I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

The Kiro no Komichi.

That was the path Nathan had chosen.

It was the shortest route to Hebi-Yama, cutting through terrain no sane traveler would willingly enter, and that was precisely what made it useful. Speed mattered here. Yorimasa needed to die before news of Morosuke reached him — before the man had any reason to feel the ground shifting beneath his feet and decided to run. If he fled to Norihiro’s side with Ayame’s secret in tow, the situation would spiral into something far messier than Nathan had any interest in dealing with. He had not come to the south to fight a war. He had come to retrieve one woman, and he had already burned through two Daimyos along the way. That was more than enough.

He intended to be gone before Norihiro even understood what had happened.

He found a stable near the edge of Minato, chose a horse that looked strong and well-rested, and rode out without ceremony. The city’s noise faded behind him quickly, swallowed by the dark.

It was already night.

Which meant, by any reasonable measure, what he was doing was completely insane. Taking the Kiro no Komichi in broad daylight was considered a death sentence. Most people would sooner walk barefoot to the capital than set foot on that path in full sun. Nathan was riding it alone, in darkness, at a steady canter.

He was not blind to the risk. He held no illusions about his own invulnerability. The power that ran through him was real — deep, inherited, closer to something divine than anything a man should carry — but the world was vast and ancient, and gods existed in numbers that humbled even the strongest among the living. There were forces out there that made demigod blood feel like very little. Nathan knew this. He had always known it.

But that knowledge had never been a reason to stop. If anything, it was an argument for moving forward. Facing things that could genuinely hurt him was the only way to understand where his limits actually were — and to push them somewhere further.

He let the horse find its rhythm and rode.

The road out of Minato toward Hebi-Yama was well-traveled even at this hour. Clusters of people moved along it in both directions — merchants pulling covered carts, laborers walking in tired silence, a few mounted figures cutting ahead of the slower traffic. Yorimasa’s domain, for all the shadow it cast, offered something Minato never quite could: order. Structure. A kind of enforced safety that attracted people who had grown weary of the city’s constant low-level violence. Even at night, the road felt more inhabited here than Minato’s streets in daylight.

Nathan rode among them without drawing attention.

But Ayame’s words kept working through his mind as the road stretched ahead. Morosuke had been working for the Daimyos. For Yorimasa, almost certainly. And yet Minato had remained a lawless, ungoverned-looking place — a city of criminals and outlaws that seemed to belong to no one. Seemed. That was the word that mattered. The chaos had not been real chaos. It had been managed, curated, kept just unstable enough that the Daimyo’s hand never became visible. The south, all of it, was the same. The Four Daimyos moved through it like fingers through water — present everywhere, visible nowhere, shaping everything.

An hour passed beneath the sound of hooves and wind.

Then the terrain began to change.

Nathan noticed it in the people around him first. The easy, tired rhythm of the crowd grew subtly tighter. Bodies drifted leftward, almost unconsciously, like a current pulling everything in one direction. No one spoke about it. No one pointed. They simply moved, and the further Nathan rode, the more deliberate that drift became.

Then he saw why.

The main road forked. The left branch carried the crowd — lanterns bobbing ahead in the dark, the sound of cartwheels and conversation fading into the distance as people pressed on without slowing. The right branch was quieter. Completely quiet. Even from a distance it looked ordinary enough, a road like any other road, packed earth between treelines. But the mist was already there. White, low-hanging, unnaturally still — not the kind that drifted with a night breeze but the kind that simply sat, as though it had always been there and intended to remain. No animals moved in or near it. No birds called from the trees along its edge. The darkness beyond the mist was a different quality than ordinary darkness, heavier, closed.

Nathan pulled his horse’s reins to the right.

The reaction from the road behind him was immediate.

"Hey — hey! That road!"

"Is he mad? Does he want to die?!"

"Turn back, you fool!"

"He’s a ronin — just let him."

He heard them clearly. Every voice, every warning, the disbelief bleeding through even the most resigned of them. He did not look back. He pressed his heels lightly to the horse’s sides and rode forward, and the white mist reached out to swallow him whole.

