I Only Summon Villainesses

”You see... you... you’re a fraud. And I’ve figured you out.”

A clearly uncomfortable frown settled on his face.

I straightened and spat out the blood in my mouth. A grin was stuck on my face and I could tell that that grin, the look I had on, wasn’t something he quite expected. Not after knocking me down so much.

”A fraud...”

The word seemed to taste wrong in his mouth.

”Mm-hm.”

I rolled my shoulder. It clicked in a place shoulders weren’t meant to click and I made a point of not letting that show on my face.

”See, I’ve been hitting you this whole time. And it’s been like punching a wall. A smug wall. And at first I thought, well, the guy’s just tougher than me. Fair. Makes sense. Look at me, I’m held together with spite and bad decisions right now.”

He said nothing. He was watching my hands.

”But that’s the thing...”

I went on, taking a slow step to the side, keeping him turning with me.

”A tough man, you hit him enough times in the same place, eventually something gives. Bone bruises, the skin splits. The bodies can be honest like that, you know. They keep score whether you want them to or not.”

I gestured loosely toward him, toward all of him, standing there unmarked.

”You’re not keeping score. Everything I throw at you just... stops. Like it hit something that isn’t you before it ever got to the part that is you.”

For the first time, the frown deepened into something real.

I was freaking right.

When my fist had connected with his jaw earlier, the one clean hit I’d landed, it had felt wrong. It had felt like hitting him through a held breath. Through a sheet of something invisible that swallowed most of the force before it reached the man underneath.

Whatever the thing around him was, it was picky about what it let in.

From there, I had a few options to consider. But all of them revolved around the fact that he was a Divine Summoner.

So in that case, I exhaled slowly and pulled something of divinity against him.

The cold around me changed first. That was always how it started, the air drawing tight, the temperature of the night bending toward me like the dark was leaning in to watch.

Then the White Flames bloomed across my right hand.

It crawled up over my knuckles and wrapped around my fingers and curled past my wrist. White Flames burned without smoke, without the greedy flicker of normal fire, and it cast the snow around my feet in a pale, washed-out glow that didn’t belong to any natural light.

And of course... it did not burn me.

It never burned me.

Altharion’s eyes moved to it and stayed there.

Something crossed his face that I hadn’t seen the whole night. Not fear, he was too far above that. If I could name it, it was like the specific stillness of a man who has just heard a sound he wasn’t expecting in a house he thought was empty.

A coy smile played out on my face.

”Oh, you seem to know what this is.”

He didn’t answer.

”You feel it, don’t you. That little wall you’ve got. It doesn’t know what to do with this one.”

His hand twitched toward where his axes were planted in the snow behind him.

I didn’t give him the time.

I drove forward off my back foot and put everything I had left, every cracked rib and screaming muscle and half-working arm, behind the fist that was wrapped in white fire, and I aimed it at the center of his chest like I meant to put it out the other side.

The air around him thickened. I felt it the instant before contact, that same swallowing pressure, the held-breath wall rising to meet me, the thing that had eaten every blow I’d thrown all night.

The flame met it first.

And the flame did not stop.

There was a sound, a sound I can only describe as something tearing twith a high, brittle shriek like glass under a boot, and the pale fire bit straight through the invisible barrier as though it simply refused to acknowledge that the barrier was there.

My fist followed it in.

And landed. Properly too.

Flush against his sternum, with all of me behind it, no buffer, no held breath, no smug wall. Just him and the fire and the full weight of every decision that had led me to be standing in the snow on a freezing night attacking a man who could kill level 9 Apex beasts with his bare hands. And also claimed to be my friend by the way.

The impact threw him off his feet.

He left the ground.

For one beautiful, unreasonable second, Altharion, who had walked out of a hurricane of Apex-tier beasts, who had stood unscathed while a Calamity’s teacher buried him under mountains of ice, was airborne, folding around my fist, the white fire flaring across his chest where it had touched him.

He hit the snow and skidded.

Came to a stop on one shoulder, ten meters back, smoke rising off the front of his clothes where the divine flame had kissed him. The fabric there was scorched through. The skin underneath had a mark on it.

A real mark.

The first one I’d put on him with my own hands all night.

He lay there for a second.

Then, slowly, he pushed himself up onto one elbow. He looked down at his own chest, at the burn, at the place where his ability had simply failed to protect him for the first time in what was probably a very, very long while.

He touched it.

Pressed two fingers against the scorched skin and pulled them back and looked at them, the same way he’d looked at the blood from his side, but this was different. There was no calm in it now.

His smile was gone.

It had been gone before, but this was past that. That mask he had been wearing all the while was cracking... and something underneath where the smile used to live was finally surfacing.

I stood there with my fist still burning, breathing hard, blood dripping off my chin into the snow and a smug grin plastered to my face.

”Yeah. Hurts when it actually reaches you, huh?”

He raised his head.

And the look he gave me made every nerve in my body go very, very still.

Because all night, he had been playing. Patient, amused, conversational, taking his time with something he had already decided he could break. I had been a curiosity. An afterthought with a stubborn habit of standing back up.

That was over now.

He rose to his feet without hurry, but the lightness was gone from how he moved. The performance was gone. The casual flip of the axes, the rolling neck, the patient smile, all of it had drained out of him and left behind something quieter and infinitely worse.

He looked at me the way you look at a problem you have finally, belatedly, decided to solve.

The warmth in his voice vanished.

”Well, now that does change things.”

He reached back.

This time, he picked up his axes.

Both of them, lifted clean out of the snow, one in each hand, and the way the cold night light ran along their edges made my stomach do something unpleasant.

’Okay, I think that must have hurt him more than expected.’ I thought, looking at the white fire still wrapped around my fist, at the man who had just stopped pretending.’

I shifted my weight. Felt every injury argue with me at once.

’Now comes the part where he makes me regret it.’

The flame on my hand flared a little brighter.

And Altharion came.