I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Chapter 695: Nathan Vs Morosuke

Anyone near Morosuke’s castle that morning would have known, without needing to step closer, that something had gone very wrong inside.

The great gate hung open and shattered, its heavy doors reduced to broken timber scattered across the entrance. From the street, even those who only glanced in passing could see the courtyard beyond, and what lay across it made them stop cold. Bodies covered the ground. Dismembered, broken, bloodied. They were piled in the kind of disorder that only came from a slaughter, not a battle, not a skirmish, but a slaughter. Men who had armed themselves and rushed forward and died before understanding what they were rushing toward.

Passersby recoiled at the sight without meaning to.

Most did not linger. They kept moving, pulling their eyes away and walking faster, because whatever was unfolding behind those shattered doors was not something they wished to witness or remember. The story had already spread through the district in pieces and whispers. A ronin had come to Minato. A young, dark-haired foreigner, sharp-eyed and eerily calm, who had dragged Morosuke’s own brother through the dirt and through the street in front of hundreds of people before walking straight into the most feared man’s castle and beginning a massacre.

Before that morning, most people in Minato would have said honestly that no human being frightened them quite as much as Morosuke.

They were reconsidering that now.

And even from outside the broken gate, even standing at a safe distance in the open air, they could feel it. The ground trembled in faint, rhythmic shudders. Dust drifted from the upper walls. The castle itself seemed to groan under some tremendous internal pressure, as if the structure’s bones were being tested by something happening within them.

They were not wrong.

Inside, the fight had no audience, no space to breathe, and no pretense of courtesy.

Nathan and Morosuke moved through the interior corridor like two forces of nature compressed into human shape, their speeds blurring the eye and their impacts making the architecture pay for every exchange. There was something almost absurd in the contrast between them. Nathan was lean and compact, dark-haired, his frame carrying none of the physical enormity that Morosuke possessed. Against the giant’s thick arms and towering mass, he looked built for an entirely different kind of conflict. Even their swords spoke to the difference. Kyomei was a lean, dark blade, restrained and precise. Morosuke’s katana was a brutal instrument, long and heavy, a weapon that did not merely cut but crushed whatever it fell upon.

And yet every time the two blades met—

BADOOOOM!

The shockwave exploded outward with a violence that had no business coming from a single clash of steel. The force tore through the corridor in a ripple, cracking plaster from the walls, skittering debris across the floor, rattling every beam in the ceiling above. There was no physical logic to it, no explanation that anatomy could offer. Nathan’s arms were clearly built to a lesser scale than Morosuke’s, and yet the power behind each of his swings matched the larger man stroke for stroke.

Morosuke felt every one of them.

He had met powerful men before. Fighters who masked raw strength behind poor technique, mercenaries who had trained hard enough to become genuinely dangerous, warriors with unusual gifts. None of them had truly surprised him in a long time. But Nathan was something else. Something about him sat wrong, not in the way of a trick or an unknown technique, but in the way of a person who did not quite belong to the category Morosuke was trying to place him in. He could not explain it. He only knew it in the resistance traveling up through his hilt on every contact.

This was not an ordinary ronin.

Morosuke raised his katana high and brought it crashing down.

Nathan swung upward to meet it.

BADOOOOM!

The shockwave this time was vicious. The floor cracked beneath both of them. Every remaining window in the corridor shattered at once, glass fragments spinning outward in glittering arcs. The walls flexed under the impact.

"Where did that woman find someone like you?" Morosuke asked, pushing through the clash with a grunt of effort, his eyes still locked on Nathan.

He was curious despite himself. Chiyo had never been a genuine threat to him, an annoyance at most, a rival too small to warrant serious attention. He had let her exist because dealing with her had not yet been worth the effort. But sending a man like this? That changed the arithmetic considerably.

Nathan, however, had no idea what Morosuke was talking about.

He had no stake in whatever history existed between Morosuke and this woman Chiyo. He was not hired. He was not sent. He had not arrived with an agenda anyone else had handed him.

He had come for one thing only, and he had still not gotten it.

They separated, retreating a short distance from each other, both breathing harder now, the corridor between them filled with settling dust and cracked wood.

"I am giving you one last chance," Nathan said. His voice had not risen. His tone was not theatrical. He meant it the same way he meant a sword swing — directly, without excess. "Answer my question."

Morosuke stared at him.

Then a slow, contemptuous sound came out of him, something between a scoff and a laugh.

"Giving me a chance?" he repeated. "You dare speak to me like that, boy?"

His presence ignited.

The magic he had been holding in partial reserve burst outward at full force. It radiated from him like heat from a furnace opened suddenly, violent and oppressive, flooding the corridor with a reddish pressure that shoved against everything in the room. Nathan’s hair was blown sharply back. Dust and fragments of glass spun away from Morosuke in all directions.

"You attacked my brother," he growled, his voice dropping into something deep and furious. "You killed my men. You broke into my home." The red light across his blade intensified, bleeding along the steel like something alive. "You will not be given anything. When I am finished with you, you will beg me for a death I will not give."

Nathan said nothing for a moment.

Then he raised Kyomei.

The black blade answered.

Dark miasma bled from its edge, rising slowly in wisps and curling patterns that caught and consumed the reddish light rather than reflecting it. The sword looked less like drawn steel and more like a wound cut into the visible world.

"Let’s see that," Nathan said.

They moved at the same instant.

BADOOOOM!

This collision hit harder than any before it. The shockwave tore down both ends of the corridor simultaneously. Stone dust rained from the ceiling. The floor split in jagged lines outward from where they had made contact, and the walls groaned under the release of force that had nowhere else to go.

