Chapter 653: The Tense Kastorian Capital

Nathan turned toward the commotion ahead alongside Ayaka and Akane, his disguised eyes narrowing as he assessed the situation with practiced efficiency.

"Fuck off, you treacherous samurais! Hail Princess Haruka!"

"What did you just say, you insolent punk?!"

A confrontation had broken out between a civilian—a young man, perhaps seventeen, wearing a merchant’s apprentice apron—and a figure clad in armor that immediately caught Nathan’s attention.

It was distinctly different from the Kastorian knights’ equipment Nathan had grown familiar with over his visits. Where Kastoria’s soldiers wore armor that was disciplined, functional, designed for coordinated military formations, this man’s armor was flashier, more individually ornate—thick red lacquered plates layered in overlapping patterns, clearly designed to broadcast status as much as protect the wearer. A katana hung at his hip, and the way he wore it suggested he considered himself firmly above the crowd surrounding him.

"A samurai," Nathan murmured, his tone carrying a note of quiet assessment.

Ayaka nodded beside him, her expression complicated in a way that went beyond simple irritation.

"In the last month especially, more and more of them have started appearing in the capital," she said, keeping her voice low enough for only Nathan and Akane to hear. "Far more than when we were first summoned here three years ago. Back then you’d see them occasionally, formally escorting noble delegations. Now you see them practically on every corner—walking through the streets like they own them, laughing loudly, making pointed remarks about Haruka, the current regime, and sometimes even about Princess Kaguya herself."

"Shouldn’t they face some form of punishment for that?" Nathan asked, his eyes still tracking the confrontation ahead.

"They should," Akane confirmed, her voice carrying its characteristic quiet certainty. "But they’ve grown considerably bolder recently. The consequences that would normally deter that kind of behavior don’t seem to concern them much anymore."

Nathan’s brow furrowed slightly. "Why doesn’t Kaguya simply forbid their presence and expel them from the capital entirely? That seems like an obvious enough solution."

Ayaka and Akane both glanced at him with slightly puzzled expressions. They didn’t yet know the full nature of Nathan and Kaguya’s relationship, just thinking they were political allies.

"She’s trying to avoid any action that might trigger a civil conflict directly within the capital," Ayaka explained after a brief pause. "If Kastorian knights and samurai factions actually came to open blows here in the city streets, the damage—political and physical—would be catastrophic. She’s walking a narrow line trying not to give anyone a justification for open violence."

"That explains caution," Nathan said. "It doesn’t fully explain tolerance."

"It’s because Princess Kaguya is deeply concerned about Prince Takehiko’s rising influence," Akane said simply.

"Takehiko?" Nathan’s eyebrow rose. "The prince who was banished from the capital?"

Kaguya had mentioned the exiled prince briefly during his last visit several months ago—a passing reference to the succession complications and why Haruka’s position required careful management. Nathan had registered it as a background political factor and moved on to more immediately pressing concerns.

He was regretting that now.

Ayaka nodded. "His influence among the samurai clans has been growing steadily ever since his banishment. There are people—powerful people, noble houses, warrior families—who believe Kaguya overstepped in stripping his heir status. That it was politically motivated rather than just. And those people are increasingly willing to let that opinion be known."

"Now I understand the urgency behind crowning that infant," Nathan muttered, his mind rapidly reconfiguring his understanding of Kastoria’s internal landscape. The ceremony wasn’t just symbolic affirmation of Haruka’s claim—it was a preemptive declaration, staking territory in a succession dispute that was already in motion.

But something else was sitting uneasily in his mind, heavier than the political calculus.

Neither Kaguya nor Amaterasu had spoken to him with any real seriousness about this growing tension. During his previous visits, during their private conversations that ranged across dozens of subjects, this particular thread had been kept deliberately thin. Mentioned briefly, moved past quickly.

Yet hearing it from Ayaka and Akane now—people with no reason to manage his perception of the situation—the picture that emerged was considerably more serious than what he’d been given.

He let his gaze drift deliberately across the street around him, reading the crowd with the experienced eye of someone who had commanded armies and understood how populations telegraph their true loyalties.

The samurai in the red armor was the obvious focal point. But Nathan looked past him—at the bystanders. At the way some of them watched the confrontation with open sympathy toward the belligerent armored man rather than the young merchant’s apprentice who’d shouted in Haruka’s defense.

