I Only Summon Villainesses

The gorilla was still falling apart when the snake came for me.

It didn’t hiss. That was the thing I registered first, and the thing I hated most. A snake that size should have hissed, should have dragged sound through the undergrowth, but this one came in absolute silence, a river of dead metal pouring between the trees, and if Enhanced Senses hadn’t screamed at me through the crash of the collapsing forest, its jaws would have closed around my waist.

I threw myself sideways off my real leg, trusting the substitute one to catch me, and it did, barely, the joint jolting stiff under my weight as the ground where I’d stood simply ceased to exist. The snake’s head plowed a trench through it, four meters long, roots snapping like bones, and the soil it displaced rained back down on me in clumps.

’Okay. So they hit like siege engines. Good to know.’

I rolled up and put a tree between us, and the snake took the tree too, shearing through the trunk with the side of its skull as though the wood had personally offended it. The canopy above groaned and began to lean.

By then I had already moved. The chain shot from me and wrapped a fallen bough, and I yanked myself out from under the toppling tree, skidding low across churned earth with Wren dragging a line of fire behind me. The heat off her blade lit the snake’s flank as it turned, and for half a second I saw myself in it. Literally. My own face, warped and stretched across that lusterless metal skin, staring back at me with my own widened eyes.

’Yeah, no. I’m going to be seeing that in my sleep.’

It struck again, and this time I didn’t dodge. I stepped inside the strike, inside the arc of the skull, and drove Wren point-first into the soft hinge behind its jaw with every drop of fire my dwindling essence would let me spend. The blade sank a hand’s length and stopped dead, like stabbing into an anvil, but the fire didn’t stop.

The fire poured in through the wound and cooked it from the inside, and the snake’s silence finally broke into a shriek of stressed metal as it whipped away from me, tearing Wren from my grip and flinging her spinning into the dark.

’Ah. That’s a problem.’

The snake thrashed, smoke bleeding from behind its jaw, and its tail came around in a flat, blind sweep that took out everything at hip height for ten meters. I dropped under it. The wind of its passing still slapped me flat, and somewhere above me another tree died loudly.

Across the clearing, if it could even be called a clearing anymore, Kassie was disassembling the tentacled one.

That was the only honest word for it. The thing had the build of Nisha’s summon blown up to the size of a small house, tentacles hammering down around her like the fists of an angry god, and Kassie walked through them. She didn’t dodge so much as decline. A tentacle came down and she stepped past it, letting it bury itself in the ground beside her, and her greatsword flicked out one-handed and opened its length to the core.

The metal skin dulled her edge’s bite, I could see it, each cut shallower than it should have been, so she simply cut the same line twice. The second stroke followed the first into the groove and went through, and six meters of tentacle dropped dead to the forest floor, crushing a swath of ferns flat.

Red sparks crawled up her arm and along the blade, restless and hungry.

’She hasn’t even used both hands again. We’re fine. This is fine.’

The snake found me once more, and this time I went to it, because Wren was lying somewhere in the dark beyond it and I wanted her back. I fed fire down the chain instead, wreathing the links until they glowed, and lashed it across the snake’s eyes.

The metal lids clamped shut against the heat, and in that blind half-second I ran straight up the line of its own body, boots hammering on dead metal scales, and leapt off the ridge of its skull.

I landed hard. The substitute leg buckled a finger’s width and held, and Wren’s hilt smacked into my palm as I snatched her up off the ground without breaking stride.

’There you are, sweetheart. Never do that again.’

The snake turned its ruined jaw toward me, and I gave it the same thing I gave the bull. Low, fast, blade burning past red into white at the edge, one arc across the throat where my fire had already softened its armor from within. This time Wren went through.

The head came off. The body whipped and hammered the ground for a few seconds longer, flattening a young tree with each spasm, and then it stilled.

[You have slain a Level 8, Apex-tier, Mirror Macaque]

’Macaque. Sure. Why not.’

I stood there breathing, and I made the mistake of taking stock. The camp was gone. Not damaged, gone, erased under trenches and fallen timber, our fire scattered into embers that were now starting three separate smaller fires among the deadfall. The whole stretch of forest looked like a battle between gods had been rehearsed in it, and the rehearsal had gone poorly.

