Chapter 654: Restaurant with Ayaka and Akane

After the samurai retreated with whatever shreds of dignity he could salvage, the cheers from the surrounding crowd rang out enthusiastically and showed no sign of diminishing. People pressed forward to express their gratitude and admiration, voices overlapping in a warm, chaotic chorus directed at all three of them—though Nathan, despite his disguise, drew particularly wide-eyed looks from anyone who had witnessed what a bare hand had done to a master-crafted katana.

Then the old man who had been at the center of the original confrontation appeared through the crowd, pushing forward with the urgency of someone with something specific and immediate on his mind.

He was perhaps sixty, with the weathered hands of someone who had spent decades over cooking fires and the kind of dignified bearing that came from building something honest with those hands over a long lifetime. His eyes were bright and a little wet, and it wasn’t difficult to understand why—the small girl currently clinging to his side with both arms, her earlier ferocity entirely replaced by the trembling aftermath of fear finally released.

His granddaughter. Obviously.

"Please, please come sit with us," he said, bowing with sincere depth. "My restaurant is just here—allow me to prepare a proper feast for you. It’s the very least—"

"Don’t make it anything too elaborate," Ayaka laughed, already moving in the indicated direction with the easy comfort of someone who had long ago learned that refusing genuine gratitude was its own kind of rudeness.

The old man’s establishment was modest and warm—low tables, worn smooth by years of use, the walls carrying the particular comfortable smell of a kitchen that had been producing good food for decades. The lunch crowd that had already been seated seemed entirely unbothered by the three newcomers, several of them apparently having witnessed the street confrontation from the windows given the curious, admiring glances they directed Nathan’s way.

Ayaka took her seat immediately beside Nathan with characteristic decisiveness, closing the distance between them with the naturalness of long habit. Akane settled across from them with composed elegance, folding her hands on the table and regarding both of them with her characteristic quiet attention.

"Thank you for holding back, Onii-chan," Ayaka said after they’d settled, reaching over to grasp Nathan’s arm with both hands and offering him a genuine, unguarded smile. "Truly."

"You weren’t wrong about it," Nathan said, his tone carrying neither resentment nor false magnanimity—simply honest acknowledgment. "I have no official standing here. No authority, no recognized position in this city. Whatever I am in Tenebria, here I am a guest—and a politically complicated one at that." He paused briefly, his eyes moving to the street visible through the restaurant’s front window. "I don’t want to involve Tenebria in Kastoria’s internal politics when the opinion on the truce is already genuinely difficult for most people to swallow."

Ayaka nodded, her expression settling into something more serious for a moment.

She understood that reality well enough. The people of Kastoria carried real wounds from the years of the Demon King’s reign—villages burned, families shattered, lives ended by forces that had carried Tenebria’s banner. Asking those people to accept a truce with the demons who had ravaged everything they loved was already demanding an enormous act of political faith and personal forbearance.

Nathan walking through their capital streets and publicly executing a samurai, however deserving that samurai might have been, would have handed every skeptic exactly the narrative they needed.

"Well," Ayaka said, her tone lightening again as she tilted her head at him. "I’ll be honest—my first thought when I heard you were coming was that you’d probably just start immediately killing everyone aligned with Takehiko’s faction to secure Haruka’s throne before the ceremony. Clean and quick. Very much your style."

Nathan glanced at her sideways. "Who exactly do you think I am?"

Ayaka giggled—the bright, unrestrained laugh she never directed at anyone else. "I really did think that! Didn’t we, Akane?"

Akane, caught slightly off guard by being called as a witness to her own private assessment, looked mildly embarrassed in her composed way. "I think Onii-sama has his own ways of dealing with things," she said quietly, which was both entirely true and a diplomatic sidestep of admitting she had also briefly entertained the same concern.

"It’s true that I tend to prefer resolving situations quickly and decisively," Nathan conceded without apology. "But I understand well enough that killing isn’t always the correct solution and that some approaches create larger problems than they eliminate. What appears clean in the moment can become deeply complicated later."

"Listen to you," Ayaka said with warm amusement, resting her chin in her hand and studying him. "You’ve become quite the politician since becoming Lord Commander of Tenebria."

Nathan’s expression carried the particular kind of dry exhaustion that came from lived experience. "You genuinely cannot imagine."

A comfortable silence settled briefly, filled by the ambient warmth of the restaurant—the sounds of the kitchen, the old man’s voice directing his staff to prepare something worthy, the small girl occasionally peering around the kitchen doorway to look at Nathan with enormous reverent eyes before being shooed back by someone’s hand.

