Free Web NovelChapter 739: Freed Minato (1)
The crater the impact created was deep and total, a violent bowl gouged from the earth of Minato’s street, the shockwave radiating outward in a ring that flattened everything still standing within thirty meters and sent dust and debris boiling skyward in a column visible from the far end of the town.
Then silence.
The curses faded slowly, the hollow faces dissolving back into the dark from which they had come, one by one, until there was nothing left of them but the faint impression they left on the air, the way a nightmare leaves its residue on waking. The red glow at Morosuke’s chest flickered once more and went out entirely. The necklace lay still against the ruin of what had been his body.
Nathan was there, Kyomei at his side, his hair hanging loose and dark around his face, blood on his jaw and his arms and his chest. The gold had begun to recede from his eyes, the vertical slits softening back toward the disguised cold black that lived there ordinarily.
The street around him was unrecognizable.
Nathan stood in the crater he had made of Minato’s street, and his face was pale.
Not from the fight. Not from the blood drying on his jaw or the cuts across his arms. He drove Kyomei into the broken ground beside him and kept his hand on the handle, using the resistance of it to stop himself from reaching up to his neck, where Yorimasa’s burning bite had been quietly spreading its poison through him for the entirety of the battle. Amaterasu had done what she could, dulling the worst of it enough that his body could still function, still move, still fight. But moving like that, taking the impacts he had taken, pushing himself to the edge of what the dark magic demanded from him, none of it had helped the poison recede. If anything he could feel it sitting deeper now than when the fight had started.
He had not had much choice.
Morosuke had become something that did not leave room for half measures.
"W... what happened?"
The voice came from somewhere nearby, thin and uncertain, and Nathan looked up.
They were coming out one by one, emerging from doorways and from behind collapsed walls and from the narrow gaps between ruined buildings where they had pressed themselves during the fighting. Families. Merchants. Children with wide eyes peering around their mothers at the devastation the street had become. They looked at the enormous distorted figure lying dead in the crater, the demonic body split cleanly at the waist, the red long gone from its skin, the horn dull and lifeless. Then they looked at the figure standing beside it.
A beat of silence.
Then the street erupted.
"YEAH!!!"
"The Oni is dead!!"
"Ryo killed it!! Ryo killed the monster!!"
"The Ronin saved us!!" ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom
"RYO!! RYO!!"
Nathan stood very still and looked around at all of it with an expression that sat somewhere between discomfort and genuine bewilderment.
He had miscalculated. Not the fight. The aftermath. Two weeks ago he had dragged Nobusuke through the dirt in front of half of Minato and then beaten Morosuke on his own ground, and apparently that had been more than enough to plant his name, his description, his identity as the black haired foreign featured Ronin with the black katana, into every corner of this town. The name Ryo had spread and stuck and now here he was, standing over the corpse of something that looked like it had walked out of an old nightmare, and the people of Minato were filling in the rest of the story themselves. The Oni had brought destruction. Ryo had come and fought it and won. The evidence was lying dead in a crater in front of their eyes.
They did not need much more than that.
He had come south with every intention of moving quietly, taking Ayame and leaving before the town knew he had been there at all. Instead he had leveled several blocks of the place and was now being cheered like a figure from a children’s story.
He pulled Kyomei free from the ground and left before the crowd could close the distance.
He came down inside Morosuke’s compound and stopped.
The ground was white.
Snow covered everything, a clean and total blanket that should not have existed under an open sky in this season, and beneath it, and embedded in it, and jutting from it in various angles that spoke to how quickly the end had come, were the bodies. More than he could quickly count. Morosuke’s men and hired mercenaries alike, frozen where they had stood, their expressions locked into whatever they had been feeling in the last moment before the cold took them completely. Limbs here and there. Horror preserved in ice with a thoroughness that was almost artistic.
Snow continued to fall gently in this place and nowhere else.
It was one of the more unsettling things Nathan had seen, and his threshold for unsettling things was considerably higher than most.
"Nathan-sama."
He turned.
Yukihime walked toward him across the white ground, her steps unhurried, her expression warm and unbothered, not a single hair out of place and not a trace of exertion on her face. The falling snow moved around her as though it was deferring to her rather than simply falling.
"I have killed everyone," she said pleasantly, as though reporting that she had finished some minor errand she had been sent on. The smile she wore was entirely genuine.
She had not worried about him for a single moment. She had finished her work, and then she had waited, because she already knew what the outcome would be. That certainty was not performance. It was simply the way she understood the world, and where Nathan sat inside it.
"Good job," Nathan said.
It was simple and brief, the way his acknowledgments always were, but Yukihime received it like something precious, her smile warming by several degrees as she fell into step behind him.
Nathan crossed the white ground toward the castle and took the upper floor in a single step, one push off the earth carrying him straight to the last level, Yukihime arriving beside him a breath later without any more effort than he had used.
The corridor led him back to Morosuke’s quarters. The room was destroyed, walls gaping where the fight had passed through them, debris scattered across the floor in a way that made the space almost unrecognizable from what it had been when they entered. But the voices inside were steady and unhurried.
"You are finally here."
Hanzo stood near the far wall, composed as ever, not a single thing about her suggesting the last hour had cost her anything. Ayame stood not far from her with her arms folded. When she saw Nathan step through the ruined doorway her face opened into a wide smile and she raised her hand in a small wave, bright and unguarded.
Beside Nathan, Yukihime’s expression cooled by several degrees.
Nathan’s gaze had already moved to the floor.
Nobusuke was on his knees in the center of the room, the knife long gone from his hand, his face the color of old paper. Whatever bravado had dressed him up earlier in the evening had left him entirely. His eyes were wet and his shoulders shook and he looked up at Nathan with the expression of a man who has just finished understanding exactly how badly he has miscalculated his entire life.
Hanzo had handled him without difficulty. Nathan had never expected otherwise. He had not thought of Nobusuke as a threat from the moment he laid eyes on the man, only as an inconvenience wearing a knife, and the evidence of that assessment was kneeling in front of him now.
What did sit in Nathan’s chest, quiet and without ceremony, was regret. Not for what was about to happen. For what had already happened, for the woman named Nana, killed for the crime of existing near the wrong people. He should have finished both brothers then. He had looked at them and decided they were not worth the thought, and that decision had cost a lot of lives and wasted his time. He would not make the same accounting error twice.
He walked forward until he was standing directly in front of Nobusuke and looked down at him.
"P... please!" Nobusuke’s voice broke almost immediately. "Let me go! I will do anything! Anything you want, just let me go, please!" freewebnøvel.coɱ
Nathan reached for Kyomei.
The moment the blade began to clear the scabbard Nobusuke’s eyes went wide and something in him abandoned all remaining dignity entirely.
"PLEASE! TAKE EVERYTHING! MONEY, LAND, EVERYTHING I HAVE, JUST DON’T—"
The sword moved once.
Silence followed, the particular silence that arrives after a sound the room has not fully registered yet. Nobusuke looked down, slowly, as though his neck had forgotten how to refuse the motion. A thin red line had appeared just above his collar. Then his head left his shoulders and struck the floor, and his body followed it forward, and the blood that spread across the old wood did so quietly and without drama.
Nathan crouched and wiped Kyomei clean on the fabric of Nobusuke’s kimono, taking his time about it. Then he straightened, slid the blade home, and turned away from what was behind him as though it had already ceased to exist.
"We are leaving." He let his gaze settle briefly on Ayame. "You will stay in the Shinobi village until you are ready to move on to the capital. That is not a suggestion."
Ayame met his eyes and nodded, smiling. "With pleasure," she said, and meant it entirely.