And we were not done. That was the part that sat in my stomach like a swallowed stone. My essence was a guttering candle in a drafty room, and the trees were still moving.

”Cade.” Kassie’s voice, flat and carrying. ”Down.”

I didn’t ask. I dropped, and the bull went over me.

Another bull. Bigger than the first, its horns curving forward like twin siege rams, and it had come out of the dark at a full charge with all the subtlety of a landslide. It missed me by the width of Kassie’s warning and hit a tree that three men couldn’t have wrapped their arms around, and the tree lost.

The trunk exploded into splinters that scythed through the air above my back, and the bull barely broke stride, wheeling in a long, ground-tearing arc to line me up again.

Kassie appeared beside it mid-turn. I didn’t see her cross the distance. One moment she was across the ruin of our camp, and the next her greatsword was already falling, one-handed, almost bored, and it caught the bull across the spine and drove the entire creature into the ground so hard that the earth bounced. I felt it in my teeth. The shockwave lifted the smaller fires into brief columns and slapped them out, and the bull’s legs kicked once and stopped.

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

’That one’s yours and the lodestar knows it,’ I thought, and didn’t have time to be indignant about the notification’s addressing habits, because the tentacled one, the one Kassie had been leisurely pruning, chose that moment to spend everything it had left.

Every remaining limb came down at once. Not at Kassie. At me.

’Oh, you learn. Great. They learn.’

The world became falling pillars. I moved on instinct and Enhanced Senses and nothing else, threading gaps that closed behind me with sounds like collapsing buildings, and the ground itself began to fail, cratering, tilting, throwing my footing off with every step. A tentacle clipped my shoulder, only clipped it, and it still spun me off my feet and put me down hard on my back with the breath knocked out of me and the substitute hand sparking numb at the wrist.

For a moment, all I could see was a limb the width of a wagon coming down to end me.

Then it stopped. Mid-air. My chain was around it, and the other end of my chain was in Kassie’s fist.

She hauled. The entire creature, house and all, tilted toward her, and she rose to meet it with the greatsword trailing red sparks, and she took it apart the rest of the way in four strokes that I will be honest, I couldn’t fully follow. What I could follow was the aftermath, the sound of it coming down in pieces, each piece its own small earthquake, the dark forest around us flattening outward in a rough circle as though the land itself had flinched.

[You have slain a Level 1, Profane-tier, Mirror Mandrill]

Silence, then. Actual silence, the first since I’d woken. I lay in the crater of my own near-death and looked up past the shredded canopy at a sky I couldn’t see, and I laughed once, short and unhinged.

”Is that all of them?” I called.

Kassie didn’t answer. That was my first warning.

I sat up. She was standing amid the wreckage with her greatsword low, and she wasn’t looking at the bodies. She was looking out into the dark, at the trees beyond the reach of my flame-light, and her whole posture had changed into something I’d only seen a handful of times. Weight settled. Feet planted. Reading something I couldn’t.

”They stopped attacking a while ago,” she said quietly.

”What?”

”The last two. They’ve been in the trees since the beginning. Watching.” Her eyes never left the dark. ”Everything we did, they watched.”

The stone in my stomach grew teeth. Because I understood it before I saw it, the way you understand the punchline of a cruel joke half a second before it lands. They mirrored what they encountered. And for the whole length of this beautiful disaster, what they had been encountering was us.

Two shapes dropped from the trees at the edge of the light.

They landed without a sound, and they twisted. The first one rose and rose, drawing itself up into a tall figure with a woman’s lines, and the dead metal of its body flowed into the shape of a greatsword in its hand, and the silhouette that settled at the end of it was one I’d have known blindfolded, because I’d spent an embarrassing portion of my life memorizing it.

Kassie. Dark, lusterless, eyeless, and hers down to the set of the shoulders.

The second one didn’t bother rising far. It came up to my height exactly. A sword of black metal condensed into its right hand, and chains, my chains, link for link, slithered out of its frame and coiled lazily around its feet, and when it tilted its head, it tilted it the way I do.

’Oh, you have got to be kidding me.’

The mirror of me settled into my own ready stance, insolent and loose. And the mirror of Kassie raised its greatsword slowly, and took the hilt in both hands.