I ONLY SUMMON VILLAINESS
Chapter 430:
The snow did not fall so much as drift, slow and patient, settling over the black firs and the broken ridge like ash over a pyre that had already gone cold.
Light stood in the middle of all that white. His breath came out in thin, disciplined plumes. Frost had crept along the filigree of his vambraces and rimed the trailing edge of his cape where it dragged the powder behind him.
The cold did not trouble him though. The north stripped a place down to bone and silence, and silence was the closest thing this filthy world had ever offered to prayer.
He flexed his fingers around the grip of his blade. Then the wind shifted, and he was no longer alone.
Three of them stepped out of the treeline, fanning wide across the slope with the unhurried ease of people who already knew the shape of the trap. He counted them the way the Doctrine taught — threat first, names never — and what he counted made his lip curl.
All three of them were women.
