Chapter 652: Through the Capital of Kastoria with Ayaka and Akane

The Kastorian soldier led Nathan through the castle’s elegant corridors with visible nervousness, clearly uncomfortable escorting someone whose reputation alone made seasoned warriors pale. He walked slightly too quickly, stole glances over his shoulder too frequently, and visibly exhaled with relief when he finally pushed open the door to the designated guest chambers and bowed Nathan inside.

A place within the royal castle’s inner quarters was genuinely a considerable privilege—even high-ranking nobles and visiting dignitaries were typically housed in the outer wings. But Nathan was hardly an ordinary guest, and Kaguya had been quietly emphatic in her instructions to the castle staff about the quality of his accommodations.

The room itself was spacious and tastefully furnished, carrying Kastoria’s characteristic aesthetic blend of Eastern elegance and divine minimalism. Wide windows overlooked the castle gardens, evening light casting long amber shadows across polished wooden floors.

Once the nervous soldier excused himself and the door clicked shut, Nathan stood alone in the quiet room, allowing himself to actually think without the pressure of so many eyes watching his every expression.

Something was being hidden from him. Kaguya had been deliberately vague about the circumstances necessitating the sudden rush to crown a baby infant as heir—and that particular kind of evasion from a woman who chose her words with surgical precision wasn’t accidental.

Amaterasu was likely involved in whatever was being concealed. The Sun Goddess had always operated through layers of carefully managed information, revealing only what she deemed necessary for each party to know.

But this didn’t feel adversarial toward him personally. Nathan turned the situation over carefully in his mind, analyzing the angles. It felt more like they were simply trying not to involve him in problems that were specifically theirs—protecting him from entanglements that might complicate his own precarious position, or perhaps protecting themselves from obligations that would arise if he knew too much.

He could respect that reasoning, even if the deliberate opacity was mildly irritating.

He was still turning it over in his mind when the door of his room swung open abruptly, without knocking.

Nathan turned around with immediate instinctive alertness, his body already shifting into a defensive posture—

And then he saw them.

Both of them. Standing in the doorway, slightly breathless as though they’d half-run through the castle corridors to find him.

Ayaka moved first with characteristic decisiveness, crossing the room in several quick strides and launching herself into Nathan’s chest with a force that would have staggered an ordinary person. Nathan caught her smoothly, his hands gripping her shoulders first before folding his arms around her properly in a genuine embrace.

"You stupid onii-chan!" she declared into his chest, her voice muffled against his tunic but carrying every ounce of her characteristic fire despite it.

"How are you, Ayaka?" Nathan asked with a smile, the warmth in his voice something none of the Heroes in the throne room would have recognized as belonging to the same person.

She tilted her head back to glare up at him with amber eyes blazing—though the redness already gathering at the corners betrayed how much this reunion meant to her.

"Four months!" she accused. "Four entire months and you couldn’t find a single day to come here and see us?" Her glare sharpened. "Or don’t you actually care about us anymore?"

"I was quite busy," Nathan said evenly. "And both Tenebria and I are under considerable political scrutiny right now. Any visit carries risks—we have to be careful about how my movements appear to outside observers."

"Who cares about that!" Ayaka said emphatically, tightening her arms around his waist with renewed determination. Her anger was already dissolving, as it always did when faced with actually having him present. She pulled back slightly, tilting her head with an appraising look. "Did you grow even taller? That shouldn’t even be possible."

"And you grew even more beautiful," Nathan replied simply, looking down at her with quiet sincerity.

Ayaka’s expression shifted in an instant—the fire extinguished, replaced by sudden warmth that rose visibly to her cheeks. She held his gaze for exactly two seconds before stepping back with a dignified huff, smoothing her clothes with the air of someone pretending they hadn’t just blushed.

Akane then stepped forward from where she’d been waiting with characteristic patience, her dark eyes soft and luminous with emotion she normally kept carefully hidden from the world. She crossed the remaining distance and wrapped her arms gently but firmly around Nathan’s waist, pressing her cheek against his chest with a quiet sigh.

It was gentler than Ayaka’s fierce rush—but not one fraction less meaningful.

"Welcome back, Onii-sama," she said in barely above a whisper, with a smile so genuine and unguarded that it would have been unrecognizable to any of her classmates who knew only her serene, composed exterior. It was the smile she kept exclusively for Nathan—the one that showed exactly how much she loved her stepbrother without any reservation or performance.

