I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Chapter 704: Yukihime (1)

Nathan studied the woman before him in silence for a moment.

He had not expected this. Not the beauty, not the stillness, not the way she stood there as though the extinguished blizzard had been a minor inconvenience rather than a display of power that had nearly gotten through his strongest defensive technique. Whatever he had pictured waiting at the center of this path — something ancient, something monstrous, something that matched the groaning dark and the pale Yokai faces — it had not been this. She was the most dangerous thing on the Kiro no Komichi, and she looked like something carved out of winter by a sculptor who had been told to make something beautiful and had gone too far.

”I suppose you’re the real reason no one leaves this path,” he said.

She laughed softly — a sound that was genuinely melodious, warm in a way that felt entirely at odds with everything else about her. ”That old woman managed well enough on her own for a very long time,” she replied. ”But she failed rather miserably tonight, didn’t she.”

”Hard to blame her,” Nathan said, his grip tightening on Kyomei’s hilt. ”She ran into something worse than herself.”

”Indeed.” The smile on those blue lips widened slightly.

”Who are you?”

A brief pause, as though she were deciding how much to offer him.

”Yukihime,” she said.

The name settled into the cold air between them. Nathan filed it away and moved on. ”Yukihime. Then tell me how to get out of here.”

She was quiet for a moment, her black eyes moving over him with an unhurried curiosity that felt more unsettling than hostility would have. Then her lips curved again. ”You are a beautiful human,” she said, her voice dropping to something softer. Snow began to rise slowly around her body, spiraling upward in lazy, deliberate currents. ”I find I have no interest in letting you leave.”

”Is that what you do here?” Nathan asked. ”Kill everything that wanders in? That must grow tedious after a few centuries.”

Her smile changed. The corners of her mouth drew upward and kept going, wider than a smile had any right to be, stretching until it split her face from one side to the other in something that had moved well past beauty into something deeply wrong. ”I don’t kill handsome men,” she said, her voice still sweet. ”I reserve them something far more special.”

She moved.

The blizzard came with her — an eruption of wind and ice that hit the space between them in an instant, and Yukihime’s body launched forward inside it like an arrow loosed from a bow. Nathan swung Kyomei down in a hard arc, pouring force into the blade, and the dark edge of it cleaved through the rushing air —

And cut through nothing.

She dissolved into snow in the fraction of a second before the blade reached her, the shape of her simply coming apart into flurrying white, and Nathan felt her reappear behind him before he could fully register the absence. Her claws dragged across his back in a long, deliberate stroke, deep enough that he felt the burn of it immediately, warm blood spreading beneath his clothing.

He swung back. She was already snow again.

The needles came next — hundreds of them, sharp as split bone and launched from every direction at once. He swept Kyomei in wide countering arcs, shattering most of them in the air before they reached him, but there were too many and the angles were too varied. A dozen found skin — his forearm, his jaw, his collarbone — each one opening a small, precise cut. They accumulated quickly. She was not trying to kill him with any single strike. She was opening him, piece by piece, patient and precise, and he could feel the cold seeping into each wound the moment it was made.

Nathan exhaled once through his nose.

”You leave me no choice.”

He swung Kyomei downward and opened the door.

The miasma poured out — those shrieking dark faces, formless and ravenous, spreading outward from the blade in every direction and moving fast. He knew the risk. He had already used them twice tonight and the leash was shorter each time. But the alternative was being taken apart slowly by a thousand tiny cuts in the middle of a god-made maze with no exit.

Yukihime’s giggle rang out from somewhere in the white.

”They can’t touch me.”

She moved through the miasma as though it were nothing — the screaming dark faces parting around her like fog, unable to find purchase on whatever she was made of, her white kimono undisturbed. She came through the spreading darkness with the casual certainty of something that had never once been afraid of the dark, her hand reaching toward his face, her expression cracking open into something raw and crazed and hungry.

Nathan braced.

Then her face changed.

It happened in an instant — the reaching hand faltered, her fingers curling inward, and something crossed her features that was not pain yet but was the moment just before pain arrives when the body understands what is coming. Her hand flew to her head. Her nails — black and sharp — dug into her silver hair and her body bent forward.

”No—”

The word came out broken. Her voice had lost all its music.

”NO!! STOP!! NOOOO!!!”

She screamed and the sound of it was nothing like her laugh had been. This was not a sound she had chosen to make. She shook her head violently, nails tearing against her own scalp, her face crumpling, the perfect composure she had worn since revealing herself dissolving into something raw and animal and desperate.

Nathan stood very still, watching.

He understood before he had fully processed it — the miasma couldn’t touch her body, so they had found another way in. Through the mind. Through the head. The screaming faces pressed close around her without contact, hovering at the edges of her, and what they were doing was worse than physical harm. He could feel the strain of it through his own connection to them, the feedback of their activity, and he knew he needed to pull them back before the connection collapsed entirely and they turned.

He reached for the leash.

And then the images came.

They pushed into him through the same connection — not his memories, not anything belonging to him, but raw impressions flooding through the link the miasma maintained. He saw what they were forcing into her. He saw what she was screaming at.

Yukihime. Younger, though not by much — a thousand years sat in the image like weight in old wood, but the shape of her was the same. Her face was entirely different, though. Open in a way it had not been tonight, warm, the black eyes holding something they currently did not — genuine happiness, unguarded and complete. She was laughing at something, and the laugh was real.

Kastoria was young in these images. Its edges rough, its cities half-built, its roads still finding their shape. A kingdom at the beginning of itself.

