I Only Summon Villainesses

Chapter 280: Countdown Till You Eat Your Dirty Words

The cogwheel had four charges left. I knew because I’d been counting.

Each rotation burned one of the six flame balls. Two were already spent, their positions in the cog now dark and empty. Which meant he had four walls of explosion left before whatever reload mechanic powered that thing kicked in.

’Four walls.’ I needed to eat through them fast.

I closed the distance again, but this time I changed the approach. Instead of leading with the sword, I sent the Chains of Confession wide, looping them in arcs that cut off his lateral escape routes. Not to grab him. Not yet. Just to shrink the space he had to work with.

He noticed. His eyes flicked to the chains on either side, and his grin tightened at the edges.

I swung Frostfang in a wide horizontal arc, deliberately telegraphed. He dodged backward as expected and the cogwheel rotated. Third explosion. Flames billowed outward, but I was already twisting to the side, letting the blast shove past me while the white flames along my forearms ate the residual heat.

’Three left.’

The chains pulled inward as I advanced, tightening the corridor. He tried to vanish with his flame teleport, but the moment the fire licked around his body, I flooded the surrounding air with white flames, and his reappearance stuttered. He materialized barely two meters from where he’d stood, stumbling instead of landing clean.

That was new information. The white flames interfered with his teleportation if the concentration was dense enough.

I didn’t give him time to process it either. Frostfang came down in a vertical slash that forced him to dodge left, directly into the path of the chains. The links coiled around his forearm before he could pull free, and the moment they touched skin, he hissed through his teeth.

The cogwheel rotated. The fourth explosion rolled forward, aimed point blank at the chains binding his arm. The force of it ripped the links loose and sent me skidding backward, boots carving furrows into the dirt.

Two left.

But I’d felt it. Through the chains, through that brief contact, the resistance in his body. He was burning stamina to fuel the cogwheel, and the reserve was not infinite.

I lunged forward again before the smoke cleared and let the flame knives loose. Six of them, condensed to needle sharpness, screaming through the air in a spread pattern that covered every angle of retreat except directly backward.

He went backward. Exactly where I wanted him.

His shoulders hit the iron fence that bordered the Company property, and for a fraction of a second his composure cracked. The cogwheel spun. Fifth explosion. He used it defensively this time, the blast radiating outward in all directions to push me back and buy himself room.

One left.

I walked forward through the settling flames. The fire on the ground parted around my boots where the white flames bled into the soil, ordinary red curling away from the cold like something alive recoiling from a predator. Embers drifted upward through air that couldn’t decide whether to be hot or freezing. The scorch marks on the pavement ended in clean lines where I stepped, as if the ground itself was drawing a boundary around me.

Frostfang rested on my shoulder, the white fire along the blade flickering in a cold blue gradient. The chains dragged behind me across the charred stone, their links clicking with each step.

His breathing was heavier now. The grin was still there, but it had lost its ease. There was something harder underneath it, something recalculating.

”One more,” I said.

He blinked.

”One more explosion in that wheel of yours. You want to use it on offense or defense? Choose carefully.”

The silence between us stretched for exactly two heartbeats. Then the man exhaled through his nose and his expression shifted. The playful arrogance drained out of it. What replaced it was something colder, more honest.

He raised his hand.

The air behind him split with heat and light, and a shape began forming in the distortion. Broad shoulders, arms thick as tree trunks, a body wreathed in flames so deep red they were almost black. A low sound rolled through the ground before it reached my ears, something between a groan and a roar, felt in the teeth before the brain could name it. The temperature spiked so violently that the nearest tree ignited instantly, bark peeling away in curling strips of fire. The air pressure shifted, thickened, as if the space around the spirit simply had less room for anything else.

Fire Lord Ifrit materialized at his summoner’s back, and the ground beneath its feet turned to glass.

The man’s remaining cogwheel charge pulsed once and faded, its energy redirected into the summoning. All six positions in the cog went dark.

He looked at me with that colder expression and said nothing.

I tilted my head.

”What happened to ’how preposterous of you to think I will call my summon into a battle with a child’?”

His jaw tightened. A muscle in his neck pulled taut.

”Was I too much for you? Me?”

I rested Frostfang’s tip on the ground and leaned on the pommel.

”The child?”

”Shut your mouth.” His voice had dropped. The theatrical projection was gone, replaced by something flat and compressed. The voice of a man no longer performing.

”No, I want to understand.”

I kept my voice casual, like we were discussing the weather and not the building-sized fire elemental radiating enough heat to cook the air between us.

”You walked in here talking about burning the entire Black Snow Company. Talked about delivering a message. Called me a kid. And now you need your Heroic Spirit to handle... what was it again?”

His fingers curled at his sides. Not fists. Tighter than fists. The knuckles had gone white.

I scratched my chin with my free hand.

”A child.”

’Maggie, get ready.’

The Fire Lord’s presence was oppressive. Heat poured off it in waves that made the air shimmer and cracked the ground in branching lines. Each breath I took tasted of char and something metallic, something older than fire. This was a Heroic Spirit. The gap between this thing and the man I’d been fighting was the gap between a campfire and an erupting volcano.

But I’d be lying if I said the look on that bastard’s face wasn’t worth it.