And then the mist was in front of him, and Nathan felt it before he even crossed into it — a chill that moved up through his chest and spread across his shoulders like a hand pressing down. Not fear. He recognized fear, knew its particular weight, and this was not it. It was something older and more fundamental than that, the kind of warning the body issues not out of cowardice but out of deep, instinctive intelligence. The kind that had kept living things alive long before they learned to reason.

His horse felt it too.

The animal locked up completely, hooves skidding against the packed earth as it stopped short at the mist’s edge. Nathan pressed his heels in, urged it forward. The horse refused. It threw its head back and neighed sharply, a sound that cut through the night with raw, unambiguous panic. Its muscles bunched and trembled beneath him, legs planted like it had taken root. He tried once more, firmly, and the horse twisted sideways and reared, barely contained.

Nathan swung down from the saddle and released the reins.

The horse was gone before he had even straightened fully — hooves hammering back down the road, the sound of it fading fast, swallowed quickly by the ordinary dark behind him. He did not watch it go. He was already facing forward.

He stood at the border of the mist and looked into it.

From the outside, it had appeared simply white, low and dense, the kind of thing that might have passed for weather given the right conditions. But standing at its edge now, he understood it was nothing of the sort. It did not move. A night breeze came through the trees at his back and stirred the leaves and passed across his neck, and the mist did not shift by a single thread. It sat there, thick and absolute, and the darkness inside it was not the darkness of an overcast night. It was something denser. Something that absorbed rather than merely blocked.

He drew Kyomei from its scabbard.

The blade caught nothing — no moonlight reached here, no ambient glow from the road behind — but the weight of it in his right hand was its own kind of comfort. Not reassurance exactly. More like acknowledgment. Whatever was inside, he was not going in empty-handed.

He stepped through.

The cold hit him immediately, sudden and total, not the bite of winter air but something wet and intimate, the kind of cold that pressed into the skin and stayed there. The mist closed around him in the same instant, and within three steps the road behind him had ceased to exist entirely. He glanced back. There was nothing — no silhouette of treeline, no faint glow from distant lanterns, no suggestion that the world he had just left was still there at all. The mist had taken it.

He turned forward and kept walking.

The ground beneath his feet was still path — just barely. He could feel the slight firmness of it compared to the soft earth on either side, but even that distinction grew unreliable quickly. The mist had weight to it, pressing against his face and arms, and it moved with him in an unsettling way, thickening slightly wherever he turned his attention as though it were aware of where he was looking. He kept Kyomei loose in his grip, ready, his other hand slightly out from his side for balance.

The sounds came next.

At first it was nothing he could name — a low, resonant wrongness at the edge of hearing, the kind of sound that exists just below the threshold of certainty. He stopped and listened. Silence came back at him, but not the clean silence of open space. This was a crowded silence, full of things holding their breath. He waited. Then, from somewhere ahead and to the left, something groaned.

It was not an animal sound. It was not a human one either. It existed somewhere between the two, deep and slow and full of a misery so ancient it had stopped resembling anything recognizable. It rose and fell and rose again, and then it was joined by another, slightly further off, slightly higher in pitch, and then by a third from somewhere above him that made him still completely and look up. There was nothing to see. Only mist and dark.

He moved forward.

The path bent — or seemed to. He could not be certain whether the road itself curved or whether the mist was simply distorting his sense of direction. He picked a line and held it, trusting his body’s orientation more than his eyes, which were near useless now. The ground gave him what clues it could. He kept the firmness of it beneath each step, testing before committing his weight, moving at a pace that was slower than he wanted but smarter than the alternative.

Something brushed the air near his left shoulder.

He turned instantly, Kyomei rising, and found nothing. Only mist swirling faintly in the wake of whatever had passed through it. He scanned the space around him, eyes sharp and patient, and the mist gave him nothing back. But the cold on his left side was deeper than the rest of it now, noticeably so, the way a shadow is colder than open air, and it did not warm as he stood there.

He narrowed his eyes seeing that.

Yeah, it was going to be more complicated than he had thought.