I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Chapter 677: Sakura

The sound that followed was not like the sounds of the battle before it.

The battle before had been loud — steel on steel, shouting, the organized chaos of men who believed themselves to be winning pressing their advantage against men trying to hold a collapsing line. It had the texture of violence that was still negotiating its outcome.

What followed Nathan’s arrival had a different texture entirely.

The man who had held the Princess’s arm took a moment to understand what had happened. He stood there in the road’s dust, still in the posture of someone gripping something, and looked at the place where his hand had been. Then he looked down at where his hand now was — on the ground, fingers still curled around the pale wrist it had been holding, the pink-haired woman already recoiling away from the thing that had released her.

Then the pain arrived.

”GYARGHHH—!!”

The scream was violent and wet and completely uncontrolled — a man’s body announcing catastrophic loss before his mind had caught up with the event. Blood fountained from the stump in rhythmic pulses, bright in the afternoon light, spattering the road’s dust in a widening radius.

Everyone froze.

Every bandit. Every soldier. Every maid.

The pink-haired woman had stepped back against the carriage with both hands raised, her wide eyes moving from the arm on the ground to the man screaming over it to the figure who had appeared in the space between them as though the road had simply produced him.

Dark hair. Dark eyes. A long black blade in his hand, blood running down its length in slow threads, the darkness seeping from the steel in that particular way that didn’t look quite like smoke and wasn’t quite like shadow.

The bandit leader’s voice came from the back — strained, the voice of a man whose plan had just encountered a variable he hadn’t budgeted for.

”W — Who is that?!”

”Don’t know! Must be a ronin!”

A beat. Then the calculation of a man who had survived this long by being willing to recalculate quickly.

”Hey! You want money?! Then help us — kill the soldiers and bring me that Princess!”

Nathan glanced at him.

One glance. Brief, flat, registering him the way you registered a feature of the landscape you were about to move through.

Then he turned to the screaming man and swung.

The sound the katana made was almost quiet.

The screaming stopped.

The head completed one and a half rotations before it hit the road and rolled to a stop against the ditch’s edge.

Silence fell over the road like something physical — a drop in atmospheric pressure, every remaining person on the field inhaling at the same moment and not yet exhaling.

”Princess...move back!”

The veteran knight, Takefusa’s voice cut through it. He had already crossed the distance to the dazed woman, his arm going around her shoulder, pulling her back into the reformed cluster of his remaining soldiers and the surviving maids. They pressed together instinctively — the geometry of people putting bodies between a threat and the thing they were protecting — and watched.

Every one of them wary.

A ronin with no lord, no allegiance, no demonstrated morality — a man who had just executed a screaming, disarmed opponent without hesitation and then looked at the result with no particular expression. In Takefusa’s long experience, that category of person was as dangerous to the people they’d apparently helped as to the people they’d apparently fought.

He kept his hand on his scabbard.

Nathan turned toward the bandits.

They flinched. Not all at once — in a ripple, each man reacting to the turn of those black eyes reaching him in sequence, a wave of involuntary physical retreat that moved through the group like a shudder.

Then Nathan stepped forward.

What followed was not a duel and was not a battle.

It was a man moving through a problem with a blade.

His sword style was wrong — Takefusa saw it immediately, the veteran’s eye catching the inconsistency in the first two cuts. The grip angle was off for a katana. The draw was too wide. The footwork was built for a different weapon entirely, some other tradition, a school that had never existed in Kastoria or anywhere near it.

And yet every swing landed exactly where it was aimed.

Limbs. Not bodies — not the killing strokes of someone fighting efficiently, but deliberate choices, each cut removing a specific piece of the man it found. A forearm here. A sword hand there. The brutal arithmetic of someone who wasn’t in a hurry and wasn’t concerned about the screaming.

The black blade moved through them and left darkness in the air behind it.

”A cursed blade,” Takefusa heard himself say.

