I Only Summon Villainesses

The horn sounded again, a deeper note this time, and the summons that had been pressing the line suddenly pulled back, reorganizing themselves They drew into tight formations, clusters of ten or fifteen moving with a coordination that the earlier waves hadn’t possessed, and behind them, through the dust and the flickering light of the damaged barrier, I could see larger shapes moving.

Not just one like this time, there were several of the kind of creatures I had killed.

Five of them. Each one about the same size of that beast, carapaced and bone-spurred and radiating the kind of spiritual pressure that made the air taste like copper. They moved in a staggered line, the smaller summons falling in around them like infantry escorting siege towers.

The mercenary line stopped moving forward. Several of them started moving backward.

The Night Guard barrier pulsed, the summoners pouring essence into it, but the five creatures didn’t bother charging it. They simply walked forward, and the weight of their combined spiritual pressure pushed against the barrier like a slow tide pushing against a sand wall.

The barrier bent. Then it cracked in four new places.

“Shit,” someone said behind me. A woman’s voice. The wiry experienced one who’d been fighting efficiently on my right flank for the past hour. “That’s a Siege Line. Haven’t seen one in years.”

Another mercenary next to her, that had somehow managed to survived this long, asked with shaky hands.

“What do we do?”

The woman didn’t answer. She was looking at me.

Several of them were looking at me now. Not Sergeant Kael or the Night Guards or the mercenaries. The ones who’d seen me kill the first large creature. The ones who’d been watching me cut through the smaller summons like they were made of paper. They were looking at me the way drowning people look at floating debris.

’Not my problem. My problem is the Auction. My problem is finding the entrance. My problem is…’

But the five creatures were walking through the barrier now, the cracks widening enough for the smaller summons to flood through in waves, and if the line collapsed here then the battle was over and the Auction became irrelevant because I’d be spending the rest of the night running instead of bidding.

So it was my problem after all.

I exhaled and stopped conserving.

The [Chains of Confession] erupted from my body. Five chains, white-hot and burning with the same holy fire as [Sanctified Immolation], each one moving with a speed and intent that had nothing to do with my physical movements and everything to do with the will behind them. They shot outward in different directions, and each one found a target.

The first chain wrapped around the nearest large creature’s front leg and pulled. The creature, which had to weigh several tons, stumbled. The chain tightened and the white fire spread across its carapace, and wherever the flame touched, the spiritual energy holding the summon together began to unravel.

The second and third chains caught two of the smaller summons that had been flanking me, binding them mid-lunge and dragging them together. The fire consumed them in seconds, their bodies crumbling to ash before they hit the ground.

The fourth and fifth chains swept wide, creating a burning perimeter around a thirty-foot radius of the line. Any summon that crossed that line caught fire. Several tried and none of them made it through.

And then I activated [Emperor’s Presence] at full output.

The crimson fog that had been a passive emanation around me all night surged outward like a living thing. It rolled across the battlefield in every direction, thick and red and carrying a spiritual pressure that had nothing to do with physical force and everything to do with dominance.

The effect was immediate and dramatic.

The summons recoiled. Every single one within the fog’s reach flinched as if struck, their movements becoming sluggish, their coordination breaking down. The tight formations dissolved into confused clusters. The five large creatures, which had been walking forward with unstoppable momentum, slowed to a crawl. One of them staggered sideways, its legs buckling under its own weight as the Emperor’s Presence suppressed the spiritual essence holding its body together.

But it wasn’t just the enemies that felt it.

The mercenaries within the fog straightened. The shaking mercenary stopped shaking. His sword steadied. The wiry woman took a deeper breath than she’d been able to manage in hours, and her next strike, aimed at a disoriented summon that wandered too close, hit with a force and precision that made her blink at her own hands.

Dull, who’d been fighting steadily all night with the grinding efficiency of a man who treated combat as manual labor, suddenly moved faster. His axe, which had been landing with workmanlike competence, now bit deeper, split wider, and the summons fell before him in a tempo that quickened noticeably.

Even Sulin paused. She turned her head toward me with those blood-red eyes and squinted them in what looked like a mixture of confusion, shock and surprise.

While Jose opened his mouth and let out a short sound, surprised laugh.

“Hey,” he said, his spear running through a disoriented summon without him even looking at it. “This kid is full of tricks.”

I didn’t respond. I was burning essence at a rate that my budget absolutely did not account for, and every second of full-output Emperor’s Presence was a second I’d have to compensate for later. But the math was simple enough: if the line collapsed now, there was no later.

The chains pulled the first large creature to the ground. It crashed down with an impact that sent dust billowing in every direction, and I drove the Frostfang into the base of its skull before it could rise. The frost detonated inside its head. Same result as the one I’d killed before. The web of white cracks, the shudder, the stillness.

But I didn’t stop. I pulled the Frostfang free, let the chains drag me toward the second creature, and buried the blade in its eye socket. The frost punched through its skull from a different angle, and this time the creature thrashed, one leg swiping blindly and catching a chunk of rubble that exploded into fragments. I rode the motion, used its own flailing to wrench the blade deeper, and felt the frost connect with whatever served as its core.

And it crumbled.

’Two down, three remaining.’