I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Chapter 680: Nathan’s questions

Nathan walked the corridors of the castle until they opened onto the street again, and then he kept walking.

He was not particularly interested in the south’s internal politics. The daimyos, their territories, their alliances and grudges and the tangled arrangements they made between themselves — that was the south’s business and the south had been conducting it without his input for a long time. He had no investment in any of it.

Except for the part where it might reach north.

That was the question sitting at the center of everything he had observed since the carriage had entered this domain — whether what was being built down here in the smoke and heat and hammer sound was something that stayed south, or something that had designs on the capital, on the royalty, on Kaguya and everyone around her. And the second question sitting underneath that one: whether any of it connected to Takehiko.

Those two questions were worth answering.

He pushed back the straightforward impulse to go back into the throne hall and put enough pressure on Sadamasa to get the answers directly. It would be faster. It would also announce his presence and his purpose to everyone in the southern territory before he had Ayame in hand and was already moving north, which was the opposite of what Amaterasu had asked of him.

So he walked the streets instead.

The forge district was the same as it had been from the carriage window, except now it was immediate and surrounding — the heat pressing against his skin from the open-fronted workshops on both sides, the hammer sounds no longer filtered through wood and distance but landing directly, the smoke moving at eye level in the still air between the buildings. Workers looked up as he passed, their gazes doing the quick assessment that people in rough territories developed — reading a stranger for threat level and intention before returning to work.

Nathan walked until he found an old man.

He was sitting just inside the threshold of his workshop, hunched over a workbench with a blade in front of him in its finishing stages, his hands moving with the practiced precision of someone who had done this specific work for forty years and had stopped needing to think about the individual motions. He hadn’t looked up. Around him, visible through the open back of the workshop, several completed katana were resting in a row, wrapped and ready.

"I don’t take orders right now," the old man said without raising his gaze. "Order somewhere else."

Nathan stopped in front of him.

"Do I look like I need one of your weapons?" he asked.

The old man’s hands paused. He raised his gaze — the slow, irritated movement of someone being interrupted — and then went still.

Nathan’s black eyes met his and the old man’s expression went through several rapid stages. The irritation dissolved. Something more careful replaced it. His gaze dropped to the black scabbard at Nathan’s hip and stayed there.

The darkness sitting in the sheathed blade was visible even from this distance to eyes that knew what they were looking at.

"This—" The old man’s voice had changed register entirely. He leaned forward slightly. "May I see it?"

"You’ll lose your hand," Nathan said immediately.

The old man pulled back sharply, both hands rising slightly in the involuntary gesture of someone who had just been reminded of something important.

Nathan glanced past him at the row of finished katana in the workshop’s rear.

"You said you’re not taking orders," he said. "But you’re producing in succession."

"I’m making them for selling," the old man said, some of the defensive irritation returning now that the immediate threat of the black blade had been addressed. "The Daimyo’s orders. For the alliance — the Prince Yasumasa and the Princess Sakura’s arrangement. The great Daimyo Norihiro wishes it."

"So all of you in this street are making weapons for another daimyo?" Nathan asked.

The old man scoffed.

The scoff carried the weight of someone who had been doing an honest and skilled trade for his entire life and had opinions about people who asked obvious questions about it.

"That’s our work, ronin! What would you understand about it! I suppose you get your answers with threats and blood and a blade at someone’s throat!"

"You understand it perfectly," Nathan said, and drew Kyōmei slightly — not clearing the scabbard, but pressing the tip of the sheath against the old man’s neck with the flat, unhurried certainty of someone who had said a true thing and was illustrating it.

The old man froze.

His hands came up immediately, both palms out, his eyes wide.

"I — I have a family!"

"Then you should answer my questions seriously," Nathan said, his eyes level, his voice carrying no heat whatsoever. "So that your family continues to have you."

"I will! I will, I will answer!"

Nathan kept the scabbard’s tip against the man’s throat.

