I Only Summon Villainesses

”Orvion.”

Another snake plunged out of the sky and swallowed Stormwhite whole, tearing loose a chunk of the snake below it as it came down.

My eyes went wide. Flames flared at my back, and a warning shot up my spine before I could put a name to it.

It was the crawling fear of death. Immense. Something I had never quite felt before.

No... actually, I had.

Once.

In the first Spirit Gate I ever walked into. The figure there had been cloaked, and had caught Kassie’s sword like it was nothing, and I had been certain, right down to my teeth, that I was about to die.

The fear pressed down so hard now that the essence I’d been gathering to loose into action collapsed in my chest, and the flames at my feet guttered out under me.

My stomach dropped as my body fell after them.

At the same moment, Tristan was left to face the snake alone, and there was no way an ordinary human like him came out of a thing like that the right way up. Especially now that his summon was crushed.

Tristan was in danger.

’Fuck it, Cade!’

Rage boiled up through me, and with cold vapor curling off my breath, I whispered.

”Kassie... please, I need your help.”

”Leave it to me.”

A crimson torrent erupted from below me. Soft hands closed around me in a single grip, and everything else turned to a blur.

The first snake split clean in two, as if a blade of lightning had come down on it. Its eyes went wide. At the same time Kassie, holding me in that one hand, spun backward and up, and on the second turn she took the head of the second snake off at the neck. Then she became a streak of red lightning, snatched Tristan out of the ruin, and blew backward past the shattering waves of ice in a fraction of a second. Her legs screeched across the frozen ground as she skidded to a halt.

I found my footing. The weight that had been crushing me lifted all at once, though I couldn’t bring myself to care why.

Because as she landed she was already setting Tristan down, and when I turned to look at him I froze, my whole face coming apart.

Tristan lay on the ground, and the ice beneath him was already a spreading pool of blood. A whole side of his body had been chewed away by the snake. From the lower jaw on his left, down through his entire left arm and his ribs, it was one clean, curving cut, as neat as anything a blade could have done. His face was grey, scored with a dozen small wounds. There was something forlorn in it, and very tired.

His eyes drifted over to me, and a small, glad smile curved onto his mouth.

Then he mouthed:

”I’m... sorry. I’ll have to leave it to you.”

A tear slid from the corner of his eye as he looked at me.

And I just stood there.

Standing...

Wondering what the heck was going on...

This was all so sudden...

So sudden...

What?

I stared at him, and the color, the light in his blue eyes, slowly went out. His head sagged, and though he was still turned toward me, there was almost no one left behind the gaze.

Tristan... was dead?

”No... no, no, that... that c-can’t be...?”

My legs went weak under me as I stepped closer to his body.

Somewhere behind me, Ilse and Brunhilde had reached Kassie. She stood apart, silent, watching me. When Brunhilde made to come closer, Kassie gave her a look that stopped her mid-step, worry crossing Brunhilde’s face, before Kassie turned back to me and the man on the ground.

The whole world had gone muffled under the roar of shattering ice, so that I couldn’t hear anything, not my own heart, not even the trembling in it. And yet the words Tristan had only shaped with his lips came through louder than the crash.

I crumpled to my knees beside him, my eyes flooding as I lowered them to his face.

No words would come. There was nothing in me to find, except that I was sorry. I was so terribly sorry.

I was some guy who’d just wandered in from nowhere, and the moment I stepped into their lives they began to die. All of them... and now even Tristan.

He’d been the last anchor holding me to this crude world. The man I’d been trying to fashion myself after, day by day, without ever telling him so.

And he was... just gone?

That thought threw open some ferocious door in me, one I’d kept shut for a long time.

At the same time, the creature came for us. He sat folded in a lotus on the head of yet another snake, this one grey, and it tore through the sky, smashed what was left of the ice, and descended on us. Kassie had her sword up already, a dark grimace on her face.

But something deeply dark and menacing nudged at me from somewhere low in my soul. To let it out.

Maybe, for once in this life, I had the right to be angry.

After all, this time, I hadn’t shot my own mother.

Had they died correcting my mistakes? Had Tristan? Had Lira? Had Clara? The whole Mercenary Guild... had they?

It was everyone. And as much as I was to blame, I blamed the world too.

And if the world was to blame, then the world could die.

A vicious dark wave rolled out of me.

[Your Spirit Essence is increasing...]

[...!!!]

[Your Spirit Essence is rapidly increasing...]

[This could endanger you!]

I didn’t know what exactly the system was mumbling about.

[Dark Essence can be used as catalyst to regulate the furious increase]

[Your Attribute: Summoner’s Touch has forcibly advanced]

[Your Attribute: Infinite Vitality has forcibly advanced]

[Your Attribute: Emperor’s Presence has forcibly advanced]

[Your Attribute: Strategic Apex has forcibly advanced]

[Your Attribute: Conqueror’s Will has forcibly advanced]

[Your Attribute: Warlord’s Command has forcibly advanced]

[More Attribute are forcibly advancing to consume overflowing essence]

[Your roots to the Spirit Realm is deepening...]

I was oblivious to all of it. The moment I got to my feet, there was only one thing left in me.

To kill that creature.

I launched into the sky on obsidian knives of flame, and drove my whole twisting body across the grey mass of the snake. Wreathed in fire hot enough to instantly melt stone, I passed straight through it. The snake’s flesh sloughed back from the heat pouring off me, running black and dying where it touched me, until I burst out the far side.

The two halves came apart behind me, cleaved as though a sword of infernal flame had fallen through the snake.