I Only Summon Villainesses

Chapter 509: Nobody Said It’d Be Quick

I didn’t know if all I had was even going to be enough. But I wasn’t going to stop here. I couldn’t… not after coming so far.

The first row reached me and I stopped thinking about the last row entirely.

White flame came off me in a sheet this time, not a jet, a low wall of it thrown flat across the stone in every direction I could push. The nearest creatures went up the way the others had, thrashing, clawing at their own scalps, and for one clean breath the dark actually pulled back from the light of them.

Then the ones behind crawled over the burning ones and kept coming.

‘…Of course they did.’

That was the trouble with a flood. Set the surface alight and the water underneath doesn’t so much as notice.

So I stopped trying to hold a line and started moving instead. Feather Step took me sideways out of the first snare of hair before it closed, one stuttering shift of the world and I was three meters left of where the trap had shut on empty stone.

A chain went out of me while I was still landing, Chains of Agony, into the throat of the nearest one, and I poured the tearing pain down the length of it. It folded mid-slide. Second chain into the next.

I recalled the first before the third had even sunk home, and the recall dragged through me like barbed wire hauled back through the eye of a needle.

That was the ceiling on the chains, right there. Seven of them, and every one I spent had to be spent again, and the getting-back hurt almost as much as the giving.

They knew it too. That was the maddening part. They read the cost off the top of my head as fast as I did.

The voices started again, my own worn rasp coming from every angle at once, and under the voices the thoughts, dozens then hundreds, my worry for Wren and my thirst and every stray scrap I’d thought since I woke on these stones, poured back into my skull until I couldn’t find the one at the center that was still me.

For a moment my hands slowed. That was all it took. A curtain of hair snapped across my ribs and opened me from hip to short-rib in a hot bright line, and I felt the blood come before I felt the pain.

‘—Focus.’

I stopped fighting the flood the way I’d been fighting everything else, with flame and chain, and reached instead for the one attribute that had cost me a lot just a couple of seconds ago.

Conqueror’s Will had become Voice of Authority, and contrary to how I recklessly made use of it the last time, the Command this time was going to be simple.

‘Out of my mind you assholes!’

It was clumsy. Of course, I did not expect, commanding a bunch of profane beasts to be any easy. But I used the command to shove every stolen voice out of my mind like a shoulder against a door, and the door held, and the flood broke on it into so much noise. They were not gone though but certainly outside now. And for a moment, my head felt quiet enough to think in again.

[Voice of Authority has reached Lv. 2]

[Voice of Authority has reached Lv. 3]

I didn’t have time to enjoy it. The wound in my side was already knitting, advanced Infinite Vitality doing the ugly work of stitching me together faster than any body should, but faster-than-normal is not the same as fast, and there were a great many more of them than there was of me.

So I made the space myself.

Emperor’s Dominion came off me in a weight, not a sound, not a light, a pressure that dropped over the nearest ring of them like the whole dark had gained mass. The crawling stuttered.

A handful flattened to the stone as if a hand had pressed them down. And into that half-second of hesitation I reinforced with Voice of Authority, spilling a one-word order that a body obeys before its owner decides whether to, and for one glorious instant a whole arc of the tide simply stopped, bent heads bowed to a floor they had no reason to bow to.

It didn’t last. Using the attribute to command their thoughts out of my hand seemed far more effective than physically commanding them. Since my head was not where they should be to begin with.

Besides, command worked cleanest on things that were once used to obeying, and these things had never obeyed anyone. The bowed heads lifted again inside two heartbeats.

But two heartbeats was a lane, and I took it, white flame wrapping both fists as I went, and I put a burning hand clean through the skull of the one at the front. That one didn’t crawl back up.

‘There. That’s the trick. Not the hair. The head.’

As I moved, my reasoning was cold and fast, almost like my consciousness covered the entire battlefield and every information poured into my head in series and sequences of cold and lethal calculations.

The hair was a snare, painful, ruinous, but a snare. Fire freed me from a snare every time. The chains bought me stillness. And a burning fist through the skull was the only thing all night that had made one of them stay down for good.

So that was the shape of it. Snare, free, close, kill. Over and over, into a tide I still hadn’t finished counting.

I set my feet and started the work.

I lost track of how many. That’s the honest truth of it. There was a stretch, I couldn’t say how long, where I was better than I had any right to be, where the flame answered before I called it and the chains came back to me almost sweetly and every skull I reached I cracked. My side sealed. A new gash opened over my brow and sealed too.

[Bear Their Burden has reached Lv. 2] flickered somewhere at the edge of my sight and I didn’t even look at it.

For a while, I was winning. In the narrow sense that I was still standing and they were the ones burning.

Then I made myself do the thing I’d been carefully not doing, and pushed Enhanced Senses back out past twenty meters, past the backlash that scraped my skull like a nail down slate, to take the measure of how much of the tide I’d actually spent.

I had cleared maybe thirty of them.

The dark behind the dark hadn’t thinned at all.

For every pale bent shape I’d put down, the black had quietly folded two more up out of somewhere I couldn’t see the bottom of, and they were still coming, patient as water, toward the one warm bleeding thing in the whole of the Precipice.

I wiped blood out of my eye with the back of a smoking hand.

‘…Well,’ I said, to no one, to my own voice waiting somewhere out there to say it back. ‘Nobody said it’d be quick.’

And I turned back into them.