I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Chapter 669: Nathan Takes over

“I will speak to the Lord Commander alone,” Kaguya said.

Ryuuki and Haruka exchanged a glance — brief, wordless — and both nodded. Haruka rose from the floor, adjusted Ryuuji against her chest, and walked toward the door. Ryuuki followed.

The doors closed and the throne room settled into a silence that felt different from the silence before — smaller, more honest, stripped of the performance that a room full of people always required.

Kaguya looked at Nathan across the empty space between them.

“You are willing to take her to Tenebria?” she asked. “To protect Haruka and her child personally?”

“My women will protect her,” Nathan replied. “Most of my wives are Human. They understand what it is to be far from home and in need. Haruka won’t be a stranger — she’ll be a guest under genuine protection.” He held Kaguya’s gaze. “You trust Tenebria or you don’t. I’m not going to argue the case further.”

“I trust it,” Kaguya said quietly. “And I think it is a good solution.” She paused, and a different quality entered her expression — something more careful, more deliberate. “But tomorrow I planned to call the council and officially formalize the army I promised you. Everything prepared.”

“Cancel it,” Nathan said.

Kaguya went still. “You don’t want the army?”

“I want an army. Right now is not the right moment to ask for one.” He looked at her steadily. “Kastoria is in a considerably worse state than you presented to me before I arrived. Three major clans of Kastoria are behind Takehiko. These Shinobis are active again inside the capital itself. You have a Princess asking to abdicate her claim for her child’s safety.” He paused. “Pulling an army out of Kastoria right now while all of that is unresolved isn’t something I’m going to ask for.”

“I will manage it,” Kaguya said, her chin lifting slightly. “This is my kingdom and my responsibility. I have handled worse.”

“Can you?” Nathan stepped forward, his voice not harder but more direct. “You have enormous influence here. People worship you — genuinely, not politically. But that’s exactly why every decision you make lands harder than it would for anyone else. One misstep and the narrative shifts. Takehiko only needs one moment where you appear to have sacrificed Kastoria’s military strength for a Demon Kingdom’s war before the nobles who are still undecided start moving toward him.”

“They may question it, yes, and perhaps my standing suffers temporarily, but they wouldn’t dare—”

“I don’t want that,” Nathan said.

He crossed the remaining distance and appeared in front of her.

He looked at her white eyes directly.

His hand moved to her face — careful, his touch entirely at odds with the coldness his expression had been wearing for the last hour.

“Why didn’t you tell me how serious it was?” he asked. “Before I came. Why did you keep the depth of it from me?”

“I told you what you needed—”

“You told me the surface of it,” Nathan said. “And there is something else. Something you and Amaterasu have both been keeping from me since I arrived. I’ve been patient about it. I’m asking now.”

Kaguya’s lips parted slightly. Her composure held but her white eyes were no longer entirely still — something moving behind them, the tremor of someone holding a door closed against pressure they weren’t certain they could maintain indefinitely.

“Lord Nathan, I—” She stopped. Reorganized. “I will provide the army as promised, the situation here—”

“I don’t care about the army,” Nathan said. His voice dropped. Not cold. Something closer to its opposite — the particular quiet of something meant completely. “If I have to choose between you and a thousand Kastorian soldiers, I choose you. Every time. Without consideration.” He held her gaze. “If you are in real difficulty — not political difficulty, not diplomatic difficulty, but genuine danger — tell me. I will be there.”

Kaguya’s composure fractured at the edges. Her lips trembled once — the specific tremor of someone who has been managing alone for a long time and has just been offered something they hadn’t let themselves want.

She drew breath to speak.

“Nathan.”

The voice came from behind him — not from the doors, not from any entrance he had been tracking. Simply present, the way divine things were present when they chose to be.

Nathan didn’t turn immediately. He recognized the voice the same instant he heard it.

“I had been wondering when you’d show up,” he said, and turned.

Amaterasu stood at the far end of the throne room in the full, quiet weight of her divinity — luminous without effort, beautiful in the way that transcended the word, the kind of presence that reorganized the air around it simply by existing in a space.

Nathan looked at her and didn’t smile.

