I Only Summon Villainesses

Chapter 455: What A Wonderful Reunion, Raising Bars

The world stopped blurring.

White Feather’s talons opened, and Lady Ilse and Brunhilde dropped the last few feet onto packed snow, stumbling but upright. I slid off her neck a moment after, my legs nearly folding under me the second they touched ground.

That was when the cold hit. Not the snow, it was the empty feeling behind my ribs, like someone had scraped out the inside of a bowl. My essence reserves were somewhere south of “low” and heading toward “concerning.”

It was as though, all the injury finally decided to start registering now.

A dark keep rose in front of us, half-swallowed by drifts, its walls black with old fire damage that the snow hadn’t bothered to forgive. And spilling out of its broken gate—

The sound of steel was almost deafening. It was a clash that refused to pipe down. And along with this terrifying clangor of still was the thrashing of the snow. Even the walls of the keep shuddered, threatening to spill over as something repeated hit it.

White Feather undid her transformation immediately, settling into her human form.

“Lord Cade… I sense your subordinates within. I also sense other people… very dangerous people.”

“I see…”

Levi was the first person I saw. Well, I saw a lot of Levi running, all armed with different weapon. There was a perpetual storm above the keep, that sent intermittent lightning striking down, and eviscerating parts of the keep. Causing a chunk of stone debris to fly around.

And then there were creatures I couldn’t quite identify. They moved like darkness with many eyes.

At first, I could only recognize the fact that these strange darkness seemed very familiar. But could not remember from where or how. But as I stepped closer, I remembered the strange darkness that had led me out of the Spirit Gate where I met that damn, perverted lizard.

‘Oh oh… I didn’t want to remember that…’

It was a very gruesome and traumatic experience for me.

But I removed my attention from that and focused on the present.

‘What is that thing doing here though?’

Nisha screamed Levi’s name, and there was blood on the snow that I was fairly sure belonged to neither of them.

‘Of course. Of course it’s already gone wrong.’

I didn’t have time to be surprised. Surprise was a luxury for people with full reserves.

“Brunhilde, with me. Ilse, cover the left flank, there’s something moving in the rubble there I don’t like the shape of.”

Ilse didn’t argue. Surprisingly. And even her summon seemed to pay attention. Although she wasn’t as strong as Kassie, but the fact that she could talk meant she had a high fortitude and what that did for me was that she could learn and unlearn.

That was enough replacement for Kassie’s absence.

‘There’s never going to be a replacement. Let me make that clear.’

I ran. Frost bloomed under each footfall, the last dregs of Emperor’s Presence dragging behind me like a cloak I couldn’t afford to wear anymore. Brunhilde matched my pace, her sword already low and ready.

In the darkness attacking the gatehouse there were some things that didn’t exactly look like beasts. They moved like marionettes with too many joints, limbs bending at angles that made my stomach twist just looking at them, and where their faces should have been there was only a faint, crystalline shimmer — like looking through frosted glass at something that used to be a face.

While it seemed like they were a part of the darkness, the darkness moved and slammed against them, but recoiled from the crystalline shimmer that they emitted. It was clear that both were trying to fight each other.

And if I was right, the crystal marionettes had to be Clan Guardians. Perhaps, the Crystal Deep Clan had placed them here to protect their secret.

One of them turned toward me. I didn’t wait to find out what it could do. Brunhilde was already moving, the edge of her sword bit clean through a joint that screamed when it broke, scattering shards across the snow that glittered like broken glass and did not melt.

“Cade!”

Tristan’s voice cracked through the chaos, relief and panic fighting for the same breath.

“Tell me you brought reinforcements and not just—”

“I brought myself. Be grateful.”

“That’s not—”

He cut a guardian’s arm off mid-sentence, didn’t even flinch.

“That’s not reinforcements, you’re just a liability with good timing! Where’s Kassie? Maggie?”

“Where’s the boy?”

One of Levi’s clones answered with a raw voice.

“Inside. Throne room, if you can call it that. We got maybe ten feet past the gate before these things came out of the walls, Cade, the actual walls— and then there’s this strangeness that suddenly arrived late to the party, not as late as you though.”

Levi turned to me with a small smile.

I gave him a dubious look.

“Perhaps, I wouldn’t have been so late, if you had remembered to take me along. And not leave it to chance.”

Levi smiled.

“You had a lot on your plate already. And to be honest, I didn’t expect you here. But since you’re here. Let’s claim this price and go back home Cade. We do have to deal with that damn Blod Mage don’t we?”

I had a lot of skepticism tugging at the borders of my mind. But I thought of what was more important, getting through this and making sure everyone was safe. This was after all, the people I considered family.

An exhausted sigh fell from me.

“Right, we have to.”

A guardian’s fist came down where his head had been a second earlier. He wasn’t there anymore. Good reflexes, bad luck — he’d dodged into Nisha’s blind spot, and something else was already closing on her from behind.

I didn’t think. I just moved, my flames were out before I’d fully decided, and put it through the thing’s back hard enough that the crystalline shimmer where its face should have been exploded with flames like a wall of glass that was hit by a detonating force.

Yet… the marionette didn’t die. It just looked at me as the exploded body crawled back together.

‘Oh, that’s not good.’

“Nisha, get behind me—”

“There’s more coming from the keep!” she shouted, and she wasn’t wrong. The broken gate was disgorging them in twos and threes now, the same wrong-jointed shapes pouring out of the dark like the building itself was bleeding them.

We were not winning this. We were surviving this, which was a different and much less comfortable category.

I risked a glance past the gate, past the guardians, into the black throat of the keep beyond—and froze.

There, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the wreckage, utterly untouched by the chaos exploding around him, was a boy. Maybe twelve. Pale as the snow outside, with veins of faint blue light running just beneath his skin like cracks in ice lit from within.

He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t even watching the fight.

He was watching me. And he was smiling.

“Oh,” he said, voice carrying with unnatural clarity over the screaming and the steel, “you’re not one of them.”

Before I could answer, before I could even process what one of them meant, the air around the boy shattered like the world itself was a pane of glass and something on the other side had just driven a fist through it.

And out of that widening crack stepped something that made every single guardian in the courtyard stop moving at once.