At the small nods exchanged between certain faces. At who stepped slightly forward and who stepped slightly back.

How many people in this city genuinely wanted to see Takehiko on the throne?

Nathan’s eyes narrowed fractionally.

He didn’t know Takehiko personally. Had never met him, had no direct intelligence on his character beyond Kaguya’s carefully measured words. But Nathan had spent enough time navigating power to understand something fundamental: a man who had been banished and stripped of his inheritance, backed by samurai loyal enough to walk openly through the capital on his behalf, with sympathizers visibly embedded in the civilian population—that man was not a distant problem.

And whoever Takehiko turned out to be, Nathan doubted very seriously that he would be as strategically cooperative with Tenebria and with Nathan personally as Haruka had proven to be.

The political implications were still arranging themselves in his mind when the situation ahead escalated sharply.

"Go away!"

The voice was high, clear, and furiously indignant—belonging to a girl who couldn’t have been older than ten years old. She had stepped forward from the watching crowd to plant herself directly in front of the arguing merchant’s apprentice, her small hands balled into fists at her sides, glaring up at the armored samurai with a ferocity wildly disproportionate to her size.

"Nobody wants the likes of you wandering around our beautiful city!" she declared with absolute conviction.

A ripple of mixed reactions ran through the surrounding crowd—some people wincing with fear for her, others looking quietly thrilled that someone had said it plainly.

The samurai’s expression darkened from irritation into something uglier and colder. His pride—inflated by weeks of operating in the capital with apparent impunity—couldn’t absorb the public humiliation of being dressed down by a child.

"I will kill you for this," he said, and the flat calm in his voice made it worse than shouting would have been.

His hand moved to his katana and drew it in a single fluid motion, raising the blade overhead with the practiced ease of someone who had used it on living targets before and felt no particular reluctance about doing so again.

Ayaka sucked in a sharp breath beside Nathan. Akane’s hand was already moving toward her own weapon.

Bit Nathan had already moved.

He appeared in the space between the blade and the girl in a single step that covered thirty paces in an instant—less teleportation than movement so fast it simply skipped the middle portion of the distance entirely.

His hand came up and closed around the descending katana.

Bare-handed. No weapon drawn, no magic visibly deployed. Simply his palm wrapping around the sharpened edge as though catching a falling leaf.

The blade stopped completely. Not deflected, not slowed—stopped, as though it had struck an immovable object.

The samurai’s entire body shuddered with the impact, the reverberating force traveling back up through his arms and rattling his teeth.

"W...what?!"

He stared at Nathan’s hand wrapped around his blade. No blood. No visible wound. The katana’s edge—sharp enough to split silk dropped onto it—had done absolutely nothing.

His eyes traveled upward to Nathan’s face.

The samurai’s eyes locked onto Nathan’s disguised black ones and he froze completely.

They were dark and dangerous in a way that had nothing to do with color or shape—a quality that lived somewhere deeper, in the absolute stillness behind them. The eyes of someone who had ended lives without ceremony and was currently calculating whether to add another to that count.

The samurai had faced opponents before. He had killed before. He understood violence the way professional soldiers understood it—as a tool, occasionally necessary, occasionally satisfying.

But this was different. This was looking into something that regarded killing with the same mild neutrality that most people reserved for breathing.

Behind Nathan, the small girl had her hands raised instinctively, her earlier fierce courage entirely replaced by trembling fear as she braced for the impact of a blade that never came. When several seconds passed and nothing happened—no sound of steel, no cry of pain—she finally looked up hesitantly.

She saw only Nathan’s back, broad and completely still, positioned between her and the samurai’s drawn blade like an immovable wall that had simply decided to be there.

She stared at it with wide, uncomprehending eyes.

Nathan kept his gaze fixed on the samurai with patient, unblinking focus.

She was a child. A girl of ten who had done nothing more dangerous than speak an honest opinion in the street she lived on. And this man had drawn a sharpened blade with genuine intent to cut her down for it.

It could have been Nivea in different circumstances.

"M...move away, you bastard!" The samurai managed to recover enough to glare, his pride clawing its way back to the surface through the fear. He put his weight behind the katana, attempting to wrench it free from Nathan’s grip through brute force.

The blade didn’t move a single millimeter.

His arms strained. His boots scraped against the cobblestones as he pushed harder, putting his full bodyweight into the effort. The sword remained as thoroughly motionless as if it had been embedded in stone.

