I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Chapter 730: Hanzo

The feast stretched long into the night, unhurried and warm, the kind of gathering that didn’t so much end as slowly dissolve — people drifting off in ones and twos until the fire burned down to embers and the music faded into quiet conversation and then into nothing at all.

Nathan learned from Genzo, sometime during the later hours, that this happened once a month. A single night set aside from everything else — from the training, the missions, the ever-present awareness of enemies on both horizons. The date itself carried meaning: it marked the anniversary of the day they had arrived here, tired and hunted, and decided to call it home. One month at a time, they remembered that they had survived.

Ayame, it turned out, was invited every time. She came when she could, and when she did she stayed the night rather than make the journey back to Minato in the dark. Nathan didn’t find that particularly surprising. She had a way of belonging to places that weren’t technically hers.

By morning she was already preparing to leave. Nathan caught a glimpse of her in the early grey light, composed as ever, exchanging quiet words with Genzo near the village’s edge. Genzo was heading out himself — his own road stretching ahead of him, the long work of reaching out to scattered Shinobis across the region, pulling them in, building toward whatever came next against the remaining Daimyos. It was the kind of task that measured itself in weeks rather than days.

Nathan watched them go for a moment, then turned back to his own morning leaving Yukihime as she was sleeping peacefully.

He washed his face in cold water, worked the stiffness out of his shoulders with slow, methodical rolls, and ate without tasting much of it. His body was already orienting itself toward what came next — the particular focused quiet that settled over him before training, like a door closing on everything unnecessary.

The forest waited at the village’s edge, still and dim beneath the canopy, the light coming through in long pale shafts where the branches allowed it. Hanzo was already there when he arrived.

She stood with her back to him, arms loose at her sides, watching the treeline with the patient stillness of someone who had been waiting without minding the wait — the kind of stillness that came not from discipline alone but from years of learning that stillness was its own form of readiness.

Nathan stopped a few feet away and said nothing. There was no need to announce himself. She already knew he was there.

"You’re here."

She didn’t turn when she said it. Her voice was unhurried, neither warm nor cold — simply noting a fact, the way you’d note the light had changed.

Nathan stepped up beside her, following her gaze into the trees for a moment before settling his eyes on her instead. She turned then. Her eyes moved across his stance, his shoulders.

Whatever she concluded, she kept it behind her expression.

"Before anything else," she said, "I want to see you move." She tilted her head slightly toward the open stretch of ground between the trees. "A spar. No magic, no abilities — none of that. Only what your body knows and what your mind can do with it."

"That’s exactly why I’m here," Nathan replied.

The corner of her mouth moved — not quite a smile, but close enough to one.

They faced each other in the filtered morning light, the forest quiet around them save for the occasional shift of wind through the canopy above. Nathan settled into his stance and felt the familiar narrowing of focus — the world reducing itself to the space between them and nothing else.

She moved first.

He’d sparred with Genzo. He knew speed — or thought he did. Hanzo made him revise that understanding inside the first three seconds.

She was faster. Not by a small margin, not the kind of difference you could explain away with a good night’s sleep or a warm morning. She was genuinely, structurally faster — as though the gap between intention and movement had been removed from her entirely, leaving only the movement itself. And she was silent with it. Genzo’s speed had carried a faint signature, some minimal displacement of air, the ghost of sound that let you feel him coming a half-beat before he arrived. Hanzo left nothing. She crossed the distance between them and was simply there, her strike already threading toward him before his instincts had finished registering the threat.

He deflected rather than blocked — there wasn’t enough time to do anything more considered — and stepped back, resetting.

She didn’t press. She withdrew to a neutral distance and watched him again, patient as water.

Nathan didn’t try to match her. The idea surfaced and he discarded it immediately, because chasing her speed was a losing game and he knew it. She had years of it built into her muscles, into the architecture of how she moved. He had a week. Trying to beat her at that would only leave him overextended and off-balance — exactly where she’d want him.

So instead he watched.

He let the next exchange come to him and focused not on where she was but on where she was going — the faint tilt of a shoulder, the almost imperceptible shift in her lead foot before a change of direction. Small tells. She had them, the way every fighter had them no matter how refined they became, because the body always has to prepare for what the mind decides. The tells were small enough to be nearly invisible but they were there, and Nathan was patient.

