I Only Summon Villainesses

Chapter 298: Let the Night Battle Begin

The war drums didn’t stop.

They rolled through the ruins like a second heartbeat, deep and uneven, bouncing off collapsed walls and broken archways until it was impossible to tell where the sound was coming from. It was everywhere. Inside the stone. Inside my teeth.

Around me, the camp had exploded into motion. Men who had been sleeping were now on their feet, strapping armor, pulling blades, shoving bread into their mouths. The routine of it was sickening. They’d done this before. They’d done this enough that there was a rhythm to it.

Sergeant Kael’s voice cut through the noise.

”All units, form on the eastern barricade. Night Guard takes the inner perimeter. Mercenaries forward.”

Meat shields to the front. That was what Cressida had said, wasn’t it?

’And I still don’t know where the hell she is.’

That thought stuck in my ribs like a splinter I couldn’t pull. But then I tried not to worry too much at the same time, Cressida was a sniper, maybe she was assigned differently.

I shoved that down and moved.

Sulin fell in beside me without a word. Her black hair was already tied back, and her red eyes were fixed forward with an expression that said she had no intention of talking. Jose trailed just behind us, his green hair catching the torchlight as he yawned with the audacity of a man being asked to wake up early for work rather than a man walking into a warzone.

Dull was already at the barricade, his axe resting on one shoulder like a man waiting for a bus. He nodded when he saw us.

The eastern barricade was where the ruins opened into a wide stretch of collapsed ground, old foundations and shattered pillars forming a jagged no man’s land that stretched for about two hundred meters before the terrain rose into a ridge. Beyond the ridge, according to what Kael had briefed us on, was where the Night Fall Order would come from.

Two hundred meters of broken stone, collapsed arches, half-walls, and craters where buildings used to be.

It was a nightmare to defend and a nightmare to attack. Every five steps, the ground changed elevation. Rubble formed natural walls in some places and blind spots in others. There were pits where basements had caved in, covered in moss and loose stone that could swallow a man if he stepped wrong.

The barricade itself was crude but functional. Sharpened logs bound together with rope, driven into the ground at angles. Behind it, mercenaries were lining up in groups. There were a lot of us.

I’d expected fifty, maybe sixty. There were closer to three hundred.

Men and women in mismatched armor, carrying weapons that ranged from quality steel to rusted iron that looked like it had been pulled out of the ruins themselves. Some wore leather, some wore chain. A few wore nothing but cloth and stubbornness.

The Night Guards were behind us, forming a tighter line near the building we’d come from. Their armor was uniform. Dark grey, with engravings along the breastplates that caught the torchlight. They carried halberds and short swords, and every fifth guard held a lantern on a pole that burned with a pale blue light.

’So that’s the difference between the funded army and the expendables.’

The wiry woman from our unit appeared beside Dull. She’d found a spear from somewhere and was testing its weight with practiced flicks of her wrist.

”First wave is always mundane,” she said to no one in particular. ”The Order sends their chaff first. Tests the line. Finds the weak spots. The real trouble comes after.”

The nervous kid was there too, gripping his short sword so tightly his knuckles had gone white. He looked like he was trying very hard not to vomit.

Jose glanced at the kid, then at me, then back at the kid.

”Hey,” Jose said, his voice carrying the lazy calm of someone who had either been through this before or simply did not give a damn. ”Loosen your grip. You’ll cramp before anything even gets here.”

The kid looked at him like he’d spoken a different language.

Jose shrugged and went back to leaning against a broken pillar. ”Or don’t. Your funeral.”

’What a guy.’

But he wasn’t wrong. The tension in the air was thick enough to cut. I could feel it in the mercenaries around me, men tightening straps that were already tight, checking blades that were already drawn. The kind of nervous energy that preceded something that couldn’t be taken back.

From this side of the barricade, looking out across that stretch of broken ground, the ruins looked different than they had during the day. The torchlight only reached so far. Beyond it, everything was shadow and silhouette. Broken walls became teeth. Collapsed archways became open mouths. The wind moved through the hollow structures and made sounds that were too close to breathing.

And then the drums stopped.

The silence hit harder than the drums had. Three hundred mercenaries went quiet at once. Even the kid stopped his fidgeting.

Somewhere beyond the ridge, I heard movement. The collective sound of hundreds of bodies shifting over stone, like gravel being poured from a great height.

Then they crested the ridge.

At first, it was just shapes. Dark figures moving against the darker sky, pouring over the top of the ridge in a wave that seemed too wide for what I’d imagined. They came in no particular formation, just a mass of bodies flowing downhill and into the broken ground.

The Night Fall Order’s first wave.

They wore dark clothing, hoods and wraps that blended them into the night. Their weapons were a mix of swords, axes, maces, and a disturbing number of hooks on chains. No armor to speak of and no coordination either.

But there were a lot of them.

A man to my left spat on the ground. ”Gutter rats. They sweep the streets for anyone willing to hold a weapon and throw them at us first.”

’So both sides use expendables. Good to know.’

The gutter rats were halfway across the broken ground when a horn sounded from behind us.

”Hold the barricade!” someone roared, and the cry echoed down the line, mouth to mouth, until it vanished into the distance where other barricades held other mercenaries.

The first of them reached the rubble fifty meters out, and the terrain did its work. Men stumbled over collapsed stone, tripped on hidden ledges, fell into pits that the darkness had disguised. A few of them screamed as the ground gave way beneath them, old basements swallowing them whole. The sounds that came from those pits were not pleasant.

But the rest kept coming.

They hit the barricade like water hitting a dam. No finesse. No strategy. Just bodies pressing forward with the desperation of people who had been told to advance or die.

And then the killing started.