I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Chapter 705: Yukihime (2)

Nathan stepped out of the Kiro no Komichi.

The mist released him without ceremony — one step he was inside it, white and cold and absolute around him, and the next he was standing on ordinary ground beneath an ordinary sky, the dark of early morning spread above him with its familiar stars. Behind him, the curtain of white sat as it always had, impenetrable and still, giving nothing away. No indication that anything unusual had occurred within it. No trace of the Yamamba, or the Yokai, or the blizzard that had nearly taken him apart piece by piece.

He exhaled slowly.

The cuts were shallow — all of them, taken together. He had catalogued them at some point during the fight and the count was longer than he would have preferred, his arms and back and jaw all contributing their small complaints to a general chorus of soreness. But shallow wounds were wounds that closed, and what he actually felt most was the particular exhaustion that came not from physical damage but from the overuse of something that was not meant to be used frequently. The Pandora curses left a residue when they were called out — a heaviness that pressed behind his eyes and sat low in his chest, the feeling of having borrowed against a debt that would collect with interest. He needed to leave them alone for a while. The door needed to stay closed.

He looked to his left.

Yukihime stood pressed close against his arm, her own arms looped tightly around his, her silver hair falling loose around her shoulders in the open air. She had come through the other side of the path with him as naturally as if she had walked beside him a hundred times before, and the clinging was not coy or performed — it was the grip of someone who had made a decision and intended to honor it completely, who was not yet fully certain that what they were holding onto was real and was not yet ready to test the theory by loosening their hands.

Nathan did not ask her to.

He had meant every word he said to her in the mist. He had looked at her face in that moment — crumpled and frozen and a thousand years raw — and felt the particular clarity that came when something simply aligned with who he was. He would never abandon a woman he had taken under his protection. Not for any enemy, not for any odds, not for any version of fear dressed up as practicality. The man in Yukihime’s memory had made a calculation in the snow and decided she was an acceptable cost. Nathan had never been capable of that arithmetic and had no intention of learning it.

Perhaps she had seen that. Perhaps what lived in his golden eyes when they surfaced was something that did not translate into words but communicated directly, past language, past the careful distance people maintain from strangers. Whatever she had read in his face when he crouched in the snow and offered her his hand, it had been enough.

She had accepted.

And now, outside the path, with the cold morning air moving through her silver hair and the dark sky beginning to pale at its edges, she looked different. Not changed — she was still the same frightening, extraordinary beauty she had been in the mist, still pale as winter, still carrying that quality of something existing slightly adjacent to the natural world. But something had returned to her face that had not been there before. A quality of presence. A warmth that had nothing to do with temperature, residing somewhere in the set of her expression, the way her eyes moved when they found him.

He had given her a reason to look forward. After a thousand years of looking inward at the same grief, the same rage, the same frozen moment of betrayal on a snowy cliff — that was not a small thing.

Nathan was also not unaware of what she represented beyond sentiment. She was powerful in ways he had felt clearly and personally, power enough to dissolve through his dark magic and reach into him through the cold, to kill the Yamamba without apparent effort, to maintain a god-made mist that had been bending his senses since the moment he entered it. Whatever she had been before the cliff and the water had finished their work on her, what she was now had gone beyond ordinary Yokai classification. He could feel it when she pressed against his arm — real in a way Rena’s spirits had never quite been, solid and present and warm despite the cold of her skin, as though she had crossed some threshold that made her more than what she started as.

He was glad to have her beside him.

"Aren’t you going to ask where I’m headed?" he said.

They had cleared the far side of the path and were moving along ground that sloped gently downward toward the domain, the mountain rising ahead of them against the lightening sky. Yukihime walked as though the terrain held no particular relevance to her, each step unhurried and precise, her grip on his arm unchanged.

She shook her head lightly, a small smile finding her lips. "I will go where you go, Nathan-sama."

"Use Ryo while we’re here," he said. "Not Nathan."