"About the war against the Light Empire," Akane said then, her voice carrying the quiet deliberateness that signaled she had been waiting for the appropriate moment to raise the subject. She met Nathan’s eyes directly. "I wish to accompany you, Onii-sama."

"No." Nathan’s answer was immediate and unequivocal. "Both of you stay here. Stay safe."

"What?! Why?!" Ayaka’s composure evaporated instantly, indignation flashing across her features. "We want to help you, Onii-chan! We’re not fragile—"

"The army Kaguya is providing will be sufficient reinforcement," Nathan said steadily. "And I have other capable allies already committed. I don’t want either of you placed in unnecessary danger for a conflict that is fundamentally mine."

"Onii-sama." Akane’s voice was quiet, but she had straightened slightly, and something in her expression carried a careful, vulnerable quality that was unusual for her. "Do you not consider us your family? Your sisters?"

The question landed with more weight than its simple words suggested.

"What are you saying," Nathan replied, his tone shifting—less guarded, more genuine. "Of course you are. Both of you are important to me. We grew up together. That doesn’t change based on distance or time."

"Then let us help you," Akane said. The words were simple and direct and carried everything she didn’t say alongside them—that being left behind while he went to war felt like being told their importance had a defined limit.

"Yes!" Ayaka pressed, leaning forward slightly with a glare that was more earnest than aggressive. "Or do you think we’re actually weak? That we’d be a liability?"

"I don’t think you’re weak at all," Nathan said, and the honesty in his voice was complete.

He knew exactly what they were capable of. Summoned Heroes, blessed by divine power, trained intensively for three years in genuine combat conditions—having both Ayaka and Akane fighting alongside him would meaningfully reinforce any military campaign. That was simply true.

But the thought of them in that particular war—his war, born from his history, his pain, his unfinished accounting with the Light Empire—felt wrong in a way that had nothing to do with capability and everything to do with what they meant to him.

He didn’t want them in the middle of it. He didn’t want to look across a battlefield and see either of their faces.

"Then why?" Ayaka asked, grumbling now, the glare softening into something more plaintive.

Nathan was quiet for a moment. Then he turned toward her and reached out, bringing his hand up to gently cup her cheek.

Ayaka went still immediately, the color rising to her face with swift certainty. She looked at him with wide, suddenly nervous eyes—completely unprepared for that particular gesture, all her articulate indignation evaporating without a trace.

"Because both of you are genuinely important to me," Nathan said, holding her gaze with quiet sincerity. "And I love you."

Simple words. No performance, no qualification, no diplomatic softening. Just the plain truth stated plainly.

Ayaka’s face went fully, deeply red. She held Nathan’s gaze for approximately one second before her eyes dropped away entirely, her head turning to the side as she struggled visibly with the competing impulses of wanting to respond and being completely unable to produce coherent language.

Across the table, Akane had lowered her own face, her dark hair falling slightly forward as a flush spread warm and visible across her normally composed features. Her hands had stilled completely on the table.

Both of them were clearly, thoroughly happy about it—the embarrassment was just currently winning.

The old man arrived at precisely that moment bearing a tray of steaming dishes with the cheerful obliviousness of someone entirely focused on the hospitality he was determined to provide, apparently noticing nothing unusual about the matching red faces of his two distinguished female guests.

"Please eat!" he said with genuine warmth. "You have done our city a real service today."

Nathan lowered his hand from Ayaka’s cheek with unhurried composure and turned to acknowledge the old man with a slight nod, as though nothing of particular significance had just occurred.

Ayaka buried her face briefly in her hands.

Akane very quietly composed herself and reached for her chopsticks with great dignity.

"Thank you for saving me, big brother!"

The small voice came from beside the table, bright and completely unself-conscious. She stood beside Nathan’s seat with her hands clasped behind her back, beaming up at him with the particular radiant energy of a child whose fear had fully processed into uncomplicated gratitude and admiration.

Nathan looked at her for a moment. "You were quite brave," he said. "But try to be less careless next time. He had a sword."

"Yes! I will be more careful!" She agreed with total conviction and approximately zero actual solemnity, nodding vigorously. Then she leaned forward with sparkling eyes, apparently deciding they were now on sufficiently intimate terms for personal introductions. "My name is Suzu! What’s your name, big brother?!"

Nathan considered briefly.

