I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Chapter 736: Ryo VS Morosuke Kijin Form! (1)

"Now," he said, and his voice had dropped to something that resonated in the chest rather than the ears, "it is time."

Nathan’s eyes went wide.

Morosuke vanished.

Nathan threw his arm up on instinct alone.

The impact hit like a collision with something immovable and massive, a force that had no business existing inside a human body, and for a fraction of a second Nathan held against it, the shock wave bursting outward from the point of contact and tearing across the room in every direction. Then Morosuke snarled, and the red energy wrapped around him detonated outward in a single pulse.

Nathan went through the wall.

Stone and timber gave way around him, the castle’s face crumbling outward as he tore through it, and then there was open air and the vast pale blue of the sky above him, the ground a long way down, the wind rushing up to meet him as he fell.

Nathan twisted in the open air before the ground could make the decision for him.

His body moved the way Genzo and Hanzo had spent days forcing it to move, not with the brute redirection he would have relied on before, but with something cleaner and more economical, reading the fall and working with it rather than against it. He caught a beam of broken timber jutting from the ruined wall, swung once, and landed in a low crouch on the outer ledge of the castle’s second level, Kyomei already back in his grip.

He looked up.

Morosuke came through the hole in the wall after him like something that had stopped thinking in terms of obstacles.

The red light still burned across every inch of him, crawling along his skin in slow churning waves, and he held his large katana in his left hand with a steadiness that made it clear the arm had been doing this work for some time now, adjusting to the absence of its counterpart. He did not look diminished. If anything the loss seemed to have concentrated him, stripped away whatever he had once considered excess.

"COME RONIN!!"

Morosuke shouted, dropped toward Nathan from above.

Nathan sidestepped and let the strike carry past, the large katana biting a chunk from the stone ledge where he had just been standing. He was already moving before Morosuke could reset, circling left, reading the weight and timing of the follow through. In their first fight Nathan had simply overpowered him. Walked through his defenses and dismantled him by force, which had worked well enough at the time. But that fight had been fought like a hammer. What the Shinobi Training had given him since was something closer to water, finding angles rather than breaking through them, spending nothing unnecessarily.

He needed every bit of it now.

Morosuke came again, faster than before, the red energy pulsing brighter with each exchange as though the necklace fed on momentum, on the heat of the fight itself. His strikes were enormous, each one carrying the weight of that swollen unnatural strength behind it, and the few that Nathan chose to meet directly rather than redirect sent numbing shocks up through his arms that he had to consciously breathe through. Morosuke was not the same man he had beaten in this courtyard. Whatever those pearls were doing to his body, they were doing it thoroughly.

But he was also burning through himself to do it. Nathan could see that too.

BADOOM!!!

They traded across the outer face of the castle, using the ledges and broken stonework the way two men use whatever ground they happen to find themselves on, nothing clean or deliberate about the terrain, just the constant improvisation of a fight that had outgrown the space it started in. Nathan drew him upward, step by step, letting Morosuke’s aggression set the direction, and somewhere in the third exchange he found the rhythm beneath the fury, the small predictable hitch in Morosuke’s shoulder that preceded his heaviest strikes.

He did not exploit it yet. He stored it.

Morosuke launched himself from a ledge and Nathan met him in the air, Kyomei catching the large katana in a crossing guard that sent both of them spinning in opposite arcs before they each found purchase again, one on a broken beam, the other on the castle’s outer corner post. For a moment they simply looked at each other across the gap, both breathing, the red light around Morosuke guttering and then surging back stronger than before.

Then Morosuke pushed off the post.

Nathan pushed off the beam.

BADOOOOMM!!

BADAMMM!!

They collided in the open air above the courtyard with a crack that rolled outward like a thunderclap, steel meeting steel, and for several seconds neither of them gave ground, suspended in that ridiculous impossible moment where two forces meet and refuse to resolve. The red energy burned against Kyomei’s black blade, and the cursed sword answered it in kind, a darkness spreading from the edge outward like smoke, and where the two met the air warped and shimmered.