Confusion and humiliation warred across the samurai’s face as he processed the impossible reality of a bare hand holding his weapon with apparently zero effort.

Nathan decided he had seen enough.

He increased his grip pressure incrementally, deliberately—and the katana shattered.

Not bent, not snapped at the hilt. Shattered—the blade fracturing into multiple pieces that clattered and skittered across the cobblestones in every direction, the sound sharp and final in the suddenly hushed street.

The samurai stood holding nothing but a useless hilt, staring at the fragments of his weapon scattered at his feet with an expression of pure speechless disbelief. That katana had been folded steel, the product of a master craftsman’s weeks of labor.

Nathan looked at the broken pieces for exactly one moment.

Then his right hand closed into a fist at his side, and pale ice-blue light began gathering in the spaces between his fingers—a cold, concentrated luminescence that pulsed with quiet finality. Not an aggressive display. Not a warning.

A preparation.

He was going to kill him. The decision had been made with the same unhurried certainty he applied to everything.

"Onii-chan! Please don’t!"

Ayaka’s hand closed around his arm with both of hers, gripping with desperate strength. Her voice carried real urgency stripped of its usual fire—not commanding, not teasing, simply asking.

Nathan paused. His eyes moved to her.

"Why," he said. Not a challenge. A genuine question, asked with the directness of someone who had already weighed the alternative and found it perfectly acceptable.

"Onii-sama." Akane’s voice came from his other side, calm and precise as she stepped close. "Killing a samurai here serves neither our side nor yours. Not right now."

Nathan looked at her.

"The ceremony is days away," Akane continued, her dark eyes holding his with steady conviction. "Until then, nothing should happen that disrupts the capital’s fragile stability. If you kill him here—"

"The samurai faction gains exactly the provocation they’ve been waiting for," Nathan finished quietly.

Akane nodded once.

He held still for another moment, the ice light still gathered in his fist, the decision suspended between heartbeats.

She was right. The calculation wasn’t difficult once emotion was removed from it—and Nathan didn’t particularly have emotion invested in this samurai’s continued existence one way or the other. The correct move was simply the one that served the larger objective.

Not everything could or should be resolved through killing and strength. He knew this. He had learned it through enough costly mistakes to have genuinely internalized the lesson.

More importantly—Kastoria was balanced on a knife’s edge right now. A samurai killed in a public street by an unknown black-haired stranger, with Hero witnesses present, days before a succession ceremony that already had factions ready to declare it illegitimate—it would be a gift to Takehiko’s supporters. The perfect justification for exactly the conflict Kaguya was working to prevent.

Nathan opened his fist. The ice light dissolved, leaving nothing behind.

The samurai, who had been watching this exchange with wide eyes and considerably less color in his face than before, apparently interpreted Nathan’s stillness as an opportunity. His humiliation and wounded pride overcame what remained of his fear, and he began surging forward with a furious shout, his broken hilt raised uselessly.

He stopped.

Akane’s sword was at his throat.

She had drawn it with such clean economy of motion that no one watching could quite identify the precise moment it had happened. One instant it was sheathed, the next the blade rested with absolute steadiness against the samurai’s jugular, Akane’s posture entirely relaxed, her expression carrying the serene chill of someone who felt no more tension about this than she would about pointing at something.

"I am one of the Heroes of Kastoria," Akane said, her voice quiet and carrying perfectly in the hushed street. "Summoned and blessed by the supreme Goddess Amaterasu herself."

She let that sit for exactly two seconds.

"Do you genuinely want to continue this?"

The samurai’s face went through several rapid transitions before settling into something pale and rigid. His eyes moved from the blade at his throat to Akane’s face, finding nothing there that suggested bluff or performance.

The crowd around them was absolutely silent.

He clicked his tongue—a sharp, impotent sound that was all that remained of his aggression once the reality of his situation had fully landed—and slowly lowered his makeshift weapon. Then he turned and walked away through the crowd with stiff, deliberately unhurried steps, performing whatever dignity he could salvage from the retreat.

Several of his sympathizers in the watching crowd peeled away quietly after him, not meeting anyone’s eyes.

Then, a single beat of held silence—

And the street erupted.

Cheers broke out from the surrounding crowd with an enthusiasm that suggested considerable pent-up relief finding sudden release. People pressed forward from every direction, the cautious distance they’d maintained during the confrontation collapsing entirely as the danger resolved.