I Only Summon Villainesses

Everything hurt, and I was getting used to it, which was probably a worse sign than the pain itself.

I lay on my back in the ash and the dirt, staring up through what was left of the canopy. The white-wood trees above me were scorched and cracked, their yellow-brown leaves curling from heat, but they were still standing. Stubborn things. I could relate.

My breathing was a wreck, every inhale scraped through my chest like dragging furniture across a stone floor, and my left arm had stopped hurting entirely, which meant it had either healed itself or gone numb enough to worry about later. The Frostfang was still planted in the beast’s skull three feet to my right, and I didn’t have the energy to pull it free.

I closed my eyes. Just for a moment.

The forest was quiet. Not the suspicious, playing-tricks-on-us silence from before, where footsteps came and vanished and the trees seemed to breathe on us. This was the silence that comes after violence. The kind where even nature needs a moment to figure out what just happened.

My enhanced senses were still extended. I hadn’t pulled them back after the fight, partly because I wanted to know if anything else was coming, and partly because I’d forgotten how to turn them off when I was this exhausted.

That was when I noticed it.

The spirit essence leaking from the beast’s corpse wasn’t dissipating. In any fight I’d been in, when a creature died, the residual essence bled off into the air and scattered. Whatever that was left of its essence could now be found in its spirit core, I believed. That was how it worked. I’d seen it with the Primals, with the apex beast that Maggie had torn apart. The essence leaves the body, thins out, disappears.

This wasn’t doing that.

The essence was sinking. Pulling downward, into the soil, like water soaking into dry earth. I could feel it through my enhanced senses, a slow, steady drain, the beast’s remaining energy being drawn down through the roots and the dirt and whatever was underneath.

I watched the ground near the corpse. The grass that had been burned to ash was already showing green tips. They were not much and barely visible, but my senses didn’t lie, and those hadn’t been there a minute ago.

I turned my head, wincing at the effort, and looked at one of the trees I’d cracked during the fight. The white bark was split open, the interior exposed. And the edges of the wound were darkening. Slowly, like watching a scab form in real time, the tree was closing the gash.

’Huh.’

I lay there and stared at it.

’That’s not normal.’

In the Academy, we’d been taught that spirit gates were dense with essence, that nature inside them was alive in ways that the outside world couldn’t replicate. This was what usually explained the growth of spirit crystals on the surroundings and the strange types of trees or extreme climate conditions that could be found in a gate.

But regenerating from the essence of its own dead creatures? Feeding on the corpse of its own sub-guardian?

’Na, we certainly weren’t taught that one.’

I exhaled and let the thought go. I was too tired to chase it, and my body was loudly informing me that philosophical observations about the nature of spirit gates were not a priority when several of my ribs were doing things ribs shouldn’t do.

Instead, I did what I always did when I felt like shit and missed home. I reached for Kassie.

I pulled on the link. Gently, because I remembered how it had been smothered before, drowned under the dense wall of spirit essence that filled this gate. I expected the same static, the same silence, the same trying-to-whisper-through-a-storm sensation.

The link opened.

It wasn’t clean but was clearer than it had been since we entered the gate. The fight must have burned through a significant amount of the ambient essence in this area, thinned it enough for the connection to push through. Or maybe Kassie simply did something impossible.

I felt Kassie, distant but there. She was a low, constant pulse of concern that had been pressing against the link for a while, unable to reach me until now.

’I’m alive,’ I sent through it, not in words exactly, but in feeling. ’Barely. But alive.’

And then, for the space of maybe half a second, I felt something else.

It wasn’t Kassie. It was behind her, or beneath her, or woven through the link itself. A presence, like something I couldn’t quite name. It was vast and felt like what had been the very essence of the gate that barricaded me from reaching Kassie in the first place, now it just felt like a thing that was watching… with no iota of hostility actually.

Like catching a glimpse of something enormous moving beneath deep water. My awareness brushed against it the way your hand brushes something in a dark room, and you pull back before you even know what it was.

Then it was gone. The link thinned again as ambient essence flooded back into the space the fire had cleared, and it was just static, just the storm swallowing the signal.

I blinked.

’What the hell was that?’

I lay there for a few seconds, waiting. The link was fading back to its usual smothered state, Kassie’s presence dimming behind the wall of essence. Whatever I’d felt was already slipping from memory, the way a dream dissolves when you try to hold it.

’I almost died three times. My brain is fried. That’s what that was.’

I closed my eyes and focused on breathing. Glass-swallowing breaths, but breaths.

The sound of something crashing through undergrowth snapped my eyes open.

I couldn’t move. Everything I had was spent. My right hand twitched toward where the Frostfang sat in the beast’s skull, but even that small motion sent fire through my shoulder.

Then the obsidian shape of Nisha’s beast burst through the scorched treeline, tentacles whipping through the air, teeth bared, searching for threats that no longer existed. It skidded to a halt near the beast’s corpse, sniffed it once, and then circled the clearing with that low, persistent snarl it had been doing since we entered this forest.

Nisha came through the trees a second later, holding her Cleavers and breathing hard. She scanned the clearing, saw the destruction, the burning trees, the ruined corpse, and then her eyes found me on the ground.

For a moment, she just looked at me. At the blood on my face, my ruined knuckles, my arm hanging wrong. At the massive dead thing with a sword in its skull. At the white fire still dying in patches across the clearing.

I could see the calculation happen behind her eyes. She was D-rank, and had been doing this longer than me. She had to know exactly what kind of fight left a person looking like this.

“Are you alive?” she asked with a flat tone.

“Mostly.” My voice came out like gravel being stepped on.

She walked over and crouched beside me. Her eyes swept my body, cataloging injuries with a detachment that was either impressive or insulting. Probably both.

“Your arm is dislocated. Maybe fractured. Your ribs are…” She paused, pressed two fingers against my side, and I sucked air through my teeth. “Broken. At least three.”

“I counted four.”

“You would.” She stood and looked at the beast. Then back at me. “You killed that thing… Alone? As an F-rank?”

“I don’t recommend it.”

She was quiet for a moment. Her beast had finished circling and was now standing near the corpse, tentacles drawn tight against its body. It wasn’t snarling at the dead creature. It was snarling at the forest. At the trees. At the same things it had been snarling at since we arrived.

’Smart animal.’

Nisha noticed it too. Her jaw tightened slightly.

“We need to move,” she said. “Can you stand?”

“Define stand.”

“Put your feet on the ground and stop being horizontal.”

“Give me a minute.”

She didn’t sit down. She stayed standing, Cleavers still in her hands, eyes scanning the treeline. Whatever had happened between us personally was shelved. Here, in this gate, even though she might have fallen under fear manipulation, she was still more experienced than I was.

I used my good arm to push myself up. The world tilted. Nisha caught me by the hips before I could collapse back to where I was coming from.

I managed to stabilize on one leg but she helped me gain more balance as I eventually straightened.

“The sword,” I said, gesturing at the Frostfang still buried in the beast’s skull.

Nisha walked over and pulled it free with one smooth motion. She looked at the blade for a second, at the white residue still clinging to the edge, then tossed it to me. I caught it with my good hand and immediately felt the cold race up my arm, numbing some of the pain.

“Nisha.”

“What?”

“The ground is eating the dead beast’s essence.”