I Only Summon Villainesses

’Don’t think. You think and you’ll stop.’

Feather Step took me out of the floor of the pass and put me between White Feather and the flying blade with Frostfang raised. I had used a condensed mass of flame to fill in for the rest of the broken edge as I rushed forward.

The impact when it hit was nothing like hitting a weapon. It was nothing like hitting steel, or stone, or any dead thing I’d ever blocked before.

It pushed back with a very tenacious and terrifying intent rather than force. The blade hit Frostfang and recoiled and curved and came at me from the other side, fast and vicious and adjusting in real time, and I used Feather Step again, short jump, barely a breath of distance, and felt the wind of it pass through where my throat had been.

’Wait. Is this thing reading?’

I turned to track it, and that was when I saw the thing that broke the whole equation open.

The flying blade came at me low, angled for my ribs, a strike with nothing gentle in it.

And then Harter moved.

He shifted his weight, just slightly, stepping left. And the flying blade, mid-strike, flinched.

It didn’t pull the hit. It adjusted the angle, the barest correction — still coming, still lethal — but in the fraction of a second before it crossed the distance, it had gone wider to make sure it wouldn’t cross the space Harter had moved into.

It had made sure not to hit him.

It moved around him. Not because he called it. Because it didn’t want to hit him.

’Is that... a summon?’

I blocked the adjusted strike and felt it push back again, that furious living resistance, and in my head the whole picture turned over like a card.

A weapon that chose its angles. That hunted. That worked with the man beside it not like a tool in his hand but like a partner who knew his body and his reach and moved to complement them. That had nearly taken my throat on a redirected arc and pulled the final inch of it to make sure it didn’t clip Harter’s shoulder.

And it had pulled every strike on White Feather at the last instant when Harter himself stepped in as a shield.

Not every time. Not in any way I could have counted. But I’d been watching her deflect and deflect and deflect, and the ones that should have caught her while her guard was split, the angles that should have been automatic continuations of the strikes she’d just redirected away — those ones had always curved a breath too wide when Harter’s body crossed the line between blade and target.

At this point, it was pretty clear to me that the sword, was Harter’s protective partner.

What I wasn’t sure about...

I looked at White Feather. She was breathing through her teeth, cloak torn, blood running from the cut across her back that I hadn’t stopped, that I’d been a second too late to stop. And her face — her face had something in it that wasn’t only pain.

It was grief.

The specific kind. The kind with a name behind it.

’...Are you protecting the sword too? Is that why you won’t give it a direct hit.’

That was the only reasonable explanation for why Harter was still alive. White Feather was strong, and the fiend was not, she had more than enough power to displace him without having to take a hit.

The fact that a fight of this scale had broken out could only be because there was a variable that greatly restrained her.

And that variable... no less could be her daughter.

’But how in the world is her daughter a sword? That makes no sense!’

To be honest, I expected a hot, teenage girl about my age, granted she was a couple hundred years old. But for once, I looked for someone that would look around my age, damnit.

Not a sword!

’Well, technically, I guess we could say it’s not a sword... she rather...’

I shook my head again the next instance.

’No, I think I could be wrong about this. It could be that White Feather’s daughter is controlling it somewhere.’

I glanced back at her.

”Hey, White Feather, what’s the deal with that weapon.”

She hesitated, and responded weakly.

”...not... a weapon.”

”Huh?”

I think I might have sounded with a little bit of fear. It was the fear of being right.

White Feather raised her head and gave me a painful look.

She said nothing but the look in my eyes got fiercer.

”White Feather.”

My voice came out steady, which was extraordinary, because nothing else in me was steady at all.

”Who is the sword?”

Harter laughed somewhere behind us, the sound bright and jagged over the howl of his wind, and the flying blade swept back up into the current and turned its edge toward us both, and White Feather’s hand found my arm and her grip was iron.

She spoke quietly, grief mangling the whole weight of every syllable.

”That is the Thousand Waves Artifact. Her name is Wren.”

She breathed shakily.

”And I can’t seem to get to her.”

The sword hung at the top of its arc above us.

And for just one moment — one single, treacherous moment — it did not come down.

’Oh no! Oh crap! It’s real it’s real It’s real, the sword is her daughter!! Wait does she have a human form? Am I gonna have to fuck a sword? Oh hell nah I don’t wanna fuck a sword, how’s that even possible!’

I inhaled and exhaled.

’Calm down Cade, right thoughts, wrong place. Not here cunt!’

Above us on the rim, Kassie’s greatsword rang off Altharion’s axes in a crash that shook the mountain.

Brunhilde’s frost crept across the stone in the silence that followed.

And Harter Hammerfeld, smiling, called the sword... Wren back into himself like a man drawing a breath.

He looked at me and White Feather with a contemptuous smile playing out on his face.

Then he said:

”Let’s end this.”