I Only Summon Villainesses

The third wave was nothing like the first two.

The first had been fodder. Low rank summons that were thrown at the defensive line to probe for weaknesses, expendable bodies meant to waste our essence and test our formation. The second had escalated, the larger creature included, but still followed a recognizable pattern.

The third wave came without pattern.

The ground split in three places simultaneously, and from each fissure poured summons that moved with coordinated aggression. Not the mindless shambling of the earlier waves. These things communicated. When one flanked left, the others adjusted. When a pocket of resistance formed, they converged on it from multiple angles.

The Night Guard barrier reformed, but I could see the strain in the summoners maintaining it. The shimmering wall of essence flickered at the edges, thinning where the pressure was greatest, and the creatures threw themselves against it with a relentlessness that suggested they’d been told exactly where to hit.

The barrier cracked.

And the crack ran from top to bottom like a fracture in ice, and through that fracture, summons poured into the gap between the Night Guard’s line and ours.

“Mercenaries forward!” Sergeant Kael’s voice cut through the chaos, and I could hear the particular venom she reserved for that word. Forward, in this context, meant into the gap. Plug the hole with bodies that cost nothing.

The mercenaries surged.

Some of them, anyway. The ones who’d already seen what one of those smaller summons could do hesitated. The ones who hadn’t charged with the blind confidence of the untested. Both groups died at roughly the same rate.

I moved with the line because moving with the line kept me close to the action, and close to the action was where information lived. Every minute of this battle taught me something about the Night Fall Order’s tactics, the Night Guard’s vulnerabilities, and the geography of these ruins.

All of which I needed if I was going to find the Auction.

A summon lunged at me from the rubble, a hunched thing with too many legs and a mouth that opened wider than its head should have allowed. The Frostfang took its front legs off at the joint, and a second stroke opened it from jaw to chest. It collapsed, twitching, frost crawling across the wound.

I didn’t slow down.

Two more came from the left. I pivoted, let the first one commit to its lunge, then stepped inside its reach and drove the Frostfang through the base of its skull. Used the dying creature’s body as a shield against the second one’s charge, felt the impact shudder up through the carcass and into my arms, then kicked the whole mess sideways and split the second creature’s face open before it could recover.

It was efficient and clean with no wasted essence. Just steel and footwork.

’Three hours in. Nine to go. Conserve.’

Ahead of me, the line was buckling. Mercenaries were falling back, some wounded, some just terrified, and the gap in the Night Guard’s barrier was widening as summons poured through faster than the defenders could kill them.

That was when Sulin moved.

I’d been aware of her position throughout the fight, the same way I was aware of everyone’s position. She’d been standing near the back of the mercenary line with her arms crossed, watching the carnage with the patience of someone waiting for the right moment to step onto a stage. She didn’t draw any weapon, and just stood there with those red eyes tracking the flow of battle like she was reading a river’s current.

The moment came when a cluster of summons broke through a section of the line twenty feet to my right. Three mercenaries went down in rapid succession, claws and teeth and a spray of blood that painted the rubble, and the creatures pressed into the opening with the eager momentum of predators sensing a rout.

Sulin uncrossed her arms.

She covered the twenty feet in something that wasn’t a run. It was closer to a glide, low and impossibly smooth, her feet barely touching the ground. The first summon didn’t see her until her palm was already against its chest, and by then it was too late.

The impact was wrong. Not the sharp crack of a physical blow, but something deeper. A pulse that I felt through the soles of my boots. The creature’s chitin caved inward like it had been hit by a battering ram, and the thing flew backward into its pack hard enough to scatter them.

But it was the next part that made me pay real attention.

Where her palm had connected, veins of red light spread across the creature’s carapace. They pulsed once, twice, and on the third pulse the creature’s body simply… came apart. It was as if the structural integrity of the thing had been told to stop existing, and every joint, every seam, every connection between parts surrendered simultaneously.

The scattered creatures regrouped, five of them now circling Sulin with the cautious spacing of pack hunters that recognized a threat. She stood in the center of their ring without apparent concern, her hands loose at her sides, her hair shifting in the wind from the barrier’s fluctuations.

The first one lunged and she caught its jaws with one hand, the red light racing through her fingers and into the creature’s skull. It went rigid. Then limp. She let it drop and was already inside the guard of the second, her other palm striking its throat. Red veins pulsed and the entire thing collapsed.

She killed the remaining three in less time than it took me to process what I was seeing.

There was no wasted motion in her movement, each strike landed where it would do the most structural damage, and the bloodline ability, whatever it was, did the rest. It was like watching someone disassemble machinery with their bare hands.

’Alright, I better not let her touch me.’

On the opposite flank, Jose finally decided to participate.

He’d been standing on top of a chunk of fallen wall, his spear resting across his shoulders like a farmer carrying a hoe, watching the battle with an expression that suggested mild intellectual curiosity at best. His green hair caught the light from the barrier’s fluctuations, and honestly, he looked like he was debating whether any of this was worth the effort.

It was when a particularly large summon, a four-legged thing built like a siege engine, charged the mercenary line that Jose sighed, pulled his spear off his shoulders, and stepped off his perch.

He dropped and landed in the creature’s path. The spear came off his shoulders and into a low guard with the economy of a man who’d done this ten thousand times before. The creature didn’t slow.

Jose’s free hand came up and three lances of condensed green light materialized in the air above him, each one roughly his height and humming with an energy that raised the hair on my arms from thirty feet away. They hung there for a fraction of a second, perfectly still, and then punched forward into the charging creature with a sound like ripping canvas.

The first lance took its front left leg off at the shoulder. The second buried itself in its chest cavity. The third went through its open mouth and out the back of its skull.

The creature’s own momentum carried it forward another ten feet before it realized it was dead, plowing a furrow in the stone before collapsing in a heap at Jose’s feet. He stepped to the side to avoid the spray of dark fluid, still looking faintly annoyed, and planted the butt of his spear on the ground.

“Can they send something like the one that guy killed?” he asked, to no one in particular.

Two more summons came at him from the left. Jose planted his feet, rotated his spear in a single fluid arc, and took both their heads in one stroke. The green light trailed behind the blade like an afterimage, and where it passed, the air sizzled.

The three of us were cutting into the Night Fall Order’s wave from different angles now, and the effect was immediate. The pressure on the mercenary line eased. Creatures that had been pushing forward began to hesitate, splitting their attention between the easy prey of the regular mercenaries and the three points of focused violence that were carving holes in their advance.

I kept the Frostfang in constant motion. Cut, step, pivot, cut. The blade sang through chitin and muscle with the cold efficiency that Kassie had drilled into me, and each kill cost me nothing but physical effort.

It continued like that… until the fourth hour brought something different.