I Only Summon Villainesses

I don’t know how long the second hour ran. Time stopped being a thing with numbers and became a thing with wounds, and I counted it in those instead.

There was the gash over my brow, sealed. The one on my side, sealed. The one on my thigh that wouldn’t close no matter how long I gave it, because Infinite Vitality had only just clawed its way up to Advanced and sat there at the bottom rung of its new tier, clumsy as a newborn, dragging me shut slower than the old version ever had.

So the thigh stayed open, and I kept splitting it wider every time I put weight on the leg to lunge.

A finger on my left hand had gone the wrong way an hour back and I’d set it against a pillar without slowing, one short grind of bone on cold stone, because slowing down was the single thing this place would not forgive. My mouth tasted of old copper. I’d stopped noticing when that started.

Snare, free, close, kill. I’d built a rhythm, and the rhythm was eating me alive.

Because the problem had never been that I couldn’t kill them. I could kill them all night. The problem was arithmetic, the same arithmetic I’d thrown away at the start, and arithmetic doesn’t care how stubborn a man is.

Every skull I cracked cost me flame, and flame cost me essence, and the well behind my ribs was running down toward a floor I could feel coming up to meet it.

[Spirit Essence Is Low]

’Yeah. No thanks.’

The voices had stopped touching me somewhere back in the first hour. That was the strange gift of the night. Unshakeable Spirit had climbed the way a thing only climbs when you’ve no choice but to put your whole weight on it, and now the flood of stolen thought broke against the inside of my skull like rain on a roof.

[Unshakeable Spirit has reached Lv. 4]

They kept trying anyway. That was almost the worst of it. They threw my worry for Wren at me a hundred times an hour and it stopped landing, and somewhere in there I understood that the man who’d woken on these stones and flinched at his own voice in the dark was gone. Burned off him.

Whatever stood here now, bleeding in the firelight, had been sanded down to something that didn’t flinch at anything.

I couldn’t decide if that was growth or just damage. Out here the two wore the same face.

Then Tactical Omniscience laid the failure out for me, cold and plain, the way it did once I stopped panicking long enough to listen. I’d been burning the surface all night. Throwing flame across their backs and watching the ones behind crawl over the burning ones and come on regardless. Every wall of fire I raised only cleared the top layer, and a top layer is nothing to a flood.

The fire had to finish what it started. It had to chase.

So I stopped throwing it and started aiming it.

The white flame off my right hand narrowed to a single lick and I stamped it into the lead creature like a brand, a sigil of fire burned onto its pale bent back, and then I did the same to the next, and the next, marking a whole swath of the tide with small white seals that would not go out.

Then I let the flame off its leash, and it went hunting.

It came off my hands as living fire and it did not spread.

It sought.

Each tongue of it curved through the dark and found a mark and ran the marked thing down no matter which way it crawled, pouring into the sigil until the sigil ate the whole body. And this time I layered Purifying Flame under it, so the fire bit the profane rot in them the way it bit corruption, not just the hair but the wrong thing underneath the hair that let them stand back up.

They didn’t stand back up.

For the first time all night, the ones I burned stayed burned, hunted down and hollowed out where they crawled, white fire chewing through the dark in a dozen curving lines that each ended in a still shape.

[Heretical Pursuit has reached Lv. 3]

’...There. Now we’re talking.’

It was the best I’d fought all night. It was also the most expensive thing I’d done all night, because marking cost, and hunting cost, and purifying cost most of all, and I felt the well crater under me with every mark I laid.

’Everything good in here costs everything I’ve got. Naturally.’

So I spent the rest of it in one throw, before the well could tell me no.

All seven chains, called home at once. The recall of seven together nearly put me on my knees, barbed wire through the needle’s eye seven times over, and I knelt into it and held them coiled and screaming in my chest.

Then I struck them out as one, all seven Chains of Agony sunk into the thickest knot of the tide at a single point, and I opened every kind of pain I owned into it in the same breath.

The crushing weight of a death I had never actually died. Seven separate griefs at once, into bodies that couldn’t tell a borrowed agony from a real one.

The knot came apart. A dozen of them convulsed into stillness, hair going limp across the rock like cut rope, and for one breath the firelight showed me a clean ring of empty stone.

It was, for that one breath, devastating.

[Chains of Agony has reached Lv. 3]

And it emptied me.

The white flame guttered down around my fists to almost nothing, thin and blue and starving. My legs finally said the thing they’d been trying to say for an hour, which was that they were finished. I went to one knee. Made myself stand. The standing took everything the killing had left, and a little more that I didn’t have.

’White Feather’s precious gem is still out there,’ I told the dark, and said it aloud to give it weight. ’So I don’t get to fall. Not here.’

I couldn’t see the far end of the tide anymore. My eyes were done. But Death Sense didn’t need eyes, and when I let it open it filled me with the count I’d been refusing to take all night.

Life force after life force after life force, killing intent packed into the dark so thick it had a texture, running back past everything I’d marked and hunted and chained and burned, past any number I could stand to hold.

I had cleared, maybe, a hundred of them.

The dark hadn’t noticed.

For a moment I just knelt there in the shrinking ring of light, everything I’d spent laid out around me in cooling bodies. I had burned, marked, hunted, chained, and bled for half the night. I had leaned on every attribute I owned, and dragged the freshest of them up levels in an hour that should have taken me a season.

And I had not made a dent.

The tide took its first step back into the light.

’...Ah, damn,’ I breathed. ’That’s a problem.’

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