Morosuke felt it in his bones this time. The strength behind Nathan’s blade had grown, as though each exchange had fed rather than cost him. He bared his teeth and swung again, violent and heavy, and Nathan caught it and held, and for a moment both men were locked in a grinding contest of raw power neither was willing to yield.

Then Morosuke shifted.

It was subtle. Almost invisible. A deliberate adjustment in his grip, a slight rotation of his wrist that altered the angle of contact by only a fraction. Nathan saw the motion and began to counter it.

But Morosuke had not finished.

What followed was not strength. It was craft. A practiced, deceptive sweep of the blade that used the momentum of Nathan’s own counter against him, redirecting Kyomei outward with a heavy, circular movement and throwing Nathan’s stance briefly wide. His footing faltered by half a step. His guard opened.

Morosuke swung forward into the gap.

Nathan moved by instinct alone.

He twisted, pulling back with a speed that should not have been possible. But Morosuke’s reach was long and his timing was exact, and despite everything the blade still arrived.

It caught his cheek.

A single clean cut, shallow but precise, opening a line of red across his face. The sting of it was immediate and sharp. Nathan dropped back two full steps and reached up, pressing his fingers briefly against the wound. They came away dark with blood.

He looked at his hand for one quiet moment.

From further down the corridor, Morosuke let out a low, satisfied laugh.

"You’re strong," he said, his chest still heaving slightly from the exchanges. "I won’t pretend otherwise." He lowered his blade a fraction, not in concession but in the manner of a man making a point at his own leisure. "But strength alone does not make a swordsman. I can see it clearly enough. You fight with power and instinct, not technique. You’ve never been properly trained with a katana." A cold confidence settled over his face. "And skill, boy, will always catch what raw strength leaves exposed. No matter how much force you carry."

Nathan straightened.

He looked across at Morosuke from beneath the blood trailing down his cheek, his expression unchanged, dark and composed, giving away nothing of what he had just registered.

But something had shifted in his eyes.

"Skill, you say."

Nathan repeated the word quietly, almost to himself, his gaze dropping briefly to Kyomei in his hand.

It was true enough. He had never been taught swordsmanship. No master had ever corrected his footwork, drilled his forms, or handed him the accumulated wisdom of a school. He had simply picked up a blade and used it the way he used everything else — through force, instinct, and a body that had never learned what its limits were supposed to be. Technique had never interested him.

It still did not.

He raised his eyes back to Morosuke.

Then he drove his foot into the floor.

BADAM!

The impact cracked the stone beneath him as he vanished from where he stood and reappeared directly in front of Morosuke in a single, blistering instant. The larger man swung on reflex, panic breaking through his composure for the first time, his massive blade cutting hard toward Nathan’s guard.

Kyomei met it.

The clash rang out, and in the same fraction of a second something traveled up through Morosuke’s hilt and into his hands, then his wrists, then the full length of both arms. It hit him like a hammer strike conducted through his own bones. His grip held, but only barely, and his arms went almost instantly numb from knuckle to shoulder, the nerves overwhelmed by a force his muscles had no answer for.

His eyes widened.

Nathan was already moving.

His leg came around in a swift, brutal kick aimed directly at Morosuke’s side. The larger man brought his arm down to block, and it made no difference whatsoever. The impact tore through his defense as though it were not there. The force picked Morosuke’s enormous frame clean off the floor and sent him crashing sideways through the wall beside them.

Stone and timber exploded outward.

Morosuke burst through the exterior of the castle in a shower of debris and shot out into open air, carried by the momentum of the blow like deadweight launched from a catapult. For one disorienting instant, he was suspended in the sky above his own castle grounds, blue sky and white clouds filling his vision, the distant sounds of the city far below him.

Then a shadow fell across his face.

He looked up.

Nathan was already above him, having cleared the broken wall and launched upward in the same motion, descending now at speed, Kyomei raised.

Morosuke growled through his teeth and swung.

He never finished the motion.

Kyomei came down first.

The blade caught his hand at the wrist, passing through cleanly and completely. The severed hand fell away, still loosely gripping the hilt of his katana, both tumbling together toward the earth below.

"Garrgghh—!"

The roar that came out of Morosuke was raw and ragged, shock and agony tearing through him simultaneously. Blood sprayed upward in the open air, dark against the pale sky. His face twisted, the arrogance stripped from it entirely, replaced by something he had not experienced in a very long time.

Pain that genuinely reached him.

Nathan pulled back his free hand and drove his fist into Morosuke’s chest.

BADAM!

The sound of the impact was dull and enormous, like a boulder dropped from height onto packed earth. The air left Morosuke’s lungs in a single, violent expulsion. His body folded around the blow and then rocketed downward, falling like something thrown rather than dropped, picking up speed until it hit the ground.

BADOOOOM!

The earth gave way beneath him.

A crater opened and spread outward in jagged fractures, dirt and stone displaced in all directions by the sheer weight of impact and force. Morosuke lay at its center, chest heaving, blood pouring freely from the stump of his wrist, his whole body trembling with the effort of simply existing inside the damage that had been done to it.

He coughed.

Blood came with it.

Nathan landed in the crater a heartbeat later, touching down without stumbling, without theatrics, the way a man steps off a low curb. He crossed the short distance in two quiet steps and crouched, lowering Kyomei until its tip, still dark with Morosuke’s blood, rested against the side of his throat.

A silence settled over the ruin.

Morosuke looked up at him from the dirt, his chest shuddering, his remaining hand pressing uselessly against the ground beneath him. The contempt and certainty that had defined his face throughout the entire fight were gone. What replaced them was something rawer, stripped down by pain and the shock of an outcome he had never genuinely prepared for.

Nathan looked at him without triumph, without anger, with no more feeling in his expression than the sword at the man’s throat.

"Strength," he said quietly, "is strength."