I Only Summon Villainesses

Her helmet vanished with another spray of crimson sparks. The brief flare of light ignited the cave around us, illuminating the creature fully and casting its shadow across the wall in a grotesque, shifting silhouette that seemed larger than the thing itself.

The Spirit Beast was a muscular quadruped with a sleek obsidian-black hide stretched taut over a predatory frame. Four massive tentacles erupted from its back, each ending in that whip-like crimson tip I’d already become intimately familiar with. The damn things moved with unsettling independence, writhing and coiling even as the creature held still, like they had minds of their own.

A ridge of overlapping plates ran down its spine, pulsing with angry red-violet light — slow, rhythmic, like a heartbeat made visible. Like something inside it was burning.

Its head was worse. Rows of jagged teeth filled a mouth that seemed too wide for its skull, and its eyes — if you could call them eyes — were hollow pits that wept liquid darkness, thick rivulets of black streaming down its face like tears.

The creature snarled. The sound was a roar and a scream at once, reverberating off the cave walls until it seemed to come from everywhere.

Then it launched at us, all four tentacles striking as one.