Even at this distance he could see it — not just the color or the seeping shadow, but the quality of the cuts themselves, the way the edge went through what it found as though the material resistance of steel and bone was a courtesy being extended rather than a property being overcome.

”Cursed?” The Princess beside him repeated the word softly.

He nodded, not looking away.

The man wielding it wasn’t normal either. The wrong style producing perfect results. The absence of hesitation that went beyond training — something more fundamental than that.

It was frightening to watch.

It was also, Takefusa admitted privately, the most effective thing he had seen a single swordsman do in thirty years of watching swords.

The maids had stopped looking. Two of them had their faces turned into each other’s shoulders. The youngest soldier had gone pale in the specific way that had nothing to do with personal danger.

The last bandit standing was the leader.

He had backed against the tree line, his sword gone somewhere in the previous minutes — dropped, thrown, Takefusa hadn’t tracked it — and now he was on his knees in the road’s dust with both hands raised and his face carrying every emotion a man could produce when he understood that the last negotiation he would attempt in his life was the one currently in front of him.

”P — please,” he said. ”Please spare me, I — I have people, I have — please—”

Nathan walked toward him at the same pace he’d maintained throughout.

The leader’s voice climbed. ”I’m begging you — I’ll give you anything, I’ll tell you anything — please—”

He didn’t finish the sentence.

Nathan’s blade came down in a single straight thrust, through the center of the man’s chest, the impact pushing him back and down into the dust with a sound that was almost gentle compared to everything that had preceded it.

A groan. A collapse.

Then the road was quiet again, with a different quality of quiet than before — the specific silence of a space where all the sound has been removed.

Nathan withdrew the blade slowly.

He looked at it for a moment. Then he crouched and wiped the black steel methodically on the dead man’s kimono, running the cloth along both sides of the blade until the red was gone and what remained was simply the fundamental black of the steel itself.

He lifted it.

The blade trembled.

Faint, almost imperceptible — not the vibration of metal cooling or settling but something more deliberate, the specific tremor of something satisfied. As though the sword had been kept in darkness for a hundred years and had now remembered what it was for and found the remembering pleasant.

Nathan looked at it a moment longer.

Then he smiled — small, private, the expression of someone observing an interesting object and appreciating it for what it actually was rather than what they wished it to be.

Cursed blade, blood-forged, the pain running inward through his palm in that steady drawing pull.

He felt it. Clearly. It was simply that the Pandora curses had been burning through every layer of him for so long and with such comprehensive thoroughness that Kyōmei’s additional cost found no new territory to occupy. It pressed against the existing structure and settled into it, one more instrument in an orchestra that had already been playing at full volume.

He sheathed the blade.

The darkness receded.

Nathan straightened and turned back toward the carriage.

Takefusa had not moved — still in his protective position, hand still on his scabbard, the surviving soldiers still around the Princess and the maids. The old veteran’s expression was doing what experienced men’s expressions did when they were thinking rapidly and not ready to show the conclusions yet.

She was looking at him withcuriosity and wariness running together in her expression, one not quite winning over the other.

Nathan looked back.

She was genuinely beautiful in the way that certain people were beautiful without apparent effort — the long cherry blossom hair catching the afternoon light, the pink eyes carrying a softness that hadn’t been entirely extinguished by whatever the last hour had put her through, the kind of face that belonged to someone who had been raised being told it was an asset and had privately decided it wasn’t the most interesting thing about her.

Young. A year or two behind him at most. And she was watching him with those pink eyes in a way that was, he noted, more curious than frightened — which was either admirable composure or the specific quality of someone who had not yet fully registered what they’d just witnessed.

He took a step toward the group.

Takefusa’s blade cleared its scabbard in the same instant — clean, practiced, the draw of a man who had made this particular movement ten thousand times and had it down to pure reflex.

Nathan’s eyes moved to the blade briefly.

Then back to the woman.

”Name,” he said.

She blinked. Her lips parted slightly — the expression of someone who had been expecting almost anything other than that.

He took another step.

”I asked for your name.”

