Dimensional Summoner: Infinite Growth in a Leveling Apocalypse

[Summon selected.]

[Physical manifestation initiated.]

The distortion didn’t spread the way it usually did. It folded — inward, hard, a column of bent air two metres high that pulled the daylight out of the middle of my workshop and held it. Heat came off it first. Not fire-heat; something drier, with a smell underneath like scorched iron and burnt sugar.

Then the fold broke, and she was standing in it.

[Summon: Duchess Nyssara Vhal.]

[Race: Succubus.]

[Summon Grade: S.]

[Manifested Level: 16 — Host-Limited.]

[Manifestation Remaining: 00:12:00.]

[Combat-Language Synchronization Enabled.]

[Coordination Link Enabled.]

[Spoken instructions are transmitted clearly. Compliance remains subject to the summon’s judgment.]

She arrived mid-motion, one arm already extended and black fire on it.

That was the first thing — a low crawling flame the colour of arterial blood shading to pure black at its edges, wrapped around her right forearm from elbow to fingertips, moving the way fire does not move. It didn’t flicker. It rolled. Where it passed near the concrete, the dust lifted and turned to nothing.

She was tall, only a little shorter than me, built with the full, heavy-hipped strength of someone who has spent a life in armour and never once gone hungry. Her skin was a dusky rose-grey, ash over a warm undertone, catching the light along her shoulders and the long line of her throat. Dark red hair, near-black in shadow, pinned up in a coil that had come half undone on one side. Two horns swept back from her temples and up, black and ridged, polished along the leading edge. Her eyes were amber set in black — no white anywhere in them — and they found me before the distortion had finished closing.

Her clothing was not what the word succubus had prepared me for. High-collared coat in deep red over a fitted black underlayer, cut close through a narrow waist and split at the hip for movement, a wide belt, a chain of flat gold plates lying across her collarbone and down over the swell of her chest. All of it made to be worn while giving orders and, if necessary, while killing someone. There was a scorch mark on the left shoulder that was about ten seconds old.

Wings came off her back, leather and dark and long, half-furled, twitching once as she settled her weight. Her tail had already found the floor behind her and gone still, the way a cat’s does before it decides.

I’ll be honest about what my body did, because pretending otherwise is a lie I’d have to keep making. She was beautiful in a way that made the room feel smaller, and I noticed it in the first half-second, and I put it in a box and shut the lid, because she was on fire and I was not.

[Lethal-Action Safeguard Active.]

[A deliberate lethal action against the summoner will terminate manifestation before completion.]

Her head turned in a slow arc — the two open roller doors, the benches, the ceiling, the yard beyond, me — and stopped.

She said something in a language I heard as my own.

"Where is my hall."

Not a question. A demand with very little patience left in it.

"Another world," I said. "Earth. You’ve been physically moved, not copied, and you’ll be returned to the exact place and instant you left. No time will pass there. Nobody will have seen you go."

The soulfire on her arm didn’t go out. It contracted, tightening to a sheath, which somehow read as worse.

"You will explain that again," she said, "and this time you will explain who did it."

"I did. It’s a class ability. It picked you at random out of a pool I don’t control and can’t see." I kept my hands where she could look at them. "I can’t choose who it takes. I couldn’t have chosen you if I’d wanted to."

"Random." She said it like she was turning a coin over to check the stamp. "You expect a ruler to accept random."

"I expect you to check."

That got the first flicker of something other than anger. She tilted her head, and the pressure in the room changed — a cold prickle across the back of my neck, gone as fast as it came.

"You are not lying," she said. "You are also not sufficient. A working of this size requires a foundation, and you have none. You are a candle."

"That’s been said."

"Not by anyone competent." She flexed the burning hand. The flame answered a fraction of a second late, and I watched her notice it and file it. "And I am reduced. What is the extent of it?"

"Your body’s capped at my level. Sixteen. Knowledge, senses, training, judgment — all intact. Everything you know how to do, you still know how to do. You just have less to do it with." I nodded at her arm. "That’s why the fire lagged."

"Twelve minutes, the working said."

"Twelve. When it ends you go back. I can’t extend it and neither can you."

She was quiet for three seconds. I have rarely watched anyone think that fast in front of me.

"Then this is a theft of time," she said, "and the theft is well-aimed, whether you aimed it or not."

"What was happening?"

I expected her not to answer. She looked at the open roller door instead of at me, and when she spoke it was in the clipped register of someone reporting to an officer she has not decided to trust.

"My war minister stood up in my throne hall eleven heartbeats ago and told two of my vassal commanders that the succession would be handled tonight. He did not know I had already read his correspondence. I raised fire." Her tail moved once against the concrete. "He is standing there now with his mouth open, and so am I, and neither of us has moved, because your working stopped the world."

"Backed by someone?"

"Vharrek." The name came out flat and hard. "Duke of the eastern march. I have no proof that would survive a council. I have the shape of it — his coin in my quartermaster’s ledger, his physician attending my minister’s wife, six things that are each nothing."

"Do you still have soldiers?"

"Three hundred loyal within a horn’s call, and a hall containing the men who intend to take my chair. So I do not need strength. I have strength." Her jaw set. "I need to know what to do with the eleven heartbeats after I return, because if I burn all three where they stand I will have executed the only men who can tell me how far it goes."

I’m not a politician. I’ve never run anything larger than a compound with four buildings and a broken generator. But I’d spent an unpleasant amount of my life watching people decide what to do with someone they’d caught, and one thing in what she’d said didn’t fit.

"They want the territory," I said.

"Obviously."

"And the army. Intact." I took one slow step and stopped when her wing shifted. "If Vharrek wanted your land scorched he’d have marched. He didn’t. He bought your minister, which means he wants your legions standing, your borders where they are, and your people still paying whoever sits in the chair. That’s an expensive thing to want. It also means you’re worth more to him alive. A duchess who abdicates hands over an administration that still works. A duchess who dies makes three claimants and a war." I shrugged, which pulled the bruise, which I regretted. "If I’m right, the men in your hall aren’t there to kill you. They’re there to take you, and they’ll have a reason ready. Something that sounds legal."

She went very still.

It wasn’t agreement. It was the stillness of someone rearranging a board she had already thought was finished, and it lasted long enough that I heard the wind move across the yard.

"Captivity," she said quietly. "Not assassination. That changes the first thing I say."

"It changes what they’re prepared for."

"It changes a great deal more than that." Her eyes came back to me, and the attention had weight in it now. "What is your name."

"Adrian Vale."

"Adrian Vale." She let the soulfire go out. It didn’t fade; it stopped being, and the absence made the workshop feel dim. "A Level 16 human with no foundation, no retinue, no army, and a working that abducts an S-ranked ruler out of her own throne room." She came two steps closer, unhurried, and I made myself hold ground. "And you smell like nothing that should be attached to a body like yours."

"That’s a strange compliment."

"It is not a compliment. It is a discrepancy." Something sharpened in her face — curiosity, mostly, and under it a strand of something less academic. "I have a sense that reads the shape of a soul. It is how I find liars in a room of two hundred. I would like to use it on you."

It’s information, I thought. She’s spending her own minutes on it, and whatever she learns she takes home.

"What does it involve?"

"Looking. It is not a touch. It does not take. It does not read your thoughts, and if you had a wife and a debt and a bad conscience it would tell me none of them."

"Then look."

Nyssara Vhal smiled — small, pleased, and entirely herself — and opened her soul-sight.

And every trace of the composure she had worn since she arrived came off her face at once.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!