I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Chapter 685: Takefusa’s shock

Akiko came running through the corridor like something had broken loose inside her.

Her sandals slapped against the wooden planks in an uneven rhythm — the sound of someone who had been standing frozen in a room trying to hold themselves together and had finally failed at it and was now moving entirely on the momentum of everything they had been holding back. Her face was wet before she had even reached Sakura, the tears already running, her breath coming in short broken pulls.

”Hime—!”

Sakura heard her coming and turned.

She had been standing in the corridor with her back against the wall, her fingers working at her kimono — trying to bring it back to its correct position, to pull the fabric back over her shoulders and arrange it the way it was supposed to be arranged, the simple physical act of setting herself back in order. Her fingers were not cooperating. They shook continuously, small tremors she could not stop no matter how firmly she instructed them, the fabric slipping each time she almost had it right.

She looked at Akiko coming toward her and managed a smile.

It was not a convincing smile. It was the kind that arrived because the face had been producing smiles in difficult moments for so many years that it produced one now out of habit, without consulting the rest of her.

”Akiko,” she said.

”I am sorry—!” Akiko crashed into her.

The hug was immediate and total — both arms going around Sakura and pulling hard, Akiko’s face pressing against her shoulder, the words coming out in fragments between the crying, running together into a single sustained apology that rose and fell in the corridor’s quiet. ”I apologize, Princess — I am so sorry — it’s my fault — if I hadn’t said anything — I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”

She pulled back.

The relief of finding Sakura standing and breathing had lasted approximately two seconds before her eyes moved, and now they moved across Sakura with the frantic detailed attention of someone looking for the thing they are most afraid of finding. Her face had gone from tears to something worse — the pale, still expression of someone who has arrived at a question they desperately don’t want answered.

The kimono was disheveled.

Not terribly. Not the way it would have been if — but disheveled, the fabric not quite right at the shoulders, the inner layer showing at the collar where it shouldn’t be visible yet.

Akiko’s face went white.

”Are you—” Her voice barely came out. ”What happened? Are you all right?” Her hands came up and moved across Sakura’s shoulders, her arms, checking with the quick thoroughness of complete panic. ”Did he — did Yasumasa-sama—”

”I’m fine,” Sakura said. ”Akiko. I’m fine.”

”But your kimono—”

”He didn’t—” Sakura stopped herself. Drew a breath. ”He didn’t. I’m fine.”

Then Akiko’s eyes went past her.

The blood trail was visible from where they stood — the long dark line running down the corridor floor from the doorway behind Sakura, the color of it unmistakable in the lamplight. And on the floor just inside the ruined door frame, visible from the corridor, a shape that took a moment to resolve into what it was.

Akiko made a sound she immediately covered with both hands.

”What happened—what is that—”

Heavy footsteps arrived from the far end of the corridor.

Takefusa came at a pace that stopped just short of running .

”Princess.” He covered the remaining distance and stopped in front of her, his eyes going across her face with the same frantic assessment Akiko had applied, looking for damage, looking for the thing that would tell him how badly he had failed in his duty by not being where he should have been. ”Are you all right? What happened here?”

”I’m fine,” Sakura said again. The third time. She could hear herself saying it in the same register each time, the words becoming a flat surface she was holding between herself and the conversation.

Takefusa looked past her.

He walked to the doorway and stood in it and looked at the corridor beyond — the blood trail, the fallen door in its pieces on the floor, the arm lying against the baseboard where Nathan had kicked it clear, the fingers still curled slightly.

He stood there for a long moment.

The silence he produced was the silence of a man whose mind was moving very fast and was not yet ready to produce words.

”Princess,” he said finally, without turning. ”What happened. Exactly.”

Sakura looked at her hands.

They were still trembling slightly.

”Yasumasa-sama...” She started. Stopped. The sentence needed a moment to become something she could say out loud. ”He wanted to attack me.”

Akiko made a broken sound behind her hand.

Takefusa turned around. His face was pale now too — the color gone out of it in a way that had nothing to do with shock and everything to do with guilt, the expression of a man replaying the evening’s sequence and finding the moment he should have moved and didn’t.

