I Only Summon Villainesses

The three red eyes found me, dim as dying coals, and I lay on the wet green-lit stone and ran the maths one final time.

I couldn’t run. There was nowhere to run that the river hadn’t already tried to kill me in, and nothing in my legs to run with.

I couldn’t fight it either. I’d emptied the whole of myself into the tide it had eaten in three bites, and what I had left wouldn’t light a candle.

Every honest number I ran came back the same, and the number said I was going to die on this shelf of rock with two fingers gone and my well scraped dry, a long way from Wren, in the dark, for nothing.

”...No... This is not for nothing. I don’t do things for nothing.”

I don’t know that I believed it. But saying it kept me from lying down, and not lying down was the only move I had left, so I made it and went looking for the next one.

Death Sense gave me the next one.

It was still open from before, still full of the enormous dimmed weight of the thing dragging itself upstream, and now that the weight was close I could read it the way you can only read a wound when you’re near enough to smell it. And what I read stopped my heart for a beat and then set it going again, faster.

The Archmage was dying.

The river had done to it what all my flame and chain couldn’t, folded that street-long body and torn something loose deep inside it, and its life force wasn’t the steady furnace it had been.

It guttered and flickered. And under the flicker, frantic, I could feel it pouring what little it had into one desperate task, dragging its own ruin back together length by length, mending the flood-damage as fast as the water had dealt it.

It was healing itself. That was the only reason it still moved. Every scrap of power it had left was going into knitting a body the river had broken, and it was winning that fight, slowly, and once it finished it would be whole enough to eat me at its leisure.

It survived by healing.

I lay very still on the cold rock while that turned over in my head and showed me its other face.

Because I had a thing for that. I had exactly one thing in the whole of my dusty inventory built for precisely that, an attribute I’d been handed and never once found a use vicious enough for, sitting at the bottom of my sheet on its first miserable rung.

Fallen Divinity. Corrupted holy work that took a blessing and made it a curse. That took healing, and turned it into harm.

”...Oh,” I exhaled and it came out almost like an ugly laugh. ”Oh, you poor old thing. You’re doing the one thing I can turn against you.”

However, of course I was empty. Which meant that in order to give this thing a chance, I had to shameless release something.

But this time...

It was permitted to be short.

I just needed a short burst of ejaculation to raise some numbers of essence, and then use the skill.

So right there, with my eyes glued on the river, and my body tormenting me with pain, I dipped my hand into my groin and filled my mind with the dirtiest thoughts ever known to mankind.

...

”Ahh...” I exhaled with pleasure and relief and felt something in my essence dam.

The process was short and shameful, it wouldn’t have demanded anyone’s time really. And the essence it gave me in return wasn’t so much.

I didn’t need to drown it. I only needed to poison the one process keeping it alive, and poison doesn’t fight the body. It rides it. It lets the body do the dying for it.

So I stopped thinking like a man with an army and started thinking like a man with a needle.

I called one chain. Just one. It was all the recall I could survive, and even that dragged through me like barbed wire through the eye of a needle, so that I gasped and nearly went face-first into the stone.

Then I waited, because a needle is no good until the thing walks onto it, and the great dim head was already lowering toward the shelf, toward me, the maw parting on a wet grinding sound as the coals swung close.

Close enough.

I struck the chain not into its skull, not into anything the size of it would have shrugged off, but into the raw seam the river had torn in its side. The wound it was busy healing. The one place its own power was gathered and open and working. The chain sank into living hurt, and through that one thin line, into the exact spot where the Archmage was pouring everything it had left to save itself, I fed Fallen Divinity.

I inverted its healing.

I felt the moment it took. The frantic mending inside that seam, the knitting, the closing, all of it turned over at once, every thread of repair the thing was weaving reversing into its opposite work.

Where it healed, it opened. Where it closed, it tore. The power it had spent the last hour crawling upstream to hoard now went into unmaking the very body it had been rebuilding, and it did it eagerly, fast, with all the desperate strength of a thing fighting for its life, because it didn’t know it had been turned against itself.

The Archmage screamed.

I’d heard a great many terrible sounds that night. This was not like any of them. The whole cavern rang with it, the green-lit stone shivering dust from the ceiling, the river itself seeming to flinch in its channel, and the street-long body reared and threw itself at the walls as the wound it had been mending flowered wide open instead, black and vast and pouring.

And then I lit it.

Purifying Flame down the chain, the last true thing I had, white fire that burned neither wood nor flesh but the corruption and the divinity a thing was made of.

And this thing was made of both, rotted holiness gone to ash a very long time ago. The flame ran the chain into the opened wound and found the profane old power laid bare there, and it ate it.

For the first time all night, I made it bleed something that mattered.

The recall of the chain, when the thrashing tore it loose, nearly finished me. I felt the little that was left of me go with it, and the green light swam, and I got a hand flat on the wet stone to stop the world tilting me into the river.

But when the world steadied, the coals had pulled back.

The great head had drawn away from the shelf, back toward the deep water, that ruined body curling around a wound that was no longer healing, that had, for the first time, been taught how to hurt. The three red eyes were still fixed on me.

They would always be fixed on me. But there was something new in the dark between us now, something that hadn’t been there a minute ago, when I was only prey and it was only appetite.

It had learned that the small warm thing on the rock could bite.

”...Yeah.”

I swayed on my knees, one hand pressed to cold stone, two fingers gone, the last of the flame guttering out around the other. My voice came out wrecked, and it came out grinning, and I couldn’t have told you which one I meant.

”That’s right. I’m not food. I’m the thing that gives you food poisoning.”

The Archmage watched me from the deep water, wounded now, wary now, and did not come.

For a moment, neither of us moved. Two ruined things in a green-lit dark, the river roaring between us, each too broken to finish the other and each finally, grudgingly, knowing it.

Then, somewhere far upstream, past the roar, past the reach of the dying coals, Death Sense caught something small and bright and achingly familiar, moving through the dark toward me.

And I forgot the Archmage entirely.

’...Wren?’