She felt it immediately — the absence of what was usually there when they were in the same room. The warmth he extended to her specifically, the ease. It had been replaced by something patient and level and not warm at all.

“You should leave tomorrow,” she said. “Return to Tenebria. We will manage what needs managing here.”

“Both of you keep trying to move me away from what’s happening in this castle,” Nathan said, walking toward her now, his golden eyes steady. “You and Kaguya both. Every time the conversation approaches something real, there’s a redirection.”

“Because it doesn’t concern you directly,” Amaterasu said. “You have Tenebria. You have your wives, your children, a war against the Light Empire to prepare for. Kastoria’s internal conflicts are a smaller problem — one we are equipped to handle without—”

“Is it a smaller problem?”

He stopped in front of her.

Amaterasu went quiet.

Nathan looked at her with the specific quality of attention he used when he was done being patient with something, not aggressive, not heated, simply final.

“Amaterasu,” he said. “Don’t make me use the Seal to pull the truth from you. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to force you and I don’t want to hurt you.” His voice was entirely serious. “But I will if you leave me no other option. So speak to me. Now. Honestly.”

Amaterasu’s jaw tightened. Something moved through her divine composure — not fear exactly, but the particular conflict of someone caught between two obligations that had stopped being compatible.

She looked at Nathan.

Then at Kaguya.

Then back at Nathan.

Her lips pressed together and then opened.

“Susanoo is involved,” she said.

Nathan’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Susanoo.”

“My brother,” Amaterasu said, the words coming out now as though the decision to say them had released a pressure that had been building for some time. “He is supporting Takehiko. Actively. From behind everything you’ve seen here.”

The throne room was absolutely silent.

Nathan stood still, processing — not the surface fact but the full architecture of it. Amaterasu’s brother. A god, not a faction or a clan or a banished prince, but a divine entity throwing his weight behind Kastoria’s internal succession crisis. The Shinobis, the three samurai clans, Takehiko’s patience and his perfect timing — all of it acquiring a different dimension when a god’s hand was visible somewhere behind it.

And Amaterasu and Kaguya had known.

“Do you understand now?” Amaterasu said. Her voice carried something Nathan had heard from her perhaps twice before.

“Is that why both of you kept redirecting me?” Nathan asked. “Pretending the situation here was manageable. Keeping the real shape of it out of every conversation.”

“Yes.” Amaterasu held his gaze directly. “My brother is dangerous in ways that are not comparable to anything you have faced here. He will feel my blessing on you — my fire living inside you through the Seal — the moment he turns his attention toward Kastoria properly. And he will not hesitate. He doesn’t operate under laws or restraints or any consideration for consequences.” Her voice dropped. “He will kill you, Nathan. I am not exaggerating this. If you remain here and he decides you are a threat to whatever he has built through Takehiko — that is how it ends.”

Nathan was quiet for a moment.

He turned it over honestly, without pride or dismissal — the weight of it, the reality of a god’s involvement behind everything he’d witnessed since arriving. The Shinobis returning. The three clans aligned so perfectly. Takehiko’s patience, his timing, the complete absence of the recklessness that usually accompanied ambition. All of it made different sense now. All of it acquired the clean architecture of something designed by a divine mind rather than assembled by human calculation.

Amaterasu was rarely agitated. She was agitated now. He registered that clearly and gave it its full weight.

He could leave tomorrow. Take Haruka and Ryuuji to Tenebria, formally withdraw, let Kaguya and Amaterasu manage their own divine family conflict.

The thought lasted approximately three seconds.

“You have just given me every reason to stay,” he said, and smiled at her.

“Nathan—”

“I won’t leave you and Kaguya alone while your brother is moving pieces against everything you’ve built here,” he said. His voice was even and entirely certain. “That’s not something I’m willing to do.”

“You don’t understand the full picture,” Amaterasu said, and there was something almost desperate underneath the composure now. “If you act openly against Susanoo or against Takehiko’s faction, you antagonize Kastoria’s internal politics in a way that reflects on Tenebria. The truce fractures. Everything Kaguya has built between our kingdoms becomes ammunition for Takehiko’s people to use. You would be handing them exactly what they need.”

