I Only Summon Villainesses

I chuckled, running back over the things Celestine had told me. She had said them the way you say a thing you have checked twice.

Dragons were as old as the gods, and for some reason they had been scrubbed off the world entirely. Which meant this thing standing in the temple, breathing on the far side of a hall I could not see the end of, was far older than any of my villainesses. Older than all of them stacked end to end. This was a real threat. A real one...

”At the end of the day, it’s just a dragon.”

The creature... the said... ’just a dragon’ shifted its head over the hall, and with that one slow movement the entire place was already breaking and falling apart, massive stone debris tearing off the roof and coming down in slabs, the barely standing pillars folding in on themselves one after another until the dust rolled over us knee-high.

Forget fighting the bastard, surviving its presence was going to be impossible.

But I had a solution.

I glared at the Dragon and with words of mouth, commanded.

Before the words actually flew out, Celestine for some reason shouted at me.

”Stop!!”

But she was too late, I had spoken already.

And what I said was.

”Be Still.”

That two word command, I felt it drain a torrent of my spirit essence, my chest going cold from the inside out and my knees registering it a second later, and then everything bottomed out completely, the way a well goes from water to mud to nothing in three pulls. I was using Essence to hold Celestine, and the moment everything was drained, she vanished. White Feather too. Where the two of them had been standing there was only dust, turning over slowly in the air.

The dragon turned, slowly, and its two immense eyes fell on me. Directly on me. Nothing else in the hall was worth the turn of a head, and I had just made myself the loudest thing in it.

’It... didn’t work.’

I didn’t plan for any grand commands, all I needed was just to buy a second for all of us to escape. But even that was too much to ask for.

’Fuck, I underestimated Dragons, they’re not like in the fairytales.’

In the fairytales they sit on gold and wait for a man with a spear. This one hadn’t taken a step yet.

Its chest began to heave like a breathing mountain, rising up and following down, and then its mouth opened and it tore out a scream that sent circular shockwaves outwards. Everything, us included, was sent reeling, crashing into the debris and rolling away with it. I went off my feet, hit a slab of fallen roof shoulder first and kept going with it, and through the churn I saw Kassie tumbling, and Maggie too, and the little girl in the middle of it with nothing to hold on to. I tried to grab her while I was tumbling away.

Her hand almost slipped past mine, but I managed to get her within my grasp, hugging her in and taking the damage with my back, every edge and corner the floor had to offer. She had her face in my shoulder and her fists in my shirt and she did not make one sound the whole way down.

The vicious dark dragon suddenly flapped its immense wings and a storm was unleashed, one beat of them, and the air in the temple went from air to a wall moving sideways. Maggie was closer, and she twirled fire around herself to deal with the momentum, but she was lifted like a broken doll and slammed away somewhere towards the entrance. Her body flew and crashed through several pillars, and the stone came down behind her in pieces.

She rolled on the ground and was already standing up, spitting out a mouthful of temple.

Kassie too was already getting up, leaning one hand on her sword, with the other hanging limp. She took her good hand off the hilt for a moment and smashed it into the numb arm, hard, causing herself intense pain on purpose. I saw her face visibly contort in response to it. And it was not a sight that was common.

Afterwards though, she opened and closed her fingers, testing them, and then picked her sword by the hilt back.

As she walked forward her armor parts that were covering my hand and leg slid away and joined her, climbing up the length of her and forming a full armor, closing last over her face, while her red hair flowed down the back of it like a blood silk.

Her figure swayed forward with each movement, the red trailing behind the helmet, the sword tip drawing a thin line through the dust. While she was walking into her death with such staggering confidence, she seemed to be walking a beauty pageant instead.

Then she became a crimson lightning.

She twirled in the air and slammed down her sword on the rising dragon, and the sound of the meeting arrived a beat after the light of it did.

The entire upper atmosphere of the temple was raided by a devastating shockwave and the balance of the dragon was lost, one wing dropping, one shoulder sliding out from under it. Kassie had twirled back into the air. She landed on its back and ran towards its tail, her boots finding the ridges of it like stairs. At the same time, making a whistling sound.

Cindy appeared out of thin air and as Kassie leaped off the dragon, it was onto the fiery horse. The dragon, angrily turned, and gave chase as Kassie blasted out of the temple on her horse back, almost crushing Maggie beneath its flaming hooves.

Maggie rolled away from the way and seethed at Kassie. But she immediately had to fly out of the way completely, because the dragon’s movement was a pure destruction of everything.

Where it put its weight, the floor stopped being a floor.

Where its tail passed, the pillars went from standing to gravel without any stage in between, and the light from the broken roof came down through all of it in one wide, dirty column, thick enough to see the grit turning inside it.