Chapter 759: Sakura’s Pain
Shigeru looked at Sakura and felt something pull at him that he didn’t entirely welcome. She was already distraught, her composure barely holding, and what he had to say wasn’t going to make it any easier. But softening the truth would only do her more harm. She was in this now, whether she had chosen it or not, and she needed to understand that clearly.
"Listen, Sakura," he began, keeping his voice low and even. "War is coming. I don’t know exactly what Norihiro has planned, but this isn’t simply a move against the North. He will have the three great samurai clans standing against him, and more than that, he will be standing against Kaguya-sama herself."
The color left Sakura’s face so quickly it was almost painful to watch.
Kaguya. Their goddess, daughter of Amaterasu herself, the divine presence said to watch over all of Kastorian with both grace and terrible authority. Going against her wasn’t strategy. It wasn’t ambition.
It was madness dressed up as war.
"If he loses," Shigeru continued, "you won’t be spared from the crimes committed in his name. That is the reality."
"I don’t want that war," Sakura said quietly. Her voice was barely above a whisper.
"It doesn’t matter what you want. Norihiro has already decided."
It was only ever a question of when, and they both understood that. But understanding something and being ready to face it were entirely different things, and Sakura was clearly lost in the space between them. What could she do, after all? Her father loved her, genuinely and deeply, but love hadn’t stopped him from keeping her at arm’s length from everything that mattered. He made decisions for the world around her and kept her sheltered from every consequence until the consequences were too large to shelter her from anymore.
"I’m not telling you this to frighten you," Shigeru said, softer now. "I’m telling you because I am worried about you. You need to get away from him, Sakura, while you still can. I will help you do that."
Sakura looked down. Her eyes were wet, and she didn’t try to hide it.
Shigeru exhaled slowly through his nose.
"I’ll be here until the festival ends," he said. "Come to me when you’ve made your decision, or if you need anything before then."
She nodded, just once, small and tired.
"Thank you, onii-sama."
He gave a short nod toward Akiko, then turned and walked back toward the noise of the crowd, leaving the two of them alone in the quiet of the alley.
"Hime, are you okay?"
Akiko’s voice was gentle, but her eyes didn’t leave Sakura’s face for a moment. She already knew the answer. Anyone could see it.
Sakura stood very still, the way people do when the ground has shifted beneath them and they haven’t yet decided whether to move. The noise of the festival carried faintly from beyond the alley, laughter and drumbeats and the smell of smoke, all of it feeling impossibly distant now. She had known, somewhere in the back of her mind, that her father was not a simple man. She had never been naive enough to paint him as purely good. But there was a version of him she had held onto, the version who ruled with at least some thought for his people, who wanted prosperity for the South, who carried the weight of his position with something resembling purpose.
War dismantled that version completely.
She couldn’t quite believe it, even now, even with Shigeru’s words still sitting heavy in her chest. Her father was going to drag the South into open conflict, was going to pull countless lives into the fire of his ambitions, and there would be no walking it back once it began. The hatred between the North and South was already old and deep, stretching back centuries to the Shogun incident, festering quietly beneath every political agreement and forced courtesy. But hatred that old could still be lived alongside. It could be carried, however bitterly. War was something else. War would break something that no amount of time could put back together.
Kastoria might truly come apart.
And that thought hurt her in a way she hadn’t expected, because unification had always been the quiet dream she carried closest to herself. Not power. Not the prestige that came with being the daughter of a great Daimyo, with the blood of the last Shogun running through her. She had never wanted any of that. She wanted the North and South to stop looking at each other like wounds that hadn’t healed. She wanted something whole.
Her father was going to make sure that never happened.
"It explains the marriage," she murmured, almost to herself. "I thought it was political. I always knew it was political, that was never a surprise. But he had other plans for me entirely, didn’t he."
Akiko said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.
Being a daughter of her standing meant accepting that she would be used as a piece on someone else’s board. She had made her peace with that truth long ago, or thought she had. But there was a difference between being a political arrangement and being traded like currency for weapons, handed off to fund a war that would leave people dead in fields she had never walked through. That wasn’t something she could fold into herself and accept quietly.
