I Only Summon Villainesses

Chapter 208: Beware of the Monster You can Become!

She stood with a dark glare towards me. She probably didn’t expect that I would face her like that, given how I had just rebuked the lady that called herself Pale Rose. Even I hadn’t expected it.

’I guess I really am just a sucker for the justice of moralism.’

It was slightly funny coming from someone like me. I was also in no position to point at what the standard of moralism should be or should not be.

I beheld her face with a stern stare. The circle of white flames surrounding me had long since calmed down, forming a scorched desert circle, blazed but low, just below my knee level.

I stared at her, my arms still folded and a ghastly glow covering the atmosphere like a blanket.

”You asked what gives her the right to be a distributor of justice,” I said, my voice carrying across the sand. ”A fair question. I agreed with you. But let me ask you something in return.”

Her tails swayed behind her, agitated but controlled. She was listening.

”Do you even know what you took?”

The fox lady tilted her head, her expression shifting from defensive to genuinely puzzled frown.

”I took souls. I already told you this.”

”No.” I shook my head slowly. ”You took lives. Twenty thousand of them. Do you understand what a life is?”

She stared at me like I had asked her to explain the obvious.

”A life is... existence. A span of time between birth and death. Mortals have them. They end.” She shrugged, her massive breast shifting with the motion. ”I simply ended them sooner than they would have ended anyway. What difference does a few decades make?”

’She genuinely doesn’t get it.’

The realization hit me harder than I expected. It wasn’t that she was being cruel, to her this was just what was necessary. It was indifference... and frankly I didn’t know whether to be relieved or even be more fearful of her.

”A few decades,” I sighed and repeated. ”Let me paint you a picture. One of those twenty thousand souls you consumed... maybe he was a father. Maybe he woke up every morning before dawn to work fields he didn’t own, breaking his back under a sun that didn’t care, just so his daughter could eat. Maybe he dreamed of saving enough coin to buy her a ribbon for her hair. A simple ribbon. That was his ambition. And that ambition to him was his everything.”

The fox lady’s brow furrowed. Not with guilt, with confusion.

”And you erased him. You erased the ribbon. You erased the daughter’s smile when she received it. You erased every morning he would have woken up, every meal he would have shared, every moment of tired joy he would have stolen from a world that gave him nothing.”

”But he was going to die anyway,” she said, as if explaining something obvious to a child. ”In sixty years. Maybe seventy. His daughter too. They all die. I simply...”

”You simply what? Harvested him early?” I felt something cold settle in my chest. ”That’s exactly my point. To you, he was a resource not a person with a story, to you he is just a mere number in your count toward awakening another tail.”

Her tails stilled behind her. She was processing, I could see that much. But the understanding I was looking for wasn’t there.

”I have lived for over four hundred years,” she said slowly, her voice losing some of its earlier playfulness. ”I have watched people rise and crumble to dust. I have seen generations bloom and wither like flowers in a field. Do you know how many humans I have watched die of old age? Of disease? Of their own stupidity?” She spread her arms. ”Millions. Tens of millions. They die whether I touch them or not. The only difference is that when I take them, their deaths mean something. They become part of something greater.”

’Four hundred years. Fuck.’

It didn’t come close to Kassie and the rest but it was still a lot. Besides, she wasn’t a Spirit.

’Damn, does that mean people are allowed to live that long over here?’

To some extent, I could say, I understood now. This wasn’t a monster in the traditional sense. This was a creature so far removed from the human experience that the concept of individual human value had simply... eroded. Like a cliff face worn smooth by centuries of waves.

”You think you’re giving their deaths meaning,” I said. ”But you’re not. You’re just taking. There’s no transaction here. You didn’t offer them a choice. You didn’t ask if they wanted their souls to fuel your ascension. You simply decided their lives were worth less than your tails.”