The third exchange lasted longer. He moved to cut off her angle rather than respond to her attack directly, redirecting instead of resisting, and for a fraction of a second he had her line — his hand reaching for a grip at her wrist, the geometry suddenly in his favor—

She was gone.

Not retreated. Gone. The space where she’d been simply emptied, and before he could recalibrate she was behind him, two fingers pressed briefly against the back of his neck — a killing touch, if it had been anything more than a touch — and then she was stepping away again, unhurried.

Nathan exhaled and turned.

They moved like that through the morning — in and out of each other’s reach, a conversation conducted entirely in near-misses. No blow landed cleanly on either side, but the weight of the exchange was clear enough. She controlled the space between them with an ease that was almost architectural, and every time Nathan found a thread of opportunity and pulled on it she simply wasn’t there anymore, reappearing at a different angle with the calm of someone who had already anticipated the attempt three moves ago.

He was the one working harder. He was the one burning more — more thought, more adjustment, more recovery between exchanges. She looked, infuriatingly, as though she was on a morning walk.

But he was learning. Every time she moved he filed it away — the rhythm of her, the preferences, the angles she favored when she had a choice. He wasn’t winning. He wasn’t close to winning. But the shape of how she fought was slowly becoming legible to him, and that felt, for now, like enough.

Hanzo came at him faster.

Not the gradual escalation of someone testing limits — a sudden, decisive shift, like a gear change with no warning. She angled hard to his right, explosive and silent, the movement designed to catch him mid-adjustment, to find the seam between what he’d read and what he could actually respond to in time.

Nathan’s hand shot out.

Not a guess. Not a reflex. A decision made a half-second before it was needed, reaching into the space she was going to occupy rather than the space she’d left. His fingers found her sleeve —

Hanzo’s eyes went wide.

She twisted, liquid and instinctive, and slipped free — but only just. The near-catch landed her back several paces, and for a moment she simply stood there, eyes still slightly open with something that hadn’t crossed her face once all morning.

Surprise.

"You’re reading my movements," she said.

"Barely," Nathan replied, lowering his hand. He wasn’t being modest. "Yours are harder to read than Genzo’s. By a lot."

She studied him for a moment — the same measuring look from earlier, but different now, recalibrated. "Your eyes are sharp," she said, and her tone had shifted into something purely serious, the performance of the spar stripped away. "Your mind too. The way you process and adapt mid-exchange..." She paused, as though choosing the right weight of words. "It’s rare."

Nathan glanced at her. "You’ll surpass him, you know. Genzo." He said it plainly, without ceremony. "If you haven’t already."

Hanzo blinked. Something moved behind her expression — quiet, private — and then, almost before she could stop it, her lips curved. It wasn’t a small smile either. There was genuine warmth in it, the kind that surfaces when praise arrives from someone who clearly doesn’t give it away easily.

It was, without question, a very good thing to hear.

"You started training a week ago," she said, pulling herself back to level ground.

"Yes."

She shook her head slowly. "The progress you’ve made — the level you’ve reached in seven days — even exceptional people would struggle to match that. It’s..." She searched for the word and landed on: "Frightening, honestly."

"It’s not enough," Nathan said.

The words came without self-pity or performance. Just fact. If she could still vanish behind him without registering in his awareness until she was already there, then no amount of praise changed the arithmetic. He was still losing ground that he needed to reclaim.

Hanzo looked at him for a long moment. She knew — had known since their first exchange — that he was holding something back. Whatever he was restraining himself from using, whatever it was that lived beneath the surface of his controlled, technique-focused movements, it was considerable. Enough that if he simply let it loose, this spar would have looked very different.

And yet here he was, deliberately carrying that weight. Binding his own hands just to find the cracks in his foundation and fill them. There was something in that — in the willingness to be the weaker one in the place for the sake of becoming less weak — that she found herself genuinely admiring.

"Then I won’t hold back," she said quietly.

Nathan met her eyes and nodded once.

They both disappeared.

What followed wasn’t a spar anymore — not in any casual sense of the word. They moved through the forest for the rest of the day like two currents running against each other, crashing and separating and crashing again, the trees bearing witness to exchanges too fast for the light to follow cleanly. Hours dissolved into each other. The morning’s pale shafts became afternoon gold and then the long amber of early evening, and still they moved until late night.