I Only Summon Villainesses

The darkness wasn’t simply an absence of light, it pressed against us like a delinquent wall. Asides from the oppressive pressure that threatened to cause my knee to buckle, for a moment, it felt like the darkness itself had seeped into my lungs.

’Breathe!’

I expanded outward, letting my spirit sensitivity seep from my skin like heat, feeling the space around me the way a spider feels its web. The hangar hall stretched in my mind, vast and hollow, the geometry of it assembling itself in slow pulses. The pipes, walkways and the cold seam of a blast door somewhere to the left.

Then them.

Four. No — six. Spreading out as they moved, which meant they already knew exactly where we were.

Undoubtedly, they were the few people I had freed earlier and the remaining experts of the ship…

I held still and reached for them, pressing my Enhanced Senses tighter around their shapes to get a read — and that was when I felt it. Or rather, when I didn’t.

It was like pressing a hand against thick glass. My sensitivity found their bodies but couldn’t grip them. It slid off, scattered, returned nothing useful. No spirit signatures, no internal rhythm, nothing I could latch onto to predict a strike.

’What—’

Something caught me across the ribs before the thought finished.

I hit the floor on my shoulder and rolled, dragging the air back into my lungs through my teeth. Behind me I heard the sharp ring of metal on metal — White Feather, already engaged.

’The suits.’

I scrambled upright, blinking uselessly into nothing.

’The armored suits. How did I miss that.’

I hadn’t. That was the truth of it, the irritating and humbling truth. I had walked through this ship and registered the suits as intimidating aesthetics, the way one notices a large man’s broad shoulders without immediately thinking he could take a hit. I had assumed my sensitivity would cut through anything short of a summon.

It didn’t.

The second strike came low and fast. I felt the displaced air half a second before impact and twisted, taking the blow across the thigh instead of the knee. The force was enough to buckle me. These weren’t regular soldiers swinging standard issue — the suits amplified everything. Strength, speed, silence.

’Adapt. Now.’

I stopped reaching with my spirit and started listening with everything else. The floor. The sound of weight distribution. The subtle vibration that traveled through metal plating before a body committed to a step. I was no longer a predator reading prey — I was a blind man in a room he’d never been in before, counting edges by feel.

It was deeply unpleasant.

A third came in from the right and I dropped, letting the swing pass over my head, close enough that I felt the pressure of it graze my hair. I drove my elbow back and upward and connected with something — a joint, the inside of a knee, it didn’t matter — and the figure staggered a step back, feeling like he dodged the blow rather than took it.

’Of course the suit took it.’

Across the room, White Feather wasn’t fumbling. I could track her by sound alone — the precise, unhurried rhythm of her movement. No wasted motion. She wasn’t fighting like someone ambushed in the dark; she was fighting like the dark was a preference.

A body hit the floor on her side. Then another sound — something cracking at the seam.

She had found a way in.

I pulled my focus back to my own three and stopped trying to read them through the suits. Instead I read the room they moved through. The vibration in the floor grating. The direction of displaced air. The slight echo change when a body mass shifted position.

It was slower. Rough. Like writing with the wrong hand.

But it was something.

I let the nearest one come to me, backed toward the wall to remove one angle of attack, and waited. Felt the commitment in the step. Sidestepped and grabbed — not the body, the arm, the joint between suit panels at the elbow — and used the momentum they’d already committed to. They went into the wall hard enough that something in the suit gave a grinding complaint.

They didn’t go down, but they went away, which bought me a second.

One second was enough.

I reached inward and summoned Kassie.

The light of her appearance emerged even more ferociously than the usual, whipping against the entire darkness and releasing a shockwave that must have knocked everyone back.

Then she took form, her appearance was not visible even to me in the darkness, for a moment the I sensed a bit of the environment but the darkness quickly regained authority. However, the weight of her presence changed the space beside me. It was like a stone dropped into still water.

I felt her take in the situation in less than a breath.

She moved. Already moving, already—

“Kassie.”

She stopped.

The silence between us lasted exactly as long as it took her to understand that I was not asking for help.

’The crews… I need you to make them on our side no matter what, the survivors mustn’t get to them first.’

I said to her mentally.

It took a beat… where I felt her attention settle on the three still circling me, then on the two White Feather had not yet finished, then back to me — this specific and almost clinical inventory, the way she assessed a battlefield rather than a person.

Then she was gone. I felt her presence vanish from the room as cleanly as a candle snuffed, moving deep into the ship, carrying herself toward something more important than this.

Good.

I exhaled and turned back to my three, or what was left of my three. White Feather had quietly acquired one of them while I was otherwise occupied.

Two, then.

My ribs still ached where the first blow had landed and my thigh was singing something unpleasant, but I could feel the shape of the room now, properly, the way you eventually stop counting stairs in the dark and simply know them.

The suit to my left shifted weight. I read the floor before it read me.

I went first…

And going first, it turned out, was the only real advantage available to me.

The moment I surrendered waiting and moved, the calculus of the fight changed. They were built for pursuit, for closing distance on a target that was backing away and stalling for an opening. The suits made them powerful but they made them heavy, and heavy things don’t pivot quickly.

I drove into the left one before he’d finished reading my intent, got under the reach of his arm and stayed there, inside the radius where the suit’s strength became a problem for its wearer rather than for me. He couldn’t bring the force down at that angle. I could. I drove the heel of my palm up into the underside of his jaw — the one place I’d confirmed wasn’t sealed — and his head snapped back.

He went down on one knee.

I didn’t wait to watch him finish falling.

The second came in fast, faster than the first two had, and I realized with a cold and unhappy clarity that he’d been watching. Learning. The previous strikes, my positioning, the way I’d begun anticipating their weight distribution — he’d catalogued it and adjusted accordingly.

His first swing came from the angle I’d been avoiding instinctively all fight.

It caught me across the side of my head.

The floor came up in a specific sliding wrongness of a hard impact, as if the world lost its edges for a moment and everything became texture without shape. I caught myself on both hands, felt the metal grating bite into my palms, and held.

’Don’t go down. Don’t.’

The footstep vibration gave him away. He was coming to finish it, no hesitation, the kind of trained economy that didn’t allow for pausing over a downed target. I rolled left on instinct and the strike hammered the floor where I’d been.

I came up without thinking, without a plan, operating entirely on the information the floor was feeding me and the ringing in my skull. He pulled back for another, and I—

— felt a second presence move through him from the side.

White Feather didn’t announce her presence. There was no sound beyond the clinking of her little bells which was followed by a sharp impact of whatever she had done to the joint between his neck plate and shoulder guard, and then the suited figure was simply no longer standing. He hit the floor with the full and final weight of someone who had stopped deciding anything.

And silence enveloped the dark world for a moment. Becoming even more dreadful and treacherous. For a moment, I felt my senses overwhelmed by fright and I stayed where I was for a moment, on one knee, breathing through my nose.

The grating pressed into my knee cap. My palms stung. The side of my head where the blow had landed was beginning to insist on itself in a low and irritating throb.

’That one’s going to be there tomorrow.’

I heard White Feather move — not toward me, not checking, simply repositioning — and the soft sound of her crouching near one of the downed figures.

“Four,” she said quietly. It was not a report. It was simply a number, stated in the particular tone of someone who had already moved past caring about it.

“I got two,” I said.

“Lord Cade, I will take care of them all.”