Chapter 732: Confused Hanzo
Morning came grey and cool, the kind that settled low over the treetops and made the forest feel closer than usual. Nathan arrived at the training ground first for once, moving through a few slow warm-up forms while he waited, watching his own footwork with the critical eye Hanzo had been sharpening in him all week.
She arrived a few minutes later.
He glanced over and noted her — same composure as always on the surface, same straight-backed economy of movement. But something was sitting differently. The way she took her position had a fraction too much deliberateness to it, like someone who was being careful in a way they didn’t usually need to be careful. He filed it away without comment and turned to face her.
"Ready?" she asked.
"When you are."
She opened with a mid-range approach, textbook clean in its form, and Nathan redirected it without difficulty. Normal enough. But when she reset and came again he caught it — the weight shift at the back foot came a half-beat late, the kind of micro-hesitation that didn’t belong in her movement at all. She compensated quickly, but the compensation itself was the tell. Smooth fighters don’t compensate. They simply move.
He didn’t say anything. He pressed instead, pushing the exchange a little harder to see what came back.
What came back was inconsistent in a way that Hanzo simply was not. She was sharper on the left than the right this morning, her timing fractionally off on any angle that brought her in close, and twice she pulled out of an approach that three days ago she would have committed to without hesitation. Each time she did, her eyes went briefly elsewhere — not to the treeline, not to his hands. Somewhere internal. Something was running in the background of her mind and using up resources she’d normally have pointed at him.
Nathan caught a thread of opening and pulled on it.
The exchange accelerated — her recovering into sharper movement as instinct overrode whatever was distracting her, both of them pushing through a rapid back-and-forth across the clearing that stripped away everything except reaction. For a stretch of perhaps twenty seconds she was fully herself again, fast and silent and reading him well, and then he cut inside on a tight angle, got underneath her guard, and took her to the ground.
Not roughly. A controlled sweep, his weight following through just enough to complete it. She went down and he came with her, ending up straddling her with both her wrists pinned to the earth beside her head, the match clearly decided.
Hanzo went completely still.
Not the stillness of someone catching their breath or calculating a reversal. Something else. Her eyes were fixed upward — at him, but not entirely at him, like she was seeing the moment and something laid over it simultaneously. A faint color had risen along the line of her cheekbones that had nothing to do with exertion.
Nathan held the position for a moment and then frowned.
Her expression was doing something he couldn’t read cleanly — controlled on the outside, but not quite controlled enough, the way a surface looks when there’s pressure building underneath it. She wasn’t looking at him the way she looked at him during training. She wasn’t looking at him like an opponent she was assessing or a student she was measuring.
He released her wrists and straightened, stepping back to give her room to stand. The frown stayed.
"Are you alright?" he asked.
"Fine," she said. The word came out slightly too quickly. She rose to her feet and brushed the dirt from her sleeve with focused attention, not meeting his eyes for a moment longer than was natural. "Just a little — distracted this morning."
"You’ve been off since we started," Nathan said, not accusatory — just factual, the way he said most things.
"I said I’m fine." She finally looked up, her expression reset into something more like its usual evenness, though the color at her cheeks hadn’t fully faded. She rolled her shoulder and settled back into her stance. "Again."
Nathan studied her for a second longer, something puzzled working quietly behind his eyes. He had seen a great many reactions from people during training. Whatever this was, it didn’t fit any category he had a ready name for.
He let it go — for now — and raised his hands.
But the frown didn’t entirely leave his face.
They resumed, and it only got worse.
The tips and corrections that had become as much a part of their sessions as the movement itself — gone. She wasn’t talking. She wasn’t really looking at him either, her gaze skimming past him rather than landing, like she was deliberately avoiding direct contact. And her movement had degraded further into something that Nathan could only describe as absent. Not tired, not injured. Absent. Like the person who had been occupying Hanzo’s body for the past three days had stepped out briefly and left something much less competent in charge.
She came at him again — slow, the angle obvious, the follow-through already telegraphed before she’d committed to it — and Nathan’s patience ran out.
He sidestepped the approach without effort, caught her wrist as it passed, and pulled.
Not gently. He turned her momentum against her and drove her back firmly against the nearest tree, one hand flat against the bark beside her shoulder, her wrist still held, his face close enough that there was nowhere else to look but at him.
"What are you dreaming about?"
