a brilliant arc of blue toward his ribs. Yukihime swept in from the right, her lance thrusting for the giant’s throat with piercing precision. Nathan drove forward from the front, Kyomei raised high, dark power roaring around him as he brought the black blade down with lethal force.

Mitsuhide answered all three.

With a howl of twisting blood and shadow, his enormous arm swept out in a brutal horizontal strike, darkness exploding from it like a storm front. At the same instant, black spikes erupted from the ground beneath them, while a curtain of blood hardened in front of his chest to intercept Nathan’s blade.

The collision shattered the silence of the mountain.

Blue light, snow white frost, and black magic burst outward together in a violent wave that tore through the broken shrine grounds. Stone split. Dust and blood flew into the air. The remains of the shrine groaned behind them, already too ruined to survive much more.

And in the middle of it all, Mitsuhide stood roaring, his giant body pushing back against all three of them at once.