I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me - Chapter 719: Nathan Poisoned (1)

One moment Nathan was standing. The next he simply wasn’t.

No stumble, no warning lean — his body locked up as though something had seized every muscle at once, and then he went down hard, the sound of it flat and final against the floor. Kyomei clattered from his grip. The room held its breath.

Every eye in the place stared.

The fight had been extraordinary — violent and escalating and genuinely difficult to look away from — and then in the space of a single heartbeat it was over, replaced by something that felt worse than any fight. Nathan lay motionless, chest barely moving, face the color of old ash.

Yukihime moved before anyone else had even processed what had happened.

She was beside him in an instant, the distance between them simply ceasing to exist, and she dropped to her knees on the floor and pulled him into her arms with a sound that wasn’t quite a word — something raw and unformed that tore out of her before she could stop it.

“No — please—!” Her voice cracked open. “Ryo-sama — Nathan-sama—!”

His face was pale and slicked with cold sweat, his breathing ragged and shallow, and the sight of it undid her completely. Tears spilled down her cheeks and froze before they could fall, crystallizing against her skin, and the temperature around her began to drop without her meaning it to. The air near the floor turned white with frost. A thin lacework of ice crept outward from beneath her knees, spreading across the stone in every direction as her emotions slipped out of her grasp entirely.

She was shaking.

And then she felt it — a hand, barely lifted, finding her cheek. Slow. Trembling with effort.

She looked down.

Nathan’s eyes weren’t open. His face hadn’t changed. But his hand was against her face, warm despite everything, and that warmth hit her somewhere so deep it stilled the storm inside her before she understood what was happening. He didn’t speak. He didn’t have the strength for it. But the touch said what words couldn’t — I’m still here. Calm down.

His arm began to sink.

Yukihime caught his hand before it could fall and held it pressed against her cheek, eyes closing for just a moment.

The frost stopped spreading.

“Genzo-sama.”

Ayame’s voice came out tighter than she intended. She crossed the room toward him, keeping her eyes on Nathan’s collapsed form, the worry in her expression stripped of any effort to hide it. She’d known something was wrong the moment she saw him — had clocked it early in that pale face and the sweat he shouldn’t have had before the fight even began — but she’d told herself she was overthinking it. She hadn’t been overthinking it.

Genzo said nothing at first. He stood looking down at Nathan, something unreadable moving behind his eyes. Then his gaze dropped to the shoulder — to the skin visible at the collar — and he went still.

The mark there was ugly. Purplish-dark, spreading outward from a central point in a way that didn’t look like any ordinary wound. It looked like something eating its way outward from the inside.

“Take him to the village,” Genzo said, turning away. “He needs treatment.”

The shinobis exchanged glances and moved to comply — until Yukihime’s gaze found them, and they stopped moving entirely.

She hadn’t said a word yet. She didn’t need to. The look was enough; the cold radiating off her in quiet, steady waves was enough. Several of them took an unconscious step backward.

“I will be the only one touching him.” Her voice was soft and even and left absolutely no room for discussion. “Lead the way.”

Nobody argued. Not one of them.

She gathered Nathan to her without effort, lifting him on a cushion of her own cold wind — gently, the way you carried something irreplaceable — and the snow swirled around her as she followed the shinobis out into the dark, a quiet blizzard with a woman at its center and a man cradled in its eye.

She kept her eyes moving. She didn’t know these people. She didn’t know this place. And Nathan, who had seemed so immovably solid since the moment they met — who had faced her in the cold without flinching, who had pulled her back from a thousand years of silence like it was the simplest thing in the world — lay still in her arms, vulnerable in a way she’d never seen him and never wanted to see again.

Something had a hold of her chest and was squeezing it slowly. She recognized the feeling, even though she’d had so little practice with it.

She didn’t want to lose him.

The thought arrived plainly, without ceremony, and settled into her like snow settling on still water. She didn’t want to lose him. Not the man who had found her when she was certain nothing would. Not her fated one.

Ten minutes of walking brought them to the edge of what looked, at first glance, like ordinary forest.

Then they crossed the threshold.

