Chapter 702: Yamamba
Nathan heard her before he sensed her.
A laugh — light, feminine, entirely wrong for the place and the dark and the cold. It threaded through the mist like smoke through a keyhole, intimate and close, the kind of sound that had no business existing in a space like this. His steps faltered for just a fraction of a second, not from hesitation but from the sheer instinctive recognition of danger — the same signal his body had been issuing since he entered this place, now amplified into something that rang clearly at the base of his skull.
The other Yokai had gone quiet.
That alone told him everything. The groaning that had persisted since he first stepped into the mist, the distant shrieking, the skittering sounds from things moving through the white — all of it had simply stopped, as though every creature lurking in this place had pulled itself back and gone still. Not from peace. From deference. Something had arrived that frightened them more than he did.
"You look delicious."
The whisper landed directly at the back of his neck, close enough that he could feel the breath of it against his skin.
Nathan spun and swung Kyomei in a single motion, fast enough to cut wind, and the blade passed through nothing but mist. Cold. Empty. The white closed smoothly around the arc of the sword as though it had never been disturbed.
Then the laughing came back — but from everywhere now. Not one point of origin. All of them, scattered throughout the mist in every direction at once, layered over itself, the same voice echoing from points too far apart for any single thing to occupy simultaneously. It surrounded him completely, rising and falling, playful and unhurried, the laugh of something that had never once feared anything inside its own domain.
Nathan ran.
He broke forward into a full sprint, Kyomei tight in his grip, the ground beneath his feet unreliable and the mist pressing in from all sides. He picked a direction and committed to it, letting speed replace the strategy his senses could no longer give him.
"You can’t escape~"
The voice came from directly in front of him, singsong and close, but Nathan did not slow. He ran through the place where it seemed to originate and found nothing but more white. The laughter bloomed again behind him, then to his left, then above.
He ran until he realized, with a cold and sinking certainty, that he was going nowhere.
The path had no end that he could find. The mist showed him nothing ahead that differed from what he’d left behind — same white, same cold, same absolute absence of landmarks. He had lost all sense of direction the moment that laughter began, and whatever force governed this place had taken full advantage of it. The white stretched endlessly in every direction, the ground continued beneath him without change, and the feeling of motion was becoming increasingly difficult to trust.
This was not natural. None of it had ever been natural, but this was something of a different category entirely. The mist didn’t just cloud vision or muffle sound — it reached into perception itself and rewrote it. His sense of direction, his spatial awareness, the basic understanding of where his body was relative to everything else — all of it had been quietly, methodically dismantled since the moment he stepped onto the Kiro no Komichi. Something with the power to do that was not a creature. It was closer to a principle.
Godly rank magic.
He was almost certain of it now.
A quiet, brief thought surfaced — something adjacent to regret, though he would not have called it that. He had walked into this path without truly calculating what it might contain. A dangerous Yokai, yes. A cursed road, yes. He had accounted for all of that. But magic of this depth, god-touched and woven into the landscape itself — that had not been part of his estimate.
He stopped running. Stood still and breathed.
He needed a way out, and the straightforward paths had closed. But there was another possibility. The creatures that lived inside this place had existed within it for centuries. Centuries of breathing this mist, navigating its distortions, moving through it without being lost. If there was a way to orient himself here, they would know it. Not from asking — they had already demonstrated their conversational limitations — but from the one among them that clearly held dominion over everything that dwelt in the white.
The Yamamba.
Nathan’s hand tightened around Kyomei’s hilt. He drew a slow breath and let the darkness rise.
It responded immediately, the way it always did — eagerly, pressing up from the depths where he kept it caged, flooding into the blade with a hunger that he had to be careful not to mistake for his own. The mist seemed to shudder around him as it emerged, the white pulling back fractionally at the edge of each tendril of dark. The laughter, which had settled to a low ambient snicker, spiked suddenly — louder, sharper, closer, as though she was watching and found the attempt genuinely amusing.
