I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me - Chapter 657: Nathan Seeing Rena after Three Years
Chapter 657: Nathan Seeing Rena after Three Years
“You’ve been having me watched all day,” Nathan said finally. It wasn’t an accusation—simply the opening of a conversation, the establishing of shared facts between two people who both preferred clarity over pretense.
Rena’s chin lifted by perhaps two millimeters, a movement so precisely calibrated it communicated volumes about how thoroughly she rejected the framing.
“Who was watching you?” she scoffed, her tone carrying the particular dismissive quality she wielded like a practiced instrument. “I was simply ensuring that those two idiotic sisters weren’t planning something behind our backs with a foreigner and betraying us all. Nothing more.”
“You were watching me specifically,” Nathan replied with mild pleasantness. “And that’s actually quite admirable in its way. Dedicating an entire day to surveillance, carefully managed, professionally maintained. You must be tremendously popular among your classmates to have that much free attention to spend.”
The sarcasm was gentle enough to be almost imperceptible and sharp enough to land cleanly.
“Hmphhh.” Rena glanced sideways at Kiiro, who had been drifting toward her with the desperate energy of a survivor reaching shore. “I wasn’t the one watching you directly. Kiiro was handling that portion. I was simply receiving reports.”
“Rena-sama!” Kiiro’s voice came out in a traumatized rush as it reached her side and immediately pressed itself against her arm, trembling with the thoroughness of something whose entire worldview had been restructured in the last twenty minutes. “That man is genuinely terrifying! He wanted to kill me! I saw it in his eyes—he was absolutely going to—”
“Shut up,” Rena said. “You’re being embarrassingly loud.”
Kiiro swallowed its next several sentences and settled for trembling silently instead, which Rena accepted as adequate.
Nathan watched this exchange with something that wasn’t quite a smile but occupied the same territory.
Then he took a step closer.
“Foreign,” he said, his voice dropping slightly, testing the word with deliberate consideration. “Is that genuinely how you categorize me?”
“Scumbag,” Rena said, with the crisp precision of someone delivering a prepared list. “Monster. Kidnapper. There are quite a few words that fit you adequately. Foreign is simply the most neutral of the available options.”
She said it with total composure, meeting his gaze directly, her posture carrying the absolute conviction of someone who had said exactly what she intended to say.
Obviously she hadn’t forgotten any of it. How could she, honestly? The way he had arrived with overwhelming force and casually dismantled everything their group had been confident about. The embarrassing hostage situation then, where she was forced to listen Nathan fucking Semiramis…
And worse what happened in that tent afterwards…
That part she had spent considerable energy trying to bury beneath layers of careful not-thinking.
“Yet the same man you’ve just described,” Nathan said, “is the man you shared a rather deep kiss with.”
Rena’s composure fractured by exactly one small, involuntary flinch. She recovered it within the same second, but Nathan had been watching for precisely that and it wasn’t a second he missed.
“I don’t know what you’re referring to,” she said, with the particular flatness of someone deploying denial as an architectural material—building something to stand behind rather than expressing genuine uncertainty.
“I find that genuinely difficult to believe,” Nathan said. “A moment that specific tends to leave an impression. The tent. The lamplight. You in nothing but your underwear, your hair loose, your composure entirely—”
“That’s enough,” Rena said, not shouting yet but her voice carrying the warning frequency of something approaching it.
“—and I was above you, holding you while you caught your breath, and I kissed you.” Nathan continued with the same calm, reminiscent tone of someone recalling a pleasant afternoon. “Your lips were remarkably soft. You tasted faintly of whatever you’d eaten earlier and something underneath that which was entirely yours. I was quite thorough about it, as I recall.”
“I said that is enough!” Rena’s eyes swept the garden perimeter with rapid, barely disguised alarm—checking windows, checking pathways, confirming the absence of witnesses—before returning to Nathan with irises that had gone considerably darker and cheeks that were now unambiguously, visibly crimson.
Midori had developed a sudden profound interest in examining a specific bamboo stalk at the garden’s edge.
Aka and Ao had backed away several more meters and were looking at the sky with dedicated neutrality.
