I Only Summon Villainesses

It was the exact reaction I expected from Nisha. Which meant I hadn’t been overtly suspicious when I noticed the woodland itself drawing the psoriasis essence from the fallen faun and using it to restore the devastated surroundings.

More than that, Nisha was looking around, and the havoc she had seen just a moment ago was less devastating than before.

The woodland truly was healing itself.

Her gaze lingered on it, shock bleeding the color from her expression until she looked almost hollow.

’Interesting…’

I gave a small knowing smile.

“Isn’t it?” I glanced around. Where the white flames had scorched the trunks black during the fight, the bark was shedding. Peeling away in thin curls like dead skin, exposing fresh white wood underneath that looked as if nothing had ever touched it.

Above, new leaves were unfurling from the canopy, slow but spreading steadily across the ceiling line of the forest. Yellow and brown filling the gaps my fire had burned through.

And closest to where the faun’s body lay, the ground itself was different. Grass was pushing through soil that had been bare dirt thirty seconds ago, growing toward the corpse like roots reaching for water.

Green reclaiming what the fight had scorched, except it wasn’t reclaiming. It was feeding.

“But are anomalies like this common?”

Nisha’s eyes went distant for a moment, then she refocused.

“Not quite. There are only two known anomalies: locked gate and variant gate.” She held up a finger. “The first is the instance where the gateway disappears immediately once someone enters, so once you’re in, there’s no way out.” A second finger. “The second is more dangerous. Usually, the spirit beasts inside a gate are closely related to each other. But in a variant gate, the species are very distant from one another and constantly hunt each other.”

I pulled a face.

“No order then. Doesn’t that work in our favor?”

Nisha gave me a patient look.

“Think about the implication of beasts having to kill each other to survive. There might be very few of them in the gate, but those very few…”

“Will be the ones that managed to come out on top of a brutal hunt. Which means they’ll be freaking strong.”

Nisha nodded, and letting me lean against her, we both pressed forward.

“So this gate is another new anomaly now. Is that what this means?”

Nisha said nothing, but something shifted behind her eyes, a calculation she wasn’t sharing.

“Let’s regroup with Milo first. You need to get treated too, Odelia will heal you. Then we can discuss what exactly is going on.”

I looked down for a moment.

’Looks like I might eventually have to summon Maggie. Damnit, I really wanted this to go well and for me to do it alone.’

The surroundings drew my gaze a moment longer. I stared at the trees and grasses around us, and for some reason, they seemed unfamiliar.

The white trunks still rose the same fifteen feet, the yellow-brown canopy still blotted out the sky above, but something was off. The scorched clearing where I’d killed the faun should have been behind us. To our left. I was certain of it.

But when I glanced back, there was nothing but unbroken forest, white trunks standing in tight rows as if no fight had ever happened there.

Not wrong, exactly. Just… rearranged while I wasn’t looking.

“Nisha…”

“Yes,” she answered indifferently as we walked.

I squinted. “Where exactly are we going again?”

She stopped too, and looked around.

“Where did I come from again?” she muttered to herself, her eyes searching the treeline.

I exhaled and let out a short laugh.

She looked at me with a frown. “You’re laughing. Why are you laughing?”

“I mean, think about it. This damn forest just lost us, didn’t it?”

Nisha stared at me, frowning, clearly struggling to find what was funny about that.

“Okay, so?”

“I mean, don’t you see? This bastard is the enemy all along.”

Nisha looked at me like I was smoking something foul.

“What do you mean? These things may have a flow of essence and react to essence, but they are not sentient enough to act individually.”

I gave her a flat look.

“And yet, this one just absorbed the beast I killed, its supposed protector by the way, and even went and shifted our surroundings. This was not where we were standing a few seconds ago, was it?”

Nisha didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. Her silence was admission enough.

She looked around once more and then sighed.

“Well, what do we do other than press forward.”

I clicked my tongue.

“I can just burn down the entire forest though?”

Nisha considered it for a moment, her gaze sweeping the canopy.

“And then what?” She paused, still looking at me. “Do you even have the essence to pull that off? You looked like you spent quite a lot on destroying that thing.”

My eyes drifted from her. I shook my head and shrugged.

“What needs to be done should be done nonetheless. Let me burn down the woodland.”

Nisha still seemed hesitant.

“Our purpose here is to sneak in and sneak out.”

I felt my jaw tighten.

’You should be grateful enough that I’m deciding not to bring up how stupidly you got manipulated by fear and were willing to fight me.’

I suppressed my urge to grimace and instead held her gaze with a straight face.

“I think since we saw the strangeness of this place, sneaking in and sneaking out kind of isn’t the point anymore. Survival is.”

She studied me for a moment. “How about we walk forward and see how things proceed first. If it seems to not be getting better, we can then try to burn down the forest.”

I thought about it for a moment, then agreed.

To be honest, I didn’t think I had enough essence to burn the forest either. What I really wanted was to see the woodland’s reaction to a large portion of it going up in flames.

After that, I was going to pass the baton to Maggie.

“Alright then… I’ll give you twenty minutes.”