I Only Summon Villainesses

Everything about Altharion literally changed.

He came onto me... strong. The casual man who had been spinning his axes and giving speeches was gone, and the thing that replaced him crossed the snow like the distance had personally offended it. The first axe came down at my collarbone in an arc that would have split me to the hip.

I wasn’t there.

Feather Step. One pace, no more, a single stuttering shift of the world that put me half a body-length to his left before the axe finished falling. It bit into the snow where I’d been standing and threw up a spray of white.

’Still works. Good.’

That was the thing I’d figured out, lying in the snow getting my organs rearranged. Whatever he did to my hits, whatever ate them before they landed, it only touched what I sent at him. It didn’t touch what I did to myself. The Step was mine. He couldn’t refuse a thing I was only doing to my own body.

So I could move.

Moving just wasn’t going to be enough.

I reached for the old reliable, the pressure, the weight of presence I’d dropped on men until their knees buckled, and I shoved it at him like a wall coming down.

It hit something in front of him and slid off. Just slid off, like rain off oiled leather, like it had never been pointed at him at all. He didn’t even slow.

’Yeah. Figured that wouldn’t be it.’

The second axe was already coming, a flat horizontal cut at my ribs, and I lit my arm on the way up.

White fire crawled from my shoulder to my fist in the space of a breath, and I drove my forearm into the haft of the axe instead of trying to dodge it. The divine flame met that swallowing sheet of his and tore through it with that same brittle shriek, and the haft cracked where my burning arm hit it. The blow that should have folded me in half lost half its weight. It still threw me sideways and I felt one of my ribs do something it would complain about later.

But I was inside now.

Inside the reach of the axes. The only place a man with no weapon and one working trick had any business being.

I grabbed a fistful of his collar with my off hand and brought my flaming fist up into the underside of his jaw.

It connected. Through the sheet, through the negation, white fire snapping his head back and scorching a line up his chin.

Then I bit him.

Not poetic. Not clever. I had a grip on his collar and his face was right there, so I sank my teeth into the meat of his cheek and pulled, and I felt the skin tear and tasted copper that wasn’t mine for once, and he made a sound that was finally, finally not bored.

His knee came up into my stomach and the world went white at the edges. His free hand closed in my hair and ripped my head back and I felt skin lift off my scalp. He drove his forehead down into the bridge of my nose and something there gave with a wet crunch, and the cold night filled up with the iron flood of my own blood running into my mouth.

I spat it into his eyes.

He flinched. Just for a beat. A man can’t help it, blood in the eyes, even a thing like him blinks, and that beat was all I had so I took it. I jammed my burning thumb toward his eye.

He twisted. I caught the brow instead of the socket and the flame seared a black line across it, and the smell that came off it was foul, hair and skin and something sweeter underneath. He roared and threw me.

I left the ground.

Hit a tree. The same kind of tree that had been collecting me all night. My back screamed and I slid down the trunk into the snow and for a moment my legs were a rumor I’d heard once.

Across from me, he straightened.

And then he changed.

I watched it happen. His shoulders set wider, his stance dropped lower, and the air around him thickened until it bent the pale light coming off my dying flames. The cut on his cheek where I’d bitten him stopped bleeding. The burn on his brow stopped smoking. His skin took on a quality like the surface of something poured and cooled, and when he flexed his hand around the cracked axe haft, the crack I’d put there sealed itself shut.

’Oh. He can do that too.’

Reinforcement. He’d been holding it back. The whole night, that smug patience, he’d been fighting me with the negation alone and hadn’t bothered to make himself harder.

He’d bothered now.

He came at me against the tree and there was no speech this time, no offer, no mercy in it. The axe came down and I Stepped, the flame on my fist gone, costing me everything I had left to summon it again, and I lit it cheaper this time, smaller, just enough to wrap the knuckles, and I drove it up under his arm into the soft place beneath his shoulder.

The fire reached him. It always reached him. That hadn’t changed.

But it took longer this time. I felt it. The sheet around him had gone thicker, denser, and the flame had to chew through more of it before it found skin, and that half-second of chewing was a half-second I spent inside the range of a man who was now made of something close to stone.

His elbow caught my temple and the night tilted hard.

I stayed up. Barely. Martyr’s blood in me wouldn’t let me drop, that I’d take, that worked on me and not on him.

I stood there swaying, blood pouring off my chin into the white, one fist still wearing a thin coat of fire that was burning through the last of what I had.

And Altharion looked at me with both eyes now, the burned one already healing, and there was nothing patient left in his face at all.

”Fine,” he said coldly.

”Let’s do it properly, then.”