Read Novel Full Chapter 731: Hanzo Witnesses
Chapter 731: Hanzo Witnesses
Three days.
It shouldn’t have been enough time for anything meaningful. Three days was enough to learn the layout of a place, maybe develop a preference for which side of the room you slept on. It was not, by any reasonable measure, enough time to fundamentally alter the way a body moved.
And yet.
Hanzo stood at the edge of the training ground in the early morning quiet and watched Nathan run the shadow steps she had shown him two days ago — the footwork pattern that took most Shinobis the better part of a month to stop thinking about consciously and another month after that to make fluid. He wasn’t perfect. The transitions at the sharper angles still carried a fraction too much weight, a slight telegraphing in the hip that an experienced eye would catch. But the bones of it were already there, already settling into his muscle memory with a speed that sat somewhere between impressive and unsettling.
She had spent the first day teaching rather than sparring. Showing him how to feel the ground beneath him as information — the give of soil, the faint vibration of movement carried through earth and air, the way a forest breathed differently when something disrupted its stillness. Most students heard that kind of instruction and nodded and then promptly forgot it the moment they were under pressure. Nathan had listened and by the afternoon she’d caught him pausing mid-movement to simply feel — eyes half-closed, head slightly tilted, processing the environment around him like he was reading a language he’d only just been introduced to but somehow already half-knew.
The second day she had worked his movements directly — the shadow steps, the weight distribution that allowed for silent displacement. She had corrected him precisely and without repetition, because she quickly learned that repeating herself was unnecessary. He absorbed corrections the first time. Sometimes she could see the adjustment happen in real time, mid-movement, his body incorporating the note before she’d even finished delivering it.
By the third morning she was running out of things to show him that he wasn’t already beginning to reach toward on his own.
"Again," she said.
They faced each other in the familiar open stretch between the trees, the light still young and cool. Nathan settled into his stance and she felt.
She opened with something precise, feeling for where he was today. He redirected cleanly, no wasted movement, and repositioned with footwork that was already quieter than it had been forty-eight hours ago. She pressed harder. He adjusted. She shifted her angle mid-approach — the feint she’d used on the first day to vanish behind him — and this time he didn’t follow the false line. He held his ground and turned into the correct angle, and her fingers closed on empty air where his collar should have been.
Hanzo reset.
She studied him for a moment, then came again — faster, less predictable, pulling from the deeper end of her repertoire. The exchange stretched longer than any before it, a rapid back-and-forth of near-contacts and redirections, the space between them shrinking and expanding in irregular pulses. She took his right side hard and felt him adjust before she’d completed the movement. Tried the low angle and found him already dropping his center of gravity to meet it. Went for the shoulder feint that had wrong-footed him badly on day one —
He slipped it. Not perfectly. Not with her ease. But he slipped it, turned inside her guard for a fraction of a second, and the touch he landed against her ribs — light as it was definitely planned.
Hanzo stepped back.
She looked at him. He was breathing harder than she was, his jaw set with the effort of the concentration it still cost him to operate at this level for any sustained period. He would need time before that cost came down. But the look in his eyes was the same it always was — already cataloguing, already identifying what had worked and what hadn’t and why.
"Three days," she said.
"Is that a problem?" Nathan asked.
Hanzo didn’t answer immediately. She was thinking about how to say the thing accurately, because she had a habit of precision and she wanted to be precise about this.
"I have trained Shinobis," she said. "I have seen talented people. People who were born for this work, who took to it faster than most and went further than most." She paused. "What you are doing is not that. Talented people impress you. What you’re doing is something else. Something that doesn’t have a comfortable name."
Nathan waited.
"You’re a monster," she said plainly. "In the best possible sense of the word — but still. What you’ve absorbed in three days, what you’ve built in three days..." She shook her head slowly. "It took me two months to reach where you are now. You’ve done it in three days while deliberately handicapping yourself."
A beat of quiet settled between them, broken only by the trees shifting overhead.
"You still beat me," Nathan said.
"Today," she replied. "Yes." She picked up her stance again, looking at him seriously. She was going to raise the level. "Come."
Nathan exhaled once, rolled his neck, and vanished from his spot.
