I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me-Chapter 663: Kastorian Feast after the Ceremony of Heir (2)

Chapter 663: Kastorian Feast after the Ceremony of Heir (2)

Nathan had genuinely debated skipping it.

The feast was political theater as much as celebration, and he had limited patience for rooms full of people performing their alliances at each other over expensive food. He could have spent the evening in his guest quarters reviewing what he knew about the Light Empire’s current defensive positions and found it more productive.

But something kept pulling at him — a low, persistent discomfort that he couldn’t fully locate or dismiss. The combination of what Ayaka and Akane had told him about the capital’s tensions, what he had observed himself in the streets and during the ceremony, the particular quality of Takehiko’s presence and patience — all of it sat in him like an unresolved chord, too quiet to demand immediate action and too consistent to ignore.

Showing his face wouldn’t hurt. Letting the nobles see him at ease in Kastoria’s hall, present and unhurried, reinforced something useful about the state of the Tenebrian alliance. And it gave him another hour to watch Takehiko move through a room.

So he went.

The effect of his entrance on the hall was as expected strong, as it always was when he abandoned the careful ordinariness of his disguise’s behavioral component and simply walked into a space as himself.

He was in his true appearance.

The snow-white hair caught the lantern light immediately, drawing every eye in the hall’s northern half before he had cleared the threshold. The golden demonic eyes moving across the room with calm assessment produced the particular response they always produced in people encountering them for the first time — a beat of instinctive stillness, the primal part of the human mind registering something it couldn’t quite categorize and defaulting to alert.

His clothing was Tenebrian formal — a fitted suit coat in deep charcoal with dark detailing, cut in the style of Tenebria’s court rather than Kastoria’s ceremonial tradition. On someone else it might have looked foreign and awkward against the hall’s sea of kimonos. On Nathan it simply looked like a statement about where he came from and what he was, which it was.

The nobles’ reactions divided cleanly along predictable lines. Those with political awareness looked at him with the careful wariness of people reassessing a variable they had previously only understood in the abstract. Those without it simply stared.

The women in the hall, with very few exceptions, had an entirely different response.

At his section of the table, Takehiko received the information about Nathan’s identity with a brief, controlled nod — the kind that gave nothing away about what was actually being processed behind the orange eyes.

The noble leaning close to his ear finished his summary: Lord Commander of Tenebria, the one who had crushed Kastoria’s Heroes three years prior, the architect of the forced truce, here now as Kaguya’s formal diplomatic guest.

Takehiko’s gaze moved to Nathan with the unhurried assessment of someone filing a new piece of information into an existing structure. He looked at him for perhaps four seconds — long enough to form an impression, short enough to give nothing away about what that impression was.

Nathan didn’t return the look.

He found Kaguya first among the crowd — surrounded by her cluster of nobles, receiving their attentions with her usual composed grace. Her white eyes located him almost simultaneously and she gave him a brief, clean nod across the hall’s distance.

Nathan returned it with equal economy and walked on.

He registered Ayaka and Akane at their end of the table — still managing the noble cluster with the practiced dual composure of two people who had been doing this for three years and had developed effective systems. He didn’t move toward them. They had the situation handled, and approaching them in this room, in front of everyone, was not something tonight called for.

He was still looking for somewhere to settle when his eyes moved to the far end of the table.

Rena sat in her established perimeter of enforced solitude, eating with the composed unhurry of someone who had decided the feast’s social dimension was not her concern and had ordered her evening accordingly. Her yokais occupied the surrounding space with the territorial effectiveness of a small, extremely dedicated security detail. Several abandoned approach trajectories from nobles earlier in the evening were legible in the way the surrounding seating remained conspicuously empty.

Nathan’s lips curved slightly.

He walked over and took a seat five or six places down from her — close enough to be a choice, distant enough to be deniable — and reached for the nearest wine flask with the ease of someone entirely comfortable wherever he happened to be.

"Rena-sama! He’s coming! He’s coming this way!" Kiiro’s voice achieved a register of panic that was impressive given its size.

"What do we do?! Aka — should we—" Ao started.

"Can you both shut up," Rena said.

She watched Nathan take his seat down the table. He didn’t look at her. He poured wine, examined the nearest dishes with mild interest, and stabbed a piece of grilled fish with his chopstick with the unhurried ease of someone settling in for the evening.

"What do you want," Rena said.

"Nothing," Nathan replied, without looking up from his plate.

"There are other seats available. Many of them. Distributed throughout a very large hall."

"Do you want something from me, Rena-san?" Nathan asked, finally glancing at her with mild inquiry.

The honorific landed.

Rena’s expression shifted into something that communicated she had tasted something unpleasant. "That is gross. Stop it immediately."

