I Only Summon Villainesses

Chapter 302: Something Big Is Coming

The wiry woman from our unit stepped forward with her spear, its rusted head still serviceable enough. She caught the leading creature in the shoulder, the impact knocking it sideways, but the other two were already past.

One went for Dull. He caught it with a backhand swing of the axe that caved in its skull and sent it spinning into the rubble. The second came for me.

It was faster than the others.

I raised my dagger to block and realized, in the space between heartbeats, that the angle was wrong. The creature’s bone blade was coming in from below, not above, an uppercut slash that would gut me if I tried to redirect with my current guard.

So I didn’t redirect. I stepped into the strike instead.

The bone blade scored a line of fire across my left side, splitting the fabric of my coat and drawing a thin line of blood. But the step put me inside its reach, closer than its blades could operate effectively, and I drove my elbow into its throat.

It staggered. I followed with the dagger, two quick punctures into the gap between its chest plates, and it folded.

I pressed my hand against my side. The wound was shallow... annoying, but shallow.

The wiry woman gave me a look that lasted about half a second before she turned back to the fight. But I caught it.

She was clearly surprised by my movement.

An F-rank shouldn’t be fighting like this. An F-rank shouldn’t be stepping into strikes and punishing with the kind of precision that came from training with something far beyond what the battlefield offered. She didn’t know that, of course. She just knew that the kid who’d been assigned to their unit was suddenly fighting like he’d been doing this for years.

The next ten minutes were chaos. The Night Fall Order committed more summons to the center push, and the mercenary line held, but barely. Bodies piled on both sides. The Night Guard barriers flickered and shifted, trying to cover too many gaps with too few summoners. Sergeant Kael’s voice was hoarse from shouting orders that the noise of battle swallowed halfway.

And somewhere in the middle of it, I became aware that Sulin was watching me.

She hadn’t moved from her position behind the line. Still standing with her arms folded, that black hair catching the dust and firelight, those red eyes tracking the battle with the patience of someone cataloging what she saw. But now those eyes were on me.

I killed two more summons in the next exchange. The first one, I caught with a throw, the dagger spinning end over end and burying itself in the creature’s eye socket. The second, I killed with its own momentum, redirecting its charge into a broken pillar that cracked its spine on impact.

When I retrieved my dagger, Sulin’s expression hadn’t changed. But she’d unfolded her arms.

That was about when things stopped being manageable.

A horn sounded from beyond the ruins, low and resonant, the kind of sound that didn’t come from a human throat. It rolled across the battlefield like fog, and every summon on the Night Fall Order’s side responded.

They pulled back.

All of them, simultaneously pulled back as if someone had yanked on an invisible leash. The bone-blade creatures, the chitinous runners, the half-formed shadow beasts that had been harassing the flanks. All of them withdrew behind the line of Night Fall soldiers and vanished into the darkness beyond the torchlight.

For a moment, the battlefield was silent except for groaning and the crackling of small fires that had started in the rubble.

"That’s not a retreat," Dull said.

He was breathing hard, the axe resting across his shoulder, his face and arms painted in dark fluid that wasn’t his.

"I don’t know what it is but it’s not a retreat."

He was right. I could feel it. Something in the atmosphere had shifted, the same way pressure changes before a storm, not visible but absolutely present.

I wiped the dagger on my coat and looked down at the blade. It was good steel I saw while looking for a blacksmith back in Los Arcos and was reliable. But it wasn’t enough for what was coming.

I’d known this moment would arrive. I’d been calculating it since the first hour, measuring the escalation against my essence reserve, against the hours remaining, against the feeling in my gut that said the real battle hadn’t started yet.

I opened my arms, sending back the dagger into my soul and bringing forth Frostfang

The blade sang as it cleared the sheath, a thin crystalline note that cut through the ambient noise of the battlefield. White frost crawled along the edge like a living thing, spreading from the hilt to the tip in the time it took to draw a breath. Cold radiated from the metal, and the air around me fogged instantly, my next exhale coming out as a plume of white mist.

Dull looked at the sword. Then at me. Then back at the sword.

"Huh," he said. Which was, for Dull, an extended commentary.

The wiry woman stared openly. So did two Night Guards who had been repositioning the barrier line nearby. One of them actually stopped mid-step.

An F-rank mercenary pulling out a weapon that radiated cold like a legendary grade spirit gear was, apparently, noteworthy.

’So much for keeping a low profile.’

But the time for conservation was over. Whatever that horn had signaled was going to hit us soon, and I’d rather have the Frostfang in my hand when it did than be caught fumbling for it when seconds counted.

I adjusted my grip. The sword’s weight was different from the dagger, heavier, with a balance point further from the hilt that demanded wider swings and more committed follow-throughs. Kassie had drilled me on the transition between weapons until I could do it without thinking, and the muscle memory responded now like waking from a nap, groggy for about two seconds before snapping fully awake.

The horn sounded again.

This time, the ground trembled.

Something was coming I could tell... something very big and vicious was coming.