I Only Summon Villainesses

He looked at me and let out a loud laugh that rolled across the whole of the sky.

”And why is that? Because I killed that man?”

His laughter receded for a moment, and something cooler settled behind his eyes.

”Would you have been equally angry on my behalf if he had killed me instead? He fought a battle and he lost. Blame him for being weak. Why blame me for killing him? I was only doing my job.”

I tilted my head, taunted by the sheer unreasonable nonsense pouring out of his mouth.

”Job? Job? Your job was to kill people?”

He laughed.

”Of course not. My job is to find it. The door.”

His smile broadened until it showed teeth.

”And guess what? I did!!”

There was no use talking to the bastard. I was not so daft that I didn’t know he was feeding me these scraps of information to buy time, because all the while, the other snake was consuming the dead man’s body, and it had already worked almost halfway up.

I inhaled and exhaled, slow and even, letting the essence gather at my fingertips.

And then I vanished again.

I struck my hand straight into the body of the large pale snake before it could so much as flinch, and its scales parted around my wrist like wet clay.

His eyes went wide with shock.

”Again?!”

And from the tips of my fingers, I sent flames flooding the whole of his body. His massive frame began to swell, the pale color giving way to a bright molten glow, seams of orange light splitting open along his length. And in the next moment, an explosion tore loose and maddeningly vaporized the ocean, throwing up a white wall of steam where water had been.

The other one was long gone by then. I heard no second cry through the steam, so I took it for dead.

The remaining snake ate hurriedly now, past the corpse’s waist and swelling with every swallow. I blurred and stood right behind it. Then, just as I reached to grab it by the tail, the air moved, and before my eyes my right hand was sliced clean away, with no blade anywhere in sight.

It was as if the air itself had cut me.

I turned around slowly.

”You think I’m going to let you—”

”Kassie.”

”I was waiting.”

Before he could finish the words, a torrent of attacks slammed into him where he stood. Kassie had become a whirlwind of steel, and every stroke carried the weight of a mountain.

But this Uio was quick to act. He caught Kassie’s sword with his bare hand, though a second later shockwaves rippled up through that hand, bursting the muscle from the inside all the way to his shoulder, and he plummeted toward the ocean. Halfway down he redirected, kicked off empty air, and propelled himself upward, away from Kassie and straight at me.

I released Emperor’s Dominion at the same time to slam him back down, but the air in front of me acted again. It cleaved my second hand, and then one of my legs. I lost balance, but before I could fall, Kassie blurred, all red, caught me, and landed with me on a sheet of ice that had not yet broken.

Uio landed some distance off with the snake coiled in his hand.

”Let me at him! Let me at that bastard, I can kill him!”

Uio looked dazed, staring at Kassie in particular.

”I have seen that... where have I seen that...”

His eyes suddenly widened.

”You! From the Frost Gate!”

He jabbed a finger toward Kassie.

I glanced at her as I pushed myself up to stand. I was down two hands and one leg, and even so, that overflowing essence was still rushing through me. There was so much of it that I felt, absurdly, like I could do this.

I manifested one leg out of flame, and then two hands. It took a vicious amount of control, but it wasn’t impossible to execute. If anything, it came easier because I had owned hands and legs all my life, and my body still remembered their shape.

”You’re the lady from the gate, the one who attacked me.”

He laughed.

”My hand ached for days after catching your sword that one time, you know.”

Kassie stood behind me, completely indifferent to his words, but I remembered it perfectly. They were the reason I never got the Gate Boss of the Frost Gate...

He smiled at me.

”I see you remember me... to think the answer to our difficult equation had been right in front of us all along. Isn’t this fate? Yes, this is definitely fate!”

The snake in his hand glanced between him and me.

”What? You’ve met the kid before?”

”One time, when our Lord sent me to go check the core of the Gate at Athermere, since it was one of the results of the experiment.”

Listening to their conversation, I began to find it quite odd, and worse than odd, discomforting. A cold prickle crawled up the back of my neck.

’An experiment? What experim—’

At that moment, my entire body simply ceased. A cough of blood exploded from my mouth and ran hot through my nose at the same time.

Kassie’s face twisted with distress.

White Feather spoke into my mind.

”Lord Cade!”

Uio straightened and began to step closer, unhurried, the ice creaking under his heels.

”Your time limit has been reached. It’s impossible to sustain Infinity Overdrive for anything longer than one minute unless you have the body of a god. Although, I must say, I find it quite fascinating that you managed to last even this long.”

He stopped midway.

”But this is the end. This is where you lose, human.”

I chuckled. Even with blood pouring down my nose and over my lips, I found it rather laughable.

”You are foolish if you think this is all I’ve got. I’ve grown far more powerful since that Gate. White Feather. Maggie.”

First, a swirl of white sparks bloomed beside me. And following that... the entire world went dark.

The two of them glanced up.

An overflowing heat consumed the world, and the ice was melting, and rapidly so, meltwater running in sheets off the floe beneath our feet.

Kassie sighed and grabbed hold of me by the belly.

”That witch... this is going to be dangerous.”

I didn’t know why, but as Maggie entered the scene, she did so with a level of anger that felt personal. The sky blackened in a heartbeat, the air turned dangerously hot, and the water level was dropping fast, the ocean itself shrinking back as if scalded.

Out of that ocean, right behind Uio and his snake partner, a colossal, devastated cathedral was rising, broken and writhing in white flame, shedding boiling water from its spires as it climbed into the dark.