I Only Summon Villainesses

”Cade, get up. We have company...”

”Cade...”

”Cadeeeee...”

”CADE!!! WAKE UP!!! We have company...!”

’Oh God, oh God... that word. I swear I’m about to add it to my dictionary of hated things.’

I dragged myself up out of the deep sleep I’d dived into, only to feel the ground quake beneath me. I staggered to my feet at once, the substitute hand answering half a beat slow with its fingers still stiff, and birthed a ball of flame that rolled above my head, throwing at least some light around me.

In that white, incandescent glow, Kassie swung her greatsword forward and slammed it into something, and the sound that rolled back off the impact came hollow and brutally hard, like she’d buried her edge in a tree trunk cast in metal, the ring of it still hanging in the air.

I yanked Wren out of the trunk where I’d stabbed her, filled her with fire, and lunged.

My body was already getting used to the substitute leg and hand Kassie had rigged for me, moving almost like the real thing. Though, if I’m honest, the harder job was focusing at all while Kassie fought half-naked.

Then a brutal memory surfaced, and something inside me spoke up.

’This is how stupid you are, right up until you lose the people you love. Always stupid. Always playing around.’

And just like that, the whole night went bitter in my mouth, and awful. My grip tightened around Wren until her heat bit back into my palm.

I lunged forward with a trail of flames burning up everything around me. It was hard to think about anything but protecting what I loved, even though what I loved was more than capable of protecting herself.

Knowing that truth didn’t change the way I felt.

I met the thing she was fighting with Wren in my grip, pouring an immense weight of fire into her, and as I closed the distance I hauled her up over my head and brought her edge down on the creature, blasting a shockwave of flame and sound out from the point of impact and slapping the heat back across my own face.

The thing staggered back. Using Enhanced Senses, I caught the drag of its movement, went low right after it, and cranked the flames higher until the blade glowed red-hot. Then I swept a single arc across it, cleaving through the thick neck and leaving the edges of the wound scalded black, the stink of scorched meat rising off it.

Its head, like a bull’s, dropped to the floor. The rest of the body reeled back a step and went down, and I felt the weight of it hit through the soles of my feet.

[You have slain a Level 9, Apex-tier, Mirror Monkey]

’Monkey? That looked like a bull.’

Kassie straightened up, looking at me with a strange expression.

”Where have you been keeping that guy?”

Right then, the whole place quaked again. Kassie dropped into a stance and looked up.

”Uh... why are you looking up?”

The thing I’d just killed had, as far as I could make out, looked like a bull. Large head, horns curving forward, a mammalian body carried on four legs, and above all a hide hard enough to ring like struck metal. The next second, though, every one of those observations turned out to be completely wrong.

They were dropping from the trees now, and they were hard to describe. I could only really catch them as they spilled into the sphere of light above me, brief and flickering at its edge, and the one honest thing about all of them was that dark, lusterless, metallic skin. They came down the trunks like monkeys.

And the moment they hit the ground, each of them twisted to mirror a different horror.

One rose into a towering thing with impossibly long arms, six of them, each ending in too many jointed fingers, and a head so small and so far up that I couldn’t make out its shape at all. Another folded down into something like the snake I’d seen the day before, its scales the same dead metal grey, if ”yesterday” even meant anything in a place like the River Styx. A third took the build of Nisha’s summon, only far more massive, its tentacles whipping around it faster than I had any interest in counting just then.

My essence wasn’t in the best shape right now. The store of it guttered low every time I reached for it, thin and slow to answer. Whatever that Overdrive had been, it had left me scraped hollow, and though the sleep had felt long and had genuinely helped, even so, I was ringed by at least five towering monstrosities. And Kassie had already thrown herself at the last one to drop, rolling through the air to cleave the arm off the tallest.

Its arms were long and thick, and Kassie’s greatsword lodged somewhere in the middle of that limb, unable to finish the cut.

In between all of that, I was already braced to fight too.

The creature swung its second arm, the one riding just beneath the first, and lashed it toward Kassie, but my chain had already shot out and wrapped tight around it. I ducked one of the tentacles and let the rest shatter the ground where I’d been standing, throwing up a spray of dirt and torn root, retreating behind a tree and letting the chain snap that arm backward.

It wasn’t much, but it pulled at the creature’s weight and bought a half-second’s delay. Kassie took the opening. She groaned viciously and drove the strike home, and the arm tore clean off with a screech of rending metal, and then she rose up into the air, moving free and easy.

For a moment, she looked like a goddess rising.

Then she caught the greatsword in both hands. I didn’t think I’d ever see her hold that sword with both hands.

She came down on the creature, something towering, over twenty meters of it, and cleaved it clean through the midsection. The dark gorilla-thing fell apart, crumbling a whole swath of the black forest as it came down, the crash of it rolling out into the dark.

[You have slain a level 2, Profane-tier, Mirror Baboon]