I Only Summon Villainesses

Seeing Brunhilde sent a leap of pure joy through me, almost as if she were my own summon.

Then the whole landscape froze over in front of me, and my jaw came loose on its hinges.

There was no way Brunhilde could have frozen the entire gate. And yet, as far as my gaze could reach, everything stood locked in ice, the waves most of all. They towered across the island in a single seized wall, the light going pale and blue where it passed through them, and the cold rolled off the frozen water until my next breath came out as fog.

’Damn, she’s strong...’

Ice was her specialty, by the look of it. But she had also been Kassie’s teacher, which meant she must have taught the girl to fight, and frankly, from everything I’d seen, Kassie was the better fighter by a wide margin.

Which left two possibilities. Either Brunhilde was holding back, which I doubted, or Kassie had already surpassed her master. That second one, I’d put money on.

”Who are those?”

Light asked it with that arrogant lilt he never quite bothered to drop.

’Tch. Did he have to talk?’

I’d been enjoying the moment right up until I remembered he was floating at my shoulder, and then he went and spoiled it by opening his mouth.

”That’s Brunhilde, a Legend-tier summon. Send your watchdog back to the shore. There’s no need for it to leave the island.”

He turned to me, shook his head, and lifted one hand above him.

”I had wondered at the odds of you being a sensible fellow. I’m relieved I wasn’t disappointed.”

The wyvern snatched his hand and hauled him up. Light spun free through the air while the beast dropped low beneath him, and he came down neat and easy across its back. He settled himself, then flung the wyvern forward, and at last I was left alone at the edge of the forest.

He flew backwards the whole way, watching me as he went.

’What? What’s the meaning of that dogshit he just spilled? Who’s he calling dumb?’

Still, whatever he’d meant by it, I was honestly glad to watch him shrink into the distance.

I turned my gaze to the onslaught beyond the frozen waves. Even now, with that wall of ice choking off sound and sight and shockwave all at once, it shuddered where it stood, and thin cracks were already racing out across its face. When it came down it would flood the whole island, no doubt about that.

And I couldn’t perch here forever, waiting on it.

Which meant it was time for yours truly to step onto the battlefield.

My gaze narrowed, and a cold white light kindled somewhere deep in my eyes. One moment I stood there, and the next I didn’t, nothing left behind but a slow flutter of feathers.

I reappeared far out over the water. Using the flames at my feet as a propeller, I ate the distance at a frightening speed, a streak of white comet dragged low across the grey. I slammed into the towering frozen waves and tore clean through them without losing pace, ice bursting apart in a bright spray around me, and there ahead the cacophony between Tristan and that creature was finally laid bare.

However...

My face drained of colour. Within a couple of seconds sweat was beading along my hairline, and I could do nothing but stare down at the two of them.

Both were locked together like madmen. A giant snake had shoved its head up out of the water, and Tristan and the man fought on top of it, trading blows so fast my eyes couldn’t hold a single one. I lost count of how many I missed, however hard I strained to keep up.

Only the defining strikes reached me. The man drove an uppercut into Tristan’s gut and launched him straight up into the air, then reached after him with a roundhouse — but improvised at the last breath, wrenching the kick around to hammer Tristan back down instead.

Tristan hit the water and burst out of it again like a geyser, hauling clean water and lightning up with him as he rose, and he crushed the creature beneath a catastrophic detonation of the two that rolled all the way up into the clouds.

So he was resistant to one of the deadliest ordinary ways a man could die. No real surprise, that, given the nature of Tristan’s summon.

’A sovereign, huh...’

White Feather was Legend-tier. Brunhilde was too, and I already knew how monstrous the pair of them ran. A Sovereign-tier summon would be fearsome in its own right. The only catch was that it wasn’t a special summon.

At the end of the day, Tristan was a Regular Summoner, and that alone was the thing holding him back. Even so, he was still incredible.

But the thing he was fighting wasn’t fair.

The great snake writhed as the lightning laced its whole length in mad, jittering chains. The man simply came through it unshocked. He threw his hand forward, two fingers extended, a filthy grin splitting his face so wide it shone even from where I hung.

”Elyria!”

At the word, the snake coiled around his hand shot forward in a blur, and at the same time, out of nowhere, another climbed into being the size of the sky itself. A wall of green stretched from one end of the horizon to the other, and it surged in and slammed into Tristan with the weight of a falling mountain.

My eyes went wide.

’Where is he even getting snakes like that?’

Was this summoning? It didn’t feel like it. The snakes gave off no spirit essence at all, not the faintest thread, and I was starting to think that was the very thing making them so hard for Tristan to handle.

After training on my own for a while, I’d stumbled onto what I still think of as a fatal flaw stitched into all of creation. Everything carries essence. As long as Spirit Essence exists inside a thing, that thing can be sensed, and once a thing can be sensed, it can be predicted.

Naturally, the knife cut both ways. Still, it mostly favoured fighters like Tristan, the ones who move too fast to trust their eyes and lean on their other senses instead.

Which meant snakes with no essence to them at all would be next to impossible for him to feel coming.

The sky above him rumbled, and Stormwhite tore into being and came down teeth-first onto the snake’s back. Even at his enormous size, he looked like a mouse worrying at the flank of a serpent-dragon.

The man’s smile curdled into something worse.

”Orvion.”

Another snake dropped out of the heavens and swallowed Stormwhite whole.