I Only Summon Villainesses

Chapter 594: Half of Her

The colossal red eye did not blink.

Its slitted pupil swam in a ring of burning, furious light, carved straight into the vertical face of the black cliff. Heat poured out of the open chasm and rolled over the rocky beach like the open door of a blast furnace, and in a second it had baked the freezing seawater out of my dark mantle.

The eye stayed fixed on Ilse.

The Dragonborn was still locked in her triggered form, her hands pressed flat against the warm stone. Blood dripped from her fingertips where she had clawed at her own horns, and it sizzled when it hit the rock. She didn’t move. She didn’t breathe. The gaze pinning her to the beach pressed down like a physical weight, squeezing the air out of the whole cavern.

Then the pupil slowly contracted.

The eye blinked. Two great plates of black stone ground together with a deep, bass-heavy rumble, and then the lid rolled open again.

That one blink turned my whole sense of scale upside down.

My Death Sense was useless here, blinded by the size of the thing beneath our boots, but simple geometry still worked. I traced the cliff’s drop down to the boiling black surf. Then I looked at the ocean, rolling out in every direction to horizons with no light on them.

The island we were standing on was the exposed crest of a spine.

‘Oh no. The whole island is just her back.’

Most of her bound, corrupted body lay under the pitch-black sea. We were standing on one exposed fraction of her flesh, with three miles of pressurized, lightless water dropping away on every side. We had flown for miles across an ocean that was only deep enough to cover her ribs.

The cliff face shuddered, rippling from top to bottom the way a muscle does when it cramps.

The black stone above the beach began to blister. Jagged fissures split across the warm bedrock and vented jets of scalding steam that smelled like copper. Then the rock itself started to writhe.

Kassie took a step back, her iron boots grinding against the gravel, and raised her greatsword into a high guard.

“Watch the wall!”

This time, the sea-dragons came out of the cliff.

They budded straight from the rock.

Glossy pustules of pitch-black water-flesh swelled up through the splitting bedrock, pushing through the crusted stone like grotesque, parasitic fruit. The blisters stretched thin, and through them I could see slick, eyeless skulls pressing against the membrane from the inside.

With a series of wet tearing sounds, the pustules burst.

Dozens of sea-dragons came loose from the raw red flesh beneath the rock and dropped thirty feet onto the beach. They hit the warm stone with heavy, liquid thuds and found their footing without a stumble. They were the same beasts that had swarmed our floating slab: muscled constructs of dense, glassy black water, blind and completely silent.

And there were hundreds more budding from the cliff face, raining down onto the shore.

I gripped Wren’s hilt tight in my right hand and kept my left arm pinned against my broken collarbone.

My well sat at a flat, unarguable zero. I didn’t have a single drop of essence to spend. No chains, no frost traps, not one sigil of Heretical Pursuit.

‘Zero essence. Trapped on a beach made of meat. Excellent.’

The first wave of spawn surged forward, their liquid bodies sliding over the jagged rocks far faster than anything that shape had a right to move.

Kassie met them head-on.

The Tyrant Empress didn’t bother looking for the grain in their flesh. She swung her slab of iron in a brutal horizontal arc, and the Calamity-tier force behind it hit the lead dragons like a freight train. Three beasts burst into a thousand black droplets that splashed harmlessly over Kassie’s spiked greaves.

But she didn’t have her Throne of Corpses, and she didn’t have any heavy essence strikes. She was one woman swinging a very heavy piece of metal at an endless tide of falling bodies.

Light stepped up on her right flank, his blue eyes cold and flat.

His burned left arm hung dead against his ribs, black and useless, but his right hand moved with frightening precision. He held Gregory, Maggie’s heavy hunting dagger, in a low reverse grip.

A sea-dragon lunged at his chest, and its jaws opened on rows of pressurized ice.

Light slipped inside its reach, turning his shoulders just enough to let the snapping jaws pass. He drove the dagger upward and dragged the steel along the hairline seam that ran down the beast’s neck. The water-flesh went slack, split apart, and collapsed into a heavy puddle of brine around his boots.

Light flicked the brine from the blade and reported in his clipped, formal voice:

“They do not bleed. They do not tire.”

I backed up to cover Ilse as another dozen spawn dropped from the bleeding cliff face.

“Then hit them harder, pretty boy!”

We were getting overrun.

Without essence, we were trying to hold back the ocean with a bucket. Kassie smashed them back into puddles, Light cut them apart along the grain, and Ilse tore at them with her bloody claws, but for every beast they unmade, three more peeled away from the raw flesh of the island.

The air on the beach shifted, and it brought the heavy, sweet scent of funeral flowers.

Celestine stepped in front of me.

She moved with that gliding grace of hers, and her radiant attire caught the dim red glow of the eye above us. Her hands stayed empty. Her voice stayed low.

She tilted her head slightly and murmured:

“Ara? They are quite persistent.”

My empty well had nothing to give her. She was running on the banked resting time from the Nave, which locked her out of her big, destructive signature abilities. But she still had the baseline, passive application of her domain. She still had the Purifying Flame.

Celestine raised one pale hand toward the advancing swarm.