”But?” he asked. His voice was careful and quiet.

Sakura looked up at him.

”Ryo-sama arrived,” she said. ”He...” She glanced at the doorway. At the arm. At the pieces of the door. ”He cut off Yasumasa-sama’s arm.” She said it plainly because there was no other way to say it. ”And then he took him — dragged him to the Daimyo’s hall. He said he would deal with it. He told me to stay here.”

The corridor was very quiet for a moment.

Takefusa looked at her.

Then he looked at the arm on the floor.

Then he looked back at her.

”That ronin,” he said.

Not a question. Not anger yet. The flat, dazed tone of a man standing at the edge of something absurd and trying to find the right response to it.

Akiko had lowered her hands from her mouth.

She was staring at the doorway with an expression that was moving rapidly between horror and something she couldn’t quite name yet — the specific expression of someone who has just been told something that is terrible and also, in a way that feels entirely wrong to acknowledge, something else.

He had come.

He had found them and he had come and he had dealt with it.

”He attacked a daimyo’s son,” Takefusa said. He said it slowly, as though hearing it in his own voice would help it make sense. ”He cut off the Prince’s arm. And then he walked that Prince directly to the Prince’s father.”

He paused.

”That is either the greatest act of stupidity I have witnessed in thirty years of service,” he said, ”or this ronin is something that I have not correctly understood since the moment he got into this carriage.”

The second option sat in the air with considerable weight.

But the first option still had its own weight.

”He could be executed for what he did, Hime,” Takefusa said, his voice finding its direct register. ”Whatever Yasumasa-sama did or tried to do — a ronin who touches a daimyo’s son is a ronin whose head is forfeit. The Daimyo’s law here is not the capital’s law. Sadamasa-sama has the authority to—”

”N..No!” Sakura was already moving.

”Princess—”

”He saved me,” she said. The tears arrived without warning — she felt them before she was aware of deciding to cry, running down her cheeks in the sudden, uncontrolled way that things arrived when she had been keeping them at the surface too long. ”He only wanted to protect me. He did nothing wrong — Yasumasa-sama was the one who—”

Her voice broke.

She pressed her lips together and recovered.

”I...I will go to the Daimyo-sama myself,” she said. ”I will speak to him and beg if I have to.”

”Princess, that ronin told you specifically to stay—”

”I will not stand here while he is executed for helping me,” Sakura said.

Her voice had the quality that it had earlier in the day when she had stepped forward in the throne hall — the quiet, direct certainty of someone who had made a decision and would not be talked back from it. The tears were still on her cheeks. She made no move to wipe them.

She walked past Takefusa toward the main corridor.

Takefusa and Akiko followed — one from duty, one from love, both of them hurrying to match her pace.

The bodies began appearing around the first corridor turn.

Two soldiers, then three more further along, then another pair collapsed against the wall where they had apparently been running toward something and had found it moving faster than they were. The lamplight caught the blood on the floor and turned it dark and still, the pools already beginning to dry at their edges, the corridor quiet in the way that corridors went quiet after everything that had been alive in them stopped being so.

Sakura saw the first two and her hand went to her mouth immediately.

Akiko’s went up at the same moment — a synchronized gesture, both of them turning their faces slightly sideways, breathing shallow, the smell of blood thick in the enclosed space and sitting at the back of the throat with the specific heaviness of something that didn’t belong indoors.

They kept walking.

More bodies at the next turn. Then more beyond that — the count climbing as they moved further into the corridor network, the evidence of Nathan’s path through the castle laid out in a continuous, unhurried line from one end to the other.

Takefusa walked ahead of the two women, his eyes moving across each fallen soldier as they passed, his expression doing the slow, incremental work of a man revising a number upward and finding each new revision harder to absorb than the last.

He had been in battles. He had seen men die in numbers. He had walked through the aftermath of engagements between samurai clans where the bodies had been counted in dozens and the blood had run down the road’s stones like rainwater.

This was different.

This was one man.

Through this castle. Through its corridors and its guards and its trained soldiers. Alone and moving at what must have been a pace that gave none of them time to do anything useful, because every body he was stepping past wore the expression of someone who had not fully processed what was ending them before it was finished.