Then the attacks came.
They arrived without warning or sound — massive blades materializing from the mist on every side and converging simultaneously, fast enough that there was no question of dodging them all. Nathan’s darkness surged outward in a shell around him, snatching the weapons from the air before they reached him, wrapping around them and holding. The impacts came in rapid succession — BADOOOM — each one detonating against his barrier and sending force rolling through his body and down into the ground. He planted his feet and absorbed it.
But she did not stop.
More came. And more after that. A relentless barrage, blade after blade materializing from the white and hammering against the shell of darkness he was holding together by will alone. The impacts were continuous now, no gap between them long enough to breathe in, and each one cost him something. He could feel the edges of his barrier beginning to deform under the accumulated pressure, the darkness straining against the sheer volume of force being thrown against it.
She wasn’t trying to kill him outright. She was pinning him. Wearing the barrier down by weight rather than precision, keeping him locked in place, preventing him from pushing outward or moving forward.
The thought crossed his mind briefly — Khione’s ice would stop the projectiles cold, a wall of it in every direction, simple and immediate. Amaterasu’s light would cut through the mist entirely, strip the magic out of the air around him and give him his senses back. Either one would have resolved this.
He did not reach for either.
His jaw tightened.
He had made a choice when he took the name Ryo — a constraint, chosen not from weakness but from understanding. Power borrowed from gods was still borrowed power. If he leaned on it every time the situation demanded something beyond his current reach, he would never know where his own ceiling was. He would never push past it. He would simply become a relay for divine strength he had not earned the right to wield without thinking.
He was not close to the peak of what a demigod could be. He knew that clearly. And the path there required him to be unpredictable in combat, to be dangerous in raw terms, to always have something left to find within himself rather than reaching outward. That was the discipline. That was the point.
What remained to him was his darkness.
And the darkness had teeth.
It also had a price he paid every time he opened the door too wide.
Pandora’s curses did not live quietly inside him. They were older than most gods and had brought stronger things to ruin — the fear the divine had always held for Pandora had not been exaggerated, and Nathan carried what she had left behind in a body that was not designed to hold it. The demigod blood kept him standing. The discipline of containment kept him moving. But if he pushed too far, if he pried the door open too wide and let too much out at once, the curses would stop respecting the boundary between what they consumed and what they were contained by.
He could not afford that. Not here, not lost, not in the middle of a god-made maze.
"Just a bit," he said quietly, to himself or to them — it made no difference. "Come out."
He raised Kyomei.
The air went wrong.
It was not an explosion and it was not a roar — it was a cessation, a moment in which the temperature of the space seemed to drop toward something that had no number and the mist pressed in and then recoiled and the sound of the Yamamba’s laughter cut off as sharply as a severed rope. From Nathan’s body, from the blade, from the spaces between one breath and the next, they emerged. Dark and formless and shrieking without sound — shapes that pressed against the boundary between visible and imagined, vaguely human in outline, faces that were only open mouths and hollow eyes, dozens of them spilling outward and spreading through the mist like a stain through water. They moved with a wrongness that made the Yokai of this place look tame by comparison. They spread, they reached, and every projectile still raining toward him they consumed — swallowing the blades mid-flight and folding them into the dark the way the sea folds a stone dropped into it.
The barrage stopped.
Nathan held them at the edge of the leash he had given them, feeling the pull even now — the wanting, the directionless appetite that had no preference between what it was aimed at and what was holding the aim — and did not let go further.
Somewhere in the white, the silence stretched out like a held breath.
Nathan’s lips pulled into something that was not quite a smile — cold and sharp at the edges, the expression of a man who had just heard the room go quiet in his favor.
"Not laughing anymore?"
