"Here," Nathan said after a moment, reaching into his spatial space and producing a black travel cape. He held it out to her without ceremony. "Put this on."

Yukihime looked at it, then at him.

"You’re drawing too much attention," he said simply.

She took it without argument, swinging it over her shoulders and drawing the hood up over her silver hair. The transformation was immediate — she went from something otherworldly to merely a tall, graceful stranger in dark cloth. Around them, the collective mood of the road seemed to deflate. Several people who had been quietly angling for another look at her face made sounds of poorly disguised disappointment. A merchant nearby exhaled like a man whose prayer had gone unanswered.

Yukihime, hood up and unbothered, fell back into step beside Nathan and took his arm again.

The climb leveled out eventually, the steep mountain path flattening as they crested the slope, and Nathan’s first view of what waited above was the one thing he hadn’t wanted to see — a bottleneck.

The road ahead had slowed to a crawl, travelers and merchants filing into a single compressed line the way water narrows through a tight channel. One by one, people were being stopped, checked, questioned, waved through or held aside. Guards in domain colors stood at a fortified checkpoint, thorough and unhurried in the way that people are thorough when they answer to someone paranoid.

Nathan tilted his head slightly, reading the scene ahead.

"Is this checkpoint always here?" he asked, letting the question fall toward the old man standing beside him in the queue — bent forward under a heavy pack, both hands gripping the straps across his shoulders, breathing through his nose from the climb.

"Always," the man confirmed with the sigh of someone long resigned to it. "Lord Yorimasa keeps his gates tight. Has for years." He adjusted his grip on the pack straps. "You can’t blame him entirely — with Minato sitting at the domain’s doorstep, you’d be paranoid too. That town draws wolves."

Nathan gave a quiet sound of acknowledgment and said nothing more.

The old man wasn’t wrong, exactly — Minato was a town built for people with things to hide. But the picture was more layered than that. Ayame had been clear about Morosuke’s role: less an ally of the Daimyo and more a hand on the leash, a presence that kept certain ugliness contained without ever truly cleaning it up. Morosuke was buffer and informant at once — and Minato remained, underneath all of it, a place where plans against the ruling class could take root quietly and grow undisturbed.

Paranoia, then, was at least one honest response to all of that.

Nathan watched the checkpoint and ran the variables.

He and Yukihime were not the kind of pair that slipped through routine inspections unnoticed. Even cloaked, Yukihime moved like something out of a folktale — the posture, the stillness, the way the air around her felt different. Nathan himself wasn’t exactly forgettable. A guard with half a brain would pull them aside, and questions would follow that he didn’t have clean answers for, not quickly, not without manufacturing a story under scrutiny.

The gap between the checkpoint and the back of the current queue was maybe a dozen meters. The crowd was dense. The mountain face to either side was sheer and well-maintained — no loose scramble routes, no shadow paths cut by foot traffic. Getting around it cleanly wasn’t a physical problem, but being seen getting around it would be worse than simply being stopped.

He could use his Stealth Skill. It had been a while, but the ability hadn’t dulled. The problem was the crowd — a figure vanishing mid-line in a press of travelers would cause exactly the kind of scene he was trying to avoid. Panic spread fast and remembered well. And he couldn’t even use the stealth on Yukihime to begin with! 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

He could clear the checkpoint entirely from the air, but that had the same visibility problem at altitude, in daylight, above an open mountain road.

Nathan pressed his jaw together slightly, the faint creak of patience being tested.

All this thinking. He hated it. Not the strategy itself — that came easily enough — but the constraint behind it, the necessity of holding back when the direct answer was sitting right there and he was deliberately choosing not to use it.

He needed this to be clean.

Yorimasa had to die quietly, without echo, before any courier could carry word south. If the Daimyos caught even a scent of what was happening — a suspicious incident at a mountain checkpoint, a missing lord, rumors of strangers — they would lock the southern roads down hard. The planned assault on the capital would accelerate, pulled forward before they were ready for it.

And Kaguya was already stretched thin with Takehiko’s pressure eating at it from the north. A simultaneous southern push would crack something that hadn’t fully set yet. Worse still — if Norihiro and Takehiko somehow found common cause, decided that mutual enemies made temporary friends, the window Nathan had been working to hold open would slam shut entirely.