"You would prefer I skip straight to your name," Nathan replied. "Which I suppose means we are past formalities entirely."

Her lips pressed together briefly — the micro-expression of someone who had walked into a conversational corner and was deciding whether to acknowledge it or simply exit through the wall.

"Don’t call me anything," she said.

"You initiated this conversation," Nathan reminded her pleasantly.

"Humph." Rena turned her attention away.

Nathan chuckled — quiet, genuine — and ate his rice ball with complete contentment.

The distance between them was five seats and approximately three layers of things neither of them was saying, and both of them were perfectly aware of this, and neither commented on it further.

"Excuse me!"

The voice came from Nathan’s other side — bright, slightly breathless, carrying the particular energy of someone who had been gathering courage for several minutes and had finally spent it all in one movement.

A girl in a pale green kimono stood at the table’s edge, her cheeks thoroughly flushed, with three others clustered behind her in various states of identical coloring. Nathan recognized them vaguely — Heroes of Kastoria, classmates of Ayaka and Akane, part of the larger group he’d had no particular reason to interact with until now.

He thought briefly about his earlier resolution — to be less cold and closed toward the people around Kaguya’s circle. Kastoria needed to see Tenebria’s Lord Commander as something other than a distant, frightening figure. It would make the alliance easier to maintain, make Kaguya’s political position easier to defend, make the army she was providing him something the Heroes could accept rather than resent.

Small social investments now. Reasonable returns later.

"Yes," he said, his tone easy and open. "Did you need something?"

The effect of that casual, non-threatening response on four girls who had been bracing for something considerably more intimidating was immediate. Shoulders dropped, eyes brightened, the held collective breath released.

"Yes! Actually — are you really from Earth?" The one at the front asked, her voice gaining confidence halfway through the sentence.

"I am," Nathan said. "United States."

"Wow—" She blinked, recalibrating. "That’s wow. I’m Akiko, by the way!"

"Nami!" The second one stepped forward.

"Kane!" The third.

"Saeko!" The fourth, nearly simultaneously with Kane, which produced a brief collision of voices and mutual embarrassed laughter between them.

All four were looking at him with the particular combination of starstruck and desperately trying not to be starstruck that produced its own charming awkwardness.

Nathan set down his chopsticks and gave them his full attention with the easy composure of someone who found this genuinely more interesting than eating alone.

"Akiko, Nami, Kane, Saeko," he repeated, each name clear and unhurried, meeting each of their faces as he said it. "Pleased to meet you."

"Pleased to meet you," Nathan said.

He clearly didn’t look particularly pleased — his expression carried the same composed neutrality it applied to most situations — but the four of them didn’t care in the slightest. He was speaking to them, he was looking at them, and the reality of his face at close range was doing considerable damage to their ability to maintain coherent thought.

Akiko, having already spent her courage on the initial approach, found that a second helping had materialized from somewhere.

"Is it — is it true that you have over fifty wives?" she asked, the stutter only appearing on the first word before she pushed through it.

"I suppose it might reach that number before long," Nathan replied, with the mild shrug of someone discussing an administrative matter that had gotten slightly out of hand.

"Then you’re still — you’re accepting new wives?!" Nami surged forward from behind Akiko’s shoulder, the question arriving with the energy of someone who had just identified a relevant business opportunity.

Nathan glanced at the four of them with the slight smile of someone who had understood exactly where this was going approximately thirty seconds before it arrived.

"Well," he said, "that depends."

The smile did the rest.

All four of them made a sound simultaneously that occupied the precise frequency between delight and overwhelm, drawing several nearby noble heads turning to identify the source.

Five seats down, Rena ate her food with focused composure and heard every syllable of this exchange with perfect clarity.

Something was growing in her chest that she was categorically refusing to examine.

"You all wore quite beautiful kimonos this evening," Nathan added, with the same casual ease he used for everything.

"THANK YOU—!"

SNAP.

The sound was clean and final — Rena’s chopsticks, which had been held with increasing pressure over the last forty seconds, parting at the stress point with a crack that was audible in the immediate vicinity.

She set the two pieces down with controlled precision.

"Rena-sama—" Kiiro began, drifting toward her with the tentative energy of a small creature approaching something it suspects might bite.

Aka materialized beside Kiiro with impressive speed, grabbed him firmly, and pulled him backward three full feet without ceremony.

"Do you wish to die?" Aka whispered to him with great intensity.

Kiiro decided he did not wish to die and went limp in Aka’s grip.

Ao looked at the situation, looked at Rena’s expression, and found a sudden profound interest in examining the table’s woodgrain texture up close. Midori simply floated in complete silence with the wisdom of someone who had survived this long by knowing when absolute stillness was the correct strategy.