"All of you are working at this pace for a political alliance," he said. "Since when? Is this your daily workload or something recent?"

"Of course it isn’t daily!" The old man’s voice had the strained quality of someone trying to be indignant and frightened simultaneously. "But the Daimyo-sama ordered it and promised good money for everyone who met the quota! So we are meeting the quota!"

"What does Sadamasa gain from the alliance with Norihiro?" Nathan asked.

The old man’s eyes went wide in a different way.

"What — don’t speak like that! It’s Daimyo Norihiro-sama! The strongest daimyo in the south!" He looked around rapidly with the instinct of someone checking whether anyone had heard the disrespect, and when his eyes landed on a soldier standing further down the street he raised one hand and waved it frantically. "Hey — hey, help me! Help!"

The soldier looked over.

He saw the scene — old man, hands raised, a black-haired ronin with a sheathed blade pressed against his throat — and his own blade was out and he was moving before the picture had fully assembled itself.

"Lower your weapon immediately!" He came to a stop with his katana extended, point toward Nathan. "Lower it now!"

Nathan looked at the old man with a cold, measuring stare.

"Papaa?"

The voice came from behind — a woman’s voice, and with it a smaller sound, lighter footsteps. Nathan glanced to the side. A woman and a girl of perhaps ten years had appeared from the workshop’s inner doorway, both of them looking out at the scene with the wide, frightened eyes of people who had heard the commotion and come to find the source of it.

The girl was looking at the old man.

Nathan lowered the scabbard.

He straightened and turned his gaze to the soldier, who was still pointing his blade at him with the rigid posture of someone who had arrived at a situation mid-development and was committed to the position he’d taken.

"Lower your weapon," the soldier said again, steadier now that Nathan had moved back. "Now."

"I came as escort to the Princess," Nathan said, looking at him without expression.

The soldier’s eyes moved over him — the ronin’s clothes, the dark scabbard, the complete absence of any emblem or insignia that would support the claim.

"You expect me to believe a ronin escorted the Princess here?"

Nathan held his gaze.

"If you’re wrong," he said quietly, "I’ll make sure your head ends up somewhere your body isn’t."

The soldier flinched. It was small and fast and he recovered from it immediately, but it happened.

"Just — walk," he said, his voice recovering its authority with visible effort. "Walk. Move."

Nathan turned.

The soldier fell in behind him, blade still out, pointing at Nathan’s back as he guided him away from the workshop and the hammering and the old man’s workshop, down the street and away from the forge district, the smoke closing around them as they moved through it.

Nathan walked ahead of the blade.

The soldier guided him away from the forge street and the workshop district, through a narrower passage between two buildings, and then out into a side yard where a stable sat against the castle’s outer wall. The horses inside shifted at their approach, sensing something in the air and responding to it with the honest animal instinct that didn’t bother constructing reasons.

Nathan stopped when the stable came into view.

He recognized the location for what it was immediately — isolated, away from the main streets, the kind of place that was quiet enough to conduct private business without witnesses. He had been brought to similar places before in similar ways and the pattern was always the same.

He almost smiled.

"Quite a fancy weapon you have there, ronin." The soldier’s voice had changed now that the street was behind them — the official authority gone, replaced by something more personal and considerably less professional. "Hand it over. Everything you have on you. Do it slowly and we finish this quickly."

Nathan turned around.

The motion was instant and complete — not a turn so much as a dissolution of the previous position and an arrival in the new one, Kyōmei already drawn through the arc by the time the soldier’s eyes had registered the movement had begun.

The wet sound was small and final.

The soldier’s arm — the one holding the blade — separated at the point just below the shoulder and dropped to the ground, the katana still gripped in the detached hand, both of them landing in the stable yard’s dirt with a dull impact.

Silence.

