I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Chapter 678: Toward The Kajiya-Hara Domain

Nathan didn’t wait for an invitation.

The moment the carriage door was open he stepped up and ducked inside, moving past the threshold before anyone had processed what he was doing, and dropped onto the cushioned seat along the left wall with complete ease. He settled back, stretched one arm along the seatback, and looked out the window at the southern road continuing ahead.

The cushion was soft. After two full days of running and walking at a pace that had blurred the road beneath him, the cushion was very soft. He appreciated it without showing it.

Behind him, the silence had weight.

“You—!”

Takefusa’s voice arrived strangled and clipped at the carriage door — the single word carrying the compressed contents of approximately fifteen things the veteran wanted to say, none of which he could get out fast enough before the next one blocked it. The soldiers around him had reached the same impasse — their expressions caught between open outrage and the very fresh memory of what had just happened to the last group of men who had stepped into this ronin’s path. That memory made confrontation feel considerably less obvious as a next step.

Nobody moved.

Sakura appeared at the carriage door.

She looked at Nathan sitting in her seat, occupying it with his arm along the back and his black eyes already on the window, and for a moment her expression simply processed what it was seeing. Then a smile arrived — not managed, not careful, but genuinely amused. She had found the situation funny rather than offensive and wasn’t hiding it.

She stepped inside and settled onto the seat across from him with natural, unhurried ease. Her remaining maid sat down beside her, folded her hands in her lap, angled herself slightly inward, and applied considerable effort to the project of pretending the figure on the opposite seat did not exist.

“There’s space enough,” Sakura said simply, to no one in particular.

Outside the door, the collective exhale of restrained frustration was audible. Takefusa said something low and sharp that didn’t quite carry through the wood. Then the door was closed, and the carriage began to move.

The south road came up through the wheels — uneven, the stones underneath older and less maintained than anything north of the invisible line Nathan had crossed two days ago, the motion a constant mild rocking as the carriage negotiated each imperfection in the ground.

Nathan looked out the window.

Sakura looked at him.

“May I know your name?” she asked. Her voice was careful but not timid — measured, the voice of someone trying to open a conversation with a person she wasn’t sure how to read.

Nathan considered briefly.

If he was thinking about the future, having a daimyo’s daughter in the south owe him something was not worthless. The south was complicated territory and complications had a way of multiplying. A seed planted here might matter later.

“Ryo,” he said.

“Ryo-sama.” She tried the name with natural courtesy, the honorific simply part of how she spoke. “That’s a nice name.”

She was smiling. Open and genuine, no management behind it.

Nathan looked at her for a moment.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Kajiya-Hara,” she replied. “It isn’t very close to Minato but the road passes through the territory. It’s another daimyo’s domain — ruled by Daimyo Sadamasa-sama,” she added with a small smile, offering the context freely, clearly sensing he was unfamiliar with the south’s geography.

“Why are you going there?” Nathan asked.

“Oh…” She became a little nervous, her hands adjusting slightly in her lap. “I am going to meet my fiancé there.”

Nathan said nothing for a moment, looking at her.

“Why is your father marrying you to him?” he asked.

“Sadamasa-sama’s domain is where forgery is very important,” she replied, her voice settling back into something more composed as she explained. “Swords, weapons, all kinds of things are made there — it’s the finest forgery operation in the south. My father wanted to make an alliance with Sadamasa-sama, an exchange of weapons.”

Nathan’s eyes narrowed slightly.

He said nothing immediately. He turned the information over once.

“Why does your father want weapons?” he asked.

“Eh?” Sakura looked confused, genuinely caught off guard by the question. “Why do you ask… because… for our people…” she said hesitantly, trailing off.

“Are you attacked or threatened by someone?” Nathan asked, continuing.

“There are… shinobis,” she said shortly.

Nathan looked at her steadily.

“For shinobis, your father is making a deal for what ten thousand weapons?” he asked flatly.

It hadn’t much senses and Shinobis weren’t the one fight head front to begin with.

Sakura didn’t know what to reply. She looked at him with the expression of someone who had followed the conversation up until this point and had now lost the thread of where it was going, uncertain how to answer something that pointed in a direction she hadn’t looked.

“Stop questioning the Princess so rudely,” Takefusa’s voice came sharply through the window. He had pulled his horse close enough to hear and was looking through the frame at Nathan with a hard, steady stare. “You are a guest in this carriage.”

Nathan turned his gaze toward him.

Takefusa held it, jaw set, not backing down.

Nathan held it back, saying nothing, his expression carrying the flat patience of someone who had heard what was said and was waiting for it to become relevant.

Takefusa gritted his teeth.

Nathan looked away first — not because Takefusa had won but because Takefusa was no longer interesting.

“I’m changing my plans,” Nathan said casually, turning back toward the interior. “I’ll come to Sadamasa’s domain.”

A pause.

“What?” Takefusa’s voice came back through the window. “You said Minato.”

“I changed my mind,” Nathan said.

“Why the sudden change of plans?” Takefusa pressed, his tone sharper now, suspicious.

“Because I want to,” Nathan replied, turning his gaze back to the window and holding Takefusa’s eyes through the frame with complete indifference.

Takefusa’s jaw tightened visibly. His hand moved once on the reins. He looked at Nathan with the expression of someone doing arithmetic and arriving at a number he didn’t like but couldn’t dispute.

He said nothing further. He pulled his horse back.

Sakura giggled.

It was quiet and genuine — not directed at Takefusa with any cruelty but simply the natural sound of someone who had watched that exchange and couldn’t entirely contain their reaction. She pressed her lips together briefly and composed herself.

“I feel reassured,” she said, glancing at Nathan warmly. “Having someone powerful stay with us a little longer…” She said. “After today, that means a great deal.”

