I Only Summon Villainesses

Chapter 282: The Fragile Fire Lord

It happened between one strike and the next. No telegraphing, no shift in stance. She simply planted her feet and didn’t move.

Ifrit’s fist came down and Maggie simply caught it.

One hand extended outward with an open palm. The impact cratered the ground beneath her in a perfect circle, turned the soil to powder, and sent fracture lines racing through the pavement in every direction. But her arm didn’t buckle. Her body didn’t fold. She held the Fire Lord’s fist like it weighed nothing, and her crimson eyes looked up at the spirit with an expression I recognized from training.

The expression she wore right before she stopped playing.

White flames ignited along her knuckles.

They didn’t spread gradually. They didn’t creep or build. They engulfed both her fists in a single instant, burning so bright and so cold that the air around her hands crystallized into frost before evaporating. The white fire climbed to her elbows and stayed there, dense and controlled, each flame licking upward with surgical precision.

I’d done this. Once... Against the Minotaur. Coated my hands in white fire and fought bare-knuckled, using the flames as a multiplier on every strike.

But watching Maggie do it was like watching a child’s crayon drawing come to life beside the original painting.

She released the Fire Lord’s fist and hit it in the chest.

The sound that came from the impact had no business existing. It was a detonation, a concussive blast that I felt in my sternum from twenty meters away. The Fire Lord’s chest caved inward where her fist connected, the deep red flames collapsing like a sinkhole, and the spirit was launched backward. Its feet left the ground.

A building-sized fire elemental, thrown through the air by a punch from a woman who barely came up to its midsection.

It crashed through three trees on its way down. The trunks didn’t break so much as vaporize where the spirit’s body struck them, the wood turning to ash and superheated gas in an instant. The ground shook when it landed.

Maggie was already walking after it.

She hit it again before it could rise. A straight right that connected with its jaw and snapped the spirit’s head sideways. The crown of fire above its brow flickered violently. Then a left hook to the ribs that blew a hole clean through its flame body, revealing the skeletal structure of molten energy underneath.

The Fire Lord swung back. Maggie slipped the punch and buried her fist in its solar plexus, and this time the impact sent a column of white fire erupting from the spirit’s back. The trees behind it ignited from shockwaves, the compressed air hitting them was hard enough to shatter bark before the flames even arrived.

A lamppost faraway bent in half from the pressure wave alone.

The Fire Lord roared and grabbed for her with both hands, trying to trap her in its grip. Maggie ducked the first, deflected the second with a forearm strike that scattered crimson flames like sparks from a forge, and launched herself upward.

Her knee connected with the underside of the spirit’s jaw.

The crack that followed echoed off the Company building and came back louder. Ifrit’s head snapped upward so violently that the crown of fire separated from its brow entirely, dissipating into the night air like embers thrown from a bonfire. The spirit stumbled, one leg buckling, and for the first time its roar sounded less like rage and more like pain.

Maggie landed in the crater her own attacks had made and didn’t stop.

A flurry of strikes, each one wreathed in white fire, each one landing with that same devastating force. Ribs. Stomach. Thigh. Chest again. Every impact blew chunks of the Fire Lord’s body apart, scattering crimson flame like gore. The spirit tried to reform, its elemental body knitting back together, but Maggie’s white fire was eating the seams. Wherever her flames touched, the deep red couldn’t grow back. It left black wounds in the spirit’s body that smoked and hissed.

The ground around them was gone. What had been pavement and grass and soil was now a crater of fused glass and scorched earth, still glowing orange at the edges. Two more trees collapsed, their trunks eaten through by conducted heat. The iron fence had melted into a puddle of slag. The lamppost was gone entirely.

The summoner was backing away.

I saw it before he probably wanted me to. The way his weight shifted to his back foot. The way his eyes moved from the fight to the street behind him. The way his jaw worked as if he was chewing on something bitter.

He was calculating whether this was survivable.

Maggie hit the Fire Lord with an uppercut that lifted the entire spirit off the ground, and the shockwave blew the summoner’s coat open. He raised his hand.

”Enough.”

He said it to himself, not to us. The word was quiet, barely audible over the sound of the Fire Lord crashing back to earth.

Ifrit began to dissolve. The massive body lost cohesion, the deep red flames unraveling from the extremities inward. Arms first, then legs, then torso, the elemental coming apart like a bonfire in a hurricane. The spirit’s face was the last to go, and for an instant those burning eyes found Maggie’s, and I could have sworn there was something close to respect in them before the Fire Lord dissipated entirely into sparks and heat distortion.

The summoner was already running.

He wasn’t running dramatically or leaving us with a parting threat or a vow of revenge. He simply turned and ran, his coat smoking, his face carrying the expression of a man who had just revised a fundamental assumption about the world.

I thought about chasing him. For about half a second.

Then I looked at the battlefield. At the crater that used to be a courtyard. At the melted fence, the collapsed trees, the glass-smooth earth where the Fire Lord had stood. At the Company building with every ground-floor window blown out and scorch marks climbing the facade.

And at Maggie, standing in the center of it all with white flames still guttering along her forearms, her habit torn at the shoulders, her crimson eyes tracking the retreating summoner with the detached focus of someone deciding whether the prey was worth chasing.

She decided it wasn’t.

The flames died. She turned back toward me, and her expression settled into its default state: cold, bored, faintly disgusted by everything in her general vicinity.

”That was his Heroic Spirit?”

I nodded.

She looked at the dissipating embers where the Fire Lord had been and clicked her tongue.

”Fragile.”

I wanted to scream and shout about how she just got a fanboy right this instance but this wreckage was making my stomach twist with pain of loss of money.

’That bastard! You and that Blood Mage! I will find and bleed money from you two!!’