"Norihiro-sama is not acting purely out of ambition, Hime-sama," Akiko said carefully, her voice measured in the way it got when she was trying to be fair to someone she wasn’t sure deserved it. "He carries real outrage over what happened to your ancestor. That anger has always been there. This is where it has led."
It wasn’t a defense so much as an explanation, and even Akiko seemed to feel how hollow it landed. She said it anyway, because Sakura deserved to understand the whole shape of what her father was, not just the worst of it.
Sakura didn’t respond right away.
"Hime-sama." Akiko hesitated, then pressed forward. "Perhaps you should seriously consider what Shigeru-sama offered. Leaving. While you still can."
She didn’t say the rest of it aloud, but it lived clearly in the space between them. Norihiro had sent his daughter to Prince Yasumasa knowing full well what kind of man he was, and when the truth of what Yasumasa had attempted was brought to him, he hadn’t flinched. The engagement still stood. Whatever love he held for Sakura, it had its limits, and those limits had become visible in a way that couldn’t be unseen. Akiko had been afraid for her before. Now that fear had taken on a sharper edge.
Sakura’s mouth curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile.
"I can’t abandon him, Akiko." Her voice was quiet and certain and unbearably sad all at once. "Whatever he is, whatever he’s done. He is the only family I have left."
"Hime..."
Akiko stopped herself. What she wanted to say was sitting right there, just beneath the surface. That Norihiro had already abandoned her in every way that mattered. That a father who bargained with his daughter’s safety had made his choice long before she was asked to make hers.
But she swallowed it down and stood beside her in silence instead.
Sakura looked at Akiko and smiled, small and genuine, the kind of smile that didn’t need words behind it.
"Thank you. Truly."
She meant it more than she could properly say. Akiko wasn’t simply a servant to her, hadn’t been for a long time, and moments like this one made that feel more true than ever.
"Hime." Akiko’s tone shifted back into its practical register, the one she used when sentiment had to wait. She reached up and adjusted Sakura’s hood, pulling it forward to shadow her face. "We need to go back before Takefusa-sama or your father notices anything."
"Yes," Sakura agreed. "You’re right."
She turned toward the mouth of the alley, and for just a moment she let herself look out at the festival. The crowd moved in that loose, unhurried way people only moved when they had nowhere pressing to be. Children ran between their parents’ legs. Couples drifted from stall to stall. Somewhere nearby someone was playing a shamisen badly and laughing about it. The whole scene was warm and ordinary and completely unreachable.
She had never been allowed out. Not properly. Her father’s rules were absolute on that, and her status only made the walls tighter. The only reason she stood here now was a hidden path she and Akiko had discovered and quietly kept between themselves, a small secret that had never been used for anything reckless until today. She would be back within the hour. Not long enough to raise suspicion, she hoped, but long enough for this meeting to have mattered.
She turned away from the noise and warmth of it and walked.
She was already thinking of her father. Of how she would approach him, what words she could possibly use, how many times she had already tried and failed to make him hear her. She knew, realistically, that it would likely amount to nothing. He had never welcomed her voice on matters of politics or war, had always kept those things sealed away from her as though she were made of something too fragile to know the truth. But she had to try again. She had to stand in front of him and make him understand what he was building toward, what he was going to break and burn and bury if he didn’t stop.
She had to at least try.
Then something moved behind her.
A rustling, quick and close, followed by a sound that cut off almost before it began. A small, muffled cry. Akiko’s voice.
Sakura turned.
"Akiko?"
The word died in her throat.
Akiko was limp, completely unconscious, cradled in the arm of a man whose face Sakura hadn’t yet had the chance to see. Her mind reached for a scream, reached for anything, but before she could lift her gaze fully she felt a presence behind her, calm and unhurried, and then a precise pressure against the side of her neck.
The world tilted side ways her vision swimming.
Her eyes went heavy, then rolled back entirely, and the alley dissolved into nothing before she could fall.
She never reached the ground. A second arm caught her before her legs gave way, steady and deliberate, as though this had all been mapped out well in advance.
Nathan stood in the alley with both of them, one in each arm, utterly unhurried. He looked at nothing in particular for a moment, then stepped forward once and disappeared, taking them both with him into the dark.
