I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

”Or perhaps I should never have trusted Norihiro in the first place.” He stopped at the base of the steps, his brown eyes level on Nathan. ”I assumed he wanted weapons. And now he sends a ronin to do what — kill me?”

”There’s a misunderstanding,” Nathan said.

He stepped forward and placed his boot on Yasumasa’s chest, applying pressure. The Prince made a choked sound beneath it, coughing blood, his one remaining hand scrabbling weakly at the floor.

”I cut off his arm and left him like this because he tried to rape a defenseless woman,” Nathan said.

Sadamasa’s hard eyes moved down to his son.

Yasumasa was crying — genuine, broken crying, the kind that pain and blood loss and terror produced in a person when all the other layers had been stripped away. He wasn’t looking at his father. He was staring at the ceiling with wet eyes and making sounds that had stopped being words some time ago.

”Was it the Princess?” Sadamasa asked, his voice carrying something difficult to read beneath its surface control. ”Is that why? Because you were paid to protect her?”

”Not exactly,” Nathan said.

He kept his boot where it was.

”I have threatened women myself to get what I needed from them,” he said, his voice carrying no particular weight on the admission — stating a fact rather than confessing one. ”But they were women who had threatened my life first. Women who wanted me dead. There is a clear line between a woman who has aimed for your throat and a woman who has done nothing to you whatsoever — who is full of innocence and fear and has not given you a single reason.”

He looked down at Yasumasa briefly.

”He was on the wrong side of that line.”

Sadamasa looked at him for a long moment.

”A ronin speaking of morals,” he said. The scoff in his voice was genuine rather than performed — real contempt, directed at the apparent contradiction. ”That is quite hypocritical, wouldn’t you say?”

His whole body changed.

The magic came off him like heat — not building gradually but simply present, suddenly and completely, filling the room’s air with the particular pressure of power that had been contained and was now choosing not to be. The lamplight shifted in response, the shadows moving in directions they hadn’t been moving before.

Nathan’s lips curled slightly upward.

”I surprise myself sometimes,” he said. ”But I became a father.”

The slight smile left.

His expression returned to its flat baseline — the cold and clean mask.

”I have daughters now,” he said. ”And when I see men like your son I think perhaps my daughters will be somewhere someday and a man like this will be nearby.” His eyes went to Yasumasa once more. ”I find I have very little patience for that.”

The thought was new. He had noticed it becoming true in the weeks since fatherhood had arrived and rearranged certain parts of him — the parts that had been indifferent had not become soft, exactly, but had become selectively ruthless in a way they hadn’t been before, aimed at specific targets now rather than general ones.

Yasumasa on the floor was a very specific target.

Sadamasa absorbed all of this silently.

Then he chuckled.

It was a short sound but genuine.

”A father,” he said.

He raised his hand.

A hammer appeared in it.

Not summoned from a rack or pulled from a holder — simply present, arriving in his grip from nowhere with the immediate solidity of something that had always existed and had simply chosen this moment to be visible. It was large, proportioned for a man of Sadamasa’s size, and it trembled with the magic running through it — not the seeping darkness of Kyōmei but a different quality entirely, hot and present and building.

Then the head of it ignited.

Fire wrapped the hammer’s striking face in a complete burning sheet — not the yellow-orange of ordinary fire but something deeper, more sustained, the specific color of heat that had been concentrated and maintained rather than simply lit. It threw the throne room’s shadows in new directions, reaching the ceiling and the walls and the bodies on the floor with its moving light.

Nathan kicked Yasumasa’s body to the side without looking down.

A single motion — his boot connecting with the Prince’s side and moving him clear of the space between the two men, Yasumasa rolling with a pained groan and coming to rest against the base of the throne platform steps, out of the way.

Nathan raised Kyōmei.

He looked at Sadamasa across the space between them.