I Only Summon Villainesses

Here is a thing I had learned about Spirit Beasts, and I had learned it the expensive way, over and over, in places that smelled worse than this one.

These beasts look at you.

They size you up, they decide what you are worth, and somewhere behind the teeth a little calculation runs. Prey. Threat. Food. Problem. Whatever it is, it is a calculation about you, and that means you are, at minimum, in the equation.

This thing did not look at me.

It looked past me, over my head, at the broken dome it had just come through.

’Ah, damn...’

”Celestine.” I did not take my gaze off it. ”You’ve been here before, right?”

”Yes.”

”If I’m not mistaken, that’s what a dragon looks like right?”

”You are very correct summoner. she said, and her voice had gone flat and careful, all the honey boiled out of it. ”The horns, the four complete limbs and independent wings. It is one, of surety.”

”How rich is your experience in fighting one?”

Celestine released a thin chuckle.

”The last time I encountered one, I didn’t stay long enough to find out. Dragons are creatures that predate everything that is in existence, they may even predate the gods themselves, we don’t know, fighting a dragon is like fighting a god.”

’...Now that is dangerous. Why the fuck is there a dragon in this damn place?!’

”Right,” I said. ”So we run.”

”We run.”

Naturally, that was the moment Wren threw a rock at it.

I want to be very clear that nobody told her to. Nobody would ever tell her to. She simply had the rock in her hand, and it was warm, and she had been holding it for a while, and somewhere in that head of hers the arithmetic came out as big thing, small rock, why not.

The rock struck the dragon just under the eye.

It made a sound like a pebble hitting a cathedral bell, and the note hung there in the dust, and it went on hanging, and every single one of us stood perfectly still inside it.

White Feather closed her eyes.

”Wren.”

”It was an accident.”

”You aimed.”

”I aimed accidentally—”

The dragon looked down.

At this point I would like to record, for whatever historians survive me, that Kassie moved first. She always does. She was already crossing the floor with her sword low and her steps quiet, running along the flank where the pews had gone over, and she went up the ruin of a pillar and off it, and she came down on the joint of that colossal foreleg with everything she had ever been taught and everything she had ever learned since.

Her blade landed true. I saw it land. I saw the edge bite between two plates where the hide folded, exactly where you would put it on anything alive.

The scale sparked with the manner with which steel sparks off stone, and the shock ran back up through her arms so hard that she came off it sideways and hit the flagstones rolling, and her sword rang away into the dark and kept ringing for a long time.

”Kassie!”

”I’m fine.” She was already up on one knee. Her right hand would not close. ”It’s fine. It’s just numb.”

’That is not what numb means, Kassie.’

Meanwhile Maggie had her hands out and the air in the temple went immensely hot. It felt like the winds were being cooked. From every space, emanated a vicious whirlwind of flames that instantaneously consumed us and the dragon. But while the dragon was getting burnt, we were perfectly fine in her flames.

The scenery of the entire night being swallowed by white flames was beautiful, honestly.

For about a second and a half it was the most impressive thing I had ever seen her do.

Then the dragon breathed in.

That’s all. No fire, no roar. It simply drew breath, and sucked in every particle of flame and released a nasty belch, the weight of that belch slammed again Maggie and knocked her flat on her back with her skirts around her knees and her hair plastered to her face.

As Maggie was falling, White Feather went in low.

She drew her ringing sword and was blurringly fast. She vanished for a second and in the next, she moment she struck the base of that neck with force enough to move a gatehouse.

The dragon’s head shifted maybe four inches.

Then it moved its neck back, casually, and White Feather went through two pillars and a wall and did not come back out.

’Oh no...’

”White—”

The tail came around.

Here is where I did the smart thing, and I want that on the record too, because it is rare. I got the chain out. I got it around a standing pillar and I got the slack across the floor in front of Wren and Kassie both, and when that tail swept through it caught the chain and the chain caught the pillar and the pillar exploded into gravel and the whole beautiful plan lasted for exactly as long as it took a very old creature to walk through a rope.

But it lasted.

That’s the thing. It bought a half second, and in that half second I had Wren’s collar and Kassie’s hand and I strained my muscles, luckily Kassie’s weight was reduced, making me able to throw both of them behind the altar stone and went after them, and the tail came through the space where we had been standing and took the altar’s front off and filled my mouth with grit.

’What Cade, that’s how you use a damn chain.’

’...Shut up, Cade.’

Afterwards — and it was only afterwards, when we were behind three feet of holy rock with our ears bleeding — I understood the shape of what had just happened.

Nothing had happened.

We had hit it four times. Four of the most dangerous people I know, doing the thing each of them is best in the world at doing, in sequence, without a mistake between them. Kassie’s blade at the joint. Maggie’s flames to consume it whole and White Feather’s brutal force. My chain in the sweep too.

And the dragon had not attacked us once.

It had shrugged, and breathed, and turned around, those attacks would have taken hundreds of beasts.

’Don’t tell me, I might have to utilize there signature abilities...’

Celestine dropped in beside me with her back to the altar and dust in that long hair, and she smiled quietly.

”Do you understand now?”

”Getting there.”

”It has not decided what we are.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and left a grey smear. ”Cade. When it decides, that is when we die. Right now we are a noise. Do not become interesting.”

I chuckled and looked at the dragon continually.

”What the hell... that’s too bad. I think I’m a naturally interesting person. What to do?”