Some of her male classmates who had spent months trying unsuccessfully to coax even a genuine glance from Akane would have wept furious tears if they could have witnessed this moment.

"You’ve grown a bit as well, Akane," Nathan said, returning her embrace with one arm and bringing his other hand to rest gently on her black hair, smoothing it with unhurried affection the way he had since she was small. "Both of you have."

There was something quietly proud in his voice beneath the statement—pride in who they were becoming, in the resilience they’d shown surviving in a world so foreign and dangerous.

"We’ve missed you," Akane said softly, pulling back just enough to look up at him. Her expression was utterly undefended. "Very much."

"Then we should catch up properly," Nathan said, a rare warmth in his eyes that the throne room version of him had kept carefully locked away. "You’ve both been assigned to show me around the capital after all—I believe we have the entire afternoon."

Ayaka burst into a short, bright laugh—genuine and unrestrained, also something she reserved almost exclusively for him.

"That’s right," she said, already moving to take hold of his arm with possessive cheerfulness. "So you absolutely cannot leave and must stay right beside us. You’re completely trapped."

"I’ll endure somehow," Nathan said drily.

Thus Nathan found himself taken out through the castle gates toward the capital streets, Ayaka pulling his left arm and Akane walking serenely on his right—sandwiched between his two stepsisters as they led him into the living heart of Kastoria.

"What exactly is that look for?" Ayaka asked with amused curiosity when she noticed Nathan’s altered appearance.

He had changed his features entirely as a precaution—black hair replacing the distinctive white, black eyes instead of glowing gold, his more overtly inhuman qualities smoothed away into something far more ordinary. Still handsome with his new disguise, but now merely the kind of handsome that turned heads rather than stopping hearts.

"I think the two of you are already attracting quite sufficient attention on your own," Nathan replied with characteristic dry pragmatism. "No need to add myself to the equation."

This was an honest assessment of observable reality.

Ayaka and Akane drew stares from every direction as they moved through the busy capital streets, the twins drawing eyes with the effortless magnetism of the extraordinarily beautiful. Kastorian residents who saw them immediately assumed they must be nobility—their bearing, their features, their unconscious elegance all suggesting aristocratic origins.

Several even mistook them for foreign princesses of particularly blessed bloodlines, which prompted whispered conversations in their wake. The striking reality was that the Arima twins were, by nearly every observable measure, even more beautiful than Kastoria’s actual Princess—though no one would say it aloud.

Men around them praised and stumbled over words, finding excuses to be helpful, to offer directions, to engage them in conversation—all transparently hoping to earn even a moment of genuine attention from either of them.

If Nathan had walked alongside them in his true appearance—the snow-white hair, the luminous pale skin, the otherworldly golden demonic eyes that marked him as something divine and terrifying—they would never have had a single peaceful moment of the afternoon together. The combination would have created chaos, drawing every eye in the capital and making genuine conversation impossible.

Far better to be three attractive young people enjoying the city unremarkably than to become an impromptu spectacle.

"Pretty smart," Ayaka grinned with approval, looking at Nathan’s disguised features with the satisfaction of someone who appreciated practical thinking.

Black hair and black eyes were by far the most common features among Kastoria’s population, making Nathan’s chosen disguise blend seamlessly into the crowd at a glance. A sensible choice.

The small problem was that there were certain things even the most careful disguise couldn’t conceal. Nathan’s natural presence—the unconscious authority that radiated from him, the effortless way he moved through a crowd as though it existed to accommodate him rather than the other way around—had hard limits on how thoroughly it could be masked.

The female population of Kastoria’s streets was making that abundantly clear. Women glanced at him as they passed and then looked again. Merchants’ daughters found sudden reasons to step outside their family stalls. A group of young noblewomen crossing an intersection ahead noticeably slowed their pace.

The disguise handled the otherworldly strangeness of his true appearance well enough. It did absolutely nothing about the rest of him.

"So I’m not allowed to call you Onii-sama out here?" Akane asked quietly, a note of genuine disappointment and mild displeasure coloring her normally serene voice.

"I don’t mind particularly either way," Nathan replied with characteristic directness. "But before we decide that—have you told any of your classmates about our relationship yet?"

"Not yet..." Ayaka answered, reaching up to scratch the back of her head with a somewhat guilty expression. "It’s complicated. The situation in Kastoria is already so tense and politically loaded right now. We didn’t want to add another major revelation on top of everything else and create more chaos. We plan to tell them eventually, just... later."

