Chapter 733: Ayame Kidnapped
"Ayame-sama has been kidnapped by Morosuke!!"
Silence fell following these words.
Nathan stood with Kyomei in his hand and turned it over quietly. Ayame. Morosuke. The pieces arranged themselves into a shape he didn’t like and liked even less for being predictable. He should have seen it. He had seen it, in some form — had stood over that man after taking him apart and made a calculation. Killing Morosuke would leave Minato leaderless, and a town like Minato without a leader was just a war waiting to find its shape. Unnecessary deaths. Chaos that would take months to settle. The pragmatic choice had been to leave him breathing and diminished, humiliated enough to retreat into irrelevance.
He had underestimated the man’s stubbornness. Or his anger. Either way, the mistake was his.
"Are these reports confirmed?" Hanzo’s voice had shed every trace of the morning’s distraction. She was looking at the messenger seriously.
"Yes, Hanzo-sama." The man nodded, still catching his breath. "Morosuke has taken complete control of Minato. He found Ayame-sama and took her — to his domain, we believe. Her current condition is unknown. His men are posted throughout the town. Every entrance, every main road."
Hanzo absorbed this and turned — but Nathan was already walking.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"Isn’t it obvious." His voice was flat and cold, carrying none of the question the phrasing usually implied. "Kill Morosuke. Bring Ayame back."
"You can’t do it alone—"
"I’ll slaughter every last one of them." He didn’t slow down. The patience he’d been running on had simply run out, cleanly and completely, like a lamp that had burned through its oil. He’d extended mercy where he should have been decisive, and now Ayame was in the hands of a man who had already demonstrated exactly what kind of man he was. Nathan was done being reasonable about it.
"Yukihime."
She fell into step behind him without a word, her expression settled and serene in the way it got when violence was becoming a near-term certainty.
"Wait." Hanzo moved to cut him off — not blocking his path, but positioning herself in front of it. "We’re coming with you."
Nathan looked at her.
She met the look without flinching. "Ayame-sama gave us everything. A home, a future, a reason to still be standing here. My uncle wouldn’t leave her to this and neither will I. And—" she added, before he could turn away again, "Yorimasa is dead. Morosuke is the last of them in this area. If we’re going to move on him anyway, we move on the whole town. We take it properly. Leave something stable behind rather than just a body and a power vacuum."
Nathan held her gaze for a moment, then gave a single nod. It was good sense. If the Shinobis could strip away the small fry, he could cut straight to the root.
"Half an hour," he said.
They were ready in less.
Nathan moved first — launching upward and threading through the sky with Yukihime close behind, the ground falling away beneath them, the treetops blurring into a continuous dark mass below. The air at that speed pressed hard against the face and tore at the edges of clothing and didn’t matter at all. Down below, glimpsed between the canopy in brief flashes, Hanzo ran — and ran was barely the right word for it. Each step covered a distance that made the word insufficient, her form flickering across the ground in long, light pulses, the shadow steps stretched to their full expression. She wasn’t catching him. But she wasn’t far behind.
The hour collapsed into itself, and Minato appeared ahead — rooftops first, then the wider shape of the town resolving out of the landscape, and even from this distance it was immediately, visibly wrong.
Nathan dropped lower and slowed, landing at the tree line with Yukihime beside him. A moment later Hanzo arrived, barely winded, her eyes already moving across the town’s perimeter with sharp professional assessment.
Morosuke’s men were everywhere. The gates, the roads leading in, the high points along the outer walls — figures posted everywhere.
"He’s made himself comfortable," Hanzo said quietly.
Nathan was already calculating the fastest route to Morosuke’s estate. Every man standing between him and that route was a problem he wanted solved in the next few minutes.
He moved to step forward.
Hanzo’s hand rose — a small, precise gesture. Wait.
"If we go in hard from the front, he’ll know we’re coming before we’re halfway through. A man like that has Ayame-sama as his only leverage. The moment he feels threatened—" She left the implication where it was.
"What then," Nathan said, the impatience in his voice barely leashed.
"We go in clean," she said. She turned and made a small signal — barely a movement at all, just a specific angle of the wrist — directed at the darkness behind them.
Nathan watched.
For a long moment, nothing happened. The men at the gate stood where they stood. Torches burned. The night held its shape.
And then, one by one, they fell.