“I won’t act openly,” Nathan replied, and the simple certainty in his voice cut through her next sentence before it formed. “Tomorrow I leave. Officially, visibly, with Haruka and Ryuuji on my way back to Tenebria. Everyone present sees the Lord Commander of Tenebria depart Kastoria. The visit concluded. The alliance confirmed. No further involvement.”

Amaterasu stared at him.

Understanding moved through her expression.

“Infiltration,” she said quietly. “That’s what you’re proposing.”

“It worked at Troy,” Nathan said. “At Alexandria. At Rome. I moved through all three without my real identity being known until the moment I chose otherwise.” He paused. “Shutting down my pressure, my presence, my power — I’ve been doing that since I arrived here as Samael. I know how to disappear into a situation.”

“Those were human conflicts,” Amaterasu said, her voice sharpening. “Susanoo is not human. He won’t be fooled by a disguise or misdirected by politics. He will feel you, Nathan. He will feel my fire in your blood and he will know what you are and he will not wait for a convenient moment to—”

“Then I won’t carry your fire,” Nathan said.

Silence.

“What?” Amaterasu’s voice came out flat and stripped of everything except pure alarm.

“I’ll shut off the Forbidden Seal,” Nathan said.

“You cannot—” She stepped toward him, and for the first time in the conversation her composure had genuinely left her entirely, replaced by something raw and direct that she wasn’t trying to conceal. “Nathan, the Forbidden Seal is the vessel for everything I gave you. Everything Khione gave you. Hera’s strength, my fire — if you shut it off you lose all of it. Every power you’ve been granted, locked away. You’d be—”

“Invisible to him,” Nathan said. “He wouldn’t feel me. No divine signature. No trace of borrowed fire or godly strength. To Susanoo’s perception I’d be nothing — a mortal wandering around Kastoria’s capital.”

“A mortal,” Amaterasu repeated. “Against a god. Against my brother specifically, who has been building this for years with patience and a plan you don’t yet fully understand.” Her voice cracked slightly at the edges. “You would be taking everything away from yourself and walking into—”

“If I need that Seal to survive something,” Nathan said, “then I’m not worthy of being the lover of the great Sun Goddess.”

The words landed in the room and sat there.

Amaterasu looked at him — this man who was a demigod, younger than she was by measures she couldn’t fully articulate, mortal in ways that still sometimes made her chest feel something she’d had no name for before him — and her divine composure was simply gone. There was no version of it available for this particular moment.

Her eyes were trembling.

Nathan reached up and touched her face — the same careful touch he’d given Kaguya earlier, his hand against her cheek with a gentleness entirely at odds with the conversation they’d just had.

“Trust me,” he said simply.

He leaned forward and kissed her.

Soft. Unhurried. Without any agenda except the thing itself.

Amaterasu closed her eyes.

Her very first kiss — still, even now, carrying that quality of something she had never given anyone before him and could not imagine giving anyone after, the specific irreversible surrender of something kept for a very long time. Her cheeks flushed immediately, the divine composure entirely absent, her body responding with the complete honesty of someone who had never learned to guard this particular thing.

She felt his hand steady against her face and the warmth of him and the certainty in the way he kissed her — as though this too, like everything else he did, had been fully decided before he moved.

When he pulled back she kept her eyes closed for one additional second.

Then she opened them and looked at him, flushed and unguarded, the most vulnerable he had ever seen her.

“I want the war against the Light Empire,” Nathan said quietly. “I want to recover everyone I have there. That hasn’t changed.” He held her gaze. “But that doesn’t mean I walk away from my other women while something threatens them. Those two things exist together.”

He turned.

Kaguya was standing very still, the warm flush on her pale cheeks the only indication that Nathan’s words had done exactly what they’d done. She pulled herself back to the present as his eyes found her.

“The woman you mentioned,” he said. “The one to hold the throne in the interim. What was her name?”

“Ayame,” Kaguya said, her voice arriving slightly later than usual.

Nathan nodded once.

“No need for you to go to her,” he said. He let a slight smile arrive. “I’ll find her and bring her here myself.”