I Only Summon Villainesses

“That’s not possible,” Milo said quietly. “The damage is still there. They’re not healing.”

He was right, they weren’t healing. The wounds were open, the frost was still eating into flesh, the injuries were real and visible and absolutely should have kept them on the ground. But they were standing anyway.

I put the big man down again. Harder this time. Frostfang took his good arm off at the elbow in a clean cut, and white fire sealed the stump before it could bleed. He hit the ground, rolled once, and started getting up with no arms.

With. No. Arms.

’What the hell is this?’

He was trying to stand using only his legs, his body lurching upward in jerking motions, the stumps of his arms swinging uselessly at his sides. The covered face turned toward me, and even though I couldn’t see his eyes, I could feel something behind the cloth that wasn’t human anymore. Wasn’t even trying to be.

“Cade, the ones over here too,” Milo called. His voice was controlled but tight. “I put two down and they’re both back up. One of them has a crushed sternum. I can see the depression in his chest. He’s still coming.”

I slashed through two more. They dropped. I counted to three in my head.

They started rising at four.

Every single one of them. The junction was filling back up with figures that should have been corpses, standing on broken legs, reaching with shattered hands, moving toward us with the same unhurried coordination they’d had at the start. No faster. No slower. Just relentless.

And their blood — I kept noticing it, couldn’t stop noticing it — their blood wasn’t behaving like blood. Where it should have sprayed, it clung. Where it should have pooled on the ground, it stayed inside the wounds like something was holding it there. Like it was being kept.

“Milo. We’re leaving.”

“We can’t get through. They’re covering every entrance.”

I glanced quickly and saw that the ones I’d dropped first had drifted back to block the tunnel mouths, filling the gaps the way water fills a container.

I counted again through Enhanced Sense. Still ten. All ten of them, standing, moving and closing the circle.

“Then we make an exit.”

I poured everything I had into Sanctified Immolation. The white flames surged up both arms and across Frostfang’s blade, burning hot enough to turn the shallow water at my feet to steam. The tunnel filled with hissing vapor and pale light.

I chose the narrowest tunnel entrance. Two of them stood in it, shoulder to shoulder. Good. Narrow meant they couldn’t flank.

“Stay on me. Don’t stop for anything.”

I charged.

The chain went first, Chains of Confession lashing out and wrapping around the torso of the one on the left. I yanked him into his partner, tangling them for half a second, and then I was on them with Frostfang wreathed in white fire. Two cuts. Both clean. Both deep enough that their bodies folded and hit the walls.

I didn’t look back to see if they got up. I already knew they would.

“Move!”

Milo was right behind me, his summon covering their rear. I could hear the sounds of the others pouring into the tunnel behind us, footsteps echoing off the stone, and there was something about the rhythm of those footsteps that made my skin crawl. Even and synchronized. Ten people moving at the exact same pace, like a single thing wearing ten bodies.

We ran.

The tunnel twisted left, then right, then split. I let Enhanced Sense guide me, reaching for any direction that didn’t have suppressed spirit essences waiting in it. Left fork, clear. I pulled Milo by the arm and we took it at a dead sprint.

Behind us, their footsteps followed with the same pace. Not getting any beat faster or slower, it was almost like a rhythm.

’Are they not chasing us?’

The unsettling curiosity landed cold in my gut and I crushed it before it could grow into something worse. Right now, thinking wasn’t the priority. Distance was.

We ran for what felt like five minutes through corridors that all looked the same — crumbling stone, shallow water, cracks of light overhead that got thinner and thinner the deeper we went. Milo’s breathing was ragged beside me. He wasn’t built for this kind of sustained sprint.

“How far?” he managed between breaths.

I checked Enhanced Sense. The suppressed essences were still behind us, still moving, still at that same steady pace. But they hadn’t gained ground.

“They’re not speeding up,” I said. “But they’re not stopping either.”

“What are they?”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

What I had was a junction ahead — another split, and beyond the right fork, my sense picked up something I hadn’t felt in the last fifteen minutes of running through these tunnels.

Open air.

“Right. Go right.”

We took the turn and the tunnel began to slope upward. The cracks in the ceiling widened. Actual light started filtering in, gray and dirty but real. The smell of the waterway hit us again — sewage and rot, the most beautiful stench I’d ever encountered, because it meant surface.

The exit was a collapsed section of the tunnel ceiling that opened into the alley between two leaning buildings. I boosted Milo up first, his hands scrabbling at the edges, then I jumped, caught the lip, and pulled myself through.

Daylight. Clotheslines overhead. The distant noise of Waterwind’s miserable population going about their miserable lives.

I turned and looked down into the hole we’d climbed out of.

The tunnel below was dark. Empty, for now. But Enhanced Sense could still feel them down there. All ten were still moving. But not toward the exit.

They were spreading out.

Going back into the tunnel system. As though they wanted to wait for the next person to come find them.

Milo was bent over with his hands on his knees, his glasses fogged, and chest heaving. He looked up at me.

“What… the hell… was that?”

I stared at the dark hole for another long moment. The steam from my dying flames was still rising off my arms.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But we need to get back to the Company. Right now.”

I grabbed his arm and pulled him upright, and we moved.

Behind us, beneath the streets of Waterwind, ten things that should have been dead resumed their patient patrol through the dark.