I Only Summon Villainesses

The javelin never reached me.

Brunhilde crossed my vision like a smear of pale light, and her katana left her sheath with a soft, wet crack, like a lake giving way underfoot. The ice spear met her blade and simply shattered. One heartbeat it was tearing toward my chest, and the next it was a hanging cloud of glittering dust, already drifting down with the snow.

She didn’t even slow.

’Right. Of course.’

I let out the breath I’d been holding and shoved myself up onto my knees, Frostfang already in my grip. It was broken but I didn’t have any other ideas right now.

’I can always supplement it with Sanctified Immolation.’

My Destrier was gone, a ruin of red snow somewhere behind me. The plain stretched white and flat in every direction, and rising on either side of it were the two mountains, dark and patient.

That was when I finally saw them.

Four figures. Two on each height, small at this distance but wrong in the way that powerful things are always wrong, they stood unbothered even though two vicious villainesses were barreling towards them.

Beside each of them crouched something enormous, hunched shapes of muscle and stone. They carried axes broad as doors and javelins that stood taller than the trees behind them, and even now another spear was lifting against the grey sky.

Hammerfeld’s people. Those bastards, Ilse hadn’t even finished her warning before they’d answered it.

’Kassie and Brunhilde should be enough...’

Kassie reached the left mountain first.

She didn’t climb it. She simply arrived, one leap eating the whole distance, and the air she dragged with her hit the slope a moment after she did and tore the snow off it in a white sheet.

The first retainer swung his axe at her with both arms, a strike that could have split a wagon, and Kassie caught it on her greatsword without breaking stride. Red sparks burst where the metal kissed. Then she pushed.

The man went backward off his own feet, and his summon, the great hunched creature beside him, lunged in to cover him.

Kassie scoffed. Her blade came up and over in that brutal overhead arc I knew far too well, the one that treated a great sword like it weighed nothing at all, and it came down through the summon’s shoulder and didn’t stop until it reached the ground.

The mountain shook. Snow slid off it in long white avalanches.

’...Yeah. There it is.’

I’d seen Kassie fight before. I’d fought Kassie before, and walked away from it feeling like a child who’d been allowed to win. But she’d always been holding the leash, keeping herself small enough that I could follow what she was doing. This was not that. This was the fossil version of her, the eight-thousand-year version, and following it was like trying to read a page after someone had already torn it out.

The second retainer on her mountain ran.

He didn’t get far.

On the right, Brunhilde made no sound at all.

She climbed her mountain the way frost climbs a window, slow and total and impossible to stop once it starts. The first javelin came down at her and she turned her shoulder so it passed a finger’s width from her face and buried itself in the slope, and where it landed the ground went white and hard and stopped being ground. She set one hand on the frozen spear as she passed it. The retainer who’d thrown it took a step back.

He was smart. Too late, but smart nonetheless.

Brunhilde’s katana came out of its sheath again, that same soft crack, and she drew a single line in the air.

Just one.

A pale, almost lazy arc.

The retainer’s summon, a thing of grey stone and grinding joints, froze mid-charge. Ice raced up its legs and over its chest and crept into the open seam of its roaring mouth, and then it was a statue, and then Brunhilde walked past it and it fell apart behind her into a hundred clean pieces that chimed against the rock like dropped glass.

She still hadn’t changed her expression.

Cold and patient on one side, laughing and ruinous on the other. Ilse and I were caught dead in the middle of the two of them, and for one stupid second all we could do was stand there in the snow and watch.

That second nearly killed us.

I felt the wind first, the same gust that had warned me before, and I threw myself flat without looking. A javelin punched into the snow where my head had been, close enough that the cold off it bit my cheek. One of the retainers, the last one on Kassie’s mountain, hadn’t run after all. He’d thrown for me. The easy target. The one without a summon out and a sword that, to him, must have looked like a toy.

’Easy target. Right.’

Something in my chest went hard and quiet.

I used Feather Step and vanished from where I’d been, and reappeared closer, halving the distance in a single blink. He flinched, that whole-body flinch of a man who’d expected the prey to stay where prey belongs. His axe came around toward me and I went under it, Feather Step again, low this time, snow spraying off my heels, and then I was inside his reach with Frostfang’s already moving.

I drove the broken tip up through the gap beneath his arm.

It wasn’t pretty and certainly wasn’t a Calamity’s killing line drawn in the sky but it worked, and he folded around it with a sound I’d hear again tonight when I closed my eyes.

I yanked the blade free and stepped back, breathing hard, my heart slamming against my ribs.

When I looked up, both mountains had gone quiet.

Kassie stood at the peak of the left one with her greatsword resting against her shoulder, the demonic helm tilted down at the wreckage around her boots, that flowing red haze trailing off her like a banner that had decided to be smoke. Brunhilde stood at the peak of the right one, perfectly still, the snow around her grown into delicate spires of ice that had not been there a minute ago.

Then Brunhilde turned her head, slowly, and looked across the whole plain at Kassie.

And Kassie, sensing it, looked back.

The air between the two mountains seemed to thin out, like the whole sky was holding its breath the way I’d held mine.

’Oh no.’

"Brunhilde!"

Ilse’s voice cracked across the snow from somewhere behind me, with a sharp warning.

"Not here."