“Or shall I continue?” Nathan offered pleasantly. “Before my stepsisters interrupted us—my hands had traveled down across your stomach, and I was moving further, and you weren’t doing anything to stop me—”
“I remember!” Rena’s composure broke cleanly and completely, the words coming out with sharp, furious heat as she stood abruptly from the bench, facing him directly with an expression that was equal parts outrage and profound mortification. “I remember perfectly well, every detail of what that scummy, opportunistic, completely unconscionable man did to me! And I remember him taking complete advantage of someone who was in a vulnerable and coerced position!”
She crossed her arms and held his gaze with the fierce stubbornness of someone refusing to concede a single centimeter of ground.
“You have a very creative way of experiencing events,” Nathan said. “From my perspective the sequence was somewhat different. Specifically the part where you pulled me down.”
“Because you were using some kind of magic on me,” Rena said, her chin lifting with total conviction. “Some kind of charm or influence. There is no other rational explanation for why I would have—” She stopped herself, recalibrating. “For why that happened.”
“Magic,” Nathan repeated.
He considered this genuinely for a moment.
His luck attribute—the statistical absurdity that had been climbing steadily since his earliest days in this world, the number that defied any reasonable ceiling and kept exceeding it regardless—did have effects that extended beyond simple fortune. It generated something. An ambient quality, a pull, an accumulation of favorable circumstances that included but was not limited to how people responded to him physically.
Whether that constituted magic in any meaningful sense, or simply an innate aspect of what he had become, was a philosophical distinction he found genuinely interesting.
He smiled slightly.
Then he disappeared.
He reappeared directly in front of her in the same instant—not the slow crossing of distance but the complete elimination of it, close enough that the night air between them had no room to exist.
Rena’s instinctive step backward was entirely reflexive and immediately regretted. The back of her knees connected with the bench’s edge and her balance shifted, her body committing to a fall she had no time to correct.
Nathan’s arms wrapped around her back in the same moment, catching her weight with unhurried completeness and holding her suspended in a lean that left her entirely supported by his arms and entirely unable to pretend she wasn’t.
He looked down at her from this proximity with the same dark, unreadable eyes the disguise had given him—which somehow managed to be as disconcerting as his real ones, carrying the same quality of something that looked at things and saw them accurately.
“If what you’re claiming is true,” Nathan said, his voice quieter now in the reduced distance between them, “then that magic would have dissolved entirely by now. Years have passed. The effect would be long gone.” He held her gaze steadily. “Which means that if you feel anything right now, in this moment, without any charm or influence or external cause—”
He let that sit.
“—then it was always yours. Not mine.”
Rena’s heart was doing something architecturally unsound inside her chest, a rhythm that had no business being as loud as it was given that she was a composed and rational person who was absolutely not affected by any of this.
She could feel the warmth of his arms through the fabric of her gown. Could feel her own pulse in places that were inconvenient to be aware of one’s pulse. Could feel her cheeks holding enough heat to be visible even in low garden lighting.
She looked back at him with everything she had—every year of practiced composure, every layer of the formidable exterior she had constructed and maintained since before she could remember clearly—and held his gaze with sheer, absolute stubbornness.
“Yes,” she managed, the word coming out with more steadiness than she had any right to expect from herself given the current circumstances.
Nathan looked at her for a long, unhurried moment.
Her brown eyes were luminous even in the garden’s low light—that particular quality of warmth that her expression worked so diligently to contradict, glowing with an honesty her words consistently refused to match. She was genuinely lovely in a way that had nothing to do with the obvious surface of it and everything to do with what lived underneath the armor.
She reminded him, in certain moments, of Licinia—the same fundamental architecture of a proud, high-born woman who had decided very early that softness was a liability and had built elaborate, carefully maintained defenses against anything that might reach the parts of her that hadn’t agreed with that decision. Licinia had eventually stopped fighting it, which had made her both more dangerous and considerably happier.
Rena seemed determined to hold the line considerably longer.
He found that interesting. He had always found it interesting.
“Is that so,” he said quietly.
Not pressing. Not mocking. Simply acknowledging what she’d said while making it gently, unmistakably clear that he didn’t believe a syllable of it.
“I don’t feel anything,” Rena repeated, the words arriving with slightly more structure and composure than before—she had recovered some ground during the brief pause, rebuilt a portion of the exterior that his proximity had temporarily dismantled. Her eyes moved away from his, finding a point somewhere past his shoulder that was significantly less dangerous to look at.
“Now let go of me,” she added, with the tone of someone issuing a reasonable administrative request rather than admitting they urgently needed the situation to change.
Nathan considered, briefly, reverting to his true appearance—letting the disguise drop, showing his true appearance rather than this foreign one, and seeing what that did to the careful composure she’d just reconstructed. He considered pressing further, saying the next thing that would make her cheeks go crimson again.
He held back.
There was a time and a manner for things.
“I see,” Nathan said simply. He steadied her with his hands—ensuring she had her balance fully before releasing his hold—and stepped back with unhurried ease.
“That’s a shame, then.”
Three words. Carrying nothing overtly provocative and everything genuinely meant, delivered with the calm of someone who was neither wounded nor deterred but simply noting a fact about the present moment that the future was entirely free to revise.
Then he turned and walked away along the garden path without looking back, his footsteps even and unhurried, disappearing gradually into the castle’s outer shadow.
Rena watched him go.
She stood exactly where he’d left her, arms coming up to wrap around herself in a gesture that had nothing to do with cold, her eyes tracking his retreating figure until the darkness absorbed it entirely and there was nothing left to watch.
The water feature knocked and poured beside her, indifferent.
Her expression was difficult to classify. Not quite anger, though anger was somewhere in it. Not quite the clean wounded pride of someone who’d been handled carelessly. Something more honest and considerably more irritating than either—the sourness of a feeling she couldn’t name cleanly and therefore couldn’t dismiss cleanly, sitting in her chest like an unresolved chord.
“Rena-sama,” Ao said carefully from beside her, having cautiously reapproached now that the immediate storm front appeared to have passed. “He is leaving.”
“I can see that,” Rena replied, with precise, clipped flatness.
A brief silence.
“Perhaps,” Aka began, with the particular tentative energy of someone choosing words near an open flame, “you might consider telling him that you haven’t actually stopped thinking about what happened. Even until now. Since, you know. You haven’t.”
Rena’s head turned toward Aka with a slowness that was considerably more threatening than speed would have been.
“Do you want to die?” she asked. The words were quiet and completely sincere.
Aka decided immediate distance was advisable and drifted backward several centimeters.
“Rena-sama.” Midori’s voice came from her other side—quieter than the others, more measured, carrying the particular quality of someone who had observed something for a long time and had finally decided the observation warranted articulation. “I say this with genuine care and not to provoke you.”
Rena’s eyes moved to Midori.
“Whenever you are in the company of the Arima sisters,” Midori continued, with the serene composure of someone who had made peace with the potential consequences of honesty, “you reliably find ways to bring his name into the conversation. Generally to curse him, yes. But consistently. For three years, with remarkable regularity.”
Midori paused.
“I think you genuinely cannot forget him. And I think perhaps that is worth—”
“OUT OF MY SIGHT!!” Rena said. “All of you! Immediately. I don’t want to see a single one of you for the remainder of this evening!”
Kiiro, Aka, and Ao vanished with the instantaneous efficiency of entities who had learned from experience that this particular tone of voice meant exactly what it said.
Midori held for exactly one additional moment—long enough to communicate that the observation stood regardless of Rena’s feelings about it—and then also disappeared.
The garden was empty.
Rena stood alone beside the bench with the bamboo shifting around her in the faint night breeze, and her face was burning with a heat that she was furious at herself for and completely unable to do anything about.
She turned and walked back toward the castle with quick, decisive steps—the walk of someone with a clear destination and a pressing reason to reach it, which was entirely constructed because the honest truth was that she simply needed to be moving rather than standing still with her thoughts.
Her reflection in one of the polished corridor lantern shields as she passed showed her cheeks still unforgivably, incriminatingly flushed, her expression carrying the complicated architecture of someone who was angry and embarrassed and underneath both of those things something considerably more inconvenient that she absolutely refused to examine further tonight.
“That’s a shame, then.”
Remembering his last words, a small imperceptible smile appeared on Rena’s lips however.
