I Only Summon Villainesses

I watched the dead creature, my expression cold. It was insidious. Human-looking, but its legs were a snail’s, and it seemed to move on some kind of membrane underneath.

While it looked human, it was nowhere near it. The features it did carry were fierce ones.

’Being able to use my own thoughts to lure me... that’s a whole different kind of ability for a spirit beast. Not one I ever thought I’d run into.’

I sighed and turned back.

Beyond me, everything was swallowed in endless dark and pillars of stone standing shoulder to shoulder, some wider than others, some taller.

’That seems to be the way back.’

Wren was somewhere out there. I exhaled and stretched, straining Enhanced Senses to take due note of my surroundings.

The Precipice was different. I’d attempted this before, but it wasn’t as easy as it had looked back in Ealdrim. Here the darkness itself shrank my senses, and it seemed like I was going blind by degrees.

When I tried to push past it, the backlash came with it, some high, thin sound grinding against the inside of my head. So I had to make do.

And turn back to find Wren, while managing a spatial awareness that didn’t even reach twenty meters around me.

But I pushed forward anyway, walking through the dark, looking for Wren in it.

It was a long while of walking and finding nothing, just dull, desolate dark and stone pillars running off to my left and my right.

I was tired.

And now my throat had started to burn, thirst setting in fast, right as I decided to take a rest.

’Here. How about you have some water?’

It was my voice. And the moment I heard it, I yanked myself up and swung my hand, releasing an arc of flame.

The flames slammed into the stone I’d been resting against and blew it apart into shrapnel.

Then nothing. Just the tick of cooling rock and the sound of my own breathing, too loud in all that dark.

’...Great. Now I’m hearing myself hand myself drinks.’

I stayed low, hand still smoking, because that voice hadn’t come from inside my head. It had come from out in front of me, maybe ten meters off, pitched exactly like mine, down to the tired rasp I’d picked up somewhere over the last hour of walking.

The Lost Mouths didn’t just read a thought. They wore it.

’So that’s how you got me the first time.’

Something shifted in the black. Not a footstep. That wet, dragging slide I already knew, the membrane under it hauling a body no membrane should have been able to move. I pushed Enhanced Senses as far out as it would go before the backlash bit down, and caught the shape at the very rim of it. Tall. Bent wrong. Long hair pooling out behind it like spilled ink across the stone.

Then it spoke again. This time it used Wren’s voice.

’Cade. Over here.’

My chest dropped, and my hand was already moving before the rest of me caught up.

’—Nice try.’

The chain went out before the thought had finished forming. I’d learned that much last time. Strike before you decide to. Chains of Agony wrapped its throat and I poured the tearing pain straight down the length of it, and the creature folded mid-slide, that stolen voice cracking into a sound no throat of Wren’s could ever make. Wet. Layered. Furious.

It didn’t die. It came apart at the seams and kept crawling.

’Persistent little thing.’

So I burned it. White flame up the hair, the same trick as before, and it thrashed and tore at its own scalp exactly the way the last one had. Simple. Almost boring.

I set my back against a pillar and made myself breathe. Somewhere past all this, the real Wren was still lying wherever she’d gone down, and every second I spent playing whack-a-mole with things wearing her voice was a second she didn’t have. That was the thought I couldn’t afford. So naturally, that was the one they reached for.

’Here. How about you have some water?’

The same words. My words. From my left this time.

And then from my right.

’Here. How about you have some water?’

Then from behind me. Then from above, somewhere up where the pillars leaned into each other and the dark went solid.

’Here. How about you have some water?’ ’Cade. Over here.’ ’I might be fucked.’

That last one stopped me where I stood. Because I hadn’t said it out loud. I’d thought it. One creature ago, trussed up in burning hair, I had thought those exact words, and now something out in the black was reading them back to me in my own worn-out voice.

I forced the backlash. Shoved Enhanced Senses past twenty meters, past the pain, that high whine already scratching the inside of my skull like a nail dragged over slate.

And I saw them.

Not one. Not three.

The dark was moving. All of it. Every pillar had a pale, bent shape folded against its base, and between the pillars the ground itself seemed to slide, a slow tide of bodies dragging themselves along on those glistening membranes, all of it crawling toward the one warm thing in the whole Precipice.

Behind those, more. Behind those, more still, the count climbing every time my senses clawed another meter forward, until I made myself stop before the number could finish landing.

Then the thoughts came.

Not voices now. Thoughts. Mine. Dozens of them, then hundreds, every stray thing I’d thought since I woke on the stones fed back into my head at once, overlapping, stacking. The worry for Wren. The thirst. That’s how you use a damn chain. I might be fucked. I might be fucked. I might be fucked, in a hundred copies of my own voice, until I honestly couldn’t tell which one at the center of it was still me.

For a moment I just stood there, a hundred versions of myself pouring in through the dark, and did the arithmetic I’d been trying very hard not to do.