I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me - Chapter 691: Nobusuke

Chapter 691: Nobusuke

The commotion reached him before he was fully awake.

His ears found it first — the particular pitch of voices below that the sleeping mind classified as background and the waking mind classified as something worth attending to. Not the ordinary noise of the building’s morning, not Minato’s continuous street sound coming through the window. Something sharper. Women’s voices, multiple, the specific quality of sound that fear and grief produced when they arrived together.

Nathan was already sitting up.

He took Kyōmei from the floor beside the mat and stepped into the corridor.

People were moving — not walking, moving, the hurried purposeless movement of individuals who had received bad news and were carrying it in their bodies before they had decided what to do with it. Two women passed him without registering his presence at all, their faces down, one of them with her hand pressed to her mouth. A third came from the staircase at a near run and turned into a side corridor without looking up.

Nathan followed the direction they had all come from.

The staircase brought the sounds up more clearly as he descended — the wailing sharpening, several voices layered over each other, the words still indistinct but the shape of them unmistakable. Grief. Anger. Fear running underneath both.

The lobby.

A crowd had formed — women mostly, the establishment’s residents and workers, arranged in a rough circle around something on the floor that none of them were close enough to.

One had her hands over her face. The sounds filled the low-ceilinged space and bounced off the walls and came back changed.

Nathan walked toward the circle.

He raised one hand and pressed it forward — not aggressive, simply present and moving — and the people at the circle’s edge registered him and stepped back, the path opening as he moved through it, the crowd parting with the quick obedience of people who were already frightened and found it easier to move than to assess.

He reached the center.

He stopped.

Nana lay on the floor in a pool of her own blood that was still fresh — still bright at the edges, still spreading in the slow way that blood spread when the heart that had been producing it had only recently stopped. Her kimono was dark with it from the shoulder down. Her expression was wrong — the face he had seen smiling twice in the span of a few hours last night now arranged by death into something twisted and fixed, the last moment of surprise or pain or both still sitting in the muscles of it without anything left to release it.

She was gone. Entirely and immediately gone — no assessment was necessary, no closer examination, the fact of it visible from where he stood with the simple finality of things that did not require confirmation.

The woman kneeling beside her was holding Nana’s arm and crying with the full-bodied grief of someone who had loved her — not performing it, not managing it, simply in it completely, her tears falling onto Nana’s sleeve and darkening the fabric.

The other women stood in their circle and wept and shook.

And across the room, not in the circle, standing on the other side of it with the ease of men occupying a space they had decided belonged to them — three men.

Two of them were facing the room.

They had the look of people who had been given just enough authority and just enough impunity to become the worst version of themselves.

One was grinning. The other was watching the weeping women with a flat amusement that was worse than the grin.

The third man had his back to the room.

He was looking out toward the entrance, one hand resting on his katana, the other tucked into his kimono at the chest. The blade at his hip still carried the morning’s work on it — the blood not yet dry, Nana’s blood, sitting on the steel with the casual indifference of something that hadn’t been considered worth cleaning.

“Told you not to mess with Morosuke,” one of the two facing the room said. He directed it at the circle of women generally, the way a man delivered a lesson he had already decided had been received. “When he asks for your women, you provide them. You should be grateful he even looks at a place like this.”

“Exactly,” the other said. He stepped forward and kicked Nana’s arm — a casual motion, no force behind it, the kick of someone moving an object rather than touching a person. “That one especially. Quite a mouth on her.” He jerked his head toward the man at the entrance. “Even slapped Nobusuke. Can you imagine.”

The man at the entrance — Nobusuke, Morosuke’s own brother — did not turn around. He was either bored or cultivating the appearance of being bored, which amounted to the same thing in a man with a fresh-blooded blade and no one currently challenging him.

“Slapping Morosuke’s little brother,” the first one said, shaking his head with the theatrical disbelief of someone describing an act of spectacular stupidity. “What exactly did you think was going to happen?”

He guffawed.

The woman holding Nana raised her head.

Her eyes were red and streaming and absolutely furious/

“She slapped him because the last girl he took is dead!” she shouted. Her voice broke halfway through and came back stronger. “Because of how he treated her! She died because of him and you dare to stand there and—”

“And so what?” the second man said.

Not aggressive. Flat. The two words delivered with the genuine indifference of someone for whom the information contained in the sentence did not register as relevant.

“Exactly,” the other agreed, looking around the circle with the relaxed survey of a man taking stock of a room. “You are tools. That is what you are here for. One death, two deaths — you have plenty of women in this place, it won’t do lasting damage.” His eyes moved from face to face without settling on any of them. “Be grateful you’re still useful.”

“You beasts—!” The woman on the floor was shaking with it now, the grief and the fury running together into something that had nowhere to go. “Chiyo-sama will never forgive this! Never! When she hears what you have done here—”

“What did you say?” The man’s frown deepened.

“You dare threaten us?” The second one stepped forward, his voice rising into the register of performed outrage. “Morosuke owns this town. Every building, every street, every person in it — they exist because he allows it. One word from him and this whole place burns and everyone inside it with it.”

“That’s right.” The first one had recovered his composure and was pointing now, the finger carrying the weight of a threat he had delivered many times and watched land. “And since you have such a loud mouth, we will make sure that Morosuke hears exactly what—”

He stopped.

He had taken a step forward and his eyes had gone to the floor — to Nana’s body, to the fold of her kimono where it had fallen open, and to the thing sitting in that fold catching the morning light that came through the entrance with the clean, unmistakable gleam of real gold.

The gold coin.

Nathan’s gold coin, the one he had flicked to her in the corridor last night, the one she had looked at with wide eyes before he closed the door.

The man’s expression completed its transformation — all the performed outrage dissolving instantly, replaced by uncomplicated greed.

His lips pulled into a wide grin.

“Well,” he said. “Look at that.” He glanced back at Nobusuke’s still-turned back. “She wasn’t completely useless after all, Nobusuke-sama.” He laughed — a short, ugly sound — and stepped toward the body, crouching down, his hand reaching toward Nana’s kimono.

“Don’t touch her—!” The woman holding Nana pulled the body tighter against herself, her voice cracking with the effort of the shout, her red eyes finding the man’s face with everything she had left in her.

He reached out his free hand, grabbed her arm, and threw her back.

She hit the floor and stayed there, winded, one hand braced beneath her.

The man’s fingers reached down toward the gold coin, the grin still in place, his attention entirely on what he was taking.

His hand made contact with something that was not Nana’s kimono.

Black lacquered wood. The scabbard of a katana, pressed flat against the floor between his reaching fingers and the coin, placed there without sound by someone who had moved without being seen moving.

He looked up.

Nathan was standing directly in front of him on the other side of Nana’s body, the pitch black eyes looking down at him from a very short distance with an expression that contained nothing readable except the total absence of anything that could be mistaken for patience.

“What—” The man’s voice changed register completely. The grin was gone. His free hand found his katana’s handle and gripped it. “Do you have a death wish? Do you know who you are—”

Nathan looked away from him.

He looked at the woman on the floor — the one who had been holding Nana, the one who had been thrown back, who was now sitting with her hand pressed to her wrist where the man had grabbed it, her face still wet, her eyes finding Nathan’s with the stunned expression of someone who didn’t know what was happening but understood that something had changed.

“Take her,” Nathan said. His voice was entirely calm. “Arrange a proper burial. Use the coin for her and for yourselves.”

The woman looked at him.

Something in his expression reached her through the shock and the grief and she nodded. She began to move toward Nana.

“What are you doing?!” The man still crouching glared at her, his voice jumping back to its threatening register. “You obey this nobody? Do you want to die?” His arm swung out toward her, the open hand coming around in a slap aimed at the side of her head—

Nathan’s foot moved.

The kick was not large. It was not a lunge or a jump or anything that required the kind of winding preparation that visible strikes required. It was simply fast — a compression of motion from stillness into impact that the eye did not track because there was no intermediate state between before and after.

The man’s body left the floor.

BADAM!!

He traveled horizontally across the lobby, through the entrance curtain, through the doorway, and out into Minato’s morning street beyond it — his body turning in the air and finding the ground and rolling, rolling, the momentum carrying him across the dirt in an uncontrolled series of rotations until he came to rest in a heap against the opposite side of the street, motionless, the sound of the impact having drawn every eye in the immediate vicinity to the spectacle of a man who had apparently been launched from a building.

He did not get up.

The lobby was silent.

Every woman in the circle had frozen. The remaining man who had been standing behind Nathan stood with his mouth in the shape of a word that hadn’t been completed, looking at the empty doorway where his companion had been and then at Nathan crouched beside Nana’s body with the coin now in his hand.

And Nobusuke turned around.

He had been facing the entrance. He had been watching the morning street with the studied boredom of a man confident enough in his reputation to not watch the room. And from that position he had seen his man come past him — fast, horizontal, airborne — and hit the street and roll and stop moving.

He turned from the doorway and looked at the room.

Found Nathan.

His hand was on his katana immediately.

The woman who had been thrown now moved — quietly, quickly, taking the opportunity the silence provided, her arms going around Nana and beginning the careful, painful work of moving her toward the side of the room, away from the center, away from the men.

Nathan watched until she had Nana clear.

Then he straightened and turned to face the room fully.

Behind him the remaining standing man had found his voice and his katana handle at approximately the same moment.