Chapter 75: Summon

Sera was the first to move toward the body.

She walked slowly, deliberately, eyes fixed on the headless heap of feathers and shattered strings still radiating something thick and wrong into the clearing, a pressure that made the hair on my arms stand up even from ten feet away.

Unorthodoxityy, concentrated and rotten, seeped out of Choez’s corpse like smoke off a dying fire.

"Sera, what are you—"

She didn’t answer. She crouched, wrapped both hands around the body, and lifted it like it weighed nothing at all.

A shadow rose out of the corpse.

It was transparent, faint, barely more than an outline of feathers and horns, but unmistakably Choez, drifting free of its own dead flesh like smoke finally given permission to leave.

For one horrible second I thought it was about to attack her, and my hand was already halfway to summoning Thunder Sunlight before the shadow simply sank into her chest and vanished.

Nobody spoke.

"...Sera?" Arthur finally managed.

She straightened, entirely unbothered, brushing dust off her knees like she hadn’t just absorbed the ghost of the thing that had killed me three or four separate times tonight.

"I already have a Silver Core," she said, as casually as if she were mentioning the weather.

That landed harder than the shadow had.

"You WHAT?" Theodore’s voice cracked halfway through the word.

"Since when?" I asked, my own voice coming out thinner than I wanted it to.

"Since before tonight. It’s not important right now." She turned toward me, entirely unbothered by four separate expressions of betrayal aimed directly at her. "Edmund. Give me its characteristics. And the gift you got."

I blinked. "You want to—"

"Make it a summon. Obviously."

I summoned Puppet Strings into my palm, the small golden ball still faintly warm from wherever it had come from, and crouched to gather the four pale yellow characteristics scattered across the mud where Choez had fallen, thin, glassy shards that pulsed faintly when I touched them.

I passed all of it over to her without another word, mostly because I still hadn’t fully recovered from the fact that my sister had apparently been sitting on an Silver core advancement without telling anyone.

She took them, closed her fist around the lot, and closed her eyes.

I had read about summon creation before, back at Earth, at home, in one of those dense little explanation paragraphs nobody actually enjoyed reading.

I still remembered most of i.

A summon, the text had explained, was Creation in its purest, strangest form. Generated by an Awakened upon a creature’s death, molded exactly in its image by fusing the Unorthadox creature’s spirit with whatever characteristics the creature left behind, alongside its gift, all of it drawn together inside the Spirit Temple of the summoner. Without a gift, there was nothing to anchor the process. The characteristics alone weren’t enough.

They were built from Unorthodoxy, the same paragraph said, possessing only limited autonomy and, crucially, no spirit of their own.

Not truly alive.

A standard summon couldn’t grow, couldn’t climb ranks, couldn’t ever surpass exactly half the strength its source had carried at the moment of death.

What it lost in growth, it made up for in permanence and utility, something that could be summoned, dismissed, destroyed outright in battle, or handed off entirely to someone else, like a weapon rather than a companion.

Watching Sera actually do it made the paragraph feel laughably inadequate.

Light gathered around her closed fist, gold and pale yellow twisting together in slow, deliberate spirals, and her expression shifted into something I rarely saw on her, complete, total focus, the same look she used to wear hunched over her charm shop counter back home, working through some especially stubborn enchantment late into the night.

Minutes passed. Nobody dared interrupt.

Finally, her eyes opened.

"There," she murmured, and released whatever she had been holding together in her palm.

The summon took shape in front of her, and I had to actually blink twice to convince myself I was looking at the same creature.

Choez, but not Choez. The dull, opaque, void-eyed thing that had killed me over and over was gone entirely, replaced by something that looked almost gentle by comparison.

Its feathers had turned a rich, brilliant crimson, catching what little light filtered through the canopy and throwing it back in soft red glints. Its beak, once crane-grey, now shone a bright, cheerful yellow, and where its eyes had been flat black voids, they now glowed a calm, steady blue, entirely without malice.

It tilted its head at Sera, docile, waiting, four legs shifting patiently in the mud.

Sera studied it for a long moment, something almost fond creeping into her expression despite everything the original had put us through.

"I name you," she said finally, "Puppeteer."

The creature let out a soft, chirping sound, nothing at all like the grating shriek I still had ringing somewhere in the back of my skull from three separate deaths, and settled onto its haunches beside her like it had belonged there its entire existence.

Theodore stared at it, then at Sera, then back at it. "You’re telling me the thing that just tried to eat all of our heads is now... a pet."

"A summon," Sera corrected, not looking away from Puppeteer. "There’s a difference."

"Feels like a technicality."

"It’s not."

Arthur crouched slightly, studying the creature with cautious curiosity. "Is it going to try to control anyone’s mind again?"

Arthur had asked this because I had already told all of them about Choez. Not about Ