I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me - Chapter 656: Followed by Yokais

Chapter 656: Followed by Yokais

After parting ways with Ayaka and Akane at the corridor’s junction, Nathan walked through the castle’s nighttime interior alone, the torchlight casting long amber intervals between stretches of cool shadow.

The hour was late enough that even the castle’s more diligent inhabitants had retired. Distant footsteps marked a guard completing his routine round somewhere two floors above. Otherwise the building breathed quietly around him, settled into the particular stillness that large stone structures accumulated in darkness.

Nathan walked without hurry, his thoughts moving through the day’s accumulated information with the methodical patience he applied to things that needed proper arrangement rather than immediate resolution.

Ayaka and Akane. The anchors the word implied went both directions, he understood. As much as they clung to him as a connection to who they were before this world claimed them—their identity, their origin, the mother they’d lost—he clung to them in the same way. They reminded him, without trying, of the person he’d been before everything. Before Tenebria, before the Demon King, before the war had rebuilt him into something that required careful management even by himself.

Sienna and Siara did the same from across a different distance. Different personalities, different expressions of the same essential function.

He was thinking of this when he stopped.

Not because anything visible had changed. Not because any sound had reached him. Simply because the accumulated texture of the day’s awareness, running like a quiet background current beneath everything else, had flagged something that had been consistent for too long to be coincidence.

“Spying is one thing,” Nathan said to the empty corridor, his voice carrying the mild, conversational tone of someone pointing out an administrative error. “But spying for an entire day approaches something else. Obsession, perhaps.”

Silence answered him. Torchlight flickered.

Nathan turned his head, let his gaze move to a specific point in the shadows near the ceiling where the architecture created a natural pocket of deeper darkness between two beams.

Then he disappeared.

He reappeared two meters back along the corridor in the same instant, and in his hand something small and yellow wriggled with escalating panic, suspended by the scruff of whatever approximated its neck.

The creature was compact and ghostlike in form—translucent yellow, vaguely rounded, with small dark eyes and antennae that quivered with distress. It looked like something between a spirit and an oversized firefly, and it had been maintaining a careful, professional surveillance distance all day with what was, in fairness, impressive dedication.

Nathan regarded it with flat, unhurried assessment.

The creature met his eyes. Felt the full weight of what was looking at it from those dark disguised irises.

Whatever courage had sustained its surveillance operation through an entire day of disciplined observation evaporated completely in approximately one second.

“Kyaaaaa!! Rena-sama!! Please help meeee!!” it shrieked, abandoning all professional composure and dissolving into pure undignified panic, tiny legs cycling frantically in the air.

“You! Release Kiiro right now!”

The voice came from behind him and to the left, sharp and immediate.

Nathan turned.

Two yokai came rushing through the corridor at speed—one vivid red, one clear blue, both significantly more substantial in presence than Kiiro’s small trembling form. Nathan recognized them from years ago. Aka and Ao, the two that accompanied Yanagi Rena everywhere she considered dangerous enough to warrant protection.

They’d grown. He could feel that immediately without needing to assess it carefully—the magical pressure emanating from them had expanded considerably in the intervening years. Whatever training or experiences had been theirs since their last encounter had done meaningful work.

Aka released a burst of potent magical energy without preamble, Ao launching a coordinated strike from the opposing angle in the same breath. The combination was fast, practiced, clearly the product of real tactical development rather than simple instinct.

Nathan wasn’t there when it arrived.

He appeared outside the castle walls entirely, Kiiro still suspended in his grip, now crying with genuine tears that flew backward in the slipstream of Nathan’s flight as he moved through the night air above the capital.

Behind him, Aka and Ao burst through a window they had apparently decided was a minor inconvenience and launched themselves skyward in pursuit.

They were fast. Genuinely fast—considerably more than Nathan had expected, tracking him through the night sky with the focused intensity of two entities who took the safety of those they protected with complete seriousness.

“Aka-niichan!! Ao-niichan!! Help meeeee!!” Kiiro wailed between sobs, tears streaming freely.

Nathan assessed the situation with efficient practicality and descended.

He landed in a courtyard garden area some distance from the castle’s main structure—a quiet space with cultivated bamboo and the soft rhythmic sound of a water feature somewhere nearby. Aka and Ao came down after him moments later, landing with visible aggression, magical energy already gathered between their small hands.

Nathan extended his arm.

Kiiro was encased in ice—a neat, transparent cube containing one very shocked and very cold yellow yokai, frost spreading across the surface in delicate crystalline patterns.

“Kiiro!!”

“You absolute—”

Both yokai stopped their charge simultaneously, eyes fixed on the hairline crack that appeared along one face of the ice cube with a sound like a fingernail on glass.

“Have you cried enough?” Nathan asked Kiiro directly, his tone carrying the mild exasperation of someone who had been patient longer than the situation warranted. “Bring me to your mistress.”

“Absolutely not!” Aka shouted, her red form practically vibrating with indignation. “There is no version of that happening! We would never betray Rena-sama to you!”

“Never!!” Ao confirmed with matching conviction, crossing both arms emphatically.

Nathan applied slightly more pressure. Another crack spread across the ice.

“Wait!!” Aka’s entire posture changed in an instant.

“Rena-sama has agreed to see you!!” Ao added, the words coming out in a rapid, slightly pained rush as though extracted against his better judgment.

“There,” Nathan said, releasing the ice. It dissolved cleanly, depositing a shivering, deeply undignified Kiiro onto the ground, who immediately shook itself like a wet animal and attempted to recover some semblance of dignity while still obviously traumatized. “That wasn’t particularly difficult.”

“Take us to her.”

Aka and Ao exchanged a look that communicated volumes about their feelings on this entire situation. Then, with the resigned compliance of two people who had correctly assessed that cooperation was currently the only viable path forward, they led him.

The location wasn’t far from the castle—a quiet garden space where bamboo had been cultivated into something between architecture and nature, the wooden water feature nearby providing its steady rhythmic knock and pour that seemed louder in the night’s stillness than it would have during the day.

A stone bench sat at the garden’s center, and on it, with the unhurried composure of someone who had chosen her seat deliberately and found it entirely satisfactory, sat Rena.

Midori floated beside her—the green yokai, the quietest of the three Nathan had encountered years ago, whose watchful presence carried a different quality than Aka and Ao’s more openly combative energy. More observant. More careful.

But Nathan’s gaze moved past Midori almost immediately and stayed where it had arrived.

Rena.

She sat as though the bench, the garden, and by reasonable extension the entire castle grounds existed as a backdrop for her presence rather than the other way around—the particular quality of absolute self-possession that could only belong to someone who had never once genuinely questioned whether they belonged in whatever space they occupied.

Her honey-blonde hair was tied back with ribbons, falling neatly along her spine. Her brown eyes caught what ambient light the garden held and reflected it back with a warmth that her expression carefully declined to confirm or acknowledge. She wore something that was distinctly European in its construction—not Kastorian, not Japanese, a choice that was either logistical or deliberate, and with Rena the distinction was rarely meaningful.

Nathan noted, with the same objective clarity he applied to most things, that the years had been entirely unreasonable in what they’d done for her.

She had been striking three years ago—the kind of beautiful that announced itself without effort and maintained the announcement without trying. But she had been seventeen then, still carrying the particular unfinished quality of someone not yet fully arrived in their own appearance.

Now she was fully, completely arrived. The same fundamental features rendered in their final form, the ojou-sama bearing that had always been present now carried with the settled authority of someone who had grown entirely into it rather than performing it.

The arrogance was intact. Nathan would have been mildly disappointed if it wasn’t.

He stopped a few paces from the bench and looked at her with the same calm, assessing directness he’d used three years ago in a tent under very different circumstances—when she’d been his hostage and had managed to be interesting despite, or perhaps because of, that constraint.

The arrogance was intact. Nathan would have been mildly disappointed if it wasn’t.

He stopped a few paces from the bench and looked at her with the same calm, assessing directness he’d used three years ago in a tent under very different circumstances—when she’d been his hostage and had managed to be interesting despite, or perhaps because of, that constraint.

Neither of them spoke immediately.

The bamboo shifted in a faint breeze. The water feature knocked and poured.

Aka and Ao hovered behind Nathan at a distance that communicated they were ready to do something about the situation but hadn’t yet identified what.

“You’ve been having me watched all day,” Nathan said finally. It wasn’t an accusation—simply the opening of a conversation, establishing shared facts.