The soldier stood with the specific frozen stillness of someone whose body had registered a catastrophic event and whose mind had not yet caught up to it. He looked at the place where his arm had been. He looked at the arm on the ground. He looked back at the place where his arm had been.

His face began the contortion that preceded a scream — the kind that would carry across the town and bring every guard in the domain running.

Nathan moved.

His free hand closed around the soldier’s throat before the sound left him — not a grip designed for slow pressure but a complete sudden stop, fingers finding the throat with precise accuracy, the scream reduced to a choked wet syllable as Nathan’s momentum carried them both down and slammed the man against the stable yard’s ground with controlled force.

"Guuhn—!"

The impact drove what remained of the breath out of him. Tears ran immediately from the corners of his eyes — the involuntary response of a body in overwhelming pain trying to process too many signals at once. His remaining hand scrabbled weakly at Nathan’s grip.

Nathan looked down at him.

His black eyes carried nothing — no anger, no satisfaction, no particular feeling about the situation at all. Just the flat, patient attention of someone conducting a necessary conversation.

"You’re going to answer my questions," he said.

The soldier bit back the pain. Fear reached him through it — the specific fear that arrived when a person understood that the thing above them was not going to be moved by anything they said or did, and that their only available option was cooperation. He nodded, small and fast, his remaining hand going still.

Nathan eased the grip fractionally.

"Why is your daimyo making so many weapons?" he asked.

"B — because Daimyo Norihiro-sama asked—" The soldier started, and Nathan tightened his grip again immediately.

The man’s eyes bulged. A strangled noise escaped him.

"What does your daimyo gain from it?" Nathan asked.

"I... I don’t know!" The words came out fractured, the soldier’s voice pushed thin by the pressure at his throat and the pain radiating from his shoulder. "But it’s Daimyo Norihiro-sama — no one refuses him, no one — please, please let me—"

Nathan tightened again.

The soldier’s body arched once against the ground, heels pressing into the dirt, and then went slack.

Nathan looked at him.

A random soldier. One posting removed from the bottom of the hierarchy, given a sword and a uniform and enough authority to shake down lone travelers in quiet corners. He didn’t know the full picture — didn’t have access to it, wouldn’t have access to it, was simply another instrument pointed at whoever was convenient. The answers Nathan needed were not going to come from here.

He had heard enough.

"You should have chosen someone else to fill your pockets," Nathan said quietly.

He shifted his grip once, precise and practiced, and snapped the man’s neck with the clean finality of someone who had decided the matter was closed.

Then he stood.

He looked at the body for a moment, then reached down and lifted it without ceremony, carrying it the two steps to the stable door and pushing it inside. The horses shifted and stamped, their eyes white at the edges. Nathan set the body into the hay at the rear stall, kicked the severed arm in after it — it landed cleanly, disappearing into the hay with a soft impact — and pulled the stable door back to its original position.

He stood outside the door.

By the time anyone found it he would be well clear of this place. Soldiers went missing in the south regularly enough that one missing soldier in a stable would not immediately constitute an investigation.

He turned back toward the forge streets.

The hammer sounds continued from that direction — the same relentless percussion, uninterrupted, the work going on regardless of everything else happening around it. From somewhere above the buildings another column of dark smoke was rising and spreading into the grey sky overhead.

Nathan looked at it.

He had the shape of things but not the specifics. Sadamasa producing weapons at an accelerated pace, incentivized workers, the output flowing to Norihiro — who was the strongest daimyo in the south, strong enough that his name in the mouth of an old craftsman produced an instinctive glance around the street. The shinobis attacking Norihiro. The marriage alliance tying Sadamasa’s son to Norihiro’s daughter.

The specifics still had gaps in them.

A random soldier didn’t have the answers. A craftsman working his quota didn’t have the answers. The answers lived in the upper floors of the castle Nathan had just walked away from, or they lived in the mouths of people who were close enough to the center of the operation to know what the center actually was.

He needed more informations.

Thinking that he walked back into the forge district.