I Only Summon Villainesses

The world went black and heavy, and something in my chest folded the wrong way.

There’s a thing people never tell you about having a strong endurance for pain. It doesn’t make it hurt less. It just makes sure you’re awake for all of it.

I was pressed flat into the shattered stone, one enormous clawed foot planted over my whole body, and every bone in me had been introduced very rudely to every other bone. My ribs were doing something ribs are not supposed to do. My mouth was full of grit and blood and the taste of old iron.

’Ah, damn...’

”Cade.” The sword’s voice, small and tight. ’Get up. Get up get up get up—’

”I’m working on it,” I wheezed, into the dirt, which wanted about a pint of me before it would let go.

The dragon leaned its weight down to grind me deeper, and that was the mistake. Not its mistake. Mine, if I’m honest, because I did the stupidest thing available to me.

I reached up with one flattened arm, laid my palm flat against the underside of that colossal foot, and let Necrotic Touch pour out of me like something spilling.

The scales there went grey. Then black. Then they sloughed off in a wet, withering rush, a whole patch of the thing’s sole rotting away in the space of a breath, and the smell of it — I will not describe the smell of it. I’ve done that to you once already this fight.

The dragon shrieked and yanked its foot back, and I rolled out from under it, ribs screaming, and got my feet under me by refusing to consider the alternative.

’That was disgusting,’ the sword said, sounding delighted.

”You’re welcome.”

Now. Let me be very clear about my strategic position, so nobody reading this gets the wrong idea and starts thinking I had a plan.

I could not beat this thing. Not with four active spirits and a fifth of the essence I’d need. Every attribute I had was a firecracker and this was a mountain that had learned to hate. The most any of my tricks did was annoy it, and I’d already learned what annoying it got me.

So I didn’t fight to win. I fought to keep moving. That’s a different sport entirely.

I ran, and it followed, and I made sure every place I ran was worse for it than for me. I baited it through the collapsed colonnade and let the falling pillars catch its flank. I laid chains across the broken ground and dropped it once, hard, felt the whole plateau shudder when it went down. I threw white fire not to burn it but to make it flinch, to buy the half-second, always the half-second.

And the whole time, without either of us deciding it, we were drifting toward the edge.

The temple, I should mention, sat on the top of the Precipice — and the Precipice is not a mountain. It’s the opposite of a mountain. It’s a canyon so vast and so deep that the top layer, the one we’d been standing on, was just a wide flat plateau, the way the rim of a well is technically ground. Below it the world dropped away in shelves, layer under layer under layer, down into a dark I had never once been curious about.

I’d like to say I chose to go over the edge.

The dragon’s tail chose for me. It came around like a felled tree and swept the last of the plateau out from under my boots, and then there was no ground, and then there was falling.

The dragon came with me. Of course it did.

We fell together down the face of the second shelf, the two of us tumbling through open air, and I burned essence I didn’t have on Feather Step and Ethereal Grace just to turn falling into something more like a very fast, very undignified descent. The cloak snapped taut behind me. The dragon roared the whole way down, sky-splitting, furious, filling the canyon with sound.

We hit the second layer hard enough to crack it.

And the second layer was worse. I knew it the way you know a room is wrong the moment you step into it. The air was colder and thicker and it moved on its own, and there were shapes in the dark down here, huge ones, patient ones, things that did not startle at a falling dragon the way the whole world above had.

’Cade,’ the sword whispered. ’What is that.’

I turned to look at what she was looking at, and I would very much like to tell you my face stayed composed.

It rose up out of the layer’s far dark like a section of the canyon wall had decided to stand — pale, writhing, wrong in a way that made the dragon look almost reasonable by comparison. It had too many of everything. It made no sound at all, which was somehow the worst part. A grotesque, colossal aberration that had clearly never once in its life had to run from anything.

And it was not looking at me.

It was looking at the dragon.

The dragon — my dragon, the sky-filling, land-ravaging, essence-sucking terror that had chased me across the ruin of a temple and swatted me into the earth like a fly — went very, very still.

Then it did something I would not have believed if I hadn’t been standing ten feet away in the wreckage.

It cringed.

The whole enormous body dropped low, wings folding tight, that vicious head tucking down and away, and a sound came out of it that I can only describe as a whimper the size of a thunderclap. It backed up. It scrambled. And then it turned and fled, threw itself back up the shelf it had just knocked me off of, clawing for the higher layer as fast as its ruined foot would carry it, with the pale writhing thing surging after it into the dark.

I stood there in the silence they left, ribs aching, essence nearly dry, absolutely dumbstruck.

’...Oh.’

Because it made sense now. All of it. The way the thing had blundered into the temple at the top of the world. The way it hadn’t cared about us at first, hadn’t seen a single one of us as a threat worth the effort. It hadn’t come up to the plateau to hunt.

It had come up to hide.

The most fearsome creature I had ever faced in my life, the beast that had nearly killed me twice in one afternoon, had spent all this time at the very top of the Precipice for one very simple, very stupid reason.

It was scared of the neighbours.

’Let’s not get too excited,’ I said out loud, to no one, to the dark, watching the second layer breathe around me. ’That thing chased off my dragon in about four seconds.’

Wren, for once, had nothing clever to say.

I looked up the long dark face of the shelf I’d fallen down, and then down into the deeper dark I still had to survive, and I came to the only conclusion available to a man in my position.

That whole time, all of it — the armageddon of black fire, the sky-splitting roars, the tsunami of darkness at my back —

I’d been running from a scaredy cat.