I Only Summon Villainesses

Chapter 516: The Archmage [Part 2]

The coals rose to meet me, and I took stock of exactly how poor I was.

The well behind my ribs wasn’t dry anymore. That was the good news, and it was thin news. Kneeling in the green-lit dark long enough to hold a sword had let some small trickle seep back, enough to feel, nowhere near enough to spend the way I’d spent all night.

I had a cupful where I’d once had a river. And across the shelf from me was a thing the length of a street that had eaten ten thousand of its lessers without chewing.

‘So no burning the surface. No throwing walls of it around and hoping. I do that twice and I’m empty and dead.’

I had thought out the winnable shape of it out for me, thanks to Tactical Omniscience. I couldn’t kill the body. Nobody with a cupful of essence kills a profane god by the pound. But the body wasn’t the thing that made it a profane god. The thing that made it a profane god was the profane power coiled at its core, and I’d already found the door to that core an hour ago, torn open in its side by the river and poisoned so it couldn’t close.

Purifying Flame was the one blade I had that cut that kind of power. It just cost like sin to swing.

So all I just needed to do now was get to the wound. Burn what’s under it. Survive everything in between on movement alone, and spend flame only when the flame would end things.

Two swings of it, maybe three, before the cup ran out. I’d have to make them count the way I’d never had to make anything count in my life.

‘Right. Kassie always said I’d learn economy the day it was the only thing left. Hate it when she’s right.’

The first eye opened wide, and the world tried to stop.

I felt it before it landed, the killing intent gathering behind that red spiral the way pressure gathers before a storm, Death Sense screaming the warning a half-second early. The freeze came off it in a cone, the same power that had held a hundred Lost Mouths still in their tracks, and I did not let it find me standing.

Feather Step. One pace, no more, a single cheap stutter of the world that put me out of the cone’s mouth before it closed. Feathers scattered around stone where I had stood and I was already three strides down the shelf, low and moving,

The old me would have burned that cone. Would have met power with power and felt very brave for the two seconds before the well emptied. I didn’t even reach for the flame. I just went around.

Closing on the body was the hard part, because the body did not want to be closed on. It reared, that colossal net-scaled length rising out of the black water, and slammed down across the shelf like a falling tower, and the whole cavern jumped. I went under the fall, not away from it.

I fed a thread of essence into my legs and arms, reinforcing bone and muscle the way Kassie had drilled into me a thousand times on a thousand cold mornings, until my body could take what I was about to ask of it, and I ran up the side of the thing.

Its scales were a net of dull gold, each one fitted to the next, no gap a normal blade would find. Wren was not a normal blade.

She thrummed once in my grip, thin and hurt and certain, and I trusted the certainty and drove her point where she wanted to go, into the hairline seam between two plates, and the scales that would have turned steel opened for her like a mouth. I climbed on the purchase she gave me. Cut, step, cut, riding the great heaving flank upward while the body bucked to throw me, every strike a handhold, every handhold a wound.

This was the swordwork. This was the thing one year of Kassie’s grooming had been for, and I felt it working in me clean and cold, no panic in it anywhere, my grip sure even with two fingers gone off the off-hand, my weight always over the edge, Wren and I moving as one thing with one intent up the side of a god.

The seam came into reach. The old wound, the river-torn ruin in its side, black and vast and still refusing to heal because Fallen Divinity had told it not to.

‘There. One.’

I set Wren’s point into the raw meat of it, and I poured the first Purifying Flame down the length of her.

It cost. God, it cost. I felt the cup drop by a third in a single heartbeat, white fire running the blade into the wound and finding the profane old power laid open there and eating it, and the Archmage’s scream this time was not the ringing shriek of an hour ago.

It was deeper. Wetter. The scream of a thing that had felt this exact fire before and knew precisely what it did to the part of it that mattered.

Then it threw me off, and the second eye found me in the air.

I had nothing under my feet to Feather Step from and half a breath to live. The unmake gaze swept across the space I was falling through, and where it passed the very air seemed to forget itself. I twisted, spent a stutter of Step off nothing but will and a scrap of essence I couldn’t spare, and the gaze took the trailing hem of my coat and a strip of skin off my ribs instead of the middle of me.

The skin didn’t tear. It lost solidity. I hit the shelf rolling with a cold hole burned in my side that didn’t bleed because there was nothing left of it to bleed, and I came up on one knee with Wren already raised.

‘…Okay. That’s going to be a problem later. If there is a later.’

The cup was under half now. The thing was wounded worse, its core burned once, but a profane god certainly does not die of once. It gathered itself in the black water, all three eyes kindling at me, and I understood with total clarity that it was done playing and the next thing it did would be everything.

The third eye. The aging breath. The one that had taken my fingers to ash with a graze, that had brought the whole ceiling down on us both. If that breath caught me square there would be no side of me left to burn a hole in.

So I let it come.

I planted myself in the open, in full view, the one warm thing on the rock, bait and swordsman both, and I felt the breath gather in it, that low grinding note building past hearing, and I called the one chain I could afford.

Chains of Agony, out and into the base of its skull, and I opened every pain I had left down that single line at the exact instant before it exhaled.

The breath hitched. Just a hitch. A god drowning in seven false agonies for one quarter of one second, its head jerking a hand’s breadth off true.

A hand’s breadth was a mile.

Feather Step into the space the flinch had opened, this time I summoned the robes of Ethereal Grace for a moment, using it to carry my weight up under the great jaw, and I was inside the reach of everything it had, close against the wound I’d burned, close enough to feel the rotted heat of the core through the torn seam.

Wren went in to the guard, all of her, guided by a thrum that had stopped being hurt and started being furious.

And I emptied the cup.

Everything.

The whole last of it, every drop I’d hoarded and counted, poured down the blade as one final Purifying Flame that did not spread and did not spray but went where the steel went, straight through the open seam and into the profane divine heart of the thing that had hunted me across the whole of the Precipice.

The core caught.

I felt it go the way you feel a held breath finally leave.

The rotted holiness at the center of it, the thing that had made a serpent into a god a very long dead age ago, took the white fire and could not put it out, because Purifying Flame is the one thing in any world built to burn exactly that. It ate inward. It ate outward.

The colossal net-scaled body lit from the inside like a lantern made of a mountain, gold seams glowing white, ash pouring off it in sheets now instead of petals.

The three red eyes went dark one at a time.

And the Archmage came apart, immediately being unmade from its own rotted heart outward, a street-long ruin of a god sighing down into ash and cold water while the river carried the last of it away without an opinion in the world.

Then there was loud silence immediately.

I was on my knees again. I don’t remember kneeling. The cup was scraped past empty, past the empty I’d thought was the bottom, into a place where even Ethereal Grace wouldn’t answer, and Wren lay across my palms gone quiet and still, the fury spent out of her.

[You have slain a Level 8 Profane Aberration: The Archmage of the Drowned Deep]

[Purifying Flame has reached Lv. 4]

[You have gained…