I Only Summon Villainesses

The B-rank summon arrived forty seconds later. It came from the east, redirected from the main assault, a lupine creature wreathed in dark flame with eyes like molten copper. It was taller than the shadow wolf had been, broader, and the heat rolling off its body turned the dust in the air to glass particles that glittered as they fell.

It was one of the strongest they had deployed tonight.

The flaming wolf and its summoner regarded each other for a single, still moment. The battlefield around them had gone quiet. Not because the fighting had stopped everywhere, but because every soldier within a hundred meters of this woman had stopped fighting. Night Fall Order soldiers who should have been pressing the line were instead pulling back, their eyes locked on the petite figure in the black habit.

The wolf lunged.

The chain lashed out and caught it across the face. The wolf’s head snapped sideways, its flames guttering from the impact, and it stumbled. Before it could recover, she closed the distance. Her fist connected with the side of its skull and the shockwave flattened everything within ten meters. Soldiers on both sides were knocked off their feet. A section of wall that had survived three centuries of erosion finally collapsed.

The wolf recovered. It swiped with a burning claw. She caught the paw, twisted, and slammed the creature into the ground. The earth cracked in radiating lines. She drove her knee into its ribs, and the sound that came out of the wolf was not a growl. It was a whimper.

She stood on its body, planted her feet, wrapped the chain around its throat, and pulled.

The wolf clawed at the ground. Its flames surged, licking at her habit, charring the edges. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t let go. She pulled harder, and the chain cut through the flames, through the spirit’s essence, through whatever held the thing together.

The wolf came apart. It unraveled, like a cloth being pulled thread by thread, and the dark fire that composed it scattered into embers that winked out against the night sky.

Its summoner who was about two hundred meters away, vomited blood and collapsed.

The woman stepped off the dissolving corpse and kept walking. The chain trailed behind her, dragging through the dirt, leaving a thin silver line in the dust.

She was walking toward Haral’s position.

“Fall back,” he said.

His lieutenant stared at him. In eleven Night Auctions, Haral had never given that order.

“Sir—”

“Fall back. Pull everyone south of the ridge back to the second line. Now!!”

The order went out and men began running immediately. They didn’t retreat in formation, didn’t even bother to cover each other, discipline was lost from them I that single instant. They all ran like how animals would run from fire.

On the mercenary side, the new commanding Sergeant watched the Night Fall Order’s southern formation dissolve. He’d been directing his units, barking at the mercenary line to hold their positions, managing the battle the way he’d done a hundred times before. And then the southern flank had simply stopped being a problem.

He couldn’t understand why until he saw her.

The woman in habit… the nun. She was walking through the battlefield at a pace that suggested she had nowhere in particular to be, swinging a chain that moved like it was alive. Around her, in a rough circle perhaps forty meters in diameter, nothing was standing. Night Fall soldiers lay in heaps. Two summons were dissolving. A third was dragging itself away on shattered legs.

But it wasn’t just the enemy.

Three mercenaries from Kael’s own line were also on the ground in her wake. They hadn’t been killed. But the one trying to stand was doing so on a leg that bent the wrong way, and the other two weren’t trying at all.

The woman had walked through the mercenary line, through his line, and out the other side, and she’d hit anyone who’d been in her path.

“Who the hell is that?” one of his Night Guards asked.

The Sergeant didn’t answer. He was watching her walk into a cluster of Night Fall soldiers who were trying to reform. The chain whipped out and three men went down in a single arc. A fourth charged her with a war axe and she caught the haft mid-swing, tore it from his grip, broke it over her knee like kindling, and backhanded him hard enough that his body left a mark on the wall it hit.

She wasn’t fighting. Fighting implied effort, resistance, some measure of reciprocity between combatants. What she was doing was closer to housekeeping.

“Do we… intervene?” the Night Guard asked.

The Sergeant watched a Night Fall summoner deploy a spirit, something canine and snarling, and watched the woman catch it by the throat and crush it in her grip without breaking stride. The summoner turned and ran before the spirit had finished dissolving.

“No,” He said.

“But she hit our—”

“No.”

The Night Guard fell silent.

The Sergeant was not a stupid man. He was not brave the way poets described bravery, the kind that charged into certain death for abstract ideals. He was the other kind, the kind that recognized when a situation had moved beyond the scope of anything he could affect and had the good sense to simply not be in its way.

The woman was a force of nature wearing a nun’s habit. She made no distinction between sides. She acknowledged no formation, no authority or command structure. She simply moved forward and everything in her radius came apart.

And the worst part, the part that made the sergeant’s hands cold inside his gauntlets, was what she wasn’t doing.

He’d been watching her for three minutes. She’d dismantled an entire flank. Destroyed summons that should have taken coordinated squads to bring down. Turned career soldiers into fleeing animals. Put a B-rank summon in the ground like it was a stray dog.

And she hadn’t used a single ability.

No single spirit essence had flared out from her even though she was clearly a summon. There was nothing that suggested she was drawing on anything beyond her body and that chain.

She was doing all of this with her hands.

From across the battlefield, he watched her pull the chain taut between her fists, clothesline two soldiers who’d been too slow to run, and keep walking.

Her crimson eyes swept the field with the flat, dispassionate gaze of someone looking for something that might actually require effort.

She didn’t find it.

His mind trembled on the edge of breaking down.

’Who in the world… whose summon is that?!’