Chapter 740: Freed Minato (2)
No one who had been present in Minato that day would ever forget it.
The story spread through the town the way only the most extraordinary stories do, passed from mouth to mouth with the breathless energy of people who cannot quite believe what their own eyes showed them. A creature torn from the darkest corners of Kastorian folklore, an Oni of genuine and terrible power, had descended on the town and a lone Ronin had stood in front of it and taken it apart. The crater was still there as evidence. The ruins of several blocks were still there as evidence. The enormous split body of something that looked nothing like any human being was still there as evidence, until the townspeople quietly and somewhat nervously arranged for it to be dealt with.
Several parts of Minato were in a sorry state. But the morning after saw something that the town had perhaps not experienced in a very long time.
People were smiling.
Reconstruction began the very next day with a speed and enthusiasm that had everything to do with the second piece of extraordinary news working its way through every street and teahouse and rebuilt market stall. Morosuke’s men were gone. All of them, the longtime loyalists and the hired mercenaries and every sword that coin had purchased in the days before the battle, vanished from Minato as completely as if the town had exhaled and blown them away. The checkpoints were empty. The corners where armed men had stood collecting money from anyone who passed were simply corners again. The women who had been hunted could walk without looking behind them.
It felt, to the people of Minato, like a hand that had been pressing down on their chests for weeks had simply lifted.
The festivities that followed were genuine and unorganized and all the more joyful for it. Laughter came back to the streets. The teahouses filled. Children ran through the reconstruction sites getting in the way and being tolerated because nobody had the heart to send them elsewhere on a day like this.
The finer points of what had actually happened remained somewhat confused in the public understanding. That the Oni and Morosuke shared some manner of connection was the prevailing theory, the precise nature of which nobody could agree on. But the confusion did not diminish the conclusion. They had seen what they had seen. Ryo had come, and the Oni was dead, and Morosuke’s grip on their town had dissolved overnight. The credit landed where the townspeople felt it belonged, and they felt it belonged entirely to the black haired Ronin who had fought in their street until half of it was rubble.
They named him protector. Guardian. They did it collectively and without asking him and with the absolute conviction of people who have made a communal decision and do not anticipate it being challenged.
Nathan did not argue. It was just a name, just a story people were telling, and if the story was enough to keep the remaining brigands and petty outlaws of Minato behaving themselves then it was doing useful work without costing him anything. The other outlaws still present in town had indeed made themselves remarkably inconspicuous. In the outlaw town of Minato, the outlaws were afraid to act like outlaws, because everyone understood that there was something considerably more dangerous than them currently in residence.
A young man, half Kastorian and half something from further shores, black hair and black eyes and a black kimono and a black katana, with a face that did not look like anything ordinary and a manner that confirmed it. He was too strange to begin with, and now he had killed an Oni alone with a cursed sword, and his fame grew by the day, accumulating the way water accumulates in low ground, drawn there by simple gravity.
He stayed because Ayame asked him to.
She had not asked with manipulation or pressure, only with the straightforward reasoning of someone who understood that leaving a town half destroyed and walking away from it without looking back was not something she was willing to do. She wanted to be part of putting it back together, not with her own hands necessarily but with her presence and her intent and the direction she could offer toward making Minato something more than it had been before. A real town rather than a lawless holding pen. A place where her women could exist without the constant low threat of violence hanging over every ordinary moment.
Nathan had listened and found that he could not argue against it. He had contributed meaningfully to the destruction of several blocks of the place, and the thought that someone innocent might have been caught in the worst of it made him quite uncomfortable. Staying a few days was reasonable. He accepted.
So Ayame took charge of the rebuilding with the natural authority of someone who has never needed a formal title to be listened to, and Nathan took up residence in her house, a proper house with walls and a roof and considerably more comfort than most of the places he had slept in recent months. Yukihime settled in beside him without discussion, as she always did, as though the question of where she would be had never been a question at all.
He rested. He let the cuts close and the bruising fade and the poison from Yorimasa’s bite recede, slowly, with Amaterasu’s help and the simple luxury of two consecutive days without anyone trying to kill him.
Outside, Minato rebuilt itself and laughed while doing it, and the name Ryo hung over the town like a quiet and rather effective warning.
On the third day Nathan was still in Ayame’s house, and for once the hours moved without urgency.
He had used the quieter stretches of those days to reach out to Medea, checking in on the state of things at home the way a man checks a wound he cannot see directly, probing for anything that had gone wrong in his absence. The answers that came back were reassuring. Tenebria was holding steady. Haruka, Ryuuki and their young son had arrived in the demon capital without incident, settled and accounted for, the promise Nathan had made to Kaguya holding its shape in the real world the way promises sometimes actually do.
The only shadow in the otherwise clean report was one he had already known about. Light Empire knights were appearing with increasing frequency along Tenebria’s borders, not in force, not yet, but in the deliberate and methodical way of men gathering information rather than seeking a fight. Scouts in polished armor doing the quiet work that precedes the loud work. Aisha’s letters had already told him this was coming, her information as reliable as it had ever been, and she had been specific enough to put a rough shape on the timeline. The Light Empire would not move against Tenebria before the end of the year. That left Nathan something close to half a year, which was not generous but was workable, provided he did not waste it.
He could not afford to be in the south when that moment arrived. Which meant everything he was doing here needed to be finished cleanly and soon.
Kastoria first. One kingdom, unified, without the fractures that invited opportunists to push their hands inside. That was the work in front of him.
He was still turning it over in his mind when footsteps approached across the floor.
Hanzo stopped in front of where he and Yukihime were seated, her posture carrying that characteristic economy of someone who does not use more movement than the situation asks for.
"It is time," she said.
"Ayame has finished?" Nathan asked.
Hanzo nodded once. "I have left ten of ours here to keep Minato stable in the meantime. More will follow as needed. It should hold."
"Good." Nathan held her gaze a moment. "What about Genzo?"
"Still no word directly from him. But Shinobis have been arriving at the village in numbers." Something close to quiet satisfaction moved through Hanzo’s voice, understated enough that someone who did not know her would miss it entirely. "My uncle is gathering them. He is doing what he said he would do, preparing us to stand against Norihiro."
Nathan absorbed that and nodded.
He rose from the couch, Yukihime rising beside him and together they followed Hanzo out through the house and into the pale morning air of Minato.
The carriage was already waiting, horses calm and ready, a dozen Shinobis positioned around it. Ayame was already inside ready.
Nathan stepped up and took his seat. Yukihime followed without a word, settling close, her presence as natural and constant as weather.
Hanzo mounted her horse and the escort arranged itself around the carriage, and then Minato began to fall away behind them, its rebuilt streets and its new laughter and the crater that would probably be there for years growing smaller and quieter as the road south opened up ahead.
Direction back to the Shinobi Village.
