I Only Summon Villainesses

”That is not the only thing worth our worry. The Spirit wavelength of this gate is strange. It expanded and devoured nearly everything around it. I ran, and still I was drawn in. Yet when I landed here, there was no gate I had passed through. I was simply... here...”

My brows pulled together at that.

’Now that I think about it...’

I focused on him.

”But that means the others are probably here too.”

’Ilse, Tristan...’

He turned away, his eyes moving across the trees.

”What help will they be? Weaklings, all of them. Even you. But that red-haired woman... I have never crossed blades with a sword like hers. She is strong. That much I can tell.”

I chuckled at the bastard.

”Bro, she’ll fry you.”

He looked at me, confusion crossing his face again.

”I have no idea what lexical components you tend to default to. Are you perhaps unlearned?”

He paused, as if reminding himself of something.

”Ah... you are an otherworlder. Which reminds me... I have questions for you. Depending on your answers, I could put in good words for you at Headquarters.”

Then he turned away.

”But now is not the time for that. Let us find shelter.”

He walked into the forest as he spoke, his wyvern still perched at the edge of the island.

I glanced back at the summon a beat too late and asked him.

”You’re not going to dispel it?”

”Syrius will be our distress signal should we have intruders.”

’Hmm... he’s thought that far.’

I nodded along, grudging the approval even as I gave it.

We pressed deeper into the forest. Branches and high leaves closed over us, and the whole way in I couldn’t stop turning over what he’d said, the gate swelling wide enough to swallow everything around it.

If that was true, then whatever Tristan had been fighting might have been swallowed along with it. And that, oddly, dragged my mind back to that strange darkness.

The Spirit Gate back then had been strange in the same way. Its entrance had vanished too, and there had supposedly been two different gates folded into one. This time, at least, I could reach my Nave without any trouble.

Still, something nagged at me. I was beginning to see a link.

The darkness. The way the two gates rhymed with each other. I hated dredging up that perverted chameleon, but the oddities lined up too neatly to ignore.

’God, I really don’t want to run into something like that, and it’d be worse if it turned out to be Apex-tier or even higher.’

At least I had Kassie this time. That alone kept the worry small. As long as she was at my side, we were going to make it out of here.

We were.

A sound tore across the sky, so loud it shook the ground under our feet.

Light grimaced and leapt. He landed clean on a branch, coiled, and sprang to the next, and it was right in the middle of that that I shot past him, knives of flame burning beneath my feet and trailing melted leaves behind me.

He turned his head toward me mid-leap, and the surprise that crossed his face was deeply satisfying.

I reached the outermost edge of the canopy and tucked low, trying not to stand out while I found the source of the blast.

It wasn’t hard to find. It was right out in the open.

Far to the north, in the dead center of that wide ocean, a vast circular burst of water had erupted. It threw out shockwave after shockwave, shoving tsunami-sized walls of water outward in every direction. The thing was so colossal that even at this distance, near the very edge of what my eyes could measure, it looked ready to swallow the sky. And the waves rolling toward us dragged a shadow ahead of them, black enough to swallow the water beneath.

”Oh gods...”

I stared until my eyes forgot how to blink.

Light eased out past the edge of another tree and frowned.

”Good Judge, the island is going to get washed away.”

I glanced at him, horrified.

”Wait, really? We just got land and now it’s going to get taken from me?”

He ignored me completely and kept his focus on the cause of it all.

”More important still, what we must fear is whatever caused a shockwave so enormous.”

I read the signs, and I could tell. The sky had gone dark at that far edge, the weather turning mean. And that rumbling from before, it was almost familiar.

”That is Tristan and that strange monster.”

Light’s eyes lost focus for a fraction of a second.

”If so, then we are still safe. We must leave. Before the wave reaches the island.”

As he spoke he whistled, sharp and high, and from down in the waters his wyvern answered with a sky-scraping screech.

I hesitated. Something told me that the moment we left this place, every real problem we had was going to begin. Sure, we’d have to push on and break the gate eventually. But seizing this island and holding it as a base, in a gate flooded wall to wall with water... did anyone actually need to think that hard to see the obvious?

I turned back to him with a stubborn frown.

”Hey, shouldn’t we be trying to save this place? This could be a stronghold for us, for the whole gate raid.”

He gave me a flat look and said:

”I have a stronghold, and I have been generous enough to make you a part of it.”

At the same time, the wyvern beat its great wings above us, slamming gusts of wind through the trees and across my face.

I raised my head slowly toward it, blank-faced, and then turned back to him.

’Surely he doesn’t mean for me to dangle from his wyvern’s talons the whole way through this... he wouldn’t be that daft, right?’

Light’s eyes narrowed all at once, fixed forward on the giant waves still coming, the ones that had crossed the middle now and were throwing their shadow over the island’s edge.

But there was a figure out there. He didn’t need to say a word. The signs spoke plainly enough.

In a single instant, a vast sheet of ice spread out across the open water.