Nathan absorbed this with a small nod, neither pushing nor dismissing their reasoning.

"What about that girl—Rena?" Nathan asked then, his tone carrying casual curiosity.

Ayaka’s expression soured immediately, a visible cloud passing over her features with impressive speed.

"What about her specifically?" she asked, her eyes narrowing as she looked sideways at Nathan. "You’re remembering her name pretty quickly and precisely, aren’t you?" The suspicion in her voice was unmistakable.

Akane, walking on Nathan’s other side, also turned to give him a pointed, measuring stare that was quiet but considerably more penetrating than Ayaka’s more vocal reaction.

"She’s difficult to forget," Nathan said evenly. "She’s a rather striking individual. And I did kidnap her as a hostage during the campaign—that tends to make someone memorable."

"Yeah..." Ayaka acknowledged with a reluctant pout.

Then her eyes went wide as a very specific memory surfaced with sudden clarity.

She and Akane had walked back into that tent unannounced. Rena had been half-dressed, her face flushed and her composure thoroughly shattered—normally immaculate Rena, the ice-cold ojou-sama who treated everyone around her with magnificent indifference, looking thoroughly undone.

"W...wait a minute," Ayaka said, grasping Nathan’s arm with both hands and turning to face him directly as they walked. "Did something actually happen back then? Between you and Rena?"

Nathan blinked once, and then the memory returned to him with unhurried clarity.

He had kissed her. Thoroughly, deliberately, with every intention of it going considerably further if circumstances had permitted. And it might well have progressed to something significantly more had Ayaka and Akane not arrived back at precisely the wrong—or right—moment.

A slight smile crossed Nathan’s lips without his conscious permission.

Right. That fierce, imperious, breathtakingly beautiful blonde Japanese ojou-sama who had met his gaze with defiance even while clearly overwhelmed, who had insulted him with considerable creativity while being his hostage, who had somehow managed to be interesting in a way very few people ever were.

He had genuinely liked that girl. Still did, if he was being honest with himself about it.

"Why are you smiling right now?" Ayaka demanded, her grip on his arm tightening. "That particular smile is very suspicious and I don’t appreciate it at all."

"Do you actually dislike her?" Nathan asked, redirecting with calm curiosity. "Rena specifically?"

"I— No, I mean—" Ayaka faltered, her expression cycling through several emotions before settling into a sulk. "It’s not that I hate her exactly."

It was considerably more complicated than simple dislike. Rena was, objectively, formidable—beautiful, sharp, utterly indifferent to social pressures that governed everyone else’s behavior. Under different circumstances they might have understood each other perfectly.

But the real source of Ayaka’s discomfort was simpler and more vulnerable than she wanted to articulate: she was afraid of Rena having more genuine impact on Nathan than she and Akane did. That fear was harder to manage than straightforward rivalry.

"Is she one of your women, Onii-sama?" Akane asked instead, bypassing emotional circumlocution entirely and going directly to the point with characteristic precision.

Nathan glanced at Akane with genuine surprise, not having expected the question stated so plainly.

Both of his stepsisters were already fully aware of his situation regarding other women—they knew about Helen, about the children, about the complicated reality of who Nathan had become in this world and the relationships that had developed alongside that transformation. They had processed that knowledge with varying degrees of quiet acceptance.

But Nathan potentially having a woman from among their own classmates—someone they saw every day, trained alongside, shared meals with—that would sting differently. More personally. It would carry the uncomfortable implication that he had looked at the people immediately surrounding his stepsisters and made a selection that somehow didn’t include any consideration of how that might feel for Ayaka and Akane themselves.

Like they didn’t factor into his thinking at all when it came to certain matters.

Both of them clearly held their breath slightly, waiting for his answer.

"No," Nathan replied simply. "She isn’t. I haven’t seen her since that time."

The relief that crossed both their faces was immediate and visible—Ayaka’s tension leaving her shoulders in a single exhale, Akane’s eyes softening from their pointed watchfulness back to their normal serene warmth.

Neither of them commented on their own reaction. Neither needed to.

"What are you staring at, you absolute idiot?!"

The sharp, cutting voice rang out suddenly from somewhere ahead of them, cutting cleanly through the ambient noise of the market street.

Nathan’s eyes shifted forward with immediate calm alertness.

A commotion had broken out perhaps thirty paces ahead—a small crowd already beginning to gather at the edges of whatever was unfolding, the way crowds always did when conflict promised entertainment.