She stood beside a man. Tall, handsome, his hand finding hers naturally, the ease of two people who had stopped thinking about the gesture because it had simply become what their hands did. They were promised to each other, and the promise had been made from feeling rather than obligation.

Then the bandits came.

The town fell quickly and they ran — both of them, her hand in his, moving through snow that was already falling thick across the fields. Nathan saw the moment the man’s pace changed. Saw the calculation enter his face. Saw the apology form in his expression before he had even spoken it, and understood what it meant in the fraction of a second before it happened.

He said he was sorry.

And he pushed her down.

The ground caught her hard, and by the time she looked up, he was already running. Getting smaller in the white. Leaving her alone in the snow with the sounds of the conquest behind her and the cold rising around her body and nothing in any direction that wanted to help.

The bandits found her in the snow.

They had not given up — men like that never did, not when they had already decided what they wanted. They caught her in the open field, her kimono torn and hanging from her shoulders in ribbons, her breath coming in ragged white clouds against the night air. The first one who reached for her died with her knife in his throat before he had finished the motion, his blood impossibly red against the white ground. She did not stop to watch him fall. She ran.

But her legs were giving out beneath her. She could not feel them properly anymore — the cold had moved past sensation into something deeper, that final stage where the body stops complaining and simply begins to shut its doors. She ran anyway, clutching the tatters of her clothing against herself with one hand, the other arm pumping, her bare feet leaving prints of blood and cold in the snow behind her. She ran until the ground rose beneath her and the snow changed texture and she understood where she had arrived.

The cliff edge was there. The water below it was black and still and very far down.

The men came out of the dark behind her, breathing hard, their faces ugly with intention. She stood at the edge and looked at them, and then she looked at the water, and her mind was entirely quiet in the way that minds sometimes go quiet when they have received more than they were built to hold. Her family was dead. The man who had promised himself to her had used her as a distraction to save himself and had not looked back.

There was nothing waiting for her in any direction that was not pain.

She stepped off the edge.

The water received her without ceremony, cold beyond any cold she had already felt, and the dark closed over her completely.

And then something else opened.

Not warmth. Not light. Something that had no name in the language of the living — a door at the bottom of the world’s cold, and through it something vast and old and utterly without mercy poured into the body of a girl who had died at the age of everything-stolen-at-once. A curse forged from betrayal and cold and the particular violence of being abandoned by the person who swore they never would. It filled her entirely and she was reborn in the water, and what rose to the surface was no longer entirely the person who had fallen.

The images tore through her — her mother’s face at the moment the blade found her, her father’s hands going still, and that man, that face, the apology in it before he pushed her, the way his back had looked as he ran. The miasma fed them into her without mercy or pause, each one louder than the last, a thousand years of burial ripped open in seconds.

Nathan watched Yukihime’s composure come completely apart.

The tears on her face were freezing as they fell. Her hands had found her own hair and she was pulling at it, shaking, the serenity she had worn like armor dissolving into something almost unbearable to witness. Whatever she had become in a thousand years of haunting this path — the beautiful, terrible, laughing thing that dissolved into snow and drove her claws through men’s backs — none of it was here anymore. What was here was the girl at the cliff’s edge, and she had just been put back there without warning.

Nathan canceled the miasma.

The dark faces recoiled and vanished, sucked back behind the door he slammed shut on them, and the effort of it hit him immediately — he bent forward slightly, one hand bracing on his knee, dragging breath back into his lungs in hard pulls. His body ached in several places he had stopped cataloguing. The cuts on his back and arms were still bleeding.

He straightened anyway.

Yukihime had fallen to her knees in the snow. Her fingers were pressed into the ground, digging furrows in the white, her silver hair hanging forward around her face. Her shoulders were shaking. The blizzard had died entirely — the cold that remained was just cold, ordinary and directionless, nothing being driven by intent.

Nathan walked forward until he was standing directly in front of her. He looked down at her for a moment.

”Why are you still here?” he asked.

”They have to pay.” The words came out low and raw and scraped. ”All of them.”

”They paid,” Nathan said. ”You killed all of them. Every man who came down this road. That debt was settled a long time ago.”

Yukihime said nothing. Her frame kept trembling.

Nathan was quiet for a moment, reading what was in front of him. Then — ”You have nowhere else to go.”

She flinched as though he had struck her.

”You’ll spend eternity in this mist,” he said, not cruelly but without softening it either, because the truth had no obligation to be comfortable. ”Alone. With nothing left to hunt and nothing left to feel. This path was never a home. It was a place you ended up when everything else was taken.”

He crouched down.

His hand came forward and found her chin, tilting her face upward gently but with a certainty that left no room for resistance. Her black eyes, swollen now and bright with frozen tears, met his, and whatever she found in them made her breath catch.

”Come with me,” he said.

Her lips parted. No sound came out.

Nathan’s expression shifted — not the cold mask he wore in combat, not the calculated blankness he used as armor, but something more direct than either. His eyes moved, the dark of them bleeding briefly into gold shot through with something older and more luminous, the demigod nature surfacing just below the surface of the ordinary. It came and went in a breath.

”I’m not afraid of you,” he said. ”And I’m not weak enough or cowardly enough — to leave you here alone.” His thumb moved, brushing away a tear that had not yet frozen against her cheek, the cold of her skin sharp against his fingers. ”I won’t leave you behind. Not the way he did. You’ll stay beside me, and I’ll keep you there.”

Yukihime’s breath came out unsteadily.

”This place doesn’t deserve you,” Nathan said quietly. ”It never did. Come with me, Yukihime.” His eyes held hers and did not look away. ”I’ll protect you.”