I Only Summon Villainesses

The copy of Maggie threw its flame first.

The white lance crossed the basin and the real Maggie stepped in front of us and met it with her palm, and the night turned inside out. Light everywhere. Heat like a hand pressed flat against my whole body. The stone ridge under us cracked in three places, and Kassie’s arm was around me before I even started to fall, hauling me back from an edge that no longer existed.

When my eyes worked again, Maggie was still standing there. Her sleeve was gone from the elbow down. The stone around her had melted into a glassy bowl.

”Hm,” she said.

That was all. But I had known her long enough to hear what sat under it. The copied flame was real fire. Not a shape of fire, not a picture of it. The thing had watched her burn a forest for an hour and had come away with something that could actually burn.

The colossus came up out of the valley to its full height, and the valley came with it. Metal trees folded upward into its legs, its shoulders, feeding the shape, and its chain gathered at its waist link by enormous link, and when it stepped toward the ridge the whole basin rang like a struck bell.

Then its other hand opened, and Kassie fell out of it.

Not Kassie. The scout. It hit the slope below us already twisting, rising into her shape with a greatsword of dark metal, whole again, both hands on the hilt. The colossus had rebuilt its broken finger and given it back its favorite glove.

Kassie let go of me and rolled her shoulder once.

”That one’s mine,” she said, and there was something in her voice I decided not to look at directly.

She went down the slope to meet herself, and the two Maggies threw fire at each other, and I stood on the burning ridge with an empty well where my essence should be, holding a sword I could barely afford to heat.

’Think. That’s the one thing you can still pay for.’

So I watched. The copy of Maggie was strong, and its fire was real, but it fought the way the copy of Kassie had fought. It threw the palm lance. It threw it again. It threw the same hour of Maggie over and over, and the real Maggie was already treating it like a slow student, stepping through gaps that only existed if you knew what came next. The forgery had her power. It didn’t have a single year of her.

But it didn’t need to outlast her. That was the cold part. It was the size of a cathedral and it was standing in its own body. Every lance Maggie broke, it drew more of the valley up into itself, and the valley was very, very deep.

Below me, steel met steel, and I looked down in time to watch Kassie fight her mirror, and this time it was not close. The copy swung the way she had swung tonight. Kassie swung the way she had learned to swing before this country had a name. She let the mirror’s blade slide down her own, stepped through, and took its head off with the return stroke, and when the body began folding down into a monkey she kicked it, flat and contemptuous, into the melted glass bowl that was still glowing from the first exchange.

It didn’t come out.

And that was when the whole night finally arranged itself in my head. The scout dying in leftover heat. The forest fire Maggie had started, still crawling across the ridge at our backs, eating toward the basin because nothing had told it to stop. The colossus drawing its strength up from the valley floor, from the body, from the roots.

We were fighting the glove. The hand was the ground.

”MAGGIE!” I screamed it over the roar. ”STOP HITTING THE PUPPET! THE VALLEY IS THE BODY! PUT YOUR FIRE IN THE FLOOR!”

She heard me. She didn’t nod, didn’t answer, but her next step went forward instead of sideways, and forward, and forward, walking through the colossus’s lances the way you’d walk through rain you had decided not to respect, and the copy of her poured everything down at that small advancing figure. The land around her died in stripes of white. Her habit burned at the edges. She kept walking.

Kassie understood before I said anything, because of course she did. She came up the slope, took me under her arm like luggage, and moved, and behind us the colossus bent all its height and both its hands toward the little nun who had reached the lip of the basin.

Maggie knelt. She put her bare palm flat against the stone, almost gently, the way you’d check a child for fever.

”Plebeian thing,” she said. ”You watched me for an hour.”

The white came up out of the ground.

Not a lance. Not a blast. The whole floor of the valley caught the way a page catches, edge to edge in one breath, tens of thousands of metal trees going up together, and the copied flame in the colossus’s hands guttered like a match in a storm next to what was underneath it. The giant shape of Maggie made no sound. It bent, and softened, and ran, habit and chain and bowed head all flowing down into the blaze that was unmaking the body it stood on, and the last thing to lose its shape was the cupped hand, still trying to hold its little forged fire while the sea of the real thing rose around it.

The light reached all the way up into the dead sky of the River Styx. For a while, nobody said anything.

[You have slain a Level 4, Profane-tier, Mirror Silverback]

One notification. The valley, the colossus, the scouts, the whole long night of bulls and snakes and forgeries of the people I loved. All of it had been one creature, and the system charged us for one kill.

’And it was only a Level 4.’

I sat down where I stood, because my legs were done taking requests, and I started laughing, quiet and cracked. Kassie stood over me with her sword resting on her shoulder, watching the valley burn, and Maggie came up the slope with her ruined sleeve, looking as though she had been mildly delayed on her way to somewhere important.

”You’re both filthy,” she said.

”We missed you too,” I said.

Kassie held out her hand and pulled me up, and didn’t let go right away, and I didn’t mention it. Below us the fire worked through the basin with nothing left to argue against it, and far out across the dark of the Styx, where the light of our burning reached, I saw the horizon move.

Not one thing. Many things, at many distances, shifting at the edge of the glow the way a crowd shifts when a door opens. None of them came closer. They had only turned to look.

’One down,’ I thought, and my hand tightened on Wren. ’This place has just learned our faces. And we haven’t even met the ones worth copying us for.’

Maggie was already walking.

”Come along,” she said. ”The night here is long, and you’ve made us famous.”