”Just who is he,” Takefusa said.

He wasn’t asking anyone in particular. The words arrived because they needed somewhere to go.

Akiko looked at the body nearest her — a young soldier, no older than twenty, lying face down with one arm stretched forward as though still trying to close the remaining distance — and looked away immediately.

The footsteps arrived before the figure did.

Quiet, steady, unhurried — the footsteps of someone walking through their own house after a long day, carrying nothing unusual in their rhythm. They came from the far end of the corridor ahead, from the direction of the throne hall, and resolved into a shape in the lamplight that became, as it drew closer, Nathan.

Dark kimono. Kyōmei sheathed. Both hands at his sides. His expression carrying nothing at all — not satisfaction, not fatigue, not the particular weight that walking through a castle full of bodies he had made might be expected to produce in a person.

He walked toward them and the corridor’s lamplight moved across him and he looked exactly as he had looked when he had gotten into the carriage a day ago.

The three of them had stopped walking without coordinating it.

The silence that followed had weight.

”R — Ryo-sama—” Sakura stepped forward.

Takefusa’s arm came across in front of her immediately, stopping her at the shoulder. He kept his eyes on Nathan. His hand had not gone to his scabbard — some honest assessment operating underneath the reflex had apparently concluded the reflex was not useful here — but his jaw was set and his gaze was direct and wary in the way that experienced men went wary when they were looking at something they had not correctly measured before and were measuring correctly now.

Nathan looked at them without expression.

”Do you understand what you have done here?” Takefusa asked. The anger in his voice was present but controlled. ”You have attacked a daimyo’s son in his father’s house. You have killed — how many—” He stopped himself. Recollected. ”The consequences for this—”

”I protected the Princess you were assigned to protect,” Nathan said.

The words were quiet and completely level.

Takefusa went still.

”While you were somewhere else,” Nathan added, ”she was taken down a corridor into a closed room. By your future lord’s son. In the house you escorted her to.”

The corridor was very quiet.

Takefusa’s jaw tightened to the point where the muscle showed at the side of his face. He held Nathan’s gaze with the expression of a man who had been given an accurate account of his failure and was discovering that there was nothing — not pride, not rank, not thirty years of service — that constituted a useful retort to it.

He said nothing.

Because there was nothing to say.

Sakura looked between them for a moment and then looked at Nathan directly.

Yasumasa was not with him. There was no one behind him. The corridor beyond was empty in the lamplight all the way back to the throne hall doors.

”Ryo-sama,” she said carefully. ”What happened? With the Daimyo-sama — what did he say?”

Nathan looked at her.

”He said he will address it tomorrow,” he said. ”He’ll speak to everyone in the morning.” He glanced at Takefusa. ”No one is to go to him tonight. Not anyone.”

The instruction landed with a flatness that made it something other than a suggestion.

Takefusa looked at Nathan for a moment longer.

He was thinking.

A ronin from the north. Dead soldiers throughout the castle. The Daimyo alive, apparently, and making appointments for morning conversations rather than raising the alarm.

The arithmetic of that did not produce a simple answer.

Takefusa opened his mouth.

Nathan had already turned and was walking away — down the corridor in the direction of the guest quarters, his sandals quiet on the planks, Kyōmei a dark line at his hip, the lamplight sliding across him and releasing him as he moved through it.

Takefusa closed his mouth.

The three of them watched him go until the corridor’s curve took him from view and the footsteps faded and the corridor was simply a corridor again with its bodies and its lamps and its particular smell.

Akiko was the first to exhale.

It came out long and unsteady, the breath of someone who had been holding it without realizing it and was only now discovering the fact.

”Takefusa-dono,” she said quietly, not looking at him. ”What is he?”

Takefusa had no answer ready.

He looked at the empty corridor where Nathan had been a moment ago.

”I don’t know,” he said. And the honesty in it was complete — no professional deflection, no veteran’s composure managing the admission. Simply the truth, delivered by a man who had been thirty years in service to powerful people and had never once felt as thoroughly outclassed as he had felt in the last hour.

Sakura meanwhile was silent staring at Nathan’s receding back.