I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Chapter 676: To the South of Kastoria

The capital’s roads were well-maintained for perhaps thirty miles in every direction — the practical radius of noble concern, where the stones were level and the bridges sound and the inns had roofs that didn’t leak. Beyond that the road became a suggestion. Beyond fifty miles it became a memory.

Nathan ran.

Not the restrained movement he used in public — the full, unhurried extension of a body that had stopped being ordinarily human some time ago, eating distance at a pace that would have been incomprehensible to anyone who happened to see it and wasn’t prepared to revise their understanding of what a person could do. The trees blurred at the road’s edges. The milestones passed in rhythms.

He ran and he thought.

Amaterasu had spent two hours telling him things she had clearly been holding back since before he arrived — the full history of Kastoria’s recent decades compressed into a briefing that explained, retroactively, the particular quality of damage he’d been observing in everyone around him since he stepped off the road and into the ceremony.

The previous King.

Nathan had encountered genuinely bad leaders before — men who were weak, or cruel, or stupid, or some combination arranged in varying proportions. The previous King of Kastoria had apparently been a specific and rare variety: the kind who was intelligent enough to understand exactly what he was doing and simply didn’t care. He had taken a functional kingdom and treated it as a personal asset to be harvested, starting from its edges — the south first, abandoned to its own entropy when maintaining it stopped being immediately profitable — and working inward.

The south had been rough territory before him. Under his reign it had become something categorically different — a genuinely lawless stretch of land where the lords who remained were corrupt by necessity or nature, where dangerous creatures moved freely because nobody was sending anyone to address them, where people survived by the specific skillset that survival in unguarded places required.

And somewhere in that territory, in a town called Minato, a woman who had watched her sister die because of that King had been living quietly for however many years, wanting nothing further to do with any of it.

Nathan could understand that impulse completely.

He ran through the second morning and let the landscape change around him.

The north had been cedar and stone and the particular ordered beauty of a territory that had been managed for a very long time. The center had been rice paddies and market roads, the comfortable productivity of a kingdom’s breadbasket. The south — once he crossed whatever invisible line marked its beginning — was something else.

The trees grew differently here. Larger, older, less managed, their roots breaking the road’s remaining stones and their branches meeting overhead in ways that turned the path into a series of green tunnels. The air was different — heavier, carrying more moisture and more of everything that lived in moisture. Birds he didn’t recognize, sounds at the forest’s edge that could have been wind or could have been something else.

Beautiful in its way. Honest, at least — a place that didn’t pretend to be safer than it was.

On the afternoon of the first day he stopped at a river crossing where the bridge had partially collapsed and a ferryman had set up permanent residence on the bank, charging crossing fees to anyone too heavily laden to ford.

Nathan forded.

The ferryman watched him from his stool with the expression of someone who had seen the full range of what the south produced and had learned to reserve judgment until he understood what category a new arrival belonged to.

Nathan nodded at him as he came up the far bank, water draining from his sandals.

The ferryman nodded back.

No conversation. Exactly right.

He practiced at night.

The second evening he made camp off the road — no fire, no need for one, his body generating enough warmth to make the mild southern chill irrelevant — and in a clearing of flat ground between two large roots he drew Kyōmei for the first time with the intention of learning it.

The darkness seeped out immediately as the blade cleared the scabbard, and the pain arrived with it — that specific inward drawing, the blade’s cost pressing against his palm and up through his forearm.

He breathed through it and felt it settle into the existing structure of the Pandora curses, finding its level, becoming one more layer of continuous sensation rather than a separate emergency.

Then he looked at the blade properly.

It was different from the demonic sword — the weapon he’d carried since Tenebria, forged from materials that responded to demonic power, balanced for a style of combat that used magic as an extension of the steel. Kyōmei had no relationship with magic whatsoever. It was purely, completely physical — steel and craft and the specific geometry of five centuries of darkness soaked into the grain.

It was also different from Alexander’s golden sword, which had been built for overwhelming, statement-making force — the kind of sword that won battles by existing at the front of an army and being seen.

Kyōmei was quiet.

Nathan moved through the basic forms first — not Tenebrian forms, not the broad aggressive sweeps he used with the demonic sword, but the compact, precise movements he’d observed Kastorian swordsmen using during the ceremony. Shorter draw angles. Less commitment per strike. The philosophy of a sword style built for ambiguity — where you might be standing close to someone you weren’t certain you needed to kill yet.

The blade moved differently than anything he’d used before.

It was faster in the hand than its weight suggested — the balance point further back, the tip lighter, designed for cuts that began and ended before the opponent had fully registered the beginning. He adjusted his grip twice before finding the position that let the blade do what it wanted to do rather than what he was trying to impose on it.

