I Only Summon Villainesses

They coiled around the hilt and ripped it out of the ground and the blade came screaming through the air toward my outstretched hand.

The beast tore the chains from its face and hurled me downward. I hit the ground so hard I bounced, but my fingers were already closing around the Frostfang’s grip as it arrived, and the cold of the blade raced up my arm and into my chest and something clicked into place.

The cold met the fire.

I don’t know how to describe what happened inside me in that moment. The frost of the blade and the remnants of the white flame in my body didn’t cancel each other out. They fed each other. The cold sharpened the fire and the fire heated the cold and something in between surged up through my arms and into the sword until the Frostfang blade was glowing white, wreathed in flame that burned cold and hot at the same time, frost crystals forming and evaporating along the edge in the same instant.

As I stood, the beast charged but I gripped the Frostfang with both hands quickly and met it.

The first cut opened a gash across its reaching arm, and fire poured into the wound like water into a crack. The beast screamed and swung with the other arm, and I ducked under it and brought the blade around in a two-handed slash that carved across its stomach. Not a boxer’s hit this time. A swordsman’s cut, long and deep, and the white flames that erupted from the wound didn’t just burn. They spread across the beast’s torso like frost spreading across glass, blazing lines that traced the map of every crack I’d punched into its hide earlier.

Every weak point I’d created with my fists became a channel for the fire.

The beast staggered. It swung wildly and I parried with the flat of the blade. The impact jolted through my arms but I held. I pivoted and slashed across its knee, the same one I’d destroyed before, and the newly healed joint came apart again under the burning edge. The beast buckled.

I pressed forward. Two-handed overhead slash into its shoulder, splitting the hardened hide and burying the blade halfway to its collarbone. Flames erupted from the wound and the beast’s entire left arm went limp. It tried to grab me with its right, and I ripped the sword free and cut the hand off at the wrist.

White chains exploded from me again, not the last-gasp threads from before but real chains, thick and burning, fed by whatever new well of essence the sword had opened. They lashed around the beast’s legs, its remaining arm, its torso, its horns, wrapping and tightening and pulling taut until the creature couldn’t move.

It fought them. Of course it fought them. The chains groaned and strained and two of them snapped with sounds like breaking glass. But more replaced them, and the white fire burning along each link was eating into its hide at every point of contact.

The beast roared. The green light in its eyes blazed desperately.

I walked toward it. The Frostfang burned in my hands, white fire racing along the blade, and the chains held the creature in place, and I felt like death walking. Not the good kind. The kind that should have died three times tonight and was still standing through nothing but refusal.

I raised the sword with both hands.

“I told you to stay down.”

I drove the blade down through the top of the creature’s skull.

The white fire detonated.

It erupted from the wound and raced through every crack, every chain-burned mark, every gash and cut and blistered patch across the beast’s entire body. The flames didn’t just burn on the surface anymore. They burned inward, through muscle and bone, lighting the creature up from the inside until white fire blazed from its eyes, its mouth, the gaps between its horns. The chains tightened one final time and the beast’s body seized, every muscle locking rigid.

Then it collapsed.

The green glow died. The chains dissolved into fading embers that drifted upward through the smoke. The white fire burned for a few seconds longer, consuming the last of what it could find, and then it too went out, leaving behind a scorched and ruined thing that no longer resembled the forest’s guardian.

[You have killed a Primal (Tier 4++++++++) Spirit Beast, Ironhorn Faun]

[You have received Primal Horn]

I stood over it, both hands still on the sword hilt, and I couldn’t let go. Not because I was making a statement. Because my fingers had locked and I didn’t have the strength to open them.

My legs gave out.

I dropped to my knees beside the creature, the Frostfang still planted in its skull, and the forest around me was burning and quiet and I was still alive and I didn’t understand how.

I stayed there. Breathing, every inhale felt like swallowing glass, but air was moving in and out and that was enough.

The flames in the forest were dying. Without my essence to feed them, the white fire had nothing left. The natural trees were too green, too alive, too soaked with whatever power this creature had poured into them to burn for long.

I looked down at the beast. At its ruined face, the horns still attached, the eyes dark and glassy.

“You were strong,” I said. My voice was barely there. “You were really strong.”

I finally managed to pry my fingers off the sword hilt. Fell the rest of the way to the ground. Lay on my back in the ash and dirt, staring up through the canopy at the sky.

Everything hurt.

I started laughing. I don’t know why. It hurt so bad that the laughing made me cough and the coughing made me groan and the groaning made me laugh again and I lay there like a broken idiot in the ashes of a burning forest, next to the thing that had almost killed me three separate times, and I laughed until I couldn’t anymore.