I Only Summon Villainesses

Chapter 283: I Hate Black Soups! But We May Be In One!!!

The fire was still settling when I heard footsteps goming fast from the direction of the eastern street, and I recognized the cadence before I saw the faces. Milo’s measured stride, the twins’ synchronized rhythm, and what sounded like Cressida running.

I was standing in the middle of what used to be a courtyard.

Emphasis on ”used to be.”

Milo came around the corner first. He had his glasses pushed up and his coat folded over one arm, the picture of a man returning from a calm evening errand. His mouth was already open, mid-sentence to whoever was behind him, and then he saw the crater.

His mouth stayed open and killed the sentence in the process.

Ophelia and Odelia appeared behind him. Then Cressida, who nearly ran into Ophelia’s back because she was looking at something on her hand and not at the wasteland that had replaced their headquarters’ front yard.

She looked up.

”What the f...”

She didn’t finish the word. Her eyes were traveling across the destruction in a slow arc, taking inventory. The melted iron fence. The slag puddle where the lamppost had been. The fused glass where soil used to exist. The Company building facade, scorched and windowless on the ground floor. The three tree stumps, still smoldering, where full-grown trees had stood an hour ago.

Then her eyes found me.

Then they found Maggie, who was sitting on a chunk of displaced pavement a few meters away, legs crossed, examining a tear in her habit’s sleeve with the bored focus of someone who had already moved on from whatever caused this.

Milo closed his mouth, adjusted his glasses and opened his mouth again.

”Cade.”

”Milo.”

”What happened to our courtyard?”

”Someone came to deliver a message.”

His eyes moved to the crater, to the glass and to the building.

”I can see the message was received.”

Cressida had both hands on her head now, turning in a slow circle like she was trying to take in the full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree scope of the devastation and her brain was rejecting it in installments.

”The fence is gone. That was iron. Where did the iron go?”

”It melted,” I said.

”B–But... Iron doesn’t just melt!”

I shrugged.

”Well, it does if a Heroic Spirit stands on it long enough.”

That shut everyone up for about three seconds. Odelia, who had been quietly cataloging the damage with the same expression she wore behind the reception desk, looked at me sharply.

”A Heroic Spirit... I’m guessing you’re not talking about Sister Magdalene?”

”What? No! Of course not, Maggie would never do this. It was a Fire Lord, specifically. Name was Ifrit. Belonged to a summoner who walked in about forty minutes ago talking about burning the Company to the ground.”

Milo’s expression hadn’t changed, but something behind his glasses had gone very still. He had the look of a man doing math he didn’t like the answers to.

”Where is this summoner now?”

”He ran.” I jerked my chin toward Maggie. ”She persuaded him.”

Maggie didn’t look up from her sleeve but said plainly from where she sat.

”His spirit was fragile.”

Ophelia had moved to the building’s entrance and was peering through one of the empty window frames, her face tight with a worry that looked less like fear and more like someone calculating how much broken glass she was going to have to sweep.

”You said he came to deliver a message. Did he say who sent him?” Milo asked.

And that was the question, wasn’t it? The one that had been sitting at the back of my skull since the summoner ran, assembling itself piece by piece while I stood in the crater and watched the embers die.

The summoner had made mention of some Blood Mage. This man had sent him, and that too, with a Heroic Spirit and the explicit instruction to burn the Black Snow Company in order to deliver a message.

This wasn’t a street dispute, I didn’t think it was something territorial too. Who would be crazy enough to deploy a Spirit Summoner for posturing.

This was a declaration.

It was that moment when I thought about it that the memory surfaced like a coin dropping into a slot that had been waiting for it.

We were in the reception a few months ago, Levi had a booze in his hand and that easy grin splitting his face while he talked about Kassie tearing through Manhattan like a natural disaster.

”She single-handedly destroyed over thirty summoners and their summons, many of which are Manhattan’s top brass. I’m talking B ranks.”

And then, almost as an afterthought:

”It’s a good thing that The Blood Mage was not around, though.”

He’d said it lightly. A throwaway line. The verbal equivalent of wiping sweat from your brow after dodging a truck. But the relief in it had been real, and I hadn’t thought about it since because there’d been no reason to.

There was a reason now.

”The Blood Mage,” I said.

Milo’s reaction was immediate and unmistakable. His posture didn’t change, his expression barely shifted, but his hand, the one holding his folded coat, tightened until the fabric creased.

