I Only Summon Villainesses

Chapter 501: Leaving An Essenceless Man Alone With A Dragon Has To Be The Lowest Move Possible

The plan, if you could call it a plan, had exactly one moving part, and the moving part was me not being where the dragon was looking.

Kassie had taken the looking with her.

She’d blasted out the front of the temple on Cindy, red against the fire of the horse, and the thing had gone after her the way weather goes after a coast, wide and stupid and total. That was the window. It was not a big window. It was the kind you climb through sideways, with a child under one arm and no dignity left to speak of.

“Wren. Hold on. Whatever you see, do not let go.”

She held on. The kid had a grip like a debt collector.

I went the other way. Through the broken back of the hall where a slab had come off the roof and left a gap the size of a cart, out onto the slope behind the temple, and down. Down was the only direction that made sense. Down meant rock, and rock meant something between us and the sky, and something between us and the sky was the whole of my strategy now that I couldn’t so much as light a candle.

I reached for essence out of habit and got nothing back. Everything I had emptied on a simple “Be Still” was still empty, and it was going to stay that way for a good while, and ‘a good while’ is a funny amount of time to have when there’s a dragon in it.

So…

‘Legs, then.’

Behind me the temple screamed. Not the dragon this time. The temple. Stone doesn’t make a sound like that unless it’s being asked to do something stone was never built for, and I heard the whole front of it go, a long grinding cough of a collapse that pushed a wall of dust down the slope faster than I could run from it. It caught us.

For a moment there was no up or down, only grit and grey and Wren’s fists in my shirt, and then we were through it and coughing and still, somehow, upright.

I did not look back to admire the work. Looking back is for people with essence.

The ground helped. It broke into a dry cut in the rock, a riverbed that a river had abandoned a long time ago, and I took it, half running and half falling along the stones with Wren bouncing against my ribs. The walls came up on either side. Not high. High enough. Enough that a massive head sweeping the slope for two women and a fire-horse might miss two small shapes moving low along the bottom of a ditch.

Might…

‘Just get to the tree line. Just the tree line.’

The tree line was a dark smudge maybe four hundred paces on, and four hundred paces has never in the history of the world looked so much like four hundred miles.

At the same time, up and to my left, the fight was happening without me, and I watched pieces of it go by between the walls of the cut like a window on a train.

Kassie was magnificent, which is an annoying thing to have to say about someone. She rode Cindy in tightening circles around the dragon’s legs, close enough that the thing kept snapping its head down after her and missing, kept committing its whole terrible weight to a bite that closed on nothing but scorched air and horse-smoke. Every miss cost it balance. Every miss she made it pay for.

Meanwhile Maggie was the ceiling. She hung up in the dust with fire wrapped around both arms and she wasn’t attacking so much as denying, throwing walls of heat across the dragon’s eyeline every time it tried to lift its head and take stock of the wider field. Every time it tried to notice me, Maggie put the sun in its face. She was buying my four hundred paces one flinch at a time, and she was doing it while bleeding from where the pillars had thrown her.

They were a machine. A brutal, beautiful, two-woman machine, and for one honest second I let myself believe the machine might win.

Then Kassie set up the big one.

I felt it before I understood it, the air along the cut going tight the way it does before real weather. Cindy planted and reared.

Kassie rose in the stirrups with the crimson pouring off her armor and her sword going up, and Maggie above her folded all her fire down into a single spear of it and drove it into Kassie’s blade like she was feeding a forge, and the dragon, staggered, half-blind, one shoulder already dropping, was exactly where it needed to be to receive the answer to every question it had asked us in that temple.

It was going to land. I would have bet my empty well on it.

And then they were gone.

Both of them. Between one blink and the next, no light, no sound, no collapse. Kassie’s swing finished itself in empty air, no rider to carry it, and Cindy came apart into sparks that the wind took, and Maggie’s spear of fire fell into nothing because there was no hand left to hold it. The strike that was going to win arrived at a dragon that no longer had anything in front of it.

Just like that. Like a lamp switched off in a room I wasn’t standing in.

My legs kept going. My legs are smarter than the rest of me. The rest of me had stopped, cold, somewhere back at the moment the two of them stopped existing, and it was screaming a thing I did not have the essence to do anything about.

‘No. No, no, that’s not — she was landing it, she was —’

The dragon straightened. Slow and confused, if a thing that old can be confused, turning its colossal head across a field that had just gone quiet, looking for the two nuisances that had vanished off the face of its afternoon. It hadn’t killed them. I knew it hadn’t killed them. There’d been no blow, no blood, nothing but that clean, total absence, and there is only one thing in my whole miserable arrangement that looks like that.

Time. Their time. The clock I never watch because I’m always too busy using them, run all the way down at the exact worst second the world had to offer.

Naturally.

And now there was nothing between the dragon and the wider field except a smudge of dust settling, and two small shapes at the bottom of a ditch it had simply forgotten to look at yet.

I looked at the tree line. Still four hundred miles away. Closer to two hundred now.

‘Then we run the two hundred,’ I told nobody, and I ran it, Wren clamped to my chest with her face turned away from all of it, the good and silent weight of her the only thing in the world I still had any say over.

The cut bent. The trees came up to meet us. I got under the first of them with my lungs on fire and my legs finally, quietly informing me they were done taking suggestions, and I put my back to a trunk and slid down it with the kid in my lap and did the only thing left.

I listened for wings.

That was when the system spoke up, in that flat little voice it uses no matter what’s on fire.

[Summoned entities Kassie and Maggie have exceeded their sustained duration.]

[Both entities have returned safely to your Soul Sanctum.]

‘Oh great… so it’s just me… and the damn dragon. And I don’t have essence damnit!’