I Only Summon Villainesses

Running through a dark forest is a bad idea. Running through a dark forest at Kassie’s pace, on one real leg, with barely enough essence left to keep a light burning, was the kind of idea that would have made past me sit present me down for a long talk.

I ran anyway.

Kassie went ahead through the trees, following the two fleeing shapes by sound and by whatever else eight thousand years gives you, and I followed her by the red sparks that snapped off her body in the dark. My flame ball bobbed above me, smaller than I liked. Every branch looked like a monkey. Some of them were.

One dropped on my left, twisting into a bull as it fell, and I didn’t even break stride. Wren swept out, still hot from the last fight, and took its front leg off at the joint, and Kassie’s sword came back over her shoulder without her turning around and finished it against a tree.

[You have slain a Level 4, Apex-tier, Mirror Marmoset]

’Stop sending the small ones. You’re just feeding us notifications.’

Then the trees ahead began to glow.

At first I thought it was dawn, which tells you how tired I was, because nothing about the River Styx had suggested it believed in dawn. The glow was orange, and it was moving. It rolled along the horizon to our right like a wound opening in the dark, and smoke stood over it in a column I could finally see the sky against.

The forest was burning. Not our scattered campfire embers. Kilometers of it.

”Kassie.” I caught up to her on a ridge of roots, breathing hard. ”Tell me that’s not another one of them.”

She had stopped. That alone worried me. She stood watching the fire line with her head slightly tilted, and the two scouts, small and fast in the distance, had changed course. They had been running straight. Now their path bent hard away from the glow, and things were coming the other way through the trees, dozens of small metallic bodies, fleeing toward us, past us, around us, and not one of them stopped to twist into anything. They ran like animals ahead of a flood.

Whatever was in that fire, the mirrors wanted no part of it.

The fire line bulged. A tree came down inside it, then another, and something walked out through the burning gap with its own light around it, white and gold and furious, and I felt my whole body sag with a relief so heavy it was almost a blow.

She was small. She was wearing a scorched habit. Her chain dragged behind her through the embers, and a mirror the size of a horse came at her from the flank, half-twisted into some new shape, and she hit it once with her fist and it stopped being anything at all.

”Maggie,” I said. It came out weak.

She looked up the ridge at me. Even from that distance, in the middle of a forest fire she had personally started, she managed to look inconvenienced.

”There you are,” she called, walking up out of the burning like a woman leaving a bath drawn wrong. ”I have been listening to your noise for an hour. All this racket, miscreant. I assumed you were dying.”

”We were, a little.”

”Naturally.” She reached us, stopped, and glanced once at Kassie, and Kassie glanced once at her, and the entire exchange between the two of them fit inside that. Then Maggie’s dead crimson eyes went past us to the two scouts shrinking into the dark. ”You’re letting those leave.”

”We’re chasing those,” I said. ”They’ve been copying us all night. They watched everything. They’re taking it back to something.”

”Then why are you so slow.” She raised one hand, and the air above her palm ignited.

’Can’t blame me for not having my original legs!’

I had watched Maggie’s flames level buildings, so it wasn’t the size of the fire that stopped my breath. It was what the fires already behind her had told me and I was only now hearing. All night we had cut these things, crushed them, torn their shapes apart, and the shapes had just crawled back into monkeys and kept moving. But the snake had shrieked when my fire got inside it. The horse-sized one hadn’t gotten back up.

Steel doesn’t kill a mirror. Fire does.

”Maggie.” My voice came steadier than I felt. ”The far one. The one on the left. Can you reach it?”

She didn’t answer, and so instead the sky did. The flame left her palm flat and silent, a lance of white heat that crossed three hundred meters of darkness faster than my eye could follow it, and the trailing scout, the one still dented from Kassie’s stroke, the one that had spent an entire night wearing my face, lit up from inside. It made it four more steps. Its shape ran like wax, monkey to half-formed me to nothing, and it came apart into slag among the roots and stayed there.

[You have slain a Level 3, Profane-tier, Mirror Ape]

The notification hit and I laughed once, ugly and relieved. Killed by the goddess of fire. There were worse ways for a fake me to go, and honestly, one or two worse ways the real one had already come close to.

The last scout, the one carrying Kassie’s shape, poured on speed.

We ran it down together, and for a short stretch the night almost felt winnable. Kassie ahead, low and terrible. Maggie beside me, not even hurrying, her chain hissing through the ferns, fires still climbing the sky behind us. The scout broke from the trees onto open ground, a long bald slope of dark stone falling away into a basin, and Maggie raised her hand again for the finish.

Then the scout did something none of them had done all night. It stopped running. It turned, stood at the lip of the basin looking back at the three of us, and stepped off the edge like a swimmer.

We reached the lip seconds behind it, and I looked down, and my stomach understood before my head did.

There was no forest in the basin. There were shapes like trees, rank after rank of them filling the valley wall to wall, and every one of them was the same dark, lusterless, dead metal. Thousands. Tens of thousands. They stood in perfect stillness, and the scout fell among them and never landed, because the floor of the valley opened and took it in the way water takes a raindrop, and a slow ripple spread out from the point where it vanished. The ripple rolled across the whole basin. The trees swayed with it.

It was one thing. The valley was one thing. Everything we had fought tonight, everything we had killed, the bulls and snakes and the gorilla and the copies of us, all of it had been fingers, and we were standing on the back of the hand.

”Cade,” Kassie said quietly, ”step back from the edge.”

I stepped back from the edge.

The center of the basin rose. Slowly, without violence, the way a sleeper sits up, dark metal flowing upward and inward and finding a shape as it came, and I waited with my heart in my ears to see whose shape it had chosen. Kassie’s, I thought. It had to be Kassie’s. She was the strongest thing it had seen tonight.

It wasn’t Kassie’s.

The shape that stood up out of the valley floor, taller than the treeline, taller than anything, wore a habit. A small, neat figure scaled up to the size of a cathedral tower, head slightly bowed, a chain of dark metal gathering at its waist link by enormous link, and beside me the real Maggie went very, very still.

”An hour,” I heard myself say. ”You said you’ve been fighting for an hour.”

She didn’t answer.

The colossus raised one hand, palm up, exactly the way she had on the ridge. And in the cup of that vast dark palm, quiet as a match catching, a white flame bloomed.