I Only Summon Villainesses

They’d lost the room. A hundred creatures that navigated by the shape of returning sound, dropping into a space where every pulse they threw came back muffled, smeared, wrong. I watched one clip a stone spur it should have cleared by a yard and go tumbling.

Another pulled up short of a wall that wasn’t there, and a third simply stopped flying and hit the floor with the sound of a dropped bundle of sticks. The clean falling geometry of the dive came apart into something scrambling and furious and close, and that was fine, because close was where the rest of us lived.

”They’re still coming!” Ilse shouted, somewhere off to my right.

”Good!” I shouted back. ”Now they have to land!”

And they did.

The first rank hit the frost and skidded, wings scrabbling for purchase they didn’t have on ice, and Brunhilde walked into them the way you walk into a wheat field.

Glacies Aeterna came around in a flat unhurried arc and took four of them apart at once, and the cold that had been denied the ceiling had absolutely no trouble at all with anything standing on her ground.

Ice climbed up wings mid-beat and locked them shut. Bodies came down. She didn’t hurry. She never hurries. That was the entire point of her.

But there were a hundred, and she was one, and the whole colony had worked out inside about six seconds that the woman in the white regalia was the thing you go around.

Which left me and Ilse.

”On your left!” she called.

I didn’t look left. Looking is slow. I moved right and swung where the thing was going to be, and Wren caught it across the wing membrane and folded it into the ground.

Nice.

’Don’t sound so surprised.’

Then the noise of Ilse’s fighting stopped on my flank, which it had no business doing, and I made the mistake of glancing over.

She had planted her feet. Her sword was down at her side, forgotten, and she’d gone very still in the falling snow with her chin tipped up and her eyes shut, and then her shoulders rolled and something came out of her. She grew.

Not much. Half a head, maybe more, her frame filling out heavier and denser through the arms and back as the leathers went tight across her. Two blunt dark horns pushed up out of her hairline and curved back through the pale braid, still slick and steaming faintly in the cold.

She opened her eyes.

The bat that hit her a half-second later was doing forty miles an hour and outweighed a large dog.

She caught it out of the air with one hand.

’...What.’

She caught it, and she turned, using its own dive, and put it into the bone floor hard enough that I felt the impact come up through my boots and into my teeth.

Then she picked up her sword like she’d only set it down for a second and went to work, and I stood there for one entire wasted heartbeat with my mouth slightly open.

”Nine years holding a Calamity,” she said, not even breathing hard, as another one came in and she broke its wing with a backhand. ”What did you think that built?”

’Fair. Extremely fair.’

’I like her more than you,’ Wren said.

’I noticed that this morning, actually.’

After that it stopped being a battle and became work.

Snow, and shrieking, and the wet crack of light bones meeting things they weren’t built to meet. Meanwhile Brunhilde was a slow white weather-front moving through the middle of it, and Ilse was a wall on my flank that hit like a siege engine and grew about an inch angrier every time something got past her, and I was — well. I was the one who kept moving.

Because that was my job, and I’d worked it out about ten seconds into the wave. They hunted by isolating. They wanted the one who broke off from the group, and every single one of them that peeled toward the edges of the fight was looking for exactly that.

So I gave them one. Me. Loud, alone, lit up.

White flame ran up Wren and off my knuckles and made me the brightest thing in a cavern full of blind creatures who hated bright things, and I ran the outer edge of Brunhilde’s frost with a comet’s tail of them screaming after me, and every single one that chose me over the woman with the greatsword was one that flew, at speed, straight into the part of the field where the ice was thickest. The cold got in through the gaps at my collar and sat there against my skin. My breath went out ahead of me in rags and the flame ate it.

She didn’t even have to look up. She just kept swinging.

The last dozen figured it out too late, tried to break for the ceiling, and found they couldn’t climb out of the snow they couldn’t see through. Brunhilde ended that argument with a single lifted hand and a lattice of crystalline lances that went up instead of down.

Then it was quiet.

The snow kept falling, softly, over a floor of white and black and broken wings, and the frozen sun burned on above it all like nothing had happened. Somewhere under the drifts something was still twitching, and then it wasn’t.

I stood there bleeding from six places, breathing hard, and looked at the two of them across the wreckage. The blood on my forearm had already stopped running and gone tacky in the cold, which was convenient now and would be a great deal less convenient later, when I had to get the sleeve off it.

Brunhilde grounded her sword. Frost sighed off her shoulders.

Ilse shrank. That’s the only way to describe it. The horns went back down into her hairline, the mass drained out of her arms, and she stood there in leathers that suddenly fit again, staring at her hands with an expression I couldn’t read.

”You knew she could do that,” I said to Brunhilde.

”I taught her to do that.”

”You taught—” I stopped. Looked at Ilse. ”There’s a whole thing here I haven’t been told about, isn’t there.”

”Yes,” they both said.

’...Of course.’

Ilse rolled her shoulder, tested it, and made a small satisfied noise at whatever she found there. She was, I noticed, standing about a foot closer to Brunhilde than she had been all day, and neither of them had said a word about it, and naturally I had exactly enough survival instinct not to be the one who did.

”Next time,” Ilse said, sheathing her blade, ”warn me before you volunteer as bait.”

”There wasn’t time.”

”There’s always time to say ’I’m about to do something stupid.’”

”That’s four words. Do you know how much can happen in four words?”

She looked at me flatly. Then, with whatever the horns had cost her arriving all at once, she sat down right there in the snow among the dead things, put her head back against the stone, and laughed. Once, short and ugly and real.

It was the first sound she’d made since the hollow that wasn’t armored.

Brunhilde, at the edge of the field, did not turn around.

But the frost around her boots crept forward another quiet inch.

’Let’s not get too excited...’

’That will take time.’