He had given her his real name before they left the mist — an offering of trust. Trust extended first, before it had been earned, because sometimes that was the only way to build it. She had received it carefully, the way a person receives something they were not expecting to be given.

"Ryo-sama, then," she said, the smile remaining, shaped around the unfamiliar syllables with something approaching tenderness.

Nathan glanced at her.

The change in her face was more visible now in the growing light, away from the white of the mist that had been her domain for so long. She looked like someone who had just remembered they were alive — which was, in its own way, exactly what had happened. The fear was still underneath it, he could sense that. The deep and quiet fear that none of this was permanent, that the hand offered in the snow would eventually be withdrawn, that history had a tendency to repeat itself in the lives of people who had already been broken by it once. She clung to his arm partly because she wanted to and partly because some part of her was waiting to be let go, and the clinging was a way of knowing the moment it happened.

Nathan had no intention of letting it happen.

Whatever he was building — the pieces of it still scattered across the south, still taking shape, the women and the alliances and the purpose that was slowly accruing around him — Yukihime was part of it now. He had decided that the moment he reached out his hand to her in the cold. He did not make offers he intended to revoke.

"Aren’t you feeling any cold, Ryo-sama?"

Yukihime’s voice came soft and curious as she glanced up at him, her pale fingers laced around his arm — hands that had never once been described as anything other than glacial to the touch.

"No," Nathan answered simply.

She held his gaze for a moment, searching it the way someone searches a flame to understand how it doesn’t burn them. Then, finding whatever answer satisfied her, she smiled — a quiet, unguarded thing — and rested her head against his shoulder as they walked.

"Whenever I touch someone," she murmured, her breath curling faintly in the cold air, "they freeze. Every time. Without exception." A small pause, and her grip tightened just slightly. "But when I touch Ryo-sama... I feel warmth. For the first time in a very long time."

The faintest flush of rose crept up her cheeks. She said nothing more, and she didn’t need to.

Nathan didn’t comment on it either, though the thought sat at the back of his mind — quiet and worth examining. His immunity to cold came from his bond with Khione, that much was obvious. But immunity was one thing. Warmth was another entirely. He wasn’t simply unaffected by Yukihime’s power; she could feel something radiating back from him, something alive and human that her ability had never encountered before. Perhaps his connection with Amaterasu played a role in making that innate warmth from him.

Regardless, for a being whose very nature kept the world at arm’s length, it was no small thing for Yukihime.

For someone who hadn’t felt another person’s warmth in a thousand years, it was everything.

The main path into the Hebi-Yama region was never quiet at this hour. Merchants with their packed mules and creaking carts, travelers wrapped in road-worn cloaks, peddlers calling their wares — the road breathed and jostled like a living thing. Nathan and Yukihime merged into the flow of it as the domain’s outer roads widened and the crowd thickened around them.

It didn’t take long for the crowd to notice them.

It started at the edges — a glance here, a double-take there. Then the murmurs. Then the staring. Heads turned the way they always do when something beautiful and slightly wrong passes by, something that doesn’t belong to the ordinary world of carts and road dust and common faces. Nathan drew looks on his own merits, but Yukihime beside him was something else altogether.

Her hair caught what little winter light filtered through the pale sky, silver as frost on a window, loose and impossibly fine. Her skin was the white of untouched snow — not sickly, not washed out, but pure, luminous, the kind of complexion that looked like it had been sculpted rather than born. Her features were sharp and refined, the face of someone from an old painting given breath and motion. The silk of her outer robe shifted as she walked, pale blue and silver, entirely unbothered by the cold that had everyone else bundled and hunched.

Several merchants forgot mid-sentence what they’d been saying. A young man walking the opposite direction walked directly into a cart and didn’t seem to notice. Somewhere behind them, someone dropped something heavy.