Rena requested a new pair of chopsticks from a passing servant with complete dignity and resumed eating.

Not far down the table’s length, the noble cluster around Ayaka had thickened again despite Ayaka’s increasingly nominal attention to it.

She was smiling and nodding at appropriate intervals with the automatic social competence of someone who had been managing this particular performance for three years, but her eyes kept angling toward the section of table where Nathan sat — blocked by the intervening cluster of her female classmates, visible only in frustrating fragments between shoulders.

Akane had abandoned the performance entirely.

She was simply looking at Nathan directly, watching the conversation with her classmates unfold from across the table’s distance, her expression carrying that particular quality of controlled attention that contained considerably more underneath than it showed on the surface. The nobles standing around her had been talking for several minutes and had only gradually, uncomfortably, become aware that none of their words were landing anywhere.

"Hey! Can’t you see you’re bothering them?!"

Teiji’s voice came out louder than he’d probably intended, carrying enough volume that the immediate area went briefly quiet. The cluster of nobles turned toward him, registered that he was a Hero, registered his expression, and produced a rapid collective round of apologies before redistributing themselves elsewhere with the efficient retreat of people who had correctly assessed the social weather.

"Sorry about that," Teiji said, turning to Akane with the warm smile he reserved specifically for her and which she consistently failed to notice as specifically for her. "They’re incredibly invasive. Are you alright?"

Akane wasn’t looking at him.

He followed her gaze across the table to where Nathan sat with Akiko, Nami, Kane and Saeko clustering around him with their flushed faces and bright eyes and the very specific body language of four people executing a plan they thought was subtle.

Teiji’s smile stopped working.

He looked at Akane’s expression — the quality of attention she was giving that particular corner of the room — and felt something clench in his chest that he didn’t have a clean name for and didn’t want to examine closely in the middle of a feast.

He clenched his fists once, released them, and said nothing.

Nathan, entirely unaware of the various dramas orienting themselves around him, was conducting what had become a genuinely interesting conversation.

He had started asking questions — about their experience since being summoned, what their lives in Kastoria actually looked like day to day, how Kaguya and the royal household had treated them. The answers had surprised him slightly.

No Divine Knights. No forced conscription into campaigns they hadn’t agreed to. Reasonable accommodations, genuine care from the castle staff, and a fundamental respect for their autonomy that had apparently been Kaguya’s explicit instruction from the beginning.

They had been frightened, disoriented, homesick in waves — all the expected human responses to being ripped from everything familiar. But they hadn’t been used as tools or treated as weapons to be deployed at will.

They had landed in the wrong kingdom, Nathan thought. He and his classmates. If the summoning had distributed them differently, several things might have gone considerably less catastrophically.

"By the way — Samael!" Akiko leaned forward with the energy of someone arriving at the part of the conversation they had been building toward. "Can we call you Samael?"

"Call me whatever you like," Nathan said.

"Then — Samael!" She took a breath. "We were thinking that later tonight, after the feast, a few of us were going to have a small gathering of our own. More relaxed than this. And we wanted to invite you!"

The other three nodded with coordinated enthusiasm.

Nathan looked at them.

He understood the architecture of this invitation with complete clarity — the private gathering, the relaxed atmosphere, the wine that would flow more freely than at a formal feast, the gradual progression toward a situation where a man with reportedly fifty wives might reasonably be persuaded to consider four more candidates who were Heroes of Kastoria, summoned by a goddess, and currently extremely motivated.

It was actually a reasonably constructed plan.

"Well," Nathan said, a slight smile forming, "that sounds—"

"Kyaaaa!"

A rice ball struck Akiko square in the face with the accuracy of something thrown with genuine intent rather than accidental arc.

She froze.

Then Nami received one. Then Kane. Then Saeko, who got wine — a full splash of it across her hair and the front of her kimono — and stood completely still for three seconds processing this development.

The four yokais had mobilized with the coordinated efficiency of a unit that had identified a threat and responded to it.

"You are all far too noisy!"

"You are bothering Rena-sama with your racket!"

"Completely inconsiderate!"

Kiiro threw a second rice ball for emphasis, missed, and hit an entirely uninvolved noble three seats down who looked around in profound confusion.

"W — WHAT—" Saeko found her voice, turning toward the yokais with an expression of outraged disbelief.

Aka raised a third rice ball with calm, clear intent.

Saeko looked at it. Looked at Rena sitting five seats down with an expression that could have been described as several things, none of them welcoming. Looked back at the rice ball.

"Let’s go," she said immediately.

The tactical retreat was swift and complete — all four of them backing away from the table with the speed of people who had correctly assessed that the next escalation would involve something worse than rice, sending apologetic, longing looks toward Nathan as they withdrew into the feast’s general crowd.