I Only Summon Villainesses

Chapter 303: Time To Shine

It started as a vibration in the soles of my feet, barely perceptible, like a heavy cart rolling over cobblestone several streets away. Then it grew. The rubble around us began to shift and click, loose stones dancing against each other, small cascades of gravel sliding down the remaining walls.

"What is that?" the wiry woman said, her voice flat with the kind of calm that comes from being too tired to be scared.

Nobody answered her. Because what emerged from the darkness beyond the ruins answered the question far more effectively than words could.

It came through the gap between two crumbling towers, and it had to turn sideways to fit.

The thing was massive, almost the same way a ship could be considered massive, a scale of existence that made the word "big" feel inadequate. It walked on four legs, each one as thick as the pillars that lined the ruin’s main corridor, and its body was a fortress of dense black carapace that caught the firelight like wet stone. A crown of bone spurs jutted from its skull, each one taller than a man, framing a face that was all jaw and no eyes.

It didn’t need eyes. The smaller beast summons that flanked it, dozens of them, served as its sight. They chittered and skittered around its feet like pilots guiding a warship into harbor.

Actually for a second, I wondered if this was actually a spirit summon of a spirit beast. The line between the two sometimes can be vague after all.

The mercenary line, what was left of it, went quiet... not silent... quiet. The difference was that silent people have stopped making noise. Quiet people are still making noise but can’t hear themselves over the sound of their own fear.

"What in the name of..." Sergeant Kael’s voice died halfway through the sentence.

The thing took another step. A section of collapsed wall that had served as part of our barricade crumbled under its foot like dried clay. It didn’t notice. It walked through our fortification the way a person walks through a puddle.

’That thing is at least Myth or Legend rank. Maybe higher.’

I could feel the essence radiating off it, thick and oppressive, the kind of spiritual pressure that pressed against your chest and made breathing feel like work. The mercenaries closest to it were already backing up slowly. Their instinct was pulling at their legs, telling them to get away from the thing that could flatten them without slowing down.

"Hold!" Kael shouted. "Hold the line!"

Nobody held the line. The line didn’t exist anymore. The creature’s presence had dissolved it the way hot water dissolves sugar, not violently, just inevitably.

The Night Guard defensive summoners tried. A barrier shimmered into existence directly in the creature’s path, a wall of translucent energy that had stopped everything else tonight. The creature walked into it.

The barrier cracked like ice on a pond. Then it shattered. The summoner behind it staggered back, blood streaming from his nose, and collapsed.

’All right. That’s enough of that.’

I stepped forward.

I didn’t think about it. There wasn’t time to think about it, and thinking would have been counterproductive anyway. The creature was forty meters away and closing. The mercenaries were scattering. The Night Guards were trying to establish a second barrier line and failing. In about fifteen seconds, that thing was going to reach the inner barricade where the wounded were sheltering, and after that it would keep going until someone stopped it.

So I stopped thinking and started moving.

The Frostfang trailed frost as I ran, white crystals forming in the air behind me like the wake of a boat. The cold intensified with every step, the blade responding to my intent, and I could feel the essence flowing from my core into the sword in a steady, measured stream.

I moved with measure because twelve hours was twelve hours and I still had to be standing at the end of it.

The smaller summons noticed me first. Three of them peeled off from the pack flanking the creature’s legs and came at me in a staggered formation. Fast, coordinated, clearly being directed.

I didn’t slow down.

The first one leaped. I cut it out of the air with a single horizontal stroke. The Frostfang’s edge passed through chitin and flesh like they were paper, and the frost that followed the blade’s path froze the wound solid before the creature hit the ground.

The second came from the right. I pivoted on my lead foot, let the swing carry me through a full rotation, and brought the blade down in a diagonal slash that took the thing from shoulder to hip. It split apart and hit the ground in two frozen halves.

The third hesitated. Which was the worst thing it could have done because hesitation gave me time to close the distance, and at close range, the Frostfang was obscene.

I took its head.

Three kills in maybe... four seconds?

I heard someone behind me say "What?" in a voice that had forgotten how to be loud.

But I was already past them, the frost trail marking my path across the rubble like a white scar on dark stone, closing the distance to the massive creature that was still advancing with the indifference of geography.

It sensed me. Or rather, its handlers sensed me through it. The crown of bone spurs shifted, the eyeless skull rotating to orient on the source of the cold that was suddenly cutting through its escort.

’Good. Look at me Ashley’

I reached the creature’s left forelimb and swung.

The Frostfang hit the leg just above what would have been the ankle on a human. The blade bit deep, carving through the outer layer of carapace and sinking into the denser material beneath. Frost exploded outward from the point of impact, racing up the creature’s leg in branching fractures that crystallized the surface of the chitin.

The creature’s leg buckled.

But it was merely a fraction. The kind of stumble that would be invisible if you were watching from a distance. But at close range, I felt it, the shift in weight, the momentary loss of balance, and I knew that the Frostfang’s frost was doing what it was designed to do.

Making things brittle.

I pulled the blade free and swung again, hitting the same spot. This time, the frozen carapace shattered under the impact. Chunks of black chitin, laced with white frost lines, broke away and scattered across the ground like dark hail. The flesh beneath was exposed, pale and dense.

The creature screamed. Not with a mouth. With its whole body. The sound was a vibration that ran through the stone underfoot, through my bones, through my teeth. It was rage and pain compressed into a frequency that my body understood before my brain did.

Then it swung its leg.

I was already moving, but the sheer mass of the thing made the swing wider than anything I’d trained against. The limb swept through the space I’d occupied half a second ago, clipping a stone column that had stood for probably centuries and reducing it to gravel.

’What the... how is it that fast?!’

I rolled, came up on one knee, and reassessed.

The creature was turning toward me now, abandoning its forward advance to deal with the thing that had hurt it.

Good, at least it meant it wasn’t heading for the barricade anymore.

However at the same time, it was bad.

Because now all that mass and all that rage was focused on me.