I Only Summon Villainesses

Harter Hammerfeld laughed like a man who’d been waiting his whole life to laugh like that.

And the wind answered him. The green-white current tore through the broken wall of the pass and rewrote the air inside it, and at the heart of that howling sat one flying sword, thin and bright as a splinter of mirror glass, spinning so fast it threw light in every direction at once.

White Feather moved around it like she had been born knowing exactly where it would be.

She did not block, match or meet it in any way. Instead she tilted and turned. Her blazing sword came up not to stop the flying blade but to redirect it — a glancing angle, the flat of her steel kissing the flat of its edge, and the flying blade sang off the contact and curved into the stone wall and screamed back into play without slowing. She was already somewhere else. Every move she made was the same move: don’t be where it wants you to be.

She made it look like water.

It looked like water because the flying blade moved like a living thing.

That was what made it wrong. I’d seen Harter throwing it, aiming it, and I’d filed it away as a weapon, as a tool in a man’s hand.

But I was standing at the floor of the pass now, eyes level with the battle that had crashed through the mountain wall, and I watched the flying blade miss White Feather and arc back toward Harter and slow down before it reached him — slow and adjust and angle away, shaving past his shoulder instead of returning to his hand, looping out in a wide sweep to come at White Feather from the left side this time, from the angle it had decided on, and Harter’s hand was nowhere near it.

It didn’t seem like he had called it back, nor had he aimed it again.

Instead, it was as though the sword had chosen him.

’Is a weapon allowed to be that sentient?’

I glanced down at the broken Frostfang, slightly envious.

White Feather’s sword came up and deflected it again, but this time it cost her — the impact rocked her back a full step, and Harter was already inside the gap, one hand throwing a fist of compressed wind that hit her guard like a hammer blow. She took it on the crossed blade, both feet grinding back through the snow, and the flying sword looped wide and came screaming back in from behind her.

She knew. She twisted before it arrived, let it pass an inch from her shoulder, and her return cut drove Harter back three steps. The flying blade curved and came again. She deflected again and again.

Every time, she turned it away.

Every time, when Harter threw himself into the gap it made, the flying blade was already curving to follow — to be where he needed it, to cut off the retreat she was going to make, to herd her the way a clever dog herds something it’s been told to catch.

They were working together. The man and his sword. One thing, two bodies.

Right in the next instant, a crash from above pulled my eyes up.

Kassie’s greatsword came down on Altharion’s crossed axes so hard the stone beneath his feet cracked in a ring, and he drove forward into the force of it instead of bracing against it, stepped inside her reach, and raked the back edge of one axe across her shoulder. The sound it made rang off both walls of the pass.

He grinned at her.

Fifty feet above me on the broken rim, the two of them moved like things that were playing the only game that had ever held their interest. Rushing upon each other blow after blow.

The stone lip of the pass was coming apart under them, impact by impact, Kassie driving the force with a brutal impact but what was more unbelievable was the fact that Altharion was matching barely even breaking a sweat.

He did not retreat from any of her strike, nor did he spend another summon to cushion himself, he simply met her force with equal and opposite force, the axes catching her sword each time and throwing it wide in a spray of sparks.

She could not get through him.

She could get to him. That was the thing she’d learned to do, brute force eating the shields he threw at her, and she was past them now, her blade reaching him, and it still wasn’t enough because whatever he was, whatever sat behind the harmless smile and the patience and the careful management of his dead army, it was old and it was strong and it met Kassie of the eight thousand years blow for blow and smiled about it.

Every Calamity had an era they were born to end.

Altharion fought like he’d survived one.

Brunhilde moved in his shadow, frost tracking every step he took, and every time he turned to manage her she was somewhere else — the two of them working their geometry, the same unchoreographed sync that had unmade the army below, and still the man bent the geometry around himself, one more dead thing thrown into Brunhilde’s blade, one more redirect, one more impossible parry on Kassie’s greatsword.

I looked back down.

White Feather’s back was nearly to the wall.

’She can’t fight both of them at once. Harter and the sword together, from two sides—’

Well, it wasn’t like she couldn’t. Although, I knew very much how costly her powers were. It wasn’t like they were not usable at all. And I had the essence to spare.

’Is she perhaps worried about me?’

She could be... it was slightly annoying.

The flying blade came in from the right. White Feather turned to take the angle and Harter drove in from the left, a full-bodied charge, wind screaming around his fist. She had a choice. Block the sword or block the man. You could not block both and the answer was pretty obvious.

Which was why I was even more shocked when White Feather chose the man.

Her sword caught his forearm and turned him, and the flying blade tore a long line across her back through the cloak, and white feathers scattered into the wind as she vanished quickly away from the vicinity only to stagger backward as she appeared a few distance away.

She was breathing hard now, and the flying blade curved and came back in to continue what it had started.

It came for her.

And I was already moving.