He did not wait for an answer. His foot came down hard against the ground and he surged forward, Kyomei raised, and the curses poured ahead of him like a tide that had been waiting for permission. They moved faster than he did — spreading out through the mist in every direction, formless and ravenous and completely indifferent to the white that had been blinding him for the past several minutes. They did not navigate by sight. They navigated by something older and more fundamental than any of the senses the mist had been systematically dismantling, and within seconds Nathan felt them lock onto something.
She was running.
The Yamamba — the thing that had stalked this path for longer than the city of Minato had existed, the presence that made every Yokai in the mist fold back into the white and go still — was running from him. He could feel it through the connection the curses maintained with him, a faint directional pull, the sense of something ahead moving fast and not moving fast enough. The laughter was gone entirely now. The playful omnipresence that had surrounded him on all sides had collapsed into a single, retreating point.
It was almost remarkable.
She could have kept fighting him. Individually, between the two of them, Nathan was not certain how that engagement would have resolved — she was old and the domain she occupied was hers in ways that ran deeper than territory. But these things he had released were not him. They were not anything that could be negotiated with, outwitted, or outlasted. Pandora’s curses were the collected weight of every terrible thing ever sealed away, and they had no ceiling that anything in this world had yet found. Even a Yokai who had breathed god-made mist for centuries could recognize something worse than herself when it came pouring through the dark toward her.
Nathan kept running, keeping his focus split — forward momentum with his body, the constant pressing discipline of keeping the curses on their lead rather than letting them wheel back toward the only other living thing in the mist. It was like running while holding a flame near dry cloth, close enough to be useful, not so close that everything caught.
"Tell me how to get out of here," he called into the white ahead, his voice flat and carrying, stripped of any warmth, "and I let you live."
Nothing came back. Only the sound of his own footsteps and the faint distant wrongness of the curses pressing further into the mist.
Nathan’s eyes narrowed.
He released more of them.
The darkness spread from Kyomei’s blade in a wide torrent — not the precise, aimed strike he had used against the Yokai earlier but something broader and more terrible, a flood of shrieking faces and reaching shapes that crashed outward through the white like a wave breaking against everything at once. The mist buckled visibly around it, the white fracturing at the edges where the dark passed through, and the cold that had been so absolute and constant thinned suddenly as something more unpleasant replaced it.
BADOOOM!!
The ground trembled. The sound was everywhere.
"Stop!!"
The voice was no longer singsong. It was not amused or omnipresent or intimate at the back of his neck. It was a shout — full-throated and genuine and carrying something Nathan had not heard from her yet.
Fear.
He pulled the curses back in a single motion, drawing them toward Kyomei and compressing them back behind the boundary, sealing the door with the focused effort of someone closing a lock against significant pressure from the other side. They resisted, the way they always resisted, curling reluctantly back into the dark. He forced them in, held the containment, and let the silence settle.
He opened his eyes.
She was standing in the mist ahead of him.
Old — ancient in the way that things are ancient when time has compressed and warped them rather than simply wearing them down. Her skin was pale and deeply folded, the texture of bark on a tree that had weathered several generations of storms, her face sunken and severe around eyes that were sharp despite everything else about them. She was small, hunched, ragged at the edges in a way that suggested she had never once concerned herself with appearance, had never needed to. She was the Yamamba. The road and the mist and every creature living in the white were, in some sense, hers. She had never had reason to think about how she looked to anyone who walked here, because no one who walked here had ever left.
Right now, those ancient eyes were fixed on Kyomei.
Not on Nathan. On the blade. On the faint residue of darkness still curling along its edge — the traces the curses left behind when they were called back, the fingerprints of something that even she recognized as fundamentally, categorically above her own classification of dangerous.
Nathan looked at her and kept his expression closed. Whatever was happening beneath it — the pallor that had crept into his face from the effort of containment, the dull throbbing in his arm where the smaller Yokai had opened him — none of it showed. His face was a wall, cold and even, and he let her look at the blade for as long as she needed to fully understand her situation.
Then he spoke.
"The way out," he said. "Tell me."