A wave of blinding white fire rolled across the black beach.

It made no sound. It simply rolled forward like a tide, erasing as it went. The holy fire washed over the first two dozen sea-dragons, and their corrupted water-flesh turned to fine grey ash on contact, with no burning and no screaming, and blew away on the hot draft.

Holy fire was poison to anything the abyss had corrupted.

But the sea-dragons weren’t the only corrupted flesh on the beach.

The white fire rolled past the swarm and over the dark, warm stone of the beach itself. Wherever the flame touched the bedrock, the stone came apart.

A shriek tore out of the cliff face, loud enough that I felt it in my teeth and in my broken collarbone.

The rock under the fire crumbled to grey ash, and beneath it lay the raw, pulsing red meat of the island. The fire chewed into that flesh and left jagged, smoking scars in it.

I forced my Tactical Omniscience outward, and red vector lines spread across the battlefield.

The grid snapped into place over my vision. This time I ignored the spawn and tracked the fire instead, mapping how the beach itself was holding together.

The holy flame was spreading across the stone, and the lines showed me where it was headed: straight for the base of one of the river-chains.

The vector lines lit up its iron links and traced them back to the point where they were bolted into the bedrock. The structural map flashed a stark red warning.

The chains were anchored in the corrupted flesh of the island. The stone was only a crust over it.

‘Oh god. The fire.’

The gods had chained her, and then they had used her own regenerating mass to hold the anchors in place.

Every time we burned the flesh to kill the spawn, we burned away the bedrock. We were destroying the very foundation that kept the chains bolted down.

To hurt her was to free her.

I spun toward Celestine, my voice cracking over the roar of the fire.

“Cellie, stop! Stop the flame!”

Celestine glanced back at me, and her courteous smile slipped for a fraction of a second, but she obeyed at once. She closed her pale hand into a fist, and the white fire vanished from the beach.

In the sudden dark came the wet, heavy thuds of fifty more spawn dropping from the cliff.

With the holy fire gone, the swarm surged over the ash-covered rocks.

Three sea-dragons launched themselves at Light together.

The knight sidestepped the first and dragged Gregory across its ribs. But he only had one working arm. The second beast rammed its dense liquid shoulder into his chest and threw him backward onto the hot stone.

The third went straight for his throat, its split jaws gaping.

Kassie got there first. She drove her iron boot into its skull and crushed it against the gravel, and ten more swarmed her for it.

Burying her greatsword in the mass of water-flesh, Kassie barked:

“Cade! Burn them!”

We were stuck in a catch-22, and both ends of it killed us.

If I ordered Celestine to use the Purifying Flame, we would burn away the island’s flesh and break the chains holding the apex predator of the Precipice down. If we stopped using the fire, the parasites would drag us to the ground and eat us alive within thirty seconds.

Meanwhile, Devant stood on a raised outcrop of basalt twenty yards away, well out of the swarm’s path.

The boy hadn’t drawn Kurotsuki. He hadn’t moved to help. He was turning his dented tin cup lazily in his fingers and watching the chaos with mild, pleasant interest.

Over the sea of writhing black bodies, Devant met my eyes and smiled, and his voice carried over the noise without any effort at all:

“Do not stop.”

My heart hammered against my shattered collarbone.

‘He said do not stop. He’s contradicting himself.’

The tally in my head translated it on the spot. When Devant said do not stop, the truth was the exact opposite. He was telling me that more fire was a catastrophic mistake. He was confirming exactly what my Tactical Omniscience had just mapped.

But I didn’t have a choice.

A huge winged sea-dragon tore loose from the cliff directly above Celestine and dropped like a stone toward her unprotected back.

I jabbed a finger past her shoulder.

“Burn it! Cellie, burn it now!”

Celestine spun with that same gliding grace, her hand sweeping upward in a wide, elegant arc.

The Purifying Flame erupted from her fingertips in a narrow pillar of white that caught the diving beast in mid-air. The dragon came apart and fell as a shower of harmless grey ash over her radiant hair.

But the tail of the fire carried on past the falling ash and struck the face of the cliff.

The white flame slammed into the bedrock around the anchor point of the nearest river-chain.

The island screamed again.

The sound knocked my balance sideways, a pitch of pure agony that made the dark ink lines in my skin flare with sympathetic heat.

The stone and red flesh holding the iron bolt in place dissolved into ash. The anchor was gone.

The nearest link, thick as a cathedral spire, suddenly had nothing to hold on to.

With a sky-splitting crack, the river-chain tore free from the cliff face.

The chain whipped backward under unimaginable tension. Thousands of tons of iron tore through the air, flattened a whole stretch of the beach, and plunged into the boiling black sea.

Losing the anchor threw the whole island off balance.

The ground under our boots pitched.

The beach tilted thirty degrees toward the ocean.

I lost my footing, and my boots skidded across the slick, ash-covered stone as gravity hauled me toward the black surf. Kassie rammed her greatsword straight down into the bedrock and hung on to it like an anchor, while Light clawed at the stone with his one good hand.

High above us, the red eye rolled wildly in its socket, burning with fury.