No sound. No struggle. No alarm raised or sword drawn. Morosuke’s men simply ceased to stand, dropping like candles being pinched out, each one taken before he had any reason to know he should be afraid. The Shinobis didn’t appear — there was nothing to see, no shadow crossing the torchlight, no rustle in the bushes. They were simply the reason men stopped standing, and nothing more visible than that.
Nathan watched it happen and said nothing.
He had understood, intellectually, what Shinobis were trained for. Watching it done was a different education entirely.
"Now," Hanzo said.
Nathan nodded and followed by Yukihime and Hanzo entered Minato.
°°°°
Morosuke’s castle wore its damage like a bad scar — walls patched with fresh timber where stone had crumbled, scaffolding propped against the sections that hadn’t been rebuilt yet, the ghost of the fight still readable in the bones of the place even as workers labored to erase it. You could see where the force of certain impacts had traveled through the structure, cracks running from the point of contact outward like frozen lightning. They were filling them in. But the shape of what had happened here wasn’t something fresh plaster was going to fully hide.
Around the castle and through its corridors, Morosuke’s men moved in numbers that suggested he had pulled in every body he could find. Over a hundred of them — stationed at every entrance, patrolling every hallway, weapons already drawn in the way of men who had been told something dangerous was coming and weren’t sure from which direction. The atmosphere was taut. Prepared, or trying to be.
At the top floor, in the private rooms that overlooked the town, Morosuke sat on the edge of his bed and waited.
His right hand ended in a wrapped mass of white bandaging where Nathan’s blade had finished the argument between them, the linen already showing faint traces of what lay beneath. The rest of him carried the session’s other souvenirs — bruising, a stiffness in the way he held himself. But his eyes were sharp and focused and pointed at the middle distance with an expression of private satisfaction.
Around his neck, resting against his chest like an afterthought, hung a necklace of pale beads — the kind a monk might carry, smooth and worn, utterly unremarkable to look at.
Morosuke turned it over in his remaining fingers and smiled.
"You really think this is going to work." The voice came from the corner. "How remarkably stupid."
Ayame sat against the wall with her wrists bound in front of her, back straight, expression composed. She looked at Morosuke almost with contempt.
Morosuke rose from the bed, unhurried.
"That Ronin arrived and dismantled everything I built. Killed Yorimasa. Cleared the whole thing up rather neatly." He tilted his head, watching her face for something she wasn’t giving him. "The timing is rather convenient for you. I think he’ll come for you."
Ayame said nothing. She held his gaze without expression.
He hadn’t confirmed anything — but he’d guessed enough. She could see the shape of his thinking and it wasn’t entirely wrong. It was just wrong about the outcome.
"So what?" she said, after a moment. "All of this for a petty revenge? You’ve gone through considerable effort to humiliate yourself a second time."
"Oh, I wouldn’t call it petty." He smiled. "Quite spectacular, actually, when it’s done."
"You signed your own death warrant the moment you touched me," Ayame said. Her voice didn’t change register. It wasn’t a threat delivered with heat.
"Shut—"
Her hair was wrenched back before the sentence finished. Nobusuke had crossed the room without her noticing, his fist closing in her hair and pulling her head back at an angle that was designed to hurt and communicate very clearly who was in control of the room.
Ayame looked up at him. Her expression didn’t shift. Not fear, not pain — just that same unimpressed, steady regard, as though she was observing something mildly distasteful from a comfortable distance.
Nobusuke’s mouth curled. He leaned down close enough that she could smell the sake on his breath. "When we’re done killing that trash Ronin," he said softly, smirking, "I’m going to take my time with you. I’ll make sure your screams carry all the way across Minato."
His tongue moved across his lower lip.
"Nobusuke." Morosuke’s voice came flat and firm from across the room.
Nobusuke released her hair and straightened.
Morosuke looked at Ayame amused.
"When the Ronin is dead, he can do whatever he wants with you." He spread his remaining hand in a small, magnanimous gesture. "It’s not every day an opportunity like that presents itself. A Princess." He tasted the word like it amused him. "Extraordinary thing to have on hand."
Ayame didn’t reply.
There was nothing worth saying to men who were already dead and simply hadn’t been informed yet.
The moment they tried using her as bait to draw Nathan, it was already over.
She settled her back against the wall and waited.