The forest swallowed them both until once more night.
°°°
Night had settled fully over the village by the time the training ended, the sky above the treeline a deep, starless dark pressed down by cloud cover. Nathan had gathered himself and left without ceremony — the way he always did, conserving energy even in departure — and the forest had gone quiet in his wake.
Hanzo remained.
She sat where she was for a time, letting the stillness come back in properly, breathing with it rather than against it. Meditation was less a ritual for her than a necessity — the way you drain water from a vessel that’s been filled too fast, giving the mind room to process what the body had been too busy to think about. She moved through it unhurried, and when she was done she opened her eyes and simply looked at what the day had left behind.
The training ground told a quieter story than most. No deep gouges in the earth, no shattered bark or uprooted ground — nothing like the aftermath of a real battle between two people trying to harm each other. Just the soft impressions of footwork in the dirt, a few disturbed patches of grass, the faint marks of movement that would be gone by morning. She found herself smiling at it without fully deciding to.
It had been a while since training had felt like this. With Genzo it was different — familiar in the deep, worn way of something practiced for years, the back-and-forth between two people who knew each other’s rhythms so well the challenge had to be deliberately manufactured. With Nathan it was something else. He was newer to this, technically her lesser in almost every measurable way, and yet there was nothing passive about teaching him. He pushed back against instruction the way good students do — not with resistance but with immediate application, forcing her to stay sharp, to find new angles, to reach for things she hadn’t needed to reach for in some time. Twice this week he had caught her off guard. Actually caught her — and she was not a woman who was easily caught.
She was still thinking about the second time when her gaze dropped to the ground and found the sword.
Kyomei lay in the grass at the edge of the clearing, dark against dark, easy to miss. Nathan kept it close during training without ever actually using it — a constant presence at the periphery of the session, like a thing that was waiting rather than resting. He must have set it down during one of their later exchanges and simply not retrieved it when he left.
Hanzo crouched and picked it up.
The cursed energy hit her the moment her fingers closed around the scabbard. Not violently — it didn’t lash out or burn. It simply was, immediate and undeniable, a deep cold malevolence sitting quietly inside the lacquered wood like something that had long ago made peace with what it was. She had encountered cursed objects before. Weapons with histories soaked into them, blades that carried the weight of the deaths they’d caused. This was different in degree. This was the kind of thing that had a name, that people built stories around, that changed hands through catastrophe rather than commerce.
She straightened slowly and looked at it for a moment.
"Who are you, exactly."
It wasn’t the first time the question had surfaced. Nathan moved like someone trained by more than one tradition, thought like someone older than his face suggested, carried a sword that had no business being in ordinary hands — and yet here he was, in a Shinobi village in the middle of nowhere, voluntarily making himself the least capable person in every room he entered just to find the gaps in himself.
She tucked the sword under her arm carefully and turned back toward the village. Whatever the answer was, leaving a weapon like this in a dark field where children wandered in the early mornings was not something she was willing to do.
The village had gone to sleep by degrees. The paths between the houses were empty, the cookfires burned down to dim coals, the occasional light in a window the only sign of anyone still awake. Hanzo moved through it without sound — old habit, as natural as breathing — and found the small house that had been given to Nathan without difficulty.
The door was unlocked, standing slightly open. She slipped inside and immediately softened her presence out of courtesy, that instinctive Shinobi adjustment that reduced you to background — the sound of your footsteps, the shift of air around your movement, all of it pulled inward to nothing. If they were sleeping she had no intention of disturbing them.
She had taken perhaps four steps into the interior when she heard it.
A muffled sound. Indistinct at first — and then the floor beneath her feet gave the faintest tremor, the kind of vibration that traveled through structure rather than air. She stopped.
Frowned.
The sounds were coming from deeper in, from behind a door that had been left fractionally open, a thin line of amber lamplight cutting across the dark hallway floor. She moved toward it slowly, not quite sure what she was walking into, one hand still holding Kyomei against her side.
Through the gap in the door, the lamplight flickered.
The gap was narrow — a finger’s width, maybe less, the panel not quite latched. Enough. She pressed close to the wall and turned her head and looked through it, and what she saw made every thought she’d been carrying dissolve instantly into nothing.