”How disrespectful—!”

”How dare you speak to the Princess Sakura like—!”

The voices overlapped, indignant, and one of them in their outrage had helpfully provided exactly what he’d asked for.

”Sakura,” Nathan repeated.

He was already revising. The name landed against Amaterasu’s briefing and didn’t match — but more than the name, the rest of it didn’t match either. The descriptions he’d been given of Ayame had been specific: older, mature and hard around the edges, carrying the particular quality of someone who had made a deliberate choice to disappear and had spent years being good at it. The woman in front of him had the look of someone on a journey she hadn’t chosen, not someone who had chosen to vanish.

He’d thought perhaps a disguise. The pink hair had made him consider it for a moment.

But no. This wasn’t her.

”What do you want?” Takefusa’s voice was controlled and flat.

”Wait...Takefusa-san.”

Sakura’s hand came up, stopping him, and she stepped forward out of the group’s protective cluster.

She looked at Nathan directly.

”Please,” she said. The word was simple and completely without performance — not pleading in the way that was asking for mercy, but asking in the way that was genuinely asking. ”If you need money, we will give you whatever we have. But please don’t hurt anyone.”

and something moved through her expression that she didn’t bother concealing. The faint brightness at the corner of her eye that she blinked away before she raised her gaze back to him.

She was worried about her people. Not performing it. Actually worried.

Nathan looked at her for a moment.

”I thought there was only one princess in Kastoria,” he said. ”And she’s at the capital.”

A beat of silence.

”Princess Sakura is the daughter of Daimyo Norihiro-sama,” Takefusa said. The tone was careful — not defensive, but measuring how much context was required.

Nathan heard about Daimyos which were equivalents of Count and Dukes basically.

”That doesn’t make her a princess,” Nathan replied.

The soldiers around him went tight in the jaw simultaneously.

Takefusa’s eyes moved over Nathan coldly.

”You’re from the capital,” he said.

”That doesn’t matter,” Nathan said.

He turned.

”Hm—” Sakura’s voice, behind him, carried the slight hesitation of someone choosing to say something they weren’t entirely certain about. ”Are you going somewhere? Perhaps... if we are traveling the same direction, you could accompany us.”

”Princess?” Takefusa’s confusion was genuine.

”You saw what he did, Takefusa-san.” Her voice was quiet but not uncertain. ”He is strong. If he travels with us, perhaps we lose no one else on the road.” A pause. ”I would rather ask than not ask.”

Nathan turned back.

”Minato,” he said. ”That’s where I’m going.”

Something moved across Takefusa’s expression — recognition, or the shadow of it, the look of someone who had filed the destination away under a category.

Of course. A ronin heading to Minato. Free town, no law, no oversight. Exactly where that type went.

He didn’t say any of that.

”We can take you as far as the road allows,” he said instead.

”No need,” Nathan said, turning again.

”The daimyo’s soldiers patrol these roads heavily.” Takefusa’s voice was even, factual, delivered without particular inflection. ”A lone ronin draws attention here. A lone ronin with a cursed blade and a trail of bodies behind him draws considerably more.” He paused. ”And if you kill daimyo soldiers to clear the road, the attention becomes the kind that follows you into Minato and waits.”

Nathan stopped.

He stood on the road for a moment with that sitting in the space it occupied.

He had been dealing with complications since the first hour south of the capital — three separate groups of what he had generously categorized as enthusiastic criminals who had read his solitary travel as an invitation. He had dealt with all of them quickly and without significant effort, but Takefusa’s point was accurate in its structure: efficiency created its own kind of visibility. Bodies left a record.

He did not want a record.

He wanted to walk into Minato as nothing, find a woman who had spent years becoming unfindable, and walk back out with her before Susanoo’s attention drifted south.

At the very least he wanted to avoid killing until finding Ayame.

Traveling under the cover of a daimyo’s daughter and her escort was — functionally — a great deal more invisible than traveling alone.

He exhaled once.

”Fine,” he said.