Chapter 735: Nathan and Hanzo Invade Morosuke’s Castle!
Nathan stood before Morosuke’s castle.
The same courtyard. The same stones beneath his feet. The last time he had stood here this ground had been painted red, bodies piled in every direction, the air thick with the smell of blood and iron. He had carved through Morosuke’s men without ceremony back then, without hurry, because back then he had taken his time. He had been making a point.
Right now he had no interest in making points.
"Yukihime." His voice was even, almost quiet. "I leave them to you. Kill them all."
She turned to him with that unhurried grace of hers, and smiled. "As you wish, Ryo-sama."
He held her gaze for just a breath, then nodded once at Hanzo. Together they moved, shadow steps carrying them upward and forward in a blink, their bodies dissolving into the air above the courtyard before a single one of Morosuke’s men could register what they were seeing.
The guards stood there in the sudden absence of them, turning in every direction, weapons raised and finding nothing.
"Where did they go?!"
"They just vanished!"
"Find them! Search every corner!"
"They must be hiding, scared off by how many of us there are!"
"Would you please," a voice cut through all of it like a blade through silk, "shut your filthy mouths."
Every head turned.
Yukihime stood exactly where she had been, unhurried, unbothered, the cold air moving gently through her hair as though the world around her was simply weather she had decided to tolerate. The men who had been shouting orders fell silent one by one as their eyes found her, and for a moment the courtyard was very, very quiet.
Then the murmuring began.
"Gods above, look at her..."
"The first one to grab her gets her first, that’s the rule!"
"Don’t be an idiot, we all take a turn!"
"Can’t wait, can’t wait..."
The looks they gave her were exactly what they were, and Yukihime felt each one like something being dragged across her skin. Her expression did not change, but something behind her eyes went cold and absolute.
"Only my dear Nathan-sama," she said softly, almost to herself, "is allowed to look at me that way."
She swept her hand through the air in a single elegant motion.
The blizzard answered her.
Snow and killing cold erupted across the courtyard in an instant, a wall of white that swallowed the men before any of them could draw a proper breath to scream. The temperature dropped so fast it was almost merciful. Almost. When the white settled there was nothing left standing.
Yukihime exhaled slowly, tilting her gaze upward toward the castle tower Nathan had disappeared into.
It had only been seconds. Barely that.
She already missed him.
Inside, Nathan and Hanzo moved through the castle at a pace that left no room for hesitation. Morosuke would be above, in whatever room a man like him retreated to when he wanted to feel powerful. Nathan knew the type.
As they climbed, his mind turned the question over quietly. What exactly did Morosuke want from all this? Revenge was the obvious answer, and obvious answers were usually right. The man had figured out that Nathan and Ayame were connected, and the fall of Yorimasa right on the heels of their confrontation had made that connection impossible to miss. Nathan could not fault the logic.
What he did fault was his own assumption. He had beaten Morosuke thoroughly enough that he expected the man to accept it, to swallow the humiliation and quietly remove himself from Minato rather than risk a second lesson. That had been a mistake in judgment, and Nathan was not in the habit of making the same mistake twice.
But something else nagged at him as he moved through the corridor. A man like Morosuke did not raise an army of this size simply out of wounded pride. Pride might start the fire but it does not sustain it, not to this scale, not with this much coin spent on mercenaries and ronin and whatever else had flooded into Minato over the past few days. There was calculation underneath the anger. There had to be.
Which meant Morosuke was holding something. Some advantage he believed would change the outcome this time, some card he had not played yet and was waiting to place on the table at exactly the right moment.
Nathan did not know what it was.
He kept moving.
Morosuke’s men came at them in waves as they climbed, pouring out of side rooms and down stairwells, the castle’s defenders throwing themselves forward with the desperate energy of men who had been told that numbers were their salvation. They were wrong about that. Nathan had Kyomei in his right hand and he cut through them at a speed that rendered the blade nearly invisible, each stroke clean and total, bodies parting before they could register that the sword had moved at all. Blood traced long arcs across the walls and pooled in the grooves between the floorboards. The cursed blade drank deeply and did not slow.
Beside him Hanzo worked with her short sword in quick decisive strokes, each movement exactly as large as it needed to be and no larger, the efficiency of someone who had spent a lifetime learning that elegance and lethality are not separate things. She left no openings. She wasted nothing.
Together they carved upward through the castle, leaving the corridors behind them draped in ruin, a trail of mutilated bodies marking every step they had taken toward the man waiting somewhere above.