Yukihime paid none of them any mind. She hadn’t spared a single glance to either side since stepping onto the main road. Her cheek rested against Nathan’s shoulder, her hands clasped around his arm, and the whole carnival of human reaction passing around her might as well have been wind. She had only him in her line of sight — the line of his jaw, the steadiness of his stride, the warmth bleeding through his sleeve into her palms.

They looked, to anyone watching, like a husband and wife who had been walking together for years and had quietly decided the rest of the world could handle itself.

Not everyone on the road was a merchant or a pilgrim.

Minato drew all kinds, and some of those kinds traveled in groups and kept their hands close to their weapons and their eyes close to opportunity. Nathan had already clocked them — four men, rough-built and road-dirty, the kind who moved with the lazy confidence of people used to taking what they wanted from those who couldn’t stop them. They’d been shadowing the edge of the crowd for half a minute before they made their move.

Their eyes hadn’t left Yukihime once.

Nathan felt her fingers still on his arm as the four spread apart and circled, cutting off the path ahead. The crowd around them scattered back in a breath, pressing to the sides of the road, watching with the tight, paralyzed attention of people who want to see what happens but want no part in it.

"Hand over the woman."

"Come with us, princess. We’ll take good care of you."

"Mm, yeah — real good care." Laughter, low and ugly. One of them licked his lip without shame.

"I want a turn first—"

"We all get turns, don’t worry about it."

More laughter. The four of them grinned at each other like dogs who’d cornered something and hadn’t yet registered it might have teeth.

What they also hadn’t registered was the temperature.

It had dropped — subtly, then not so subtly — in the seconds since they’d moved to block the path. Their breath was coming out heavier now, little clouds forming faster than the ambient cold should have produced. The mud under their boots had begun to harden. None of them noticed. They were too busy looking at Yukihime with the kind of hunger that had nothing to do with discretion.

Yukihime had gone very still.

The warmth that had been in her face moments ago — the gentle color in her cheeks, the soft curve of her smile — was gone. She stood straight now, no longer leaning against Nathan’s shoulder, and her expression had become something flat and unhurried, the way deep winter is unhurried. She looked at the four men the way ice looks at everything: without feeling, without rush, already knowing how this ends.

"Ryo-sama," she said, her voice perfectly even, "please allow me to handle them."

Nathan didn’t particularly care what handling them looked like — they’d earned whatever she had in mind. But walking into the Hebi-Yama domain over four frozen corpses on the main road was not the kind of entrance that went unnoticed. If word reached the Daimyo before they did, the whole approach fell apart.

He brought his hand over hers where it rested on his arm, pressing it gently.

"It’s fine."

Whatever cold calculus had been running behind Yukihime’s eyes flickered, interrupted. She blinked — just once — and the faint flush crept back across her cheeks as she felt the warmth of his hand over hers.

"Haa~" The sound escaped her before she could stop it, barely a breath, and she turned her face slightly away.

Nathan, for his part, didn’t look at her.

His eyes had moved to the four men, and whatever had been in them before — neutral, unreadable — was gone. What replaced it was darker and quieter and vast, like looking into a well and realizing there’s no bottom. His killing intent surfaced for just a fraction of a second, no longer than the space between a heartbeat and the next — but it hit all four of them like a sudden wall of pressure, like the air itself had turned solid and hostile and deeply, personally interested in their suffering.

They froze.

Not from Yukihime’s power. From something older and more primal — the part of the brain that lives beneath thought, beneath instinct even, the part that only knows predator and responds with the wordless animal command to stop moving.

Their grins dissolved. Their bodies locked. One of them had gone visibly pale; another had taken a half step back without realizing it. All four of them stood rigid, staring, some part of them suddenly and completely certain that whatever they’d thought this was, they had been wrong.

Nathan had already looked away.

He guided Yukihime forward with the same unhurried calm as before, his hand returning to rest at his side as they walked past the four men — close enough to brush shoulders, close enough that the bandits could have reached out. None of them moved. They stood motionless, watching him pass, and stayed that way long after Nathan and Yukihime had disappeared into the flow of the crowd ahead.