Around him the southern forest made its sounds. Something large moved at the clearing’s edge in the early hours of the second morning and then moved away, apparently deciding that whatever it had found wasn’t what it was looking for.

Nathan kept practicing.

By dawn he had the basic relationship with Kyōmei established — not mastery, not yet, but the initial understanding between a swordsman and a new blade where both parties have taken each other’s measure and arrived at a functional working agreement.

He sheathed it, felt the darkness recede, felt the pain ease back to its baseline.

Stood in the clearing for a moment.

Then returned to the road and kept moving south.

Minato was may one or two days away, according to the last road marker he’d passed that was still legible.

A town on the south coast — as far from the capital as it was possible to be while still technically remaining inside Kastoria’s borders. The kind of place where people went when they wanted to stop being findable. Where a princess who had abandoned everything could become simply a woman living near water, watched by no one, belonging to nothing.

Nathan adjusted Kyōmei at his hip and ran.

He had been running for the better part of two hours at the pace that turned the road into a blur beneath his sandals — travelers and farmers and the occasional merchant convoy catching only a displacement of air as he passed, a sound like wind where there was no wind, and then nothing.

He pulled back to a walk.

Not exhaustion — his body didn’t tire this way anymore. Discipline. The south’s outskirts were close enough now that the trees had changed character and the road had thinned, and a man arriving in unfamiliar territory at inhuman speed was a man who arrived with questions already attached to him.

He breathed the slowing rhythm of the transition and let his pace become human.

The desire to simply launch himself skyward — to cover the remaining distance in minutes, the way he would have on Drakkias’s back — sat at the back of his mind and he set it aside. No golden dragon. No visible power. No divine signature, no pressure, nothing that would catch the peripheral attention of a god or anyone else.

Just a ronin walking south.

Get Ayame. Bring her north. Then work on the rest.

Simple enough in its structure. The south’s complications would announce themselves as they came.

"Kyaaaa—!"

The cry was sharp and real — not the ambient noise of ordinary travel but the specific register of genuine fear, carrying across the distance with the clarity of something that needed to be heard.

Nathan’s stride didn’t break. His eyes went right.

The path branching there was the correct one anyway — his direction, his road. He covered the distance in two steps that were not quite normal steps and arrived at an elevated position above the scene below before the sound had fully finished echoing.

The blood smell reached him before the visual details resolved.

A carriage, stopped. Good quality — lacquered panels, the horses still standing because their reins had been taken, not because the animals were calm. Around it, a tight ugly geometry of soldiers and bandits in the particular configuration of an ambush that had been planned rather than opportunistic: the soldiers cut off from each other, their angles bad, the bandits positioned to prevent any effective group response.

Not random. Organized.

On the ground near the carriage’s rear wheel, a maid in a kimono was down — a sword wound through her side, her hands still pressed against the door she had apparently been blocking with her body.

Nathan’s gaze shifted.

A senior soldier — older, grey at his temples, moving with the economical precision of someone who had been doing this for decades — had just removed a bandit’s hand at the wrist as the man reached for the carriage door, his blade continuing through the follow-through into a cut that ended the conversation entirely. The split body hit the ground.

Two more bandits came at him immediately from behind.

He was forced off the carriage’s door.

"Get the Princess!" The leader’s voice — somewhere at the scene’s edge, not fighting himself, directing. The voice of someone managing an operation rather than participating in one.

Princess.

Nathan paused for precisely one second.

Not Haruka. She was already three days toward Tenebria by now. The only other princess in Kastoria’s bloodline was the woman he’d been running south to find for two days...

Princess Ayame...

Was his absurd lucks starts once again smiled at him to bring him to her already?

The carriage door opened.

A bandit’s hand closed around something pale — a slender wrist, a white arm pulling against the grip, the resistance of someone who was not going to make it easy regardless of the outcome.

"Leave me—!"

"Princess!" A maid’s voice, raw with panic. "Leave her—!"

The man was stronger. He pulled her through the door.

Cherry blossom pink hair cascaded out first — long, falling, the specific shade that didn’t belong to anyone ordinary — and Nathan was already moving before the rest of her came into view.

He covered the distance without a sound.

The bandit’s wicked smirk had barely formed on his face — the expression of a man who had just seen his prize and was congratulating himself on it — when it stopped.

SPATTER.

Wet. Final. The sound of something that had been attached and wasn’t anymore.

The Princess dropped immediately as the grip on her released — because the grip, along with everything above the elbow that had been holding her, was no longer connected to the man it had belonged to...