I Only Summon Villainesses

The standoff broke before either of them could finish starting it.

The mountains spoke first. A low groan rolled through the rock under my boots, deep enough that I felt it in my teeth, and then both slopes simply opened. Snow sheeted off them in long white curtains, and out of the dark beneath came the rest of it — the part the Hammerfelds had been holding back.

Dozens of summons came pouring down the mountainsides and boiling up out of the plain itself, the white ground splitting and shoving them into the light, and they were not the hunched, dumb things the retainers had carried. These stood on two legs, or four, and they ran.

’Oh, you have got to be joking.’

They were fast. That was the first thing my body understood before my head caught up — the way they ate the distance, the way the snow barely slowed them. Humanoid, most of them, broad and fierce and built wrong in every direction that mattered, all of it pointed at one thing: getting to us before we got past them.

They wanted to block us off. Wall us in on the open plain and bury us under sheer numbers.

I saw the shapes of them as they closed.

A bull-headed thing the size of a house, horns like ship’s masts, shoulders that rolled with every step. A four-legged one behind it, half man and half charging horse, already outrunning the rest. Something with wings of grey stone unfolding off a mountain ledge, a gargoyle, vast and ugly, throwing its shadow across the whole field as it dropped. And lower, sliding through the snow the way a knife slides through skin, a long ribbon of water as wide as a river, rising up on itself, a great eel made of nothing but cold and motion.

’We’re going to die out here.’

I planted feet in the snow and didn’t believe it. Not all the way.

Because Kassie and Brunhilde, who one breath ago had been one wrong word from carving each other apart, both turned at the exact same moment to face the same direction.

And something between them just... clicked.

I don’t know how else to say it. There was no signal. No nod, no word, nothing I could point to. But the instant the wave broke toward us, the two of them moved like they’d done this ten thousand times, like they’d shared a body once and never quite forgotten the shape of it.

Brunhilde stepped forward and drew her line across the snow.

The ground in front of us turned to ice in a long sweeping arc, and the charging summons hit it at full speed. The centaur-thing’s hooves shot out from under it. The bull skidded, its weight working against it, those huge legs scrabbling for purchase that wasn’t there anymore.

And Kassie was already in the air.

She came down on the bull like a dropped mountain. Her greatsword took it across the spine while it was still fighting the ice for its footing, red sparks fountaining off the edge, and the force of the blow drove the whole creature down through Brunhilde’s frozen sheet and into the dirt beneath. It didn’t get up.

’...She set that up. Brunhilde set that up for her.’

Brunhilde was already somewhere else.

The centaur recovered faster than it had any right to, twisting upright and lunging past Kassie’s flank toward the soft target behind her — toward me. I lifted my sword. I didn’t have time to do anything more than lift it.

I didn’t need to.

Brunhilde’s blade met it in the throat, that soft wet crack of breaking lake-ice, and the cold ran up the creature’s neck and locked its jaw open mid-snarl. She turned her wrist. The frozen thing toppled sideways — directly into Kassie’s path.

Kassie didn’t even look. Her sword came around in a flat, brutal arc and shattered the centaur into a spray of glittering pieces without breaking the rhythm of her step, the same way you’d swat through a doorway curtain.

”Don’t put your trash in front of me,” Kassie said.

”Then move faster, fossil,” Brunhilde answered, not turning.

’They’re — are they arguing? While doing THAT?’

It should have looked like chaos. Two Calamities, dozens of summons, the whole field a churning mess of stone and snow and water. It didn’t. It looked like the only ordered thing for a mile.

They were pushing forward.

That was the part that made the hair stand up on my arms. They weren’t just surviving the wave — they were walking through it, the two of them carving a single clean lane across the plain, and every summon that came at one of them somehow ended up exactly where the other one needed it to be. Kassie’s force drove things into Brunhilde’s frost.

Brunhilde’s frost held things still for Kassie’s sword. One of them swung high so the other could go low.

When Kassie overextended on a strike and left her shoulder open, Brunhilde’s katana was already there in the gap, taking the claw that would have found it, and neither of them so much as acknowledged it had happened.

They moved like two halves of a thing that had been broken apart a very long time ago and still remembered how to fit.

I followed in the wake of it because there was nowhere safer to be.

The gargoyle came down on us then, the big one, dropping out of the grey sky with its stone wings folded back and its whole weight aimed at the center of us — at the seam between the two of them, the one place I’d have sworn was the weak point.

It wasn’t a weak point. There was no weak point.

