I Only Summon Villainesses

[Magdalene remembers a time past. When her life did not revolve around slaughter, when she had sisters to protect, and when the room smelled like bread, dirt and family.]

[All she had was a scruffy old dagger that she desperately used to protect her sisters. That dagger became a family. Even after she failed to protect those girls, the dagger stubbornly protected her.]

[Maggie has retrieved a Legendary-grade weapon]

I paused halfway through the screen, then glanced at Maggie. She frowned right back.

”What?”

’I’m honestly disappointed.’

I didn’t say that. I smiled instead.

”It looks like you got back something precious from your memory... a family member you just remembered, maybe?”

She scoffed and opened her hands. Two silvery sparks lifted above her palms, hovered, then coalesced into a pair of broad-bladed daggers, the steel polished until it gleamed with a pure violet radiance. Each cross guard had been worked into a dragon motif, ornate and coiling.

She gave them a flat look, then held them out to me.

”They’d fit you better.”

I looked down at the offered blades.

’Legendary grade. That’s supposed to be a big deal, right? Was Frostbite even Legendary grade?’

I couldn’t remember. But the daggers had a strange weight to their presence, a hum in the air around them that told me they were good steel no matter what tier the screen slapped on them. The problem wasn’t the quality. The problem was that I wasn’t sure daggers were a road I wanted to walk down again.

I’d learned the style with Tristan. It was the first thing I ever pieced together in a fight, even if I never wrung out everything the form had to give. Two reasons kept my hands at my sides while she held the blades in the space between us.

The first one I’d already said out loud. The second was Tristan.

I let out a slow breath.

’Here I am, running away from my grief again...’

I’d done it enough times that I was bound to notice eventually. Or maybe it was the company. Spend enough hours around these older ladies and something rubs off, and you start growing whether you asked to or not.

Either way, noticing hurt.

So I bent forward, lowered my back, and buried my face between my knees. The sting in my throat, the knot behind my ribs, the hot press behind my eyes. I stopped holding it and let all of it come.

My back must have shuddered, because after a while I felt a hand settle there and start to rub slow circles.

Which was a genuine mystery. There was only Maggie down here with me, and I would have bet my Soul Sanctum that Maggie did not give back rubs.

I didn’t lift my head to check. Leaning up felt like it would break whatever this was, and there is nothing dignified about interrupting your own crying to audit who’s comforting you. If it turned out to be Maggie, she would never take me seriously again.

Then footsteps came down to where we sat. No words. But I was sure the newcomer looked at Maggie, and I was sure the two of them traded some silent signal, because after that they left me to it.

My mind wandered back over everywhere I had been since I landed in this world. Terrible luck, all of it, except when it came to women, where my luck ran obscenely good. I still had not decided whether to thank fate for that or curse it.

I hated watching them die. The ones who helped me, the ones who came to mean something. Every time it left me feeling powerless, and every time I knew that was a lie, because I had three summoned villainesses standing as proof I was anything but. The matchups had just been uneven. The odds, the cost, all of it stacked against us every single time.

So unfair.

I breathed out again.

’Fine, then. If the odds are always going to be this unfair, the only right move is to get strong enough that unfair stops mattering.’

A resolve caught fire somewhere under my ribs, and I muttered it aloud.

”I have to become the unfair odd.”

It was only right. I had them with me, after all, the women who uneven this whole playing ground, and I had three more waiting at the edge of my Soul Sanctum, hoping I would finally open the door.

I raised my head and turned to Kassie and Maggie. Kassie stood without a sound. Maggie sat right beside me, the daggers still resting in her hands.

”There’s something I need to talk to you two about.” It came out plain.

Kassie shifted her weight onto her right foot. Maggie only watched my face more closely.

Being the focus of these two was harder than it looked, and once I lined up the words I was about to say, I honestly wished I could sink through the floor, because I was fairly sure they might just kill me.

I said it anyway.

”I’ve got a very strange concept for growth. I don’t know why I have a Soul Sanctum. I don’t know why my essence pool keeps swelling. But you want to hear the frightening part? It’s the method.”

I sighed.

”The only way my spirit essence goes up, the only way I get stronger, is by sleeping with my summons. And the essence I get from my summons is a hundred times richer than anything I’d get from an outsider. Which is a shame, because my summons are the hardest women in the world to get anywhere near.”

A thin smile came and went before it fully arrived.

”Or maybe I just haven’t tried hard enough. Personally I’d say I have, though. Reluctantly.” I added, fast, ”I know how that word sounds. Tentative. But I mean it. I’ve been surviving since the hour I dropped into this place, and it’s been a year, and I’m still just surviving. God, I’m going to miss Christmas.”

I exhaled and came back to the point.

”I’ve been reluctant because I want to be loved too, you know. Loved, adored, accepted, appreciated by women like you. And respected, most of all. That’s why I’ve never forced anything, even when I could have.”

I looked at Kassie, then Maggie.

”But unless I find a way through this wall between us and grow past it, I don’t grow at all. However perverted the shape of my strength is, it’s the only lever I have. And I want to stop surviving. I have to stop surviving.”

My gaze went hard.

”I have to start ruling. I can’t keep running. It’s time I paid back every last one of those bastards. The gods, the church, the Divine Hosts, whoever it turns out to be, I want to be a pain in their butthole.”

My voice dropped.

”And to do that...”

I glanced between the two of them.

”I need to have a threesome with the two of you.”