His true name was out of the question—Nathan carried enough weight and recognition that even a child mentioning it to the wrong person could generate exactly the kind of attention he was trying to avoid. The name Samael, his title in Tenebria, was equally inadvisable for the same reasons, with the additional complication of immediately flagging him as a demon-world dignitary to anyone with political awareness.

He opened his mouth.

"His name is Ryo," Ayaka said smoothly from beside him, half a second faster.

Nathan closed his mouth and looked at her.

Ayaka met his eyes with an expression of complete, cheerful innocence that was entirely unconvincing.

"Ryo?!" Suzu’s eyes went even wider, which had seemed geometrically impossible a moment before. "Like the Hero’s name! Wow, as expected of someone so amazing!" She squealed with the uninhibited enthusiasm of someone whose entire opinion of a person had just been comprehensively confirmed by a single data point.

"What exactly was that?" Nathan said, turning to look at Ayaka with measured flatness.

Ayaka’s innocent expression upgraded itself to a full grin. "You’re going to be staying in the capital for several days and you clearly don’t want to attract unnecessary attention," she said with the satisfied tone of someone explaining an obviously correct decision. "So I found you a perfectly good name. Don’t you like it, Onii-chan?"

Nathan held her gaze for a moment, then exhaled through his nose—a sound that occupied the precise territory between a sigh and reluctant acknowledgment.

"No, it’s fine," he said. "You’re right."

Practically speaking, she was entirely correct. A new face and a new name together would give him considerably more freedom to move through the capital unbothered until the ceremony concluded. And Ryo was common enough to attract no attention whatsoever.

The fact that it was the Hero of Light’s name—that Ayaka had selected it with obvious quiet amusement at the irony—he chose not to address further.

Suzu, satisfied with this entire exchange in ways she couldn’t have articulated, beamed once more at Nathan and then retreated back toward the kitchen at her grandfather’s gentle beckoning, though not without several backward glances over her shoulder.

After that, the table settled into genuine, unhurried warmth.

Nathan handled his chopsticks with natural ease—not the careful, slightly self-conscious competence of someone who had learned the skill as an adult novelty, but the automatic fluency of long habit. He and his stepsisters had eaten countless Japanese meals together back on Earth, at the family table with their mother present, in the comfortable domestic rhythm of ordinary shared life. That muscle memory had survived the summoning intact.

The food itself was excellent. The old man had clearly taken the instruction not to make a fuss as a personal challenge to be comprehensively ignored, and the result was a succession of dishes that arrived with quiet pride—grilled fish with careful seasoning, rice prepared with evident attention, pickled vegetables, a clear soup that was better than anything Nathan had eaten in months of Tenebrian military provisions.

The owner moved between kitchen and table with barely concealed delight, directing his small staff with hushed urgency and reappearing to check on his guests with a frequency that suggested he was enjoying this considerably.

He was particularly attentive to Ayaka and Akane—refilling their cups before they were empty, offering additional portions with the gentle persistence of someone who found visible satisfaction in feeding people he liked. It became apparent fairly quickly that this wasn’t simply gratitude for the afternoon’s events.

"You know them already," Nathan observed during one of the old man’s returns to the kitchen.

"It’s not our first time here," Ayaka confirmed, serving herself more fish with comfortable familiarity. "We’ve been coming since about six months after we arrived in Kastoria. The food here is the closest thing to home cooking we’ve found in this entire world."

"He never accepts payment," Akane added quietly, with the slightly guilty expression of someone who had tried and failed to resolve this situation multiple times. "We’ve stopped arguing about it."

The rest of the afternoon unfolded with the particular quality of time that moves gently because nobody is asking it to hurry.

Ayaka and Akane led him through the capital’s streets as the light shifted from afternoon gold toward early evening, showing him sections of the city that had changed since his previous brief visits—new construction here, a market district that had expanded there, a temple that had been restored following damage from a raid two years prior.

They talked. Properly, at length, without the compressed urgency of stolen moments during diplomatic visits. The twins described the years in Kastoria with characteristic honesty—Ayaka recounting the frustrations and conflicts with her usual animated expressiveness, Akane providing the quieter texture of what those years had actually felt like beneath the surface events.

Nathan listened more than he spoke, which was unusual for him and which both of them noticed without commenting on.

He provided his own account in turn. About the Trojan War, Alexandria, Rome...

And then, with the directness he applied to most things, he told them about the women in his life. Helen. The others. The children.

He covered this information with calm factual completeness—names, circumstances, the current situation regarding each.

When he was finished, both Ayaka and Akane had fallen speechless.