The Hebi-Yama Domain materialized through the cold mountain haze like something that had been built to remind people of their place in the world.

Its walls were thick and dark-stoned, mortared with the kind of permanence that takes generations to achieve, rising against the pale sky with none of the warmth that even the most severe fortifications usually carry. Before the main gate, a line of travelers and merchants stretched back along the road in a slow, joyless procession — each one stopped, questioned, bags opened and prodded, faces studied by guards who wore their suspicion like a second uniform. Even more thorough than Kajiya-Hara’s checkpoints had been, and that had already been no small thing. Nathan took one look at it and kept walking.

He steered Yukihime off the main approach without a word, circling wide along the outer wall, moving through the treeline where the snow lay undisturbed and the shadows were deep. The wall followed the mountain’s natural contour, rising and dropping with the terrain, and it took a few minutes of quiet walking before they found what Nathan was looking for — a stretch of stone unbroken by towers and unwalked by patrols, the kind of gap that existed in every fortification because no one could guard everything all the time.

"What are we going to do, Nathan-sama?" Yukihime asked, her breath a small white cloud in the cold.

Nathan glanced at her, something faintly amused crossing his expression. "You’re only asking now? After everything that just happened on that road?"

She had followed him from Minato without a single question about destination or purpose, attached herself to his arm through a mountain pass and a triggered avalanche and a flying leap over a broken precipice — all of it, without once asking why. He had noticed. It was the same quality he recognized in Medea, in Charybdis and Scylla — that absolute, uncomplicated orientation toward him that didn’t require explanation or justification, just proximity and trust.

"I want to be with Nathan-sama," Yukihime said simply, drawing his arm closer against herself and pressing into his side. "That’s enough for me."

He looked at her for a moment longer, then wrapped his arm around her back and pulled her securely against him. She made a soft sound of contentment as he bent his knees and launched upward, clearing the wall in a single clean motion, landing on the broad top of the parapet without so much as a scrape of boot on stone.

He stood there and surveyed what lay beneath them.

The Hebi-Yama Domain was nothing like Kajiya-Hara. Where that place had been heat and hammer-noise and orange light bleeding from a dozen forge-mouths, this was cold, still, and controlled in a way that felt deliberate rather than merely atmospheric. Snow lay clean and even across the rooftops and courtyards below, unbroken except where foot traffic had packed it into dark, hard lines. The altitude kept the air thin and biting. Every person Nathan could see moved with the hunched, purposeful efficiency of people who had learned not to linger in the open — thick cloaks, heavy boots, heads down.

And guards. Many more than Kajiya-Hara, walking their routes in pairs and threes, crossing and recrossing the main paths with the rhythm of a place that expected trouble and had organized itself accordingly.

It was a different gravity from Minato’s loud, sprawling disorder. Minato breathed — noisily, chaotically, with the restless energy of a place that couldn’t be fully controlled no matter who tried. This domain compressed. Everything here felt watched and measured and answered for.

"We are here to kill the Daimyo Yorimasa," Nathan said.

Yukihime’s eyes moved across the domain below them with an immediate, focused calm. "Where is he?"

"That," Nathan said, his gaze climbing the slope beyond the inner walls to where a large, heavy structure clung to the mountain just below the summit, its dark roofline cutting against the pale sky, "is what I intend to find out."

The obvious answer was that building — the one with the vantage, the height, the architecture of someone who wanted to see everything below them and be seen by nothing. But he held back the impulse to simply cross the distance in the air and land at its door. Something sat uneasily in him about this place, a low, ambient wrongness he couldn’t name yet, and he had learned a long time ago to respect that feeling even when he couldn’t explain it.

He dropped them both down from the wall, landing without sound in the shadow of a narrow side street.

He pulled a dark hood up over his own head and with a brief touch adjusted Yukihime’s hood forward to better conceal the silver of her hair. She complied without question. Among the domain’s residents — who moved in heavy cloaks and fur-lined caps against the altitude cold — they were unremarkable shapes in dark cloth. The crowd, such as it was, absorbed them without interest.