It was subtle — a faint pressure against the skin, like stepping through a curtain you couldn’t see — and then the world on the other side of it opened up entirely. A village materialized from the dark between the trees: lantern-lit and alive, buildings tucked between roots and branches as though the forest had agreed to make room for them. Shinobis moved through the paths with their faces uncovered, unhurried, and they turned to look as the group entered — not hostile, simply watchful — eyes drawn immediately and inevitably to the silver-haired woman carrying the unconscious man on a cushion of winter air.

Yukihime stopped.

She took in her surroundings slowly, cataloguing every face, every exit, every shadow that moved the wrong way.

“Here.”

A woman’s voice, from behind. Yukihime turned and followed, her gust drawing close around Nathan like a shield, until they reached a small house set slightly apart from the others.

Inside, an old man glanced up from whatever had been occupying him — and promptly forgot it entirely. His eyes landed on Yukihime and stayed there, the surprise on his face genuine and unguarded.

“Genzo.” Genzo had materialized in the doorway behind them. “Explanations later. This boy needs looking at.”

The old man — Ujitake — shifted his gaze to Nathan, taking in the pallor, the stillness, the mark at his shoulder. He nodded once, the surprise folding itself away into something more purposeful.

“This way,” he said, already moving.

Yukihime followed him into the back room and set Nathan down on the bed herself, slowly, carefully, as though the mattress might not deserve him. She straightened up and stood over him with her arms at her sides and her black eyes fixed on his face.

She did not step away.

Ujitake worked without a word, his hands moving. He drew Nathan’s kimono down from the shoulder and peeled it back to the waist, and for a moment the only sound in the room was the quiet shift of fabric.

Then Ayame made a sound in the back of her throat.

The veins ran everywhere. What had looked at the collar like a localized burn revealed itself to be something far worse — a sprawling network of purple-black lines branching outward from the bite like cracks spreading through ice, tracing every vessel from the shoulder across the chest and down both arms to the wrists. Against Nathan’s skin, lean and unmarked everywhere else, the contrast was stark and deeply wrong. It looked less like poison and more like something had been drawn into him, as though whatever lived in that wound was slowly mapping the territory it intended to claim.

“This—” Ayame caught herself, jaw tightening.

Ujitake leaned closer, eyes narrowed, one finger hovering a hair’s breadth above the darkest point of the mark without touching it. He stayed like that for a long moment.

“He’s been poisoned,” he said finally. “But this—” He shook his head slowly. “I’ve never seen anything that moves like this.”

“He is at least my equal,” Genzo said from near the doorway, arms folded, his voice carrying the flat weight of fact rather than opinion. “A demigod power. And no ordinary poison does this to a Demigod’s body.”

Ujitake looked up sharply. “A demigod power?”

Genzo nodded once.

The old man turned back to Nathan’s chest with fresh gravity in his expression. The list of things capable of marking a Demigod this way was not a long one, and none of the items on it were comforting.

“Then how did this happen to him?” Ujitake asked. “What bit him?”

“The Daimyo Yorimasa.” Yukihime’s voice came from Nathan’s other side, quiet. She hadn’t moved from where she stood over him. “When Ryo-sama fought him.”

The name landed differently than she may have expected.

Genzo went still.

Even Ujitake straightened up, something shifting behind his eyes that hadn’t been there a moment before.

“He fought the Daimyo?” Genzo said, his gaze moving to Ayame.

Ayame met it directly. “He killed him.”

The silence that followed was a different breed from the ones before it. Genzo stared at her. His mouth opened slightly and then closed again. He was not, in Ayame’s experience, a man who was often rendered speechless. He was now.

A Daimyo was dead.

One of the lords who had held the South under their thumb for longer than most people cared to remember — one of those untouchable, singular powers — simply gone. Removed by a dark-haired ronin from somewhere outside this world who hadn’t even known the man’s name three days ago.

“The Daimyo is the one who bit Ryo-sama,” Yukihime continued, her black gaze moving to Ujitake with a coolness in it that made the temperature in the room feel more literal than figurative. “Before he died. He spoke about the poison of Yamata no Orochi.”

She said it plainly. As though she were reporting the weather.

No one spoke.

Ujitake stood motionless over Nathan’s body with his hands at his sides. Genzo’s arms had uncrossed somewhere in the last few seconds without him seeming to notice. Ayame looked between them both, reading their faces, and felt a cold stone drop into the pit of her stomach as she also realized what was the name Yukihime just revealed.