Brunhilde threw her hand up and the air above us bloomed into a forest of ice, jagged spires climbing toward the falling thing, and the gargoyle smashed into them and shattered most of them and kept coming, slowed but not stopped, its stone claws spread wide.

And Kassie planted her feet and met it.

I felt the impact in my ribs from ten paces away. Her greatsword came up to catch the full weight of a creature the size of a temple, and her boots drove down into the frozen ground, and for one impossible second the two of them simply held there, stone against steel, red sparks screaming where they touched.

Then Kassie’s mouth split into that grin under the helm.

”Heavy,” she said, almost fond. ”Brunhilde.”

”I see it.”

Brunhilde’s blade kissed the gargoyle’s ankle. Just a touch. The cold raced up the inside of the stone leg in a heartbeat, and where Kassie was already shoving the thing’s weight back and to the side, the frozen joint couldn’t follow — it had become brittle, and the rest of the body was still moving, and the two forces tore the leg clean off at the knee.

The gargoyle pitched sideways with a sound like a collapsing wall. Before it had finished falling, Kassie was up its back and her sword was through the base of its skull, pinning the whole massive thing to the ground.

She wrenched the blade free and was already turning to the next.

’I’m watching two people who hate each other fight better together than anyone I’ve ever seen fight at all.’

It didn’t make sense. It made perfect sense. Both at once.

Then the water came.

The eel had been waiting. I understood that now — it had hung back at the edges, sliding loops of itself through the snow, letting the others spend themselves first, and now it surged up out of the white plain in a wall of dark water that blotted out the sky. It was enormous. Bigger than the gargoyle. It reared over the two of them and came crashing down, and Kassie did the natural thing, the strong thing, she swung her great sword through the middle of it with everything she had —

— and her blade passed through nothing.

The eel dissolved around the cut. Just came apart into spray and re-formed behind the strike, whole again, untouched, mocking. It coiled and lunged, and where Kassie’s sword had been worse than useless, the water wrapped around her arm and her chest and began, very quickly, to freeze.

It could do it too. Freeze itself, hold its own shape solid, then melt away again the instant a blow landed. Strike it and it was water. Grab it and it was ice. It stretched a second coil out across the snow, longer and longer, reaching for me at the same time it crushed in on Kassie, and for the first time since the wave broke I saw the rhythm stumble.

”Kassie.” Brunhilde’s voice went lower.

”I know what it is.” Kassie’s words came out tight, the freezing water locking around her throat. ”Do it.”

And there it was again — that wordless thing, except this time I got to see the trust underneath it, naked for one second.

Brunhilde didn’t try to cut the eel. She sheathed her katana.

Both hands open, she pressed them flat against the frozen coil crushing Kassie, and the cold that came off her was nothing like the eel’s own. The creature liked the cold. It lived in the give and take of frozen and flowing, that was the whole trick of it — it could always melt back out of anything you did to it.

Brunhilde took that choice away.

Frost exploded outward from her palms in a single roaring sheet, racing up the coil, down the coil, through the part of itself the eel had stretched across the plain toward me and into the great rearing bulk of its body all at once, faster than it could dissolve, faster than it could decide to melt. It went solid from end to end. Every loop, every reaching arm of it, the whole enormous length frozen mid-motion into one vast and brittle sculpture of dark glass.

It couldn’t become water. There was no water left in it to become.

And Kassie tore one arm free of the now-shattering ice around her, took her greatsword in both hands, and screamed the strike out of herself.

The blow came down through the frozen eel from the crown of its head to the snow, and the entire creature came apart. Not cut — destroyed, the whole length of it bursting outward into a glittering hail that rained down across the plain for what felt like a long, long time, catching the grey light, hissing as it buried itself in the snow.

Then it was quiet.

The two of them stood in the middle of the field, breathing hard, surrounded by the wreckage of an army that hadn’t lasted a hundred heartbeats. Frost steamed off Brunhilde’s shoulders. Red haze trailed off Kassie’s like smoke off a banner. And the lane they’d carved ran straight through the heart of it all, clear and open, pointing the way forward into the mountains.

I stood at the end of that lane with my sword forgotten in my hand, and I could not have spoken if my life depended on it.

Brunhilde finally turned her head a fraction toward Kassie.

”You’re slow,” she said.

Kassie let her greatsword fall back against her shoulder, and under the demonic helm, I knew she was grinning.

”And you,” she said, ”still haven’t changed, you arrogant fossil. Come on. We’re not done.”

She started walking.

After a moment, without a word, Brunhilde fell into step beside her.