Nathan felt it in his teeth.

He broke the lock deliberately, spinning away and letting Morosuke’s momentum carry him forward, and as the larger man corrected his trajectory Nathan was already below him, reversing his grip, driving upward with a stroke that Morosuke caught barely in time, the parry awkward and late and costing him his positioning. They fell together back toward the castle wall, trading two more blows on the way down, each one faster than the last, and when Morosuke’s boot connected with Nathan’s chest in a brutal kick Nathan made a choice.

He caught the heel against Kyomei’s flat rather than taking it clean.

It redirected rather than stopped it, but redirected still meant he went backward at speed, and the castle’s third floor wall did not negotiate. He hit it hard, stone giving way around him, and he came through it in a shower of dust and rubble, rolling across the floor inside until the back wall stopped him.

"Ugnnnhh..." Nathan groaned in annoyance.

He lay there for a breath, ears ringing, the taste of copper at the back of his throat.

The room around him was some kind of storage, barrels stacked against the far wall, crates piled in the corners, the ceiling low and the light coming through the hole he had just made and the narrow window across from it. Dust drifted down from the rafters in slow curtains.

He got to one knee.

Morosuke came through the hole after him, ducking the jagged edge of the broken wall without slowing, the red light casting long crawling shadows across the floor and ceiling of the room. In the confined space it looked even more unnatural, that burning crimson glow pressing against the walls as though the room itself was uncomfortable containing it. His eyes found Nathan immediately. The large katana came up in his left hand.

Nathan rose the rest of the way to his feet.

The barrels were to his left. The crates to his right. The ceiling close enough overhead that anything wide was out of the question. Morosuke’s style was built for power and reach and open ground.

The room was none of those things.

Nathan let himself breathe once, slowly, and raised Kyomei.

Morosuke stood in the ruined room with that red light churning across his skin, and he frowned. Not the frown of a man who was afraid. The frown of a man trying to solve something that was not adding up the way he expected.

"What is this, Ronin?" he said. "You aren’t fighting like you did the last time."

Nathan looked at him evenly. "Do you have a problem with that?"

Morosuke held his katana at his side, studying him with an attention that was almost analytical, the fury in him patient enough to wait while his mind worked. "Your sword movements are sharper. Your feet are different. You read my strikes before they land." He tilted his head slowly. "But you are also less violent than before. Less hungry for it."

"I don’t waste emotion on useless insects," Nathan said, and let his gaze drop for just a moment to the pearls resting against Morosuke’s chest, still burning that deep pulsing red. "That necklace is not an ordinary one."

Something changed in Morosuke’s expression. The analytical look gave way to something that sat much closer to satisfaction.

"A gift," he said, "from Daimyo Norihiro himself."

The name landed in the room like a stone dropped into still water.

Nathan said it once, quietly, tasting the shape of it. "Norihiro."

The leader of the Four Daimyos. The hand above the other hands.

"You cannot beat me this time, Ronin." Morosuke’s voice had settled into something almost conversational, the tone of a man who believes he is explaining an outcome rather than threatening one. "The last time we fought I did not use it. You won because I was incomplete. But now." He let the word sit for a moment. "Now I am not."

He growled, low and building, and the necklace answered him.

The pearls blazed. The red light that had been crawling across his skin surged inward and then expanded back outward in a single violent pulse, and Nathan watched Morosuke’s body respond to it the way a fire responds to air suddenly fed to it. The veins that had been visible before rose further, pressing against the skin as though trying to escape it. His shoulders broadened. His neck thickened. The muscles along his arms and chest swelled with an unnaturalness that had nothing to do with training or discipline or anything a human body was meant to do on its own. He grew, visibly and wrongly, filling more of the low room than he had a moment ago, the ceiling uncomfortably close to the top of his head now.

The red light poured off him in waves that made the air between them ripple.

Nathan did not step back. He shifted his weight forward onto his front foot, adjusted his grip on Kyomei, and watched the darkness bleed quietly from the blade’s edge in answer to what was burning across the room from him.