I Only Summon Villainesses

Chapter 589: Let It All Loose

The scream came up through the soles of my boots.

It skipped my ears entirely. It drove up through my heels and into my shins and set the marrow of my bones humming, a crushing weight of sound, the noise of something ancient and impossibly massive waking at the bottom of the abyss and finding its firstborn dead.

The pressure hit the shattered basalt shelf like a falling ocean.

[Warning: Extreme Acoustic Resonance Detected]

[Unshakeable Spirit has mitigated psychic collapse]

My vision broke into static, red and black. I lay flat on my back in the ash with my well drained dry, and the dark ink lines under my skin throbbed in time with the roar. I couldn’t move my arms. I couldn’t draw a breath.

‘What is… what…’

The thought wouldn’t finish. It kept slipping off the end of itself.

All around me, the party was coming apart.

Light had dropped his sword. The formal church knight was on his knees in the grey dust with his hands clamped over his ears, and dark blood ran from his nose and the corners of his eyes. His mouth hung open. Whatever the noise was doing inside his head, he had nothing left to fight it with.

A few yards away, Ilse was tearing herself to pieces.

Her Dragonborn form was still up, jagged amber scales flared and long horns curving back from her skull, but the old blood in her veins gave her no protection. It worked against her. The voice went through her draconic lineage like a sawblade. She let out a choked, wet gasp, and her talons flew to the base of her own horns, clawing at them as if she meant to rip them out of her head to make the noise stop. Blood wept from under her scales.

Maggie stood directly over me with both hands raised and her veil snapping in the downdraft.

She prayed fast, without raising her voice:

“The Light provides, the Light shields, the Light—”

The golden ward sparked around her fingertips and died.

The invocation guttered out, smothered under the weight of whatever was waking below us. Her mouth went thin. For the first time since I’d known her, Maggie looked afraid.

Her miracles were gone. She stayed anyway. She stepped squarely over my body and put her own small frame and heavy habit between me and the chunks of basalt raining down from the cavern ceiling.

I stared up at her through the gloom, my core aching with dry-rot.

My well was at zero. I couldn’t cast. I couldn’t fight. I couldn’t even pull Maggie back into the Nave to keep her safe.

Deep in the dark of my soul, a furious crimson light began to pound against the rusted iron doors of the Soul Sanctum.

Kassie was in the Nave, and she was going feral.

The bond-speech came without words. It hit like an earthquake inside my own head, panic and rage and a flat refusal to let me die on this rock. She didn’t care that my well was empty. She didn’t care that the rules of Ealdrim demanded essence to hold a body together.

I couldn’t summon her, so she tore the door down herself.

[Warning: Unauthorized Sanctum Breach]

[Entity: Kassandra – Force Override]

Crimson sparks exploded directly above me.

Kassie tore her way into the physical world. Her black lustrous armor was smoking, her blood-red hair flaring wilding all around. Her crimson eyes blazed viciously. Where her iron boots came down, the ground cracked.

She went straight for me. She grabbed the thick leather collar of my mantle, hauled me off the ground, and pinned me against her chestplate.

Air rushed back into my lungs, and I gasped.

“Kassie…”

Her lip pulled back off her teeth as she snarled:

“Shut up. You are not dying in this pit.”

The rock under our boots bucked.

A jagged fissure, wide enough to swallow a cathedral, split the center of the basalt shelf. The scream was shaking the mountain apart underneath us.

Wren’s voice cut into my head.

The floor is dead, Cade. The fault lines are shearing. We have ten seconds before this entire shelf drops.

‘Oh no. We didn’t aggro a boss. We woke up the mountain, and the mountain is trying to shake us off.’

I turned my head, fighting through the pain of the roar, and looked toward the edge of the drop.

Devant stood up from his boulder. He brushed a layer of grey ash off the shoulder of his coat at his own unhurried pace, his dented tin cup still in his left hand.

For the first time since I’d met him, he wasn’t smiling. The pleasant, hollow curve of his mouth was gone, and what replaced it was flat and cold enough to chill my blood faster than the freezing draft.

He looked down into the fissure and spoke evenly:

“It is awake. It is very angry. And it is looking for us.”

He didn’t say the opposite of what he meant. He just said what it was.

I swallowed the taste of blood, forced my voice to work, and barked out the only order I had left.

“Maggie! Grab the pretty boy and Ilse! We are leaving!”

Maggie dropped the prayer without a word and lunged across the buckling stone. She scooped Light up by his heavy leather belt with her right hand and tucked his armored weight under her arm as if he were a stuffed doll. With her left, she grabbed the scaled scruff of Ilse’s neck and dragged the convulsing Dragonborn upright on raw, Calamity-tier strength.

Kassie clamped me against her hip and broke into a heavy sprint, roaring:

“Move!”

The cliff face behind us was bare rock with no path up. The only solid stone left was a narrow, spiraling crevice cut deep into the bedrock of the chasm wall, a jagged chimney flue I could only think of as the Throat.

Devant was already moving. His boots blurred through a short-range Moonstep, and he reappeared perfectly balanced on the lip of the crevice.

Kassie hit the edge of the fissure and jumped. Her iron boots cleared the widening gap by inches. She slammed into the mouth of the Throat shoulder-first, her armor shrieking and sparking against the tight stone walls, and kept my body off the rock.

Maggie landed right behind us, dragging Light and Ilse into the narrow dark just as the roar hit its peak.

The world outside the crevice gave up.

A crack louder than the scream itself split the air, and the entire basalt shelf sheared clean off the mountain face. Hundreds of thousands of tons of ancient stone, grey ash, and the dissolving remains of the Dragon of Thorns, all of it going at once.

I watched over Kassie’s shoulder as the ledge fell away into the black, bottomless abyss.

Then the screaming stopped.

It cut off mid-note, as clean as a door slammed shut. What came after was worse.

A low, rhythmic breathing began to echo up from the dark, slow as a tide. It was the sound of colossal lungs drawing in air. The inhalation alone made a downdraft, a small hurricane that dragged the freezing air straight down the flue and pulled our hair and clothes toward the abyss.

Devant stood a few feet further down the spiraling crevice, the tails of his coat whipping in the draft. He looked down into the dark, and his amber eyes caught no light at all.

He raised his voice just enough to carry over the wind:

“The path back is gone forever.”

I slumped against Kassie’s armored chest with my well empty and my brain rattling around my skull.

‘Ah, damn. Down it is.’

Far below us, echoing up the black Throat of the Precipice, a new sound rang out.

CLANG.

It was the heavy, metallic shriek of massive iron chains pulling tight, and then snapping.