Nathan was fucking Yukihime from behind.
That was the first thing Hanzo’s brain assembled — the shape of it, the arrangement — Nathan on his knees behind her with his kimono shoved down off his shoulders and pooled at his hips, both hands gripping the snow-white flare of Yukihime’s hips so hard his knuckles had gone pale. Yukihime was on all fours on the mat, naked, her long silver hair fallen forward and dragging against the floor, and Nathan was moving — driving his hips into her in hard rhythmic strokes that rocked her whole body forward with each one, her knees sliding against the mat with every impact.
"Haaahn❤️! Haan❤️!"
Yukihime’s voice. Hanzo had heard Yukihime speak a hundred times —mostly coldly— and this was none of those things. This was raw and helpless and loud, punching out of her in broken time with Nathan’s thrusts, her back curved in a deep arch, head dropping between her braced arms.
"Yes! Please— harder, Nathan-sama—!"
Hanzo’s jaw unhinged.
She watched, couldn’t not, her feet nailed to the floor — as Nathan’s hips snapped in faster, the sound of skin against skin going sharp and wet and obscenely rhythmic in the quiet of the room. Yukihime’s breasts hung free beneath her, swaying heavy with every thrust, pale and full, the motion of them brutally frank evidence of exactly how hard he was fucking her. Her skin had gone flushed across her back and shoulders, that startling pink spreading over all that white, and a fine sheen of sweat caught the low light and made her glow.
"You like that, do you?" Nathan asked smirking.
"YYES!! Yes, please— more—" And then, when he gave her more — "HAAAHN❤️❤️!" — the sound cracking high and loud, her arms nearly buckling.
His hands left her hips.
Reached under her.
Hanzo watched his palms close over Yukihime’s swaying breasts from below — cupping them, gripping them, fingers sinking into the soft weight of them without breaking rhythm for even a single stroke — and Yukihime’s response was immediate and total, her spine arching deeper, her head throwing back.
"Hyaaaan❤️!! Tes—! Hmmmm—!"
The sound of it went straight through the door and straight through Hanzo’s sternum and lodged somewhere low in her gut like a coal.
She became aware, distantly, that she’d stopped breathing.
Her face was burning. Both cheeks, the tips of her ears, the back of her neck — all of it, blazing, a heat she had no outlet for and no framework to process. She’d known abstractly what sex was. She was not a child, she’d heard things, imagined things in the vague unformed way of someone who hadn’t yet had the imagination forced into sharp focus by reality.
This was sharp focus.
This was watching the real thing from three feet away through a door gap while her heart hammered so loud she was distantly amazed neither of them could hear it. The image was burning itself into the back of her eyes in permanent ink — Nathan’s hands on Yukihime’s breasts, Yukihime’s back arched and shining, the hard drive of his hips, the sounds she was making, the way her body moved, the way she asked for more —
"Please— Nathan-sama— don’t stop!!"
Hanzo peeled herself off the wall.
She didn’t make a decision about it. Her body just — moved, stepped back, oriented itself away from the door in a kind of panicked autopilot while her brain was still frozen three seconds behind, still standing at that gap, still watching. She looked down at her hand holding Kyomei.
She set it down against the wall. Gently. Carefully. Like sudden movements might shake something loose in her.
From inside the room Yukihime’s voice rose again — "HAAAHN❤️ yes!! Yes—!" — louder, more desperate, the moans spilling freely now with absolutely no attempt at restraint.
Hanzo walked away.
Fast. Faster than walking really, not quite running, heels nearly silent on the floor out of sheer ingrained habit even while the rest of her was in complete riot. The sounds followed her down the corridor — "Haan— more— please—" — growing fainter with distance but refusing to fade from her ears, the echo of them stubbornly lodged in her skull alongside that image, that permanent indelible image — and her cheeks were still blazing and her pulse was still hammering and she was very pointedly not thinking about why her body had gone warm in places that had nothing to do with embarrassment.
She turned the corner and put a wall between herself and that room and leaned her back against it and stared at the ceiling.
The moans were inaudible now.
She could still hear them anyway.