I Only Summon Villainesses

Chapter 241: The Woodland Threat [part 3]

The beast’s head hit the ground. The green glow died from its eyes.

I stood there, fist still buried in scorched hide, breathing so hard it hurt. Blood dripped from my knuckles, my nose, the corner of my mouth. The forest was burning in patches around us, white flames eating lazily through undergrowth and climbing tree trunks. Everything smelled like ash and cooked meat.

It was done.

I pulled my fist free and staggered back, and the moment I did, the fire coating my hands guttered and died. My spirit essence was running on fumes. My left arm was useless. My ribs were a constellation of fractures held together by stubbornness. I took one step back, then another, and my legs almost gave out.

I turned toward where I’d dropped the Frostfang sword.

The ground behind me cracked.

Not cracked. Cratered. The earth split in a radial pattern beneath the beast’s body, and a shockwave of green energy erupted outward and threw me off my feet. I hit the ground rolling, and before I could even process what was happening, a sound tore through the forest that made every roar before it sound like a whimper.

The beast was standing.

Its body was different. The blue-gray hide had darkened to near black where the fire had scorched it, but instead of damaged, it looked tempered. The cracked patches had sealed over with something that pulsed with sickly green veins of light, like its own body was stitching itself back together with raw power. Its muscles had swollen further, stretching the hide taut, and its four horns now glowed at the tips with the same green luminescence that blazed from its eyes.

It had gotten bigger, not through fear manipulation this time. It had actually gotten bigger.

The sound it made wasn’t a roar, it was a declaration. A low, rumbling bellow that vibrated in my chest and made the burning trees around us shudder. The green energy radiating from its body pressed down on the clearing like a physical weight, heavier than the purple fear wave, heavier than anything I’d felt from this creature before.

It was stronger now. Whatever I had done by pushing it to the edge, I had pushed it past something... perhaps a limit, one it didn’t have anymore.

"Oh, come on."

The beast moved.

It was faster than before. I didn’t even see the first hit. One moment I was scrambling to my feet, the next a fist the size of my torso connected with my guard and blew through it like it wasn’t there. My arms folded, the impact cratered my chest, and I was airborne. I smashed through a burning tree trunk. The tree snapped in half and I kept going, tumbling through brush and branches until I hit something solid enough to stop me.

A boulder. My back cracked against it and I slid down to the base.

I tried to breathe. Couldn’t. My lungs wouldn’t expand. Something was very wrong in my chest, worse than before, and my vision was going dark at the edges.

The beast was already closing the distance. It crossed the gap in three strides and swung again, a massive overhand that I barely rolled away from. The fist hit the boulder where my head had been and the stone exploded into rubble. Fragments tore across my face and arms.

I got to my feet. It swung again. I tried to dodge left and its other arm was already there, a backhand that caught my shoulder and spun me. I hit the ground, rolled, got up. It kicked me in the stomach and I folded around its foot and flew backward.

I crashed through undergrowth and skidded across dirt. Everything was pain. Not checkpoints anymore. Just one continuous scream from every part of my body at once.

The beast didn’t pause between attacks. It was relentless, a chain of brutality with no breathing room. Every time I stood, it hit me. Every time I tried to create distance, it closed it in a stride. It grabbed my leg and swung me into a tree. It caught me mid-roll and slammed me into the ground. It backhanded me out of the air when I tried to leap away.

I couldn’t fight this. Not with my fists, not with my flames sputtering on fumes, not with one working arm and a ribcage that felt like a bag of broken glass.

It picked me up by the throat.

Its massive hand closed around my neck and lifted me off the ground. My feet dangled. I clawed at its fingers with my one good hand but I might as well have been scratching stone. The beast brought me close to its face, close enough that I could see every crack and vein of green light in its remade hide, close enough that the heat of its breath washed over me.

Its eyes burned into mine. This close, the green glow wasn’t just light. It was intelligence, fury and contempt.

It was going to crush my throat. I could feel the pressure building, the slow squeeze, and my vision was tunneling fast.

The Frostfang sword was thirty feet to my left. Lying in the dirt where I’d dropped it during the standoff, half-buried in ash.

Thirty feet... I had almost nothing left. A thimble of spirit essence at the very bottom of a very empty well. But almost nothing wasn’t nothing.

I stopped clawing at the beast’s hand. I stopped struggling entirely, and for a split second, the creature’s grip eased a fraction, the way a predator relaxes when prey goes limp.

White chains erupted from my body.

They exploded outward in every direction, a dozen of them, blazing with the last scraps of spirit essence I had. They weren’t strong. They didn’t need to be strong. They only needed to do two things.

Half of them wrapped around the beast’s arm and face and horns. Not to hold it, not to restrain it, just to blind it, to burn it, to make it flinch for one second. The chains seared across its eyes and the beast bellowed, its grip loosening just enough.

The other half of the chains shot toward the Frostfang sword.