I Only Summon Villainesses

Chapter 442: How In The World Is This Even Possible, I’m Freaking Crashing Out Right Now!!

The word left Ilse’s mouth and the pass came apart.

Kassie went up. She launched, one boot off the frozen stone and then she was a streak of red haze tearing up the throat of the pass toward the rim where Altharion stood, and the whole ring of different beasts summons came down to meet her at once.

They ranged from different kinds, the hideous ones to the visible terrifying ones, carved out of stone, mangled flesh and even vines.

That was the point of them. I understood it the instant I saw it. Altharion didn’t move. He stayed exactly where he was, with his hands at his sides, and let his army fall into the space between himself and the thing rising to kill him.

They were all wall of bodies. Meatshields.

‘Bastard, how did he even get those?’

It would have stopped almost anything.

Of course, my Kassie was not just anything.

She was an unstoppable, eventual storm.

The first summon to reach her was a thing of grey stone, arms crossed over its face to take the blow the way you’d brace against a storm.

Kassie’s greatsword went through its crossed arms, through its face, through the rock of its chest, and out the other side without slowing, and the two halves of it were still falling away when she hit the next one.

She didn’t aim for weak points. She didn’t look for seams. Whatever clever defense each of them carried — stone skin, dissolving flesh, the trick of going hard or going soft — none of it mattered, because Kassie wasn’t fighting their gimmicks. She was fighting their mass, and there has never been a defense invented that survives enough force applied to it.

‘She’s not even slowing down.’

She tore a lane straight up through the shield wall, red sparks raining off her blade, bodies coming apart on either side of her in clean, brutal halves.

Brunhilde went up the other side of the pass in her shadow, and where Kassie broke them, Brunhilde finished them — a touch of frost to the ones that tried to re-form, the eel’s old trick turned against a dozen lesser copies, freezing them solid before they could pour themselves back together.

With force on one wall and cold on the other, the shields died between them.

And Kassie reached the top with her sword already swinging, the whole weight of her ruin focused into one strike aimed at the smiling man who had stood there and watched his army get devastated.

The strike that should have ended it.

Altharion met it with an axe.

I heard the impact from the floor of the pass — a flat, ringing crash that shook snow off both walls — and when the haze cleared, Kassie’s greatsword was caught against the head of a black double-bladed axe, and Altharion was holding it there. One hand. Smiling.

‘…No… way.’

Yes way apparently.

He had a second axe in his other hand. He hadn’t even raised it.

“There she is.”

Altharion said and brought the second axe around.

Kassie wrenched her blade free and twisted under the swing, and for the first time since I’d known her — since the day she had sat on my face and thrown me around like a child’s toy, from the field below where she had devastated the army in a hundred heartbeats — I watched Kassie fight someone who fought back.

It was fast, clean and the most of all, it was the most frightening thing I had ever seen.

Her greatsword came down and his axes came up crossed to catch it. She drove forward with all that impossible strength and his boots slid back across the stone and held. He matched her. Blow for blow, weight for weight, the two of them carving the rim of the pass into a storm of sparks and splintered ice, and the horrible truth of it settled into my stomach like a stone:

Kassie’s brute force broke his shields. It could not break him.

“I’ve waited a long time for a real swing,” Altharion said with an almost harmless smile on his face.

“Don’t disappoint me.”

Then Brunhilde arrived.

She came in low and silent on his blind side while his axes were locked against Kassie’s sword, her katana drawing that pale, soft-cracking line toward the back of his knee — the cut that had frozen a gargoyle solid, the cut that ended things.

Altharion didn’t look. He simply let go of his lock on Kassie with one hand, reached out, and seized one of his own dying summons by the throat.

He pulled it into Brunhilde’s strike.