His voice was low and clipped, eyes narrowed with genuine irritation. She had been sharp and demanding and completely present every single day until now. They had parted last night without incident — she had been fine, entirely herself, when they went their separate ways. Whatever this was, it had started between then and now, and he wanted to know what it was because training with someone operating at a tenth of their ability was not training. It was a waste of both their mornings.
Hanzo didn’t answer.
She had gone rigid the moment her back met the tree. Not with alarm — with something worse, from her perspective. Her mind, entirely without her permission, had jumped a rail and landed somewhere she had no framework for navigating. The position. His proximity. The way his arm bracketed her against the bark —
The image came back with horrible clarity. The lamplight through the door. The sounds she hadn’t understood until she’d understood them completely. Nathan’s back, the movement, Yukihime’s hands gripping whatever was in reach, her voice breaking on something that wasn’t pain at all —
Heat climbed up Hanzo’s neck and flooded her face before she could stop it. She was older than him. She was a Shinobi, trained since childhood, a woman who had faced things that would have destroyed most people. She had no business whatsoever standing pinned against a tree by a boy — a man, some traitorous part of her mind corrected immediately — going crimson because of a memory she hadn’t even been meant to acquire.
"Ryo-sama."
Yukihime’s voice came from the edge of the clearing, calm and precise. "You are being too close to her."
Nathan registered the observation and took a step back, releasing Hanzo’s wrist and giving her space. He looked at Hanzo for a moment longer, the irritation in his face shifting slightly into something less certain.
"If you’re unwell, we should stop for today," he said.
"No—!" The word came out louder than Hanzo intended, sharp and sudden, turning heads in a way that was entirely unlike her. She caught herself and straightened against the tree, clearing her throat. "I am fine. It’s nothing."
From the treeline, a small sound — soft, delicate, and amused echoed. Yukihime raised one pale hand to her lips, her eyes curved with an expression that had far too much intelligence in it to be innocent.
"She seems quite perturbed," Yukihime observed, the smile behind her fingers carrying a meaning aimed entirely at Hanzo and no one else.
Hanzo’s eyes snapped to her.
The smile didn’t waver. Those eyes — calm and knowing and faintly, terribly entertained — held hers for just a moment too long to be coincidental.
Hanzo’s stomach dropped.
She had erased her presence. She had been certain of it — thorough, practiced, the kind of concealment she could maintain without thought. Nathan hadn’t noticed her. She was sure of that too; he had been thoroughly, entirely, completely occupied.
But Yukihime had been on her hands and knees.
Facing the door.
The expression on Yukihime’s face confirmed what Hanzo had just worked out for herself. Not accusatory. Not embarrassed. Just — aware. Privately, precisely, devastatingly aware.
Yukihime’s eyes slid back toward the tree line, her smile fading into something quieter and more private. She had seen Hanzo in that doorway — the stillness of her, the way she hadn’t moved or breathed, caught completely in something she hadn’t been prepared for. And Yukihime had said nothing. Had let the moment pass without acknowledgment, without anger, without so much as a shift in her own breathing.
She wasn’t angry. The thought hadn’t even arrived in that shape.
What she felt, watching Hanzo come apart at the edges of herself this morning, was something closer to satisfaction. A clean, settled thing. Because Hanzo could watch all she wanted — could stand in doorways and carry the memory of it through her mornings and lose her footing during training because of it — and it changed nothing about what was true. Nathan was hers. What Hanzo had witnessed was simply evidence of that, playing on repeat somewhere behind those carefully composed eyes.
If anything, Yukihime found it quietly amusing.
Nathan, oblivious to the entire current running between the two of them, had already moved on. He reached down and closed his hand around Kyomei, lifting the sword from the ground — his signal, wordless as always, that he was stepping back. Giving Hanzo room. Whatever was wrong with her this morning, pushing through it clearly wasn’t working, and he wasn’t interested in running drills against someone who wasn’t present enough to make them worth anything.
He had just straightened when the sound of footsteps broke through the forest — fast, uneven, the gait of someone who had been running hard and hadn’t stopped to care about being quiet.
A Shinobi burst into the clearing, chest heaving, face tight with something urgent.
"Hanzo-sama!" He pulled in a breath. "Something’s happened in Minato!!"
Nathan’s head turned toward him. The shift in his expression was immediate and total — whatever remained of his irritation from the morning wiped clean, replaced by a cold, focused attention.
"What happened," he asked first.
The Shinobi met his gaze and delivered it plainly.
"Ayame-sama has been kidnapped by Morosuke!!"
