Chapter 741: Hanzo’s Questions
Returning to the Shinobi village settled something in Nathan that he had not realized needed settling until the tension of the south began to loosen from his shoulders.
With no word yet from Genzo, no signal to move against Norihiro, the days had a shape to them again. Nathan fell back into the training with Hanzo the way a blade falls back into its scabbard, naturally and without resistance.
He felt the difference more clearly now than he had before Minato. Fighting Morosuke had been the truest measure of what Hanzo’s teaching had done to him, not in any dramatic or obvious way but in the small things, the way his feet found angles without him consciously choosing them, the way he read the weight shift in an opponent’s shoulder before the arm had decided to move, the way he spent his energy rather than simply throwing it. Against a fight of that scale those subtleties had meant the difference between managing the exchange and being overwhelmed by it.
He understood something through that which he had known intellectually but not yet felt in his body. Raw power had a ceiling. Technique did not. A man who could hit harder than anyone alive would still lose to a man who understood exactly where and when and how to place a single strike. Refining himself, sharpening the precision underneath the force he already possessed, that was the work that would actually prepare him for what was coming. The fights ahead would not be forgiving of anything left unpolished.
He trained until the evening light had burned down to a thin orange line along the tops of the trees, and when Hanzo finally signaled a stop Nathan let out a slow breath and rolled his shoulders, feeling the pleasant exhausted weight of a body that had been asked to do difficult things and had done them.
Hanzo looked at him with that level measuring gaze of hers. "You are progressing fast," she said. It was not flattery. She did not deal in flattery.
"You still seem quite far away," Nathan replied.
"Do not expect to close that gap within at least ten years," she said simply.
Nathan looked at her and did not argue the point. He had seen what she was from the first day, the way some people are so completely suited to what they do that the thing and the person seem to have grown into each other over a long time, inseparable and self evident. Hanzo had been born to this. He wanted the foundation, the principles, the technique stripped down to its essentials. He would never stand where she stood and he knew it, and the knowledge did not bother him.
"Thank you," he said. "Regardless."
He said it plainly and without decoration, the way he said things he genuinely meant. It came out more rarely than most people’s gratitude did, which was precisely why it carried weight when it arrived. Hanzo had given him her time and her knowledge without being asked twice, and that deserved to be acknowledged directly.
Hanzo was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke her voice had shifted slightly, something underneath the usual composure allowing itself to be briefly visible.
"I should thank you as well," she said. "Truly. With you beside us, I believe we might actually have a chance against Norihiro. Against all of them."
Nathan watched her. "You were betrayed by the capital and walked away from it. I would have thought after that you would simply leave. Stay somewhere quiet and let Kastoria manage its own collapse."
Hanzo turned her gaze slightly away, toward the treeline, toward nothing in particular. The silence before her answer was not evasive but genuine, the silence of someone locating the honest version of what they want to say.
"I felt that betrayal completely," she said at last. "I will not pretend otherwise. But there are people suffering here because of the Daimyos, ordinary people who had no hand in what was done to me, who are simply caught underneath it." She paused. "And regardless of everything, Kastoria is still our Kingdom. It has always been. We cannot simply stand and watch it be ground down until nothing worth saving remains."
Nathan said nothing to that.
"Don’t you feel something similar?" Hanzo asked him.
"Not really," Nathan said, and there was no hesitation in it.
She studied him for a moment. "You are not from Kastoria. That much I can tell. But surely you feel some sense of belonging to wherever you were born? Some pull toward it?"
"Birth Kingdom," Nathan repeated quietly, more to himself than to her.
America. A world away in every sense that mattered, and no, he had never felt anything particularly warm toward it. Countries were large and abstract and demanded loyalty without always earning it. He had never been good at loving abstractions.
"I find it easier to give those feelings to people," he said. "Protecting an entire Kingdom is complicated and it is a burden I have no interest in carrying for its own sake."
"And yet," Hanzo said, something careful in her tone, "that is precisely what you are doing right now."
Nathan glanced at her. "No. Right now I am protecting the women I love. If eliminating every obstacle between them and their safety requires me to turn this entire country upside down, then that is what I will do." He paused. "The Kingdom is incidental."
Hanzo was quiet for a beat, turning that over. Then something shifted in her expression, a thought arriving and arranging itself into a question she felt compelled to ask.
"The woman you are speaking of," she said carefully. "Do not tell me it is Kaguya-sama."
It was not an unreasonable assumption. Nathan had come south at Kaguya’s direction, had retrieved Ayame at her request, had moved through the whole of this with the focused purpose of someone acting on behalf of someone they answer to. Hanzo had constructed a picture from the available pieces and arrived at a logical conclusion.
Nathan looked at her.
"As I thought," she said, reading something in that look. "Kaguya-sama managed to draw you in after all. I should not be surprised. She has that quality."
Nathan said nothing. He let a small smile settle on his face and leave it at that.
Hanzo was building a tidy and entirely incorrect version of the situation in her head, imagining him as another man caught in Kaguya’s orbit and moving at her direction out of the particular helplessness that beautiful and powerful women sometimes inspire in men. She had no idea that Kaguya was one of several, that the situation was considerably more layered and more mutual than the picture she was painting, and that Amaterasu’s name would likely feature in that picture before long as well. He had absolutely no intention of correcting her.
"The Shinobis," he said, steering the conversation onto more practical ground. "Your loyalty to Kaguya, I hope that holds."
"It does and it will," Hanzo replied without hesitation. "Kaguya-sama is the primary reason our people were not hunted to nothing. We owe her that much and more."
Nathan nodded. He had counted on that being the answer, but it was still good to hear it said plainly. The Shinobis and Ayame’s women together in the capital formed a layer of protection around Kaguya that no conventional guard could replicate. Trustworthy, capable, and loyal to the right person.
They walked in silence for a few steps before Hanzo spoke again.
"Given how committed you are to seeing us safely to the capital, I assume you intend to leave Kastoria once we arrive there?"
"Not yet," Nathan said. "Takehiko is still alive."
Hanzo’s steps slowed almost imperceptibly. She looked at him with the particular expression of someone who has just heard something their mind needs a moment to fully accept.
"You are not telling me," she said slowly, "that you intend to kill the Prince."
"Killing him would not be simple," Nathan said, his tone carrying the practical weight of someone who has already assessed the problem rather than just identified it. "But as long as he is positioned to take the throne by force, the capital remains in danger. That situation does not resolve itself."
Hanzo exhaled quietly. The Daimyos were already an enormous undertaking. The Prince was something else again, surrounded by the three great samurai clans, commanding the kind of institutional loyalty that could not simply be outmaneuvered or outlasted.
"He has the three great samurai clans standing with him," she said. "In terms of numbers alone we are nowhere close."
"We will address that when we reach it," Nathan said. "First the Daimyos."
Hanzo nodded slowly, her expression grim yet resolute.
"You’re right," she said. "The Daimyos are the priority right now. We focus our efforts there and deal with the rest as it comes. The situation with the samurai... we’ll handle it later."
Even as the words left her mouth, a heavy sense of unease coiled in her chest. Hanzo couldn’t shake the bad feeling gnawing at the back of hisjermind. Something about putting the samurai aside felt deeply wrong, like ignoring a spark while standing in a room full of dry kindling.
