I Only Summon Villainesses

Fatigue was setting into my legs fast, a dull burn crawling up from my calves with every stride, the muscles going loose and unreliable underneath me, even as they carried me forward. Not that I could stop. Not even if I wanted to.

Kassie, Maggie, White Feather, and Celestine were all gone into the Soul Sanctum, and I was alone. I’d honestly thought things couldn’t get any worse. I guess that made me pompous.

At least their disappearance had bought me a few seconds to throw myself toward the tree. The dragon still looked confused, its enormous head swinging low over the patch of dirt where Kassie had been standing, hunting for a threat that had simply blinked out of the world. Kassie had managed to make it recognize her as a threat, so her sudden vanishing must have thrown the ancient beast far more than it should have.

I shot forward like my life depended on it. Fuck, it did.

I wasn’t even sure how well Wren was faring behind me, whether her little legs were holding their own against the broken ground, or whether I was half-dragging her through it. But I was sure of her hand, at least. I felt it locked in mine, small and clammy, and we were moving at a horrifying speed, all thanks to Kassie’s brutal training.

The dragon eventually turned around. Even from that far off, it looked like the whole terrain was tilting against us, the horizon itself leaning our way, and somehow I knew that the moment it truly moved, we were done for.

And I needed to think of something. The problem, though, was that there was nothing for me to think with. Not without any essence.

I was sure I had new attributes I could use now that Cellie had arrived, but that circled us right back to the same wall. No essence.

So there was only one option left. Though I wasn’t even sure that if I took it, all my villainesses would come back to me. I couldn’t so much as step into my Soul Sanctum right now.

’I have to try, though.’

And just like my fear had warned, the dragon took flight. The whole land trembled with it.

The thing swallowed the entire darkness of the sky with its endless length, wings spanning every distance like a blanket dragged flat beneath the sky. Each beat of those wings shoved a wall of wind down onto us, flattening the dead grass and dragging grit sideways across the ground. It let out a low, vibrating growl as it climbed, and the dark of this damn precipice went deathly silent. All those snakes, those vicious monkeys, every last one of them seemed not to exist anymore.

And the place was so barren.

Then the dragon let itself come forward. I don’t even know if that counted as movement. It was closer to the fall of a meteor, instantaneous, and the moment it moved it slammed into the ground and obliterated everything.

From where I stood to the treeline I’d been so desperate to reach — all of it pulverized in a single breath as the dragon came down with that immense weight. The sound arrived a heartbeat after the impact, a flat concussive boom that I felt in my teeth more than heard.

The terrain tumbled over me. I lost my footing as the ground gave way beneath us and everything tore apart, slabs of earth folding up on end, dirt raining down the back of my collar. My hands stayed clamped around Wren’s wrists until a tingling ran through my palms, and then what had been soft flesh was a hard hilt.

I didn’t need to know more. I drew the blade against a boulder rolling toward me and cleaved it clean in two, then leaped onto one half and lunged away through the flying debris.

With Wren a sword in my hand now, things actually got a whole lot easier.

’Who’d have thought that brat could be this thoughtful.’

I rolled through the air, slicing apart every stone that came at me and using the broken pieces as stepping-stones to shove myself further through the chaos the dragon had made. My boots barely touched each one before it crumbled out from under me. Grit filled my mouth. My eyes stung with dust.

All of it took no more than a few seconds. The creature that had fallen hadn’t even lifted its head from where it landed, just lay there like a fallen mountain.

Now, though... it was already doing exactly that.

The dragon slowly extended its immense neck and head, joints grinding somewhere deep in all that bulk. Its wings folded, and even though it had flattened the ground on impact, its sheer weight still jutted out of the wrecked terrain like a sore thumb. I was starting to understand why they were called dragons, and why they had to be exterminated.

’Would the world even have grown if they weren’t? Would humans have survived at all?’

A baffling question. One I don’t even know why I was chewing on while running for my life.

’I really do be thinking about the stupidest things while running.’

Like whether a dragon was fuckable.

’Eeeww, hell no, I don’t wanna find that out!’

I refused, vehemently, in my own head, and shoved the thought back down where it came from. Then I finally broke out of the disaster zone and landed on untouched ground in a roll.

The massive tree that marked my point still stood. Even though the ground beneath it had given, it held strong, most likely because of its roots, if I had to guess.

I drove straight for it and put the trunk between me and the dragon’s line of sight. Then I stayed there a moment and dragged air back into my chest, my spine pressed flat to the bark, both lungs raw from the run.

Then I looked down at my pants.

’Damn it, it’s now or never.’

I was about to have the shortest, most dangerous gooning session of my life. Just how many people can say they’ve gooned while being chased by a dragon?