"You already beat him once," Hanzo said as they moved, her voice low and steady beside him. "He must have something prepared if he was willing to face you again."
"Yeah." Nathan did not slow his pace.
That was precisely why he had not simply leapt straight to the upper floor. Charging in blind was how men got the people they cared about killed, and there was one person in this castle whose life outweighed everything else.
"Keep your focus on Ayame," Nathan said. "I will handle the rest."
"That was already my intention," Hanzo replied.
He glanced at her once and said nothing more. They pushed forward.
The men in the corridors had started out loud and confident, bolstered by their numbers, reassured by the walls of the castle around them. That confidence did not survive contact with what Nathan and Hanzo actually were. The further up they climbed the more the mood among Morosuke’s soldiers shifted, that brash certainty curdling into something quieter and far less comfortable. The men at the back of each group watched their companions go down with a swiftness that the eye could barely follow, bodies crumpling before anyone could shout a warning, blood spreading across the floorboards in long dark sheets.
No hesitation. No effort. No sign that either of them found any of it particularly difficult.
Instinct is a more honest thing than loyalty, and instinct told these men, the mercenaries especially, that no amount of coin was worth dying for a cause that was already soaked in blood up to the ceiling. One broke first. Then another. Then a handful at once, turning on their heels and running without a word of explanation to the men beside them. The retreat spread like a crack through ice, and within moments what had been a packed corridor was thinning rapidly, soldiers abandoning their posts and taking their chances with the stairwells behind them rather than the two figures advancing from ahead.
It made the rest considerably easier.
Within minutes Nathan and Hanzo reached the top floor. It was nearly empty, the silence up here carrying a different quality than the chaos below, the kind of stillness that is deliberately arranged rather than simply absent. Their footsteps barely kissed the wooden floor as they moved through the corridor, and when they reached the door at the end Nathan did not knock.
He swung Kyomei once. The door came apart.
"You finally arrived. Ronin."
Morosuke stood in the center of the room as though he had been waiting there for some time, comfortable with the wait, in no particular hurry about any of it. His right arm ended at the wrist, the old wound still ugly at its edge. Around his neck hung a string of pearls, and Nathan’s gaze caught on them immediately without entirely knowing why. Something about them sat wrong. Something in the way the light touched them, or did not touch them.
"You came, you trash Ronin."
The voice came from the side. Nathan moved his head.
Nobusuke stood there wearing a grin that had nothing pleasant in it, the kind of expression that belongs on a man who has spent his whole life waiting to be the one holding something over someone else. He had Ayame pressed against him, one arm across her, a knife at her throat.
Nathan’s eyes went very still.
He should have killed them both the first time. He had left them breathing because they had not seemed worth the thought it would take to finish them, and now here was the price of that carelessness, standing in front of him with a blade against the throat of the one person in this room he could not afford to lose.
"Gehehe," Nobusuke said, lips pulling back. "You do know her, don’t you? So be smart about this. Obey, and maybe your precious princess keeps her pretty neck."
Ayame did not tremble. She did not look at the knife or the arm holding her or the man behind her. She looked at Nathan, and she smiled, quiet and certain, the way a person smiles when they see exactly what they expected to see.
"You came, Ryo. As expected."
Nathan took one step forward.
"Don’t move!!" Nobusuke lurched back and drove the edge of the blade into her throat, not deep, but enough. A thin line of red opened along the skin. Nathan stopped.
He shifted his gaze to Morosuke.
"This is between you and me," he said. The cold in his voice was total, the kind that does not need to be raised to carry weight. "She has nothing to do with what is between us. Release her. I am here."
Morosuke looked at him for a moment, then let out a low chuckle that carried no warmth whatsoever. He reached up and pulled his kimono down from his shoulders, baring a chest and torso that were thick with muscle, the body of a man who had spent decades treating violence as a discipline. Old scars mapped the skin in pale uneven lines.
Then the pearls around his neck began to glow.
It started as a dim flush of red, almost easy to dismiss, almost something the eye might write off as a trick of the light. Then it deepened, and the glow bled outward from the necklace and spread across Morosuke’s entire body in a wash of crimson that pulsed like something alive. The floor shuddered. The air in the room pulled tight as though the walls themselves were bracing.
Morosuke’s eyes went red. The veins along his neck and arms rose against the skin, and his muscles swelled beneath them, the transformation visible and violent and wrong in the particular way that things touched by cursed power always are.
"Now," he said, and his voice had dropped to something that resonated in the chest rather than the ears, "it is time."
