I Only Summon Villainesses

As we drew closer, we began to climb, and though the darkness gave me nothing to see, I could feel the shape of it rising under my feet. Stairs. Definitely stairs, cut from something cold and hard that pulled the warmth out of every step.

The light we’d spotted from far off swelled the closer we climbed, and the bigger it grew, the higher the dread climbed in my chest.

We’d been chased for a while now, but the higher we went up those black, arduous stairs, the farther our pursuers fell behind, until their snarling thinned out into the dark below us. I let myself think:

’Ah, hell. At least I’ll get to catch my breath after all this running.’

The next moment, I was heavily disappointed. Now I understood exactly why those bastards had refused to follow us any higher.

The ground beneath us shifted, and the white light rose with it. It was hard to make out at first, because the head attached to that light was the size of a three-storey building, and against a lightless sky there was nothing to catch its edges. Not until it reared up and came down on us, of course.

The whole ground heaved with the motion of that head, and as the serpent loosed a sky-splitting screech, both of us stopped dead and clapped our hands over our ears. Even Kassie wasn’t immune.

She recovered faster, though. She grabbed me and threw us both into the air, and that was when the colossal serpent bit down on the spot we’d just left, driving a fang like a pillar deep into the black stone. Its scales caught the faint light as it moved, overlapping in a scatter that glittered like stars.

It loosed a cry, loud and pained and furious, then flung its head around, hunting for us. All that mass slammed back down and rolled forward through the dark, flattening whatever stood in its path. I couldn’t see what that was, but from the sound of it, a shit-ton of things were getting wrecked.

’We can’t keep running. But the darkness has us at a huge disadvantage, and even Feather Step is useless when I can’t see what’s in front of me.’

Kassie twirled. Instead of running, she flew in reverse, straight back toward the colossal serpent, and said just two words to me.

”Support me...”

I was flying behind her, held tight in her grip. Then she swung me up toward the sky, and as she did, a cold thrill settled somewhere behind my ribs.

It was one of those moments, the kind where your crush is finally watching to see how your presentation turns out, and you, who never cared about class in your life, suddenly have to seize the one chance to show off.

A length of radiant chain shot out of me, fast as a whip-crack. Against something that size, the chain found purchase without any trouble at all, biting into the dark and holding fast.

For a moment, my mind replayed those outrageous movements of Maggie’s, and I wondered if I could pull off even one of them.

’Let’s not get too excited... that’ll take time.’

I let it go and focused instead on the one thing I actually did well. As the chain bit into the snake’s hide, it screeched again, a sound that tore straight past the wind and slammed into our ears until my skull rang with it.

The serpent thrashed, and the chain hauled me along with it like a hooked fish on a line. At the same time, Kassie came down with furious, crushing force and caved in its head. The impact rang up through my whole body, and the darkness itself quaked with a single thunderclap of sound.

[You have slain a level 9, Bestial-tier, Nefaric Serpent]

[You have gained a high-tier Spirit Orb]

[You have gained a Nefarious tooth, this item can be used to create a dagger with dark attributes]

[A strange creature in your inventory has consumed the Nefarious tooth]

’Yooo, what?!’

There were a dozen things I wanted to process, but every one of them got shoved aside by that last line. The creature that had just eaten my Nefarious tooth.

’What the fuck?’

I had a very strange feeling about who it was. But first, I had to stay in the moment. I landed on solid ground, and Kassie was already walking toward me. The radiance of the chains threw a sphere of light maybe three feet across, and even past its edge I could still make out the outline of her figure in the dark.

”Huh. That was a surprisingly easy kill. It’s only Bestial tier, though, so how is it this big? I’ve never seen a Bestial tier this large.”

To be honest, I didn’t know all that much about these monsters, especially once their levels came into it. Maybe I only knew Primal-tiers because those just happened to be the ones I’d faced the most. I hadn’t realized lower ranks were even allowed to get this big.

”It has to do with the level more than the tier.”

Kassie said it flatly. She cast the snake’s long body a strange look, then went on.

”We have to figure out how you eat.”

She twirled her greatsword like it weighed nothing, drove it into the body, and dragged it down, carving out a portion of the serpent’s length. Dark blood welled up thick and slow around the blade, black in the chain-light. Then she tore free a heavy slab of meat, still warm through my gloves, and chopped it into several pieces for us to carry, shaping a little of that armor of hers into a bag that I slung across my torso.

”Huh. I didn’t know your armor could stretch this far. That’s ridiculously convenient.”

She said nothing, and we simply kept moving forward.

A small bloom of fire sat cupped in my hand, throwing a thin, flickering light no wider than my own reach. As much as we didn’t want to draw the attention of whatever else was roaming the darkness, we needed to be able to see where we were putting our feet.

The torch might have been a bad idea. Because now that the big snake was dead, the smaller ones came pouring down out of the black toward us, unbelievably fast.