I Only Summon Villainesses

For a moment, there was an unsettling silence that wrapped the air like a cloak.

The Aerial Corps, marching towards us with their heads leaned over their guns, halted and held their positions. An anticipatory heart drummed faster in that moment of cold reprieve.

Then an azure light gleamed in their glass visors, and they broke into a brutal charge. The first broke away and fell into a feral race, leaping over a great distance and bolting towards us in a single breath.

White Feather stood still, her robes flowing with the gentle ocean wind.

“Lord Cade, I will carve a path for you, and you will walk.”

’Uh?’

She extended her hand, and a whirlwind of sparks flew around it, forming an invisible length, then merging into an extremely beautiful silver blade with a guardless hilt that was carved with tiny feathers scattered around it. A chain of three beads dropped from the pommel of the sword.

White Feather twirled the fine sword, and the bells clinked together. The next instant, three feathers were all that was left of her.

She appeared in the sky with her sword extending upward, then she descended, and the entire ship shuddered.

A hard grin broke out on my face as I watched from afar.

Befitting her name, she moved across the corps like a weightless feather. Her sword radiated with a silvery sheen as she weaved through their lines. Her strikes could barely be seen, but as she moved, her blade drew silver lines before they connected with her opponents.

On one clash, a ring of shockwave exploded outward. The soldier paused, looking down at his torso where the sword had diagonally cleaved through his armor, leaving a deep groove in it.

A second later, as if the man’s body belatedly realized it had been cut, blood burst forth into the open air.

But White Feather was gone — three feathers drifting in the space where she had been, spinning slowly with the ocean wind before they dissolved into nothing.

The soldier staring at his split armor hadn’t even registered yet that she was already behind the formation.

She appeared with a single clink of the bells.

Two soldiers turned in the same breath — their reaction timing was something worth noting, actually — and the second one nearly caught her with a sweep of his rifle stock. She bent beneath it with the unhurried ease of someone who had already counted the angle, and her blade drew a short silver line across his side. He folded.

’She really isn’t the same person she was when we met. Or is this how devastating she is with enough essence to spare…’

I stood back with my arms loosely folded and watched her work through them.

She teleported again with drifting feathers and landed atop a soldier’s shoulders, her weight barely registering before she was already gone. He stumbled forward into the man beside him. Her sword caught the third before the collision finished.

The pattern was beautiful — brutal in its own particular way, the way a thing is brutal when it is also completely effortless.

Then one of the corps soldiers paused.

Instead of charging or swinging, he put his back to his closest unit partner and stood still, and the azure light behind his visor shifted, it pulsed briefly, then steadied. His partner mirrored the stance.

’That’s different.’

White Feather appeared between them.

The soldier on the left didn’t look for her. He had already swung. The rifle butt caught her sword arm hard enough that the clink of the bells went jagged — a harsh clatter instead of a clean ring — and she staggered one step, her robes catching the wind at the wrong angle.

The second one drove the butt of his weapon toward her ribs.

She vanished with another spray of feathers.

But they were already rotating, and the one on the left pointed directly at where the feathers had appeared. His partner swung to cover the opposite angle.

’Wait… is that… are they…’

Reading her feathers. It seemed that these fellas were using the drifting of White Feather’s feathers as some sort of compass to detect her next location.

’If my suspicion is correct, this will be a fatal weakness. And how did they even get to know about it?!’

After all, it wasn’t a weakness one could easily see within a few minutes.

Either these corps soldiers were peerless geniuses, which was quite unlikely, or they had information on White Feather, which was very likely.

She appeared three meters to the left of where the feathers drifted, a precise shift in the pattern, and the blade flashed once — fast enough that I barely caught it—catching the pointing soldier across the forearm. He kept his footing, gave ground, and his partner was already moving to cover.

White Feather stood for just a moment, her weight balanced, looking at them with an expression I couldn’t read from this distance.

The rest of the corps was regrouping. What had been individual soldiers scattered across the deck was compressing, quietly, into something more deliberate. More than one visor pulsed with that same blue rhythm.

’They’re sharing what those two figured out.’

I unfolded my arms, slowly cracked my neck, and glanced back at Gilbert.

“Like I said… stay in place.”

As I said that to him, a great force rippled against the surface of the ship and made the metallic beast quiver as though it were alive and beholden to immense fear.

I turned back for a moment, but when I returned my head…

…the world had gone still.

Twenty meters of deck had simply ceased. The ocean wind continued beyond its edges, but within that circle, three feathers hung suspended at the exact angle the breeze had caught them — perfect and unmoving, as if someone had decided to paint this particular moment and hadn’t finished.

A soldier mid-charge had his boot lifted an inch from the surface. Another had his rifle half-raised, visor frozen in the middle of its azure pulse.

Even the sounds had stopped.

White Feather walked through them, and her blade drew its silver lines in the silence. The soldiers she passed stood perfectly still and received what was coming to them without knowing it yet.

By the eighth one, I had stopped counting.

She returned to where she had stood when it began. Then she lowered the sword.

Time came back like a door swinging open.

The feathers finished their drift and dissolved. The raised boot completed its stride. The half-raised rifle finished its rise.

Then, one after another, the soldiers registered what their bodies had already endured and crumpled. Some tried to catch themselves. Most didn’t manage it. The sounds of armor meeting the deck arrived in a slow, rolling sequence, like the last notes of something.

White Feather didn’t move.

Not for two full seconds. Sword arm extended with its weight forward, her robes were still mid-billow in a wind that had already moved on — a mirror image of herself, locked in place while the world continued without her.

I had seen the effect of using an overwhelmingly powerful signature ability on Maggie before, enough to know what that was.

White Feather went still, and the stillness told me everything.

’She gave a lot for that.’

The two seconds ended. She straightened with a slow, deliberate grace that was its own kind of cost accounting, then glanced back at me with an expression that conceded nothing.

“The path is clear, Lord Cade.”

“So it is.”

Gilbert had appeared at my shoulder at some point. He was, for once, completely wordless, staring at the cleared deck with his mouth slightly open and his usual avarice entirely absent, replaced by something that looked uncomfortably close to reverence.

It lasted about four seconds.

“…I want one.”

“You can’t have one. Not this one.”