I Only Summon Villainesses

They didn’t wait for us to be ready. Of course they didn’t. They’d spent the whole night watching us, which meant they’d also watched us catch our breath between kills, and apparently they’d decided that was a courtesy they could do without.

The mirror wearing Kassie’s shape moved first, and it moved at me.

I want to be very clear about what that means. I had spent Chapters of my life watching Kassie cross distances, and I still flinched every time, and this thing crossed the ruined camp in her exact gliding burst, greatsword in both hands, and every instinct I owned screamed the same simple message.

’Nothing survives that. You have personally watched nothing survive that.’

So I didn’t try to survive it. I killed the light instead.

The flame ball above my head winked out, and the world went black, and I was already moving sideways off my real leg with the chain spooling silently out of me. The dark swallowed everything. Then the mirror’s greatsword came down where I’d been standing, and the impact told me the rest, a detonation of soil and stone that slapped my back with grit from six meters away and left my ears ringing.

Behind me, the real Kassie roared my name, and the trees answered her with bodies.

They dropped between her and me, three of them, four, twisting as they landed into shapes from the night’s greatest hits, another bull, another snake, a squat six-armed thing, and I understood the play in one cold flash. They weren’t attacking her. They were spending themselves on her. Every second she spent carving through them was a second the thing wearing her face got to keep hunting me, and the mirrors had learned that lesson from the best possible teacher, because the one unbreakable rule of tonight’s battlefield had been this: Kassie protects Cade.

They’d watched. They’d understood. And now they were using her love like a leash.

’Okay. Okay. Think.’

I relit the flame, but I threw it, sending the ball of fire drifting off through the trees thirty meters to my left, and the mirror-Kassie’s head snapped toward the light exactly the way a thing would if it had learned that Cade and his fire were the same creature. It burst after the glow. I went the other way, low and quiet, chain gathered against my body so it wouldn’t sing.

Through the gaps in the dark I caught the other fight in flashes of red sparks, and what I saw made something in my chest go tight and strange.

The real Kassie was wading through the spawn with her sword in one hand and her fury in the other. A bull came at her and she took its charge on her palm, stopped it dead, and folded its skull into its shoulders with the pommel. The snake wrapped her sword arm and she let it, then tore her arm free through its coils, shredding it against its own grip.

[You have slain a Level 6, Apex-tier, Mirror Langur]

[You have slain a Level 5, Apex-tier, Mirror Tamarin]

The notifications stacked in the corner of my vision like a scoreboard nobody was enjoying, and behind them, past her, I saw the other me.

It was fighting her the way I would, and that was the horror of it. Chains lashing from its frame to snag her sword arm, black blade darting in and out of range, never trading blows, always stealing tempo, and it was doing all of it on two whole legs. Two whole arms. No half-beat lag in the left hand, no stiff catch in the knee. The version of me that never lost anything moved like water, and for one poisonous second the old voice slid up from the memory that had surfaced when I woke.

’That’s what you’d be, if you weren’t so stupid. If you hadn’t kept playing around until the bill came due.’

The mirror-Kassie’s greatsword sheared through the tree beside me, and the bill, as it turned out, was still coming due.

I dove. The trunk came down where my spine had been, and I rolled through deadfall and came up running, and the thing was on me again, relentless, silent, swinging that enormous sword in Kassie’s exact arcs. I gave it the chain across the eyes, wreathed in fire the way I’d blinded the snake, and it didn’t even flinch. It had watched me do that trick already. It swatted the chain aside and closed, and I threw myself flat under a horizontal cut that passed near enough to part my hair, and the wind of it alone bounced me off the ground.

’It’s her. It’s actually her, and I’m going to die to a knockoff, and Kassie is never going to let my ghost hear the end of it.’

Then it raised the sword over its head with both hands, and something snagged in my brain.

Both hands. It had opened with both hands. It had used both hands for every single swing.

Kassie didn’t do that. Kassie fought one-handed, lazy and immaculate, and she’d gone to two hands exactly once tonight, at the peak, for the killing stroke that split a twenty-meter gorilla in half. That was the Kassie this thing had studied. Not eight thousand years of her. One night of her. One fight. It hadn’t copied Kassie at all, and the thought hit me so hard I nearly laughed while scrambling backward from my own death.

It had copied my view of Kassie. The highlights. The thing had learned her from the exact same seat I’d watched her from, which meant its entire move-set was a fight I had already seen, and there was no one alive better qualified to grade this forgery than me.

’You studied the goddess rising. Fine. So did I. Let’s compare notes.’

The overhead stroke fell, the big two-handed executioner’s arc, gorgeous and final, and I did what the gorilla couldn’t. I stepped into it, inside the arc where the blade’s speed lived, and its swing carried all of Kassie’s shape and none of her adjustment, because Kassie would have already redirected, would have read my step before I took it, and this thing just kept committing to the picture it had memorized. The sword buried itself in the ground behind me. I put Wren into the wrist joint at full burn, white at the edge, and carved.

The hand came off. Dead metal, no blood, but the greatsword stayed in the dirt, and the mirror staggered in a way Kassie never would, and for the first time all night I felt the fight tilt toward us.

”KASSIE!” I screamed it raw. ”IT ONLY KNOWS TONIGHT! IT ONLY KNOWS WHAT WE SHOWED IT!”

Across the ruin, the real one heard me. And so, I think, did they.

What happened next happened fast. Kassie stopped fighting like a woman clearing a road and started fighting like a woman ending a conversation. She took the six-armed thing’s next lunge and simply went through it, both hands on the hilt now, the true article, and the difference between her and her copy was suddenly so obscene it was almost funny. The spawn came apart around her in pieces.

[You have slain a Level 7, Apex-tier, Mirror Howler]

The whole mirror of me saw her coming and made the smartest decision of its short life. It broke. It threw every chain it had, not at her but at the ground, at trees, at wreckage, hauling itself backward in my own retreating style, and Kassie’s horizontal stroke caught it anyway, catching it across the midsection with a sound like a foundry collapsing. It should have died. It didn’t. The two halves of it lost their shape mid-air, flowing, folding, and what landed in the deadfall wasn’t halves of me at all but a dark, lusterless monkey, dented and sparking, already running.

No notification came. My stomach dropped through the forest floor.

’They don’t die from that. Breaking the shape doesn’t kill the thing wearing it.’

Beside me, the one-handed mirror-Kassie made the same choice in the same heartbeat, as though a single mind had called the retreat. It didn’t lunge for its severed hand or its buried sword. The whole towering silhouette of her collapsed inward, folding down and down into a monkey the size of a child, and it went up the nearest standing tree so fast my eyes lost it between branches.

For a moment, the forest was still. Kassie landed beside me in a spray of dirt, chest heaving, sword trailing sparks, and both of us stared up into the black canopy where two small shapes were fleeing with everything they’d learned.

”They’re not retreating,” I said. My voice came out scraped. ”They’re reporting.”

Kassie’s grip tightened on the hilt until the leather creaked. Because she’d worked it out at the same speed I had, and probably faster. Somewhere out in the dark of the River Styx, something had sent scouts to collect us, and the scouts were going home carrying her shape, my shape, my chains, her sword, one whole night of our tricks and habits and tells.

And whatever was waiting at the end of their run wasn’t Level 4.

”Cade.” Kassie was already moving, eyes locked on the canopy line where the branches still swayed. ”How much essence do you have left?”

”Almost none.”

”Then keep up anyway.”

She launched. And so, God help me, did I.