He needed a quiet death. A ghost’s entry, a clean exit, no trace.

He exhaled once through his nose, slow and controlled.

"Ryo-sama." Yukihime’s voice was quiet but precise, cutting through his silence the way she always seemed to — not intruding, just arriving at exactly the right moment. "Something is troubling you."

It wasn’t a question.

"We can’t go through that checkpoint," Nathan said, his eyes still fixed on the line of guards ahead. "We need to get past them without being seen."

Yukihime tilted her head slightly, considering. Then — unhurried, almost casual — "A distraction might solve that."

"You have something in mind?"

She smiled. Not the warm, faintly shy smile she wore when their arms were linked, but something older and quieter. She lifted her gaze past him, toward the mountain slope rising steeply on their right, and Nathan followed it.

The snowpack up there was heavy. Weeks of accumulation pressed against the rock face, sitting in that particular way that experienced climbers learn to recognize and give a wide berth.

Yukihime raised one hand — barely, just a slight lift at the wrist, as though gesturing at something politely — and Nathan felt it before he heard or saw anything: a long, focused pressure, cold and dense and immense, shooting from her palm in a single concentrated lance and striking the slope above with surgical precision.

Then silence.

A breath. Two.

Then the mountain answered.

The ground shuddered first — a deep, bone-level tremor that climbed up through the soles of Nathan’s sandals. Then the sound came, a low groan building into a crack and then a roar as the snowpack gave way and the slope broke apart, tons of white and stone peeling loose and beginning their descent.

Every head on the road snapped toward it simultaneously.

"Avalanche—"

"Run!"

"Get off the path — move!"

The crowd shattered instantly, that clean collective panic that needs no leader and no discussion. Merchants abandoned their carts mid-road. Travelers shoved past one another in both directions, those heading up the mountain reversing course and sprinting back down while those coming down scrambled the other way. The guards at the checkpoint broke formation in seconds, their discipline evaporating the moment several hundred pounds of boulder came grinding and bouncing down toward their post.

The aim had been, Nathan noted, quite precise.

The largest boulder — a pale mass of granite the size of a small house — struck the checkpoint directly, obliterating the wooden frame and sending two of the guardsmen diving sideways. A third wasn’t fast enough. It caught him flush, and there was a single sharp cry before his body was launched outward over the mountain’s edge, tumbling silently into the vast open drop below, swallowed by the distance long before he reached the bottom.

Stone fragments and loose debris continued clattering down for another half minute, striking the path in bursts, buckling sections of the road’s edge. Dust rose thick and white and obscuring.

Nathan and Yukihime stood in the middle of it all and did not move.

Around them, the path had completely emptied. The road behind was a chaos of retreating backs and distant shouting. The road ahead was abandoned stone and settling rubble. Dust drifted through the air in slow curtains, and the mountain above them had gone quiet again, spent.

Yukihime raised her free hand with the same casual composure one might use to open a window, and a cold current swept out from her — low, directed, like a slow exhalation — rolling the dust ahead of them in clean waves until the path revealed itself, empty and clear, stretching forward into the Hebi-Yama domain beyond.

She looked up at Nathan.

"Was that a sufficient distraction, Ryo-sama?" The smile was back — warm now, just slightly pleased with herself.

Nathan held her gaze for a moment. There weren’t many people in his experience who could cause an avalanche as a conversational suggestion and then stand in the aftermath looking entirely composed. He found, to mild surprise, that he was smiling.

"More than sufficient," he said.

He bent without warning, one arm sweeping behind her knees and the other catching her shoulders, and lifted her cleanly off the ground.

Yukihime made a small startled sound — just one — before her hands found his chest and she settled against him, the surprise dissolving into something much warmer, her face tipping upward with a glow in her cheeks that had nothing to do with the cold.

Nathan took three steps, planted his foot hard against the remaining path, and launched them both out over the open void — a long, clean arc above the crumbled section of road, the mountain drop yawning silently beneath them — before landing soft and unhurried on the intact path on the other side.

He set her down slowly, steadying her until her feet found the ground.

Yukihime looked, briefly, as though she found the solid earth somewhat less preferable than where she’d just been. But she composed herself, straightened her cape, and raised her chin toward the domain road stretching ahead of them.

"Ready for anything," she said.