They moved through the domain together, keeping to the side streets and secondary paths, threading gradually toward the great structure above. Twice Nathan spotted guard rotations converging ahead — not searching, just walking their routes — and both times he drew them quietly sideways down a narrower passage, waiting until boots on stone faded before continuing forward. Unhurried. Patient. The building at the summit wasn’t going anywhere, and hopefully neither was the man inside it.

They had been making steady progress — careful, unhurried, the domain’s cold streets working in their favor — when they turned a corner and walked directly into a soldier.

The man’s hand went to his weapon on reflex, eyes sharpening as they landed on Nathan first — the dark hood, the black eyes beneath it, the particular stillness of someone who doesn’t move the way ordinary travelers move.

Then his gaze dropped to Yukihime.

She had her eyes lowered, her hood drawn forward, most of her face in shadow. It didn’t matter. Even the angle of her jaw and the curve of her mouth visible beneath the hood were enough to stop the man’s hand where it rested on his hilt.

His suspicion didn’t disappear — it shifted, curdling into something uglier and more personal.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

"Travelers," Nathan said.

"I’ll need to check you both." He straightened, pulling the authority back into his posture. "Step aside here."

"Is that necessary?" Nathan asked evenly.

Yukihime raised her chin slightly then, just enough for the pale light to catch her features fully — those clean, carved lines, the dark eyes, the face that had been stopping men dead on roads since long before anyone here was born.

The soldier’s mouth curved into something that wasn’t a smile so much as a declaration of intent. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

"Very necessary," he said.

He didn’t get another word out.

Nathan’s hand closed on his throat before the sentence had fully left the air, slamming him backward into the stone wall of the building behind him with enough force to knock the breath from his lungs entirely. The sound was a dull, contained crack — wall absorbing impact, no echo into the street. The soldier’s mouth worked soundlessly, hands flying up to claw at Nathan’s forearm, finding no give whatsoever.

Nathan lifted him.

The man’s boots left the ground. His face went dark.

Nathan’s black eyes looked up at him without expression, without urgency, with the patient emptiness of someone who has done this many times and has no particular feelings about doing it again.

"I am going to ask you one question," he said quietly. "You are going to answer it. Do you understand?"

The soldier nodded in short, jerking motions, fingernails still dragging uselessly at Nathan’s arm.

Nathan loosened his grip — just enough.

"Where is Daimyo Yorimasa?"

"H— he’s at the Orochi Temple—" The words came out in a broken rush, saliva and fear. "On the summit — right at the top — please, I’ll say nothing, I swear it, just let me—"

Nathan’s grip closed again.

The man thrashed once, twice, then went still — not unconscious, just out of options, staring down with wide eyes that understood perfectly what came next. Nathan held him there, considering. There was no version of releasing this man that ended cleanly. He was already thinking through the problem when Yukihime stepped forward beside him.

She raised one pale hand and pressed two fingers gently to the soldier’s forehead.

The effect was immediate and absolute.

The man’s body locked rigid, every muscle seizing at once as a white frost spread outward from her fingertips — racing across his skin in branching patterns, climbing his neck and jaw and temple, leeching the color from him in seconds. He managed one choked, muffled sound of pure terror, his eyes frozen wide, before the frost reached them too. Hairline fractures spread across the surface of him like a mirror dropped on stone. Then, without violence, without drama, he simply — came apart. A dry, soft collapse, the whole of him crumbling downward out of Nathan’s grip and settling onto the ground as a quiet pile of white powder and crystalline fragments.

Nathan looked at his now-empty hand, then down at the snow on the ground.

"No trace," Yukihime said pleasantly, brushing her fingers together. "No body to find, no blood to follow. Just a little extra snow." She looked up at him with a small, composed smile. "Was that helpful?"

Nathan found himself smiling back. It was difficult not to.

"Very," he said.

He turned his eyes upward toward the summit. Through the rooftops and bare winter branches he could make out the dark silhouette of a structure built against the mountain’s peak — heavy roof lines, the kind of architecture built for ceremony and permanence. The Orochi Temple.

And Yorimasa was inside it.

"Let’s go," Nathan said.