Nathan glanced at her.

He had no intention of becoming her guard. That was not what this was. But Sadamasa’s domain and Minato were on the same road, and the weapons arrangement had the structural quality of something larger underneath it — the kind of thing that became a problem for everyone in the surrounding territory whether they chose to engage with it or not. He wanted to see it with his own eyes before he moved on.

The carriage rolled on and Nathan let the silence sit while he thought.

The weapons arrangement kept pulling at him. Not loudly — not the sharp instinct that preceded immediate danger — but the quieter, more persistent feeling that arrives when something doesn’t add up and the missing piece matters.

Norihiro was the ruling daimyo of the south. The strongest one, from what he’d gathered. A man with enough territory and enough soldiers to have survived in the abandoned south without the capital’s protection for however many years Haruka’s father had been deliberately ignoring everything below the border. A man like that didn’t need to sell his daughter for weapons out of weakness.

Which meant he wanted them for something specific.

And Kaguya had told him plainly that the south and the north were not on good terms — the capital, the royalty, the three great samurai clans, all of it sitting in an uneasy relationship with whatever the south had become in the years of neglect. That tension didn’t make the weapons deal easier to explain. It made it harder.

A daimyo in an ungoverned territory, quietly accumulating steel from a forgery domain, through a marriage alliance that tied another daimyo’s loyalty to his.

Nathan looked out the window at the passing trees.

Maybe he was overthinking it. He had been wrong before — not often, but occasionally — and the south was complicated enough that he was missing context he didn’t have yet. The simplest explanation was sometimes the real one.

He would see it with his own eyes. That was enough reason.

“Why are you going to Minato, Ryo-sama?”

Sakura’s voice arrived with the natural, unpressured quality of genuine curiosity — no angle behind it, no probing. She was looking at him with that open expression, her pink eyes warm, her hands folded in her lap. She was simply curious about him the way someone was curious about a person they couldn’t quite place.

“For a job,” Nathan replied quietly.

“Oh.” She tilted her head slightly. “You’re coming from the capital and the north… it must be something important, perhaps?”

Nathan looked at her.

He could see what she was doing — not manipulating, not extracting information, just genuinely trying to understand what she was looking at. His features had been catching her attention since he’d gotten in the carriage. There was something in the way she looked at him that was working through a question she hadn’t decided whether to ask yet.

He wasn’t going to answer what she’d asked. But she seemed eager enough that he could redirect.

“So no daimyo rules Minato?” he asked.

Sakura smiled and shook her head. “Minato is a free town. No lord, no soldiers, no oversight — it belongs to whoever is in it on any given day.” She paused, and something genuinely concerned moved through her expression. “It’s dangerous, Ryo-sama. You should be careful there.”

The maid beside her shifted.

“I… don’t think he needs to be careful, Hime-sama,” she said, her voice carrying the careful awkwardness of someone pointing out something obvious while trying not to be impolite about it.

She glanced briefly toward the road behind them — toward where the aftermath of the earlier ambush was now a considerable distance back — and said nothing further. The implication was clear enough. It was the people of Minato who might want to be careful.

Sakura blinked. Then she laughed softly, the sound surprised out of her, and pressed her lips together.

Nathan let that settle and moved on.

“You said shinobis are attacking you,” he said.

The shinobis.

He turned the information over as he said it. He knew their history in Kastoria — initially allied to the royal family, instruments of the crown, loyal to their leader. Then the previous King had executed that leader for reasons that didn’t hold up to examination, and they had responded the only way an organization built entirely around lethal capability could respond. They had killed him for it and disappeared into the south, severing every tie to the capital they’d ever had.

Now they were attacking Norihiro.

Why?

“They are, yes,” Sakura said. She nodded, but something in her posture had shifted slightly — a small, almost imperceptible tightening.

“Why?” Nathan asked.

The question landed.

Sakura lowered her gaze.

Not quickly — not the flinch of someone caught in something — but the slow, movement of someone who knew the answer and had complicated feelings about it. She looked at her hands in her lap and said nothing for a moment.

“That’s enough questions.”

Takefusa’s voice came sharp through the window, his horse pulled close again. He was looking at Nathan with a hard stare — not the professionally controlled look from earlier but something with more heat in it, the look of someone who had let the conversation go further than he wanted and was drawing a line now.

Nathan didn’t look at him.

“Looks like someone’s feeling guilty,” he said.

He said it to no one in particular. His voice was level and quiet, conversational, not aimed — just a statement released into the carriage’s air.

Sakura shuddered.

It was small — barely visible, the slight movement of someone who had been touched somewhere they weren’t expecting — but it was there. Her eyes stayed down. Her hands tightened once in her lap and then relaxed deliberately, the conscious effort of someone reasserting control over their own reaction.

“You—!”

Takefusa’s voice came through the window with real heat now, his horse pressing close enough that his shadow fell across the frame. He was staring at Nathan gritted teeth.

Nathan turned his head and looked at him.

He was leaning back against the cushioned seat, entirely relaxed, one hand resting loosely on Kyōmei’s scabbard, his black eyes carrying nothing at all — no aggression, no provocation, simply the flat, patient look of someone who had said a true thing and was waiting to see what the response to a true thing turned out to be.

Takefusa held the look.

His jaw was tight. His hand on the reins was tight. Every line of him was tight.

But he didn’t say anything.

Because there was nothing to say that would improve the situation, and he was experienced enough to know it. Denying it would confirm it. Arguing it would confirm it. Threatening Nathan would — given the morning’s demonstrated evidence — accomplish precisely nothing except making the problem louder.

He pulled his horse back from the window without a word.

The carriage continued rolling south.