I Only Summon Villainesses

Chapter 504: Crushed From Above

[Summoner Status]

Name: Cade Marlowe

Rank: E

Spirit Essence: 1390/4000

Active Spirit: 4/6

[Main Attributes]

Summoner’s Touch (Advanced) Lv. 3

Infinite Vitality (Advanced) Lv. 1

Sculptor’s Gift (Advanced) Lv. 20

[Extra Attributes]

Emperor’s Dominion (Advanced) Lv. 1

Tactical Omniscience (Advanced) Lv. 1

Unshakeable Spirit (Advanced) Lv. 1

Voice of Authority(Advanced) Lv. 1

Heretical Pursuit (Advanced) Lv. 1

Chains of Agony (Advanced) Lv. 1

Condemnation (Advanced) Lv. 1

Bear Their Burden (Advanced) Lv. 1

Feather Step (Advanced) Lv. 1

Ethereal Grace (Advanced) Lv. 1

Fallen Divinity (Basic) Lv.1 : Corrupted holy magic that inverts blessing into curses, harm into healing and healing into harm.

Purifying Flame (Basic) Lv. 1 : A property that is capable of burning both corruption and divinity. This can be used with a flame type attribute.

Death Sense (Basic) Lv. 1: You can perceive life force intensity, detect dying/diseased, sense any range of killing intent no matter how suppressed.

Nerotic Touch (Basic) Lv. 1: Your touch can accelerate decay, age organic matter, cause withering wounds.

Now that I had a semblance of essence back, I had two options. One of them was to summon one of the villainesses. Facing a dragon on my own was, of course, the purest kind of madness.

But now that I was staring at the boon of attributes I’d managed to receive from Celestine’s arrival, I was starting to think that… maybe it wasn’t.

‘These abilities are sick. Surely they aren’t intoxicating me, right?’

No, I was sure they weren’t. I really didn’t have enough essence for that. Meanwhile, I now had the chance to leave three of the villainesses back in the Nave and let their time build up. All I had to do until then was survive, and soon enough I’d be able to see them again.

These were my thoughts even as I ran, boots slamming over cracked temple stone, the heat at my back pressing like the mouth of an open furnace. Behind me the dark flames the dragon had unleashed were still ravaging the whole land, the pillars, the broad stairs, the whole ruined sprawl of the place going black and folding in on itself.

I draped the Ethereal Grace over my shoulders and tapped Feather Step every few strides. Each time I did, the ground seemed to forget my weight for a breath, the next step landing paces further on than it had any right to, and that was the only reason I was still ahead of the thing at all.

The cloak had changed a lot once the attribute hit Advanced-tier. Now it sat against my body like a silky robe, cross-collared, cool at the back of my neck, closer to something you’d lounge in than a cape. It was, annoyingly, comfortable. Almost enough to give me the official standing of White Feather’s legal husband.

What I still hadn’t worked out was how to feel about a piece of cloth that cost essence just to wear. A cloak that billed me for the privilege. Maybe some other time. When I actually had essence to spare.

With the Ethereal Grace on me my movement came faster, and I blurred through the dark, the world smearing past in streaks of black and dull orange. But the dragon stayed relentless. Every time I thought I’d bought myself a stretch of clean ground, that roar came again from behind, closer than before, and the heat climbed another notch at my back. It was like being chased by a damn tsunami of darkness.

It had started out like a creature that had blundered into the temple by mistake, barely bothering to look at any of us, not seeing a single one as a threat worth the effort. And now, out of nowhere, it was hunting me down through its own fire like I’d wronged it personally.

‘Damn, it must be angry about that time.’

There was no other explanation.

“But then it didn’t even work! You sucked my essence dry, you cretin. Why the hell do you have to be mad too?”

‘Have you maybe considered that… maybe we were in its lair to begin with? And that we destroyed its home.’

“Shut up! You threw a stone at it. You have no right to say shit.”

‘I didn’t know it was real…’ She sounded ashamed, and suppressed.

‘I can’t believe this girl. She really meant that as an excuse?’

Even now, halfway through a dead sprint, I felt the urge to snap the sword in two across my knee and throw the halves into the fire behind me. This girl was nothing but a troublemaker. But I couldn’t. She was helpful.

Another thunderous roar tore across the landscape, low enough that I felt it come up through the soles of my boots, and another wave of black flame came rolling in from every direction at once. It came on like a flood.

I spun, and white flame was already climbing my hands, curling up past my wrists. I fed the purifying property into it and watched the fire deepen and burn gold, hot enough that the air in front of my face went to a shimmer.

I shaped it into a sphere around me and rolled it outward to meet the flood of black flame head-on. The two fronts hit with a sound like a wet forge being quenched, a hiss that swallowed the whole roar for a heartbeat. The next moment stopped me where I stood.

‘Oh shit…’

The dragon’s dark fire was being consumed, swallowed and dragged over into white wherever the two touched, and I could feel the reach of my control widening as more and more of the flood surrendered to me. But it cost. Every scrap I claimed pulled harder at my mind, a steady drag behind my eyes, and reached that much deeper into my essence. My grip on the sword had gone white-knuckled without my noticing, the hilt slick under my palm.

However, the scale of the thing was hopelessly against me. My revised white flames were dangerous, sure, spreading like a plague of their own, but the black fire had stretched over everything in sight, every direction, all the way to the edge of what I could see and past it. I ran the math without wanting to. Long before I finished purifying a flood that size, I’d be dried of essence all over again, standing empty in the middle of a burning field.

‘I can’t go down that route again.’

So I shot a single chain forward through the dark flames, the purifier riding the white fire down its length, link by link, the whole thing kicking against my arm as it drove ahead. Where it passed, a corridor tore open through the flood of obsidian fire, walls of black standing on either side of a narrow run of clear air.

I ran through it at everything Feather Step could give me, the heat pressing in from both walls, fast enough that I seemed to blink out and reappear at the far end. At the same moment, the dragon, gone for a breath, buried somewhere back in its own fire, was on me again.

This time there was no chase to it. It was instant. The light overhead went out like a lid coming down, a vast pressure dropped over me all at once, and riding it came the smell, thick and rotten, the reek of something long dead dragged up into the open, in the half-second before the thing took shape directly above me.

It came down with that meteoric might and smashed the ground, and me along with it — into smithereens.