I Only Summon Villainesses

”Do you have a death wish?”

”I have many wishes, and death is not one of them. Let’s not act like you’ve not been at it surface level with me.”

A dark grimace settled on her face and stayed there.

And I got the distinct feeling this was going to be one of those times where I would receive a...

Then Kevin made a sound.

It was a small sound. That was the awful part. Not a roar, not a death-rattle, nothing with any drama in it — just a short wet cough out of the corner, the kind of noise a thing makes when it is trying to get comfortable and can’t.

I went over.

The grey had spread. It had come up out of the gash and along his flank and reached the joint of one of the middle legs, and where it had got to, the flesh had gone loose and cool under my hand. I put my palm on his side anyway. The hide there gave without pushing back, soft as wet cloth, and stayed dented where I lifted my fingers. He didn’t do anything about it. He’d stopped being able to do anything about anything a while ago and had, in the way of animals, simply not mentioned it.

’Death Sense.’

I opened it and I wished immediately that I hadn’t.

The life in him was down to a thread. Not fading. Already mostly gone, with the last of it running out through a hole it had no way of closing, and Death Sense told me the thing Death Sense always tells me, which is the truth, straight, without any interest in whether I wanted it.

’He’s got hours.’

Ilse came and crouched beside me. She didn’t say I told you. She had earned the right to say it about nine ways over and she put it down and left it.

”Can you take it now?” she asked. ”The essence. Before it goes.”

”...Yeah.”

”Will you?”

I sat there with my hand on a dying animal in the dark at the bottom of the world.

Here is the part I keep turning over.

If I had killed him when we found him, when he was strong and asleep and full, I would have got more. Every hour I’d let him lie there being alive had cost me essence I could not afford, and essence is Brunhilde, and I had known that the entire time and let it run anyway. I hadn’t been merciful. Mercy is a thing you do for the other party. He hadn’t wanted anything from me. He’d wanted the corner and the dark and to be left alone, and I’d given him that, and it had cost the woman in my sword an amount I would never be able to measure.

So it wasn’t for him.

It was so I could keep on being a man who didn’t do it, for one more day, in a place that was very obviously going to take that off me eventually.

’That’s the most selfish thing I’ve ever done,’ I thought. ’And it’s the only thing I’ve done down here I don’t hate.’

He died about an hour later. He didn’t make any noise when he went. The sides just stopped going in and out, and Death Sense went quiet, and the corner of the crack became a corner with a body in it.

Then Ilse butchered him, because I couldn’t, and I am not going to pretend I helped.

She did it fast and she did it without any ceremony, working on her knees in the grit with her sleeves pushed past the elbow, and afterwards she handed me a strip of something and said, ”Eat it or I will hold your nose,” and I ate it.

It was the worst thing I have ever eaten. It tasted like the smell of a room that has been closed for a hundred years. It was cold and it was wrong and it did not want to go down, and my body took it the way a dry field takes rain, greedily and without asking my opinion, and I got about four mouthfuls down before I had to stop and breathe through my nose and think very hard about a bowl of noodles I had eaten in a different world.

”You are crying,” Ilse observed.

”It’s the taste.”

”It is not.”

”It’s mostly the taste.”

She let me have that one.

We slept after that. Or did whatever this place gives you instead.

And when I woke up, the back wall of the crack was open.

I sat up so fast I cracked my skull on the stone.

’What—’

Wren, dry as a bone: He dug.

’What?’

Before he died. He was restless for hours, Cade, you were asleep and I was not, and he went at the back wall on and off the whole time with those front legs and I did not tell you because I assumed it was nothing.

I crawled over.

He’d taken a good three feet out of the rubble at the base of the back wall, a rough burrow going in and then turning, the loose stone pushed back either side of it in two low ridges, and where it turned, cold air was coming through. Moving air. Not the dead still stuff of a sealed hole.

’Why.’

Why does anything dig? He was dying in a small dark room. I imagine he wanted out.

’...’

I put my hand into the gap and felt the air run over my knuckles, cold and slow and coming from a long way off.

”Ilse.”

She was already awake. She’d probably been awake the entire time, because she is the kind of person who is.

”I heard him,” she said. ”I thought about waking you. Then I thought about what you would have done, which is help, and I decided you needed the sleep more than that animal needed a partner.”

”He dug us a door.”

”He dug himself a door,” Ilse said. ”We are using it. Those are different things, and I would like you to hold onto the difference, because if you start believing the Precipice gives you gifts for being kind, it will kill you inside a week.”

’...That’s fair.’

’That’s brutally fair, actually.’

It took us most of an hour to get through. It was tight in two places, tight enough that I had to push Glacies Aeterna ahead of me and squeeze after it, and the turn took skin off both my elbows and put enough grit in my mouth that I stopped bothering to spit, and I would like to state for the record that dragging a Calamity’s greatsword through a worm-hole is not a thing anyone warns you about, and that Brunhilde had opinions the entire way.

Then the rock opened and let us out onto a ledge.

And the layer in front of us was not the one we’d been walked flat in.

It went down. Not a slope, a drop, so wide that the green glow of the far side was a smear instead of a wall, and old cold air came up out of it in a slow steady breath that moved my hair and left the stone under my boots damp. Far below there was water, or something moving that sounded like water.

Ilse stood at the edge with her hand flat on the rock and looked down into it for a long moment.

Then, without any expression at all: ”Where did Kevin go?”

’She used the name.’

I know.

’She used the name, Wren.’

I know, Cade. Let her have it.

I looked back at the hole we’d come out of, and then down into the drop, and then, because it was the only thing left to do with my hands, I hitched the greatsword higher on my shoulder.

”Down, then,” I said.

”Down,” Ilse agreed.

And behind us, out over the ruined stretch of layer where five titans had walked and a hundred things had died over a hole in a wall, something enormous and unhurried began, very quietly, to tidy up.

***

[A/N]

Update has been slowed because of certain issues. I apologize sincerely as I work my best to fix the update consistency and while you’re at it, you might want to check out my new book. I’m sure you’re going to enjoy it. Theo is a breath of fresh air, even though he doesn’t have the best of first impressions.

Another thing I’d like to point out is how much we have all been voting guys. It’s really nice to see. So amazing. We’re sitting in T70 and even though it’s a far cry from T10, it’s so much farther than before, and it’s all thanks to y’all. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!