’He knows the name.’

”What did you just say?” Odelia said from behind her non-blood sister.

”The Blood Mage. Manhattan’s heavy hitter.” I looked at Milo directly. ”Levi mentioned him once, back when Kassie tore down the Manhattan Trade Center. Said we were lucky the Blood Mage wasn’t there. He didn’t elaborate. I guess because we weren’t supposed to be their problem anymore.”

I gestured at the crater.

”Looks like we’re still their problem.”

Milo was quiet for a long moment. The kind of quiet that meant he was choosing his words with the precision of a man defusing a bomb.

”The Blood Mage is not someone Levi discusses casually. If he mentioned the name at all, even in passing, that should tell you something about the weight it carries.”

”It’s telling me plenty right now.”

Cressida had stopped spinning. Her hands had dropped from her head to her sides, and the shock on her face had reorganized into something harder. She wasn’t looking at the damage anymore. She was looking at me.

”Manhattan sent a Heroic Summoner to our front door. To send a message.”

Odelia spoke next, flatly, like she was testing the words to see if they’d stay together. ”Most likely because of what happened to their Trade Center.”

”That’s how I’m reading it.”

”Then this isn’t over.”

”No.”

Silence settled over the group. Not the comfortable kind. The kind where everyone is thinking the same thing and nobody wants to be the first to say it out loud.

Maggie said it anyway.

”It’s retaliation.”

She’d stopped examining her sleeve and was looking at the group now with those crimson eyes, her expression carrying the cold clarity of someone who’d watched empires declare war over less.

”The first move was yours. Destroying their center. This was the response. The question is not what happened. The question is what comes next.”

She stood, brushing debris from her habit.

”In my era, when someone sent a champion to your gates with a message of fire, it meant one of two things.”

She held up a finger.

”Submit.”

A second finger.

”Or prepare for everything they have.”

’Great. So it’s war.’

Milo exhaled slowly through his nose.

”We need Levi.”

”Where is he?”

”He and Tristan went on a different mission, after which he said they would also be going for a meeting with a contact in the outer districts. He should be back within a month.”

The Blood Mage had sent a summoner with a Heroic Spirit to burn us down, and the one person who actually understood the full scope of what that meant was not going to be around for the next one month.

Didn’t this mean, we would have to keep the company from any external attacks for the next one month?

I looked at the crater again. At the glass and the slag and the scorched earth. At the Company building standing wounded but intact behind it.

The summoner had come to deliver a message. Instead, he’d had his Heroic Spirit dismantled by a petite nun in under two minutes, and he’d run home with nothing to show for it except singed eyebrows and a shattered ego.

’Which means the message he delivers won’t be the one the Blood Mage wanted.’

It would be worse.

It would be that the Black Snow Company had something that could eat a Heroic Spirit for breakfast and not even consider it a real fight. And that kind of information didn’t make people back down. It made them escalate.

I turned to Milo.

”I don’t think we can wait for Levi to come back before we discuss the next line of action. I think we may be in a black and irritating soup. Goodness, I don’t like black soups!”

Milo nodded once.

”I do agree with you.”

I raised a brow towards him.

”Really? You hate black soups too?!”

He adjusted his glasses and shook his head.

”Oh not that. I actually enjoy those. I grew up with an herbalistic mother, I’ve had even worse than black soup. But the do grow on you if you let them...”

I gave him an irritating glare.

’All of that and you still needed a frame of glasses to assist you with your sight. Poor thing...”

Ophelia had come back from the building entrance. She looked at the shattered windows, then at me, then at Maggie, then at the crater. Then she sighed with a heaviness that transcended the situation

.

”I just mopped those floors.”

Despite everything, I almost laughed.

Cressida kicked a chunk of fused glass across the ground. It skittered over the smooth surface where the courtyard used to be and stopped at the edge of the crater.

”So,” she said, folding her arms. ”How big was the fire thing?”

I held my hand above my head, then raised it higher, then gave up and just pointed at the Company building.

”About that tall.”

Her eyes widened.

”And Maggie beat it. With her fists.”

”She beat it with her fists.”

Cressida looked at the Pyre Saint, who had already begun walking back toward the building entrance as though the conversation had ceased being worth her time.

”I want to be her when I grow up,” Cressida said quietly.

’Get in line.’