I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me - Chapter 694: Morosuke

Chapter 694: Morosuke

“Boss! Morosuke-sama!”

Up in the private upper quarters of the castle, one of Morosuke’s men stumbled into the room without so much as announcing himself, shoving the doors open so hard they slammed against the frame.

The chamber he burst into was large and dim, heavy with the lingering smell of sweat, sake, and incense. Rich fabrics lay scattered across the floor in careless disorder. On the wide bed at the center of the room, several women slept in tangled sheets, their bodies limp with exhaustion, the marks of a long and brutal night still visible on their skin.

And there, seated among the wreckage of indulgence, was Morosuke.

He was a massive man, broad through the shoulders and chest, his build thick with the kind of strength that did not come from training alone but from a life spent breaking things with his own hands. He was bare to the waist, and the dim light running across his skin revealed old scars carved into him in jagged lines, pale against the darker tone of his body. Some were thin and sharp, some deep and ugly, the sort left behind by blades that had come close but not close enough. He looked less like a nobleman in his own chambers than a beast at rest in its den.

Without rising, Morosuke reached lazily for a bottle of sake beside the bed.

“You’d better have a good reason to barge in like that,” he said.

His voice came out low and rough, a growl more than ordinary speech.

The man who had entered was already sweating. “Yes, Morosuke-sama. It’s urgent. Someone has broken into the castle.”

Morosuke barely reacted. He pulled the sake bottle closer, as though the matter bored him already.

“So that’s what the noise is,” he muttered. “Then deal with him.”

The retainer swallowed hard. His face had gone pale, and the memory of what he had seen still clung to him with enough force to make his hands shake.

“That’s the problem, Morosuke-sama. He’s too strong. He’s already cut down many of our men…” His breath caught for an instant before he forced the rest out. “And he beat Nobusuke-sama.”

The room changed.

It was subtle at first. Morosuke did not leap up, nor did he roar. He simply stopped moving. The bottle of sake hovered for a moment in his hand, then lowered slowly back to the floor.

“What did you say?”

The words were quiet.

That made them worse.

“He—he beat Nobusuke-sama,” the man repeated quickly, his voice nearly tripping over itself. “And he looks like a ronin.”

Morosuke’s eyes narrowed.

A thick silence settled over the room. One of the women on the bed stirred faintly in her sleep, then went still again.

At last Morosuke pushed the bedding aside and stood.

He rose like something heavy being unchained. His full height made the room feel smaller at once. Even barefoot, he seemed imposing enough to crowd the space around him, and when he stepped away from the bed the floorboards gave a low complaint beneath his weight.

“Was he sent by that witch and her women?” he asked.

There was open contempt in his voice now, sharpened by suspicion.

“We… we don’t know,” the retainer said. “But he caught Nobusuke-sama at one of the pleasure inns owned by Chiyo.”

Morosuke’s mouth hardened into something darker than a scowl.

“So,” he said, “he’s with that woman.”

The servant lowered his head, though not before Morosuke saw the fear on his face. “He’s dangerous, Morosuke-sama.”

That, more than anything, seemed to irritate him.

Morosuke glanced at the man only once, then turned and crossed the room toward a side alcove hidden behind a sliding panel. He pulled it aside, revealing a weapon set apart from the others like an offering before a shrine.

Inside rested a katana so long and heavy it looked almost absurd beside ordinary blades. It was not a weapon meant for average hands or average strength. It belonged to a man of unusual size, someone who could wield brute weight as easily as others handled steel.

Morosuke stared at it for a moment.

Then his gaze shifted.

Beside the sword, resting in silence, lay a pearl necklace.

It was beautiful at first glance, almost delicate, the smooth pale surface of each pearl catching the dim light with a faint, ghostly sheen. Yet there was something unsettling about it too, something ominous in the way it had been placed there, untouched and self-contained, as though it mattered more than decoration ever should. Morosuke looked at it in stillness, his expression unreadable.

But in the end, he left it where it was.

His hand closed instead around the katana.

The moment he lifted it free, the shelf beneath seemed to breathe, as though some great burden had been removed from it. Even the servant watching from across the room felt the shift. The blade was immense, its presence oppressive before it was ever drawn.

Morosuke gripped the hilt tightly and pulled the sword from its scabbard.

Steel slid free with a long, heavy scrape.

Then he let the empty scabbard fall.

It hit the floor with a hard crack.

The servant flinched.

In the three years he had served Morosuke, he had never once seen him draw that blade for an actual fight. Others died before things ever reached that point. Men were beaten, carved apart, made examples of, but Morosuke himself had never needed to meet an intruder with steel in hand. The very fact that he was doing so now said more than any shouted order could.

This was no ordinary disturbance.

Whoever that ronin was, Morosuke had already decided he would not be handled lightly.

Especially not after Nobusuke had been disgraced.

Especially not after someone had dared force his way into the castle itself.

Without another word, Morosuke stepped out into the corridor.

He moved barefoot over the polished wood, the great katana hanging at his side, its naked blade gleaming darkly in the muted light. There was no rush in his pace, only certainty. The kind of certainty men had when they believed violence belonged to them by right.

At first, from his chambers, the commotion below had been little more than distant tremors and muffled impacts. But the farther he walked through the upper corridor, the clearer the sounds became.

Screams.

Not the sharp cries of alarm from startled guards.

Real screams.

The raw, ragged kind torn out by pain so intense it stripped a man of pride before it stripped him of life. They rose in bursts from below, mixed with crashing wood, frantic footsteps, and the brief metallic clash of weapons cut suddenly short.

Morosuke knew those sounds well.

He had heard them countless times before.

He had caused them himself.

He knew the sound a man made when steel opened him. He knew the broken shriek that followed a severed limb, the wet choking gasp of someone dying on blood, the hopeless cry of a person who understood too late that no one was coming to save him. Such sounds had never troubled him. They had always belonged to others.

But now those sounds were coming from his own men.

And with every step he took down the corridor, they grew louder.

Morosuke had barely descended two steps when he saw him.

Coming from the opposite end of the corridor, walking straight through the aftermath of slaughter with the same calm as before, was Nathan.

Bodies lay strewn behind him across the hall and the rooms beyond, twisted where they had fallen, leaving the polished floor smeared with blood and dark footprints. In Nathan’s hand, Kyomei hung low at his side, its black blade still wet, fresh blood sliding slowly from the edge and pattering onto the wood beneath him.

Morosuke stopped.

His narrowed gaze ran over the young man in silence.

He had expected someone larger, perhaps older, someone with a face weathered by decades of killing. But the intruder standing before him looked unexpectedly young. That did not make him less dangerous. If anything, it made the sight of the corpses behind him all the more unsettling.

Nathan lifted his eyes and studied Morosuke in return.

At once, he could tell this man was different from the others.

There was weight in him. Not just in his size, though Morosuke was indeed a massive figure, broad and hard like a boulder given flesh, but in the pressure he carried without moving. The air around him felt denser somehow, charged with the kind of power lesser men borrowed by hiding behind his name.

“Are you Morosuke?” Nathan asked.

His tone was flat, direct, almost indifferent.

Morosuke’s lip twitched faintly. “I am.”

Nathan gave a slight nod, as though confirming something simple.

“I have a question for you.”

For a moment, Morosuke simply stared at him.

Then a dark, humorless amusement touched his face.

“A question?” he repeated. “You slaughtered my men just to ask me a question, boy?”

Nathan did not blink.

“Not really,” he said. “I killed them because they attacked me.”

The answer came without apology, without anger, and without even the smallest effort to justify himself. It was a plain statement, cold in its simplicity.

Then Nathan took one more step forward, and his gaze hardened.

“Now will you answer me,” he said, “or do I have to beat the answer out of your mouth?”

For the first time, the silence between them sharpened into something dangerous.

Morosuke’s expression darkened.

There was no outburst, no immediate roar of fury. His anger came differently. It thickened in the corridor like smoke, heavy and oppressive. Then power burst from him.

A violent aura of magic ignited around his body, glowing with a brutal intensity that flooded the hall in a reddish light. The floor beneath his feet trembled. Dust stirred loose from the beams overhead. Even the blood on the wood seemed to quiver at the release of that monstrous force.

“You’ve got courage,” Morosuke said, his growling voice dropping lower. “I’ll give you that.”

His fingers tightened around the hilt of his massive katana.

“But the moment you stepped into my castle,” he said, “you signed your own death sentence.”

He lifted the blade, and red light bled across the steel like fire spreading under the surface.

Nathan answered by raising Kyomei.

The black sword came up soundlessly, yet the air around it seemed to shift the instant he did. Dark steel faced red-glowing steel, and for one long second neither man moved.

They only looked at each other.

Morosuke’s stare was heavy with murderous certainty, the arrogance of a man who had crushed countless people and never once doubted he would crush the next. Nathan’s was colder, unreadable, stripped of everything except intent.

The corridor held its breath.

Blood dripped from Kyomei.

Red light pulsed from Morosuke’s blade.

Then both men moved at once.

Their feet slammed into the floorboards with explosive force, cracking the wood beneath them as they launched forward. In the same instant, the distance between them vanished, their bodies tearing through the corridor like opposing storms about to collide.