I Only Summon Villainesses

The word left Ilse’s mouth and the pass came apart.

Kassie went up. She launched, one boot off the frozen stone and then she was a streak of red haze tearing up the throat of the pass toward the rim where Altharion stood, and the whole ring of different beasts summons came down to meet her at once.

They ranged from different kinds, the hideous ones to the visible terrifying ones, carved out of stone, mangled flesh and even vines.

That was the point of them. I understood it the instant I saw it. Altharion didn’t move. He stayed exactly where he was, with his hands at his sides, and let his army fall into the space between himself and the thing rising to kill him.

They were all wall of bodies. Meatshields.

’Bastard, how did he even get those?’

It would have stopped almost anything.

Of course, my Kassie was not just anything.

She was an unstoppable, eventual storm.

The first summon to reach her was a thing of grey stone, arms crossed over its face to take the blow the way you’d brace against a storm.

Kassie’s greatsword went through its crossed arms, through its face, through the rock of its chest, and out the other side without slowing, and the two halves of it were still falling away when she hit the next one.

She didn’t aim for weak points. She didn’t look for seams. Whatever clever defense each of them carried — stone skin, dissolving flesh, the trick of going hard or going soft — none of it mattered, because Kassie wasn’t fighting their gimmicks. She was fighting their mass, and there has never been a defense invented that survives enough force applied to it.

’She’s not even slowing down.’

She tore a lane straight up through the shield wall, red sparks raining off her blade, bodies coming apart on either side of her in clean, brutal halves.

Brunhilde went up the other side of the pass in her shadow, and where Kassie broke them, Brunhilde finished them — a touch of frost to the ones that tried to re-form, the eel’s old trick turned against a dozen lesser copies, freezing them solid before they could pour themselves back together.

With force on one wall and cold on the other, the shields died between them.

And Kassie reached the top with her sword already swinging, the whole weight of her ruin focused into one strike aimed at the smiling man who had stood there and watched his army get devastated.

The strike that should have ended it.

Altharion met it with an axe.

I heard the impact from the floor of the pass — a flat, ringing crash that shook snow off both walls — and when the haze cleared, Kassie’s greatsword was caught against the head of a black double-bladed axe, and Altharion was holding it there. One hand. Smiling.

’...No... way.’

Yes way apparently.

He had a second axe in his other hand. He hadn’t even raised it.

”There she is.”

Altharion said and brought the second axe around.

Kassie wrenched her blade free and twisted under the swing, and for the first time since I’d known her — since the day she had sat on my face and thrown me around like a child’s toy, from the field below where she had devastated the army in a hundred heartbeats — I watched Kassie fight someone who fought back.

It was fast, clean and the most of all, it was the most frightening thing I had ever seen.

Her greatsword came down and his axes came up crossed to catch it. She drove forward with all that impossible strength and his boots slid back across the stone and held. He matched her. Blow for blow, weight for weight, the two of them carving the rim of the pass into a storm of sparks and splintered ice, and the horrible truth of it settled into my stomach like a stone:

Kassie’s brute force broke his shields. It could not break him.

”I’ve waited a long time for a real swing,” Altharion said with an almost harmless smile on his face.

”Don’t disappoint me.”

Then Brunhilde arrived.

She came in low and silent on his blind side while his axes were locked against Kassie’s sword, her katana drawing that pale, soft-cracking line toward the back of his knee — the cut that had frozen a gargoyle solid, the cut that ended things.

Altharion didn’t look. He simply let go of his lock on Kassie with one hand, reached out, and seized one of his own dying summons by the throat.

He pulled it into Brunhilde’s strike.

The frost took the summon instead of him, blooming up its frozen body in a heartbeat, and Altharion used the brittle statue of it as a second shield, kicking it off his hand and into Brunhilde’s path so that her follow-up shattered on stone instead of flesh. He’d sacrificed it without a thought. He’d done it without looking. Even down here, even with two Calamities on him, the man fought from behind a wall of bodies he was perfectly willing to spend.

’He’s using them as armor. Right up to the last one.’

”Stop hiding behind corpses,” Brunhilde said, and her voice had gone to that flat, awful calm again.

”They’re not corpses if I haven’t finished with them,” Altharion said pleasantly, and threw another one at her.

The three of them moved across the top of the pass like a single furious storm — Kassie’s force, Brunhilde’s cold, and Altharion in the eye of it, never still, never open, always with one dying thing between himself and the killing blow. They were faster than I could properly follow. I caught it in pieces. Kassie’s blade biting a chunk out of the stone where Altharion’s head had been. Brunhilde freezing the ground beneath his feet only for him to vault off a frozen summon and land somewhere new. An axe ringing off a katana in a spray of white sparks. The two queens working in that wordless, beautiful sync — and Altharion, alone, matching the both of them at once.

It wasn’t enough. I could see it. Kassie could break a hundred summons and it wouldn’t matter, because the man behind them gave just as good as he got, and as long as he had bodies to spend, the duo could never quite close the distance to the only target that counted.

Down on the floor of the pass, I gripped Frostfang so hard my knuckles ached, useless, watching the people I’d come here with throw everything they had at a smiling wall.

”How the heck is he even managing to do that. I have never been able to match Kassie, it is simply impossible for a human to.”

Ilse glanced at me and shrugged.

”Then he simply isn’t a man. At least not right now.”

She looked up.

”There’s very little that is known about Divine Summoners after all.”

I opened my mouth to retort. But that was when the world to our left exploded.

The wall of the pass — solid mountain stone, older than anything — simply burst, blown inward in a roar of rock and snow and a shrieking gust of green-white wind that knocked me flat against the frozen ground. Something enormous had hit it from the other side. Something that had its own war going, on its own scale, and had just come crashing through the mountain between us without caring that we were here.

Two figures spilled into the pass through the broken wall, locked in a fight so fast it was barely a fight at all, just a smear of color tearing across the snow.

One of them rode a screaming current of wind, blades of it spinning around him like the wings of some vast green insect, his laughter high and wild over the howl of it. The air bent wrong wherever he moved. Fairy-light and razor-edged, beautiful and ugly at once.

The other was a woman with a thin sword, and she met every cut of that wind with a turn of her blade, calm in the heart of the storm, her white cloak streaming behind her like — like a banner. Like feathers.

My breath stopped.

I knew that sword. I knew that twirling, disappearing momentum, the way it knocked a thing off its course and deceived direction as easy as breathing.

”White Feather?”

It was a relief to find the person I had come here for, at the same time, it wasn’t so much of a relief. Because she was locked in a deadly battle with the man riding the wind of blades.

His annoyingly handsome face settled into me and I instantly knew, with a cold certainty exactly who he had to be.

That ugly fiend. Fairywind!

Or Harter Hammerfeld.

Across the pass, even Altharion paused — just for an instant, his axes lowering a fraction as he glanced at the hole torn through the mountain and the two combatants pouring through it.

”Ehh...”

He said softly, and for the first time he sounded genuinely surprised.

”Now that — that wasn’t part of the plan.”

He grinned at Ilse.

”So this is him huh...”

Meanwhile, White Feather’s eyes found mine across the chaos.

And widened.

”Lord Cade?!”