I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Chapter 722: Nathan’s awake

Nathan came back like a man breaking the surface of deep water — gasping, sudden, the dream shattering around him as his eyes flew open and his body lurched upright before his mind had caught up with where he was.

”Haagh—”

The sound tore out of him rough and involuntary. He was drenched. Sweat ran down his bare chest and neck in thin rivulets, and every muscle in his body felt wrung out, emptied of whatever had been holding them together. He pressed the heel of his palm against his forehead as the headache announced itself — not a gentle thing, not a dull ache, but a splitting, white-knuckled pressure behind his eyes that made the room tilt unpleasantly at its edges. He breathed through it. Long, deliberate, painful breaths.

The dream clung to him. His father’s voice. The dojo floor against his palms.

He wondered, not for the first time, whether those memories would ever stop being vivid. Whether time would eventually do what it did to most things — soften them, reduce them to impressions rather than experiences. But he suspected not. Those moments had been cut too deep, pressed into him during years when he’d had no real armor to speak of, and they had set like scar tissue — permanent, defining, oddly necessary. Whatever he was now, whatever boldness had allowed him to stand before a literal Goddess on the first day of his summoning without his legs giving out beneath him — that hadn’t come from nowhere. Matthew Parker had built it into him whether Nathan had wanted it or not.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He’d stopped being sure a long time ago.

”R... Ryo-sama...?”

The voice was small. Uncertain in a way that voice almost never was.

Nathan turned.

Yukihime was beside the bed, sitting in a chair that had clearly been pulled close and kept there — her arms folded across the mattress edge, her head resting on them, her silver hair spilling across the sheets in a pale cascade. She’d been sleeping here. Or trying to. She lifted her face toward him now, and even in the dim light of the room he could see what the last however-long had done to her — the redness around her eyes, the exhausted, fragile quality in her expression that sat so strangely on features he’d only ever seen composed or coldly certain.

”Yukihime.” The smile came on its own, quieter than he intended, pressed thin by the pain still radiating through his skull. But it was real.

It was all she needed.

”Nathan-sama—!”

She was out of the chair and into him before the name had fully left her lips, and the impact was enough to draw a groan out of him despite himself — but his arms went around her anyway, instinctively, pulling her close against his chest as she buried her face against his shoulder. She was shaking faintly. He could feel the trembling she was trying to contain and failing at, and the sound of her voice when it came was fractured in a way that had nothing performative about it.

”I was so afraid...”

”I know.” He moved his hand slowly through her silver hair, the gesture unhurried, steady. ”I’m sorry for worrying you.”

She didn’t respond immediately. She just held on.

After a moment Nathan drew back slightly — not away from her, just enough to look around. A small room. Simple. The kind of place built for function rather than comfort, but clean and quiet, low light coming through a narrow window. Nothing he recognized.

”What happened, Yukihime,” he asked, his voice still roughened at the edges. ”Where are we?”

The last thing that surfaced clearly when he reached back — fighting Genzo, the exchange of blows, the moment Pandora had cracked through the air — and then the shoulder. The shoulder, and then nothing.

The poison. Yorimasa’s bite. Of course.

His hand moved reflexively to his neck. Bandages, wrapped close and careful. He couldn’t see the mark beneath them but he could feel it — a deep, gnawing heat that hadn’t gone anywhere, radiating outward into his chest and jaw in slow, insistent pulses. Not incapacitating. But present. Unmistakably alive inside him, the way something living and malevolent was alive.

”You’ve been unconscious for a week, Ryo-sama.”

Nathan went still.

”A week,” he repeated.

Yukihime nodded against his shoulder. When she pulled back enough for him to see her face fully, the evidence was all there — in the raw redness of her eyes, the shadows beneath them.

A week. He’d lost an entire week.

”It is already a miracle that you’ve woken up at all.”

The voice came from the doorway.

Nathan looked up.

The old man — Ujitake stood at the entrance with his arms loose at his sides, his eyes moving over Nathan in the practiced way of a healer taking inventory. He crossed the room and stopped at the bedside, studying Nathan’s face with an expression that hovered somewhere between professional satisfaction and lingering disbelief.

”Actually—” He let out a short breath through his nose that might have been the beginning of a laugh. ”A miracle may not be a strong enough word. By every measure I know, boy, you should not be here.” He tilted his head slightly. ”You should not be alive.”

”He’s the one who treated you,” Yukihime said quietly, her hand still resting near Nathan’s arm as though she wasn’t quite ready to stop confirming he was solid.

Nathan’s jaw tightened. He already knew the answer to the question forming in him but he asked it anyway — needed to hear it said plainly.

”Did the poison leave my body?”

”No.” Ujitake said it without softening it. ”What is inside you is a replicate of the true poison of the Yamata no Orochi. Had it been the genuine thing — the real venom of the beast itself — nothing on this earth would have kept you breathing, Demigod or otherwise. The replicate should have killed you too. By any logic I can apply to this situation, it should have.” He paused, something flickering briefly behind the old eyes. ”And yet here you are. I don’t know what to call that other than an extraordinary will. Or perhaps something else entirely watching over you.”

Nathan looked at his own hands. The faint discoloration still visible near his wrists — the furthest reach of those spreading veins — had receded slightly. Not gone. But pulled back.

”You couldn’t remove it,” he said.

”I tried. I failed.” Ujitake said it plainly, without apology for the fact or decoration around it. ”What I managed was suppression. The poison is still in you — it will remain in you — but I have pushed it back enough that your body is no longer losing the fight against it every hour.” He folded his hands in front of him. ”You will still have pain. Nausea. Days where it reasserts itself more than others. What I’ve done is not a cure. It is a delay. The poison is still running its course, only slower now. I bought you time.”

The word delay sat in the room with all the comfortable warmth of a blade placed flat on a table.

Nathan held Ujitake’s gaze for a moment. Then he looked down at the bandaging at his neck. He didn’t speak immediately — let the full shape of it settle over him the way it needed to, without flinching from it.

He was alive. The poison was still inside him. And somewhere out there, there might be an answer to it — or there might not be.

He unclenched his hands slowly.

”Thank you,” he said finally, looking back at Ujitake. ”For what you managed.”

Gratitude, Nathan understood. He wasn’t without it. Ujitake had done something that by the old man’s own admission shouldn’t have been possible, and whatever time had been bought — however uncertain its price — was time Nathan intended to use.

But a week. Seven days gone, swallowed whole while he’d been lying motionless in a stranger’s back room. The capital wasn’t waiting. And somewhere in the machinery of things he’d set in motion before the poison had pulled him under, pieces were still moving without him.

That sat in him like a splinter.

He pushed the sheets back and swung his legs to the floor.

”You should be careful.” Ujitake said. ”You’ve only just opened your eyes.”

”I need to leave.” Nathan pressed his teeth together as he stood, locking the groan behind them through sheer stubbornness. He took one step and the world reminded him immediately and thoroughly that it had opinions about that — nausea rose fast and sharp from somewhere low in his gut, and the wound at his neck chose the same moment to reassert itself, a deep flaring heat that radiated down into his chest and up along his jaw like something with its own heartbeat.

His balance tipped.

”Ryo-sama—”

Yukihime was there before he hit anything. Her hands found him — firm, steady, colder than anyone else’s would have been but grounding in a way that had nothing to do with temperature. She held him upright and said nothing for a moment, but the worry on her face said more than enough.

”I’m fine, Yukihime.” He straightened up carefully, one hand braced against her arm. ”Kaguya will do something about this. When we reach the capital.”

He said it with enough certainty to make it sound like a plan rather than a hope. Whether Kaguya could touch something like this — a replicate of the venom of a creature that had gone to war with Susanoo — he genuinely didn’t know. The honest answer was that he wasn’t sure anything short of divine intervention was going to reach into him and pull this poison out by its roots. His body wasn’t a God’s body. It didn’t have the architecture for that kind of resilience. The replicate had nearly killed him, and the real thing would have done it without pausing to consider the matter. Whatever cure existed for something like this, if one existed at all, he was going to have to find it the hard way.

He filed that away alongside everything else currently waiting for his attention and kept moving.

The outside air hit him clean and cool, carrying the green smell of deep forest, woodsmoke from somewhere further in the village, the quiet sounds of a settlement that had learned to exist without drawing attention to itself. Nathan stood in the doorway for a moment and took it in — the paths winding between buildings, the lanterns still lit against the shade of the canopy overhead, the shinobis moving through it all.

And everywhere he looked, more of them.

”You are awake.”

Nathan turned left.

Genzo stood a short distance away on the path, arms loose at his sides.

”You’re coming or not?” Nathan asked him. No preamble. No softening of the edges.

”I gave you my answer on that matter already,” Genzo said.

Nathan’s expression shifted — a degree of cooling, something flattening behind the eyes — and he turned away. If Genzo wouldn’t come, that was a fact to work around rather than argue against. He’d find another way to ensure Ayame’s safety in the capital, or he’d convince her that the protections already available were enough. One problem at a time.

He’d taken three steps when Genzo spoke again.

”But there may be a way I could be persuaded.”

Nathan stopped.

He turned around slowly.

Genzo’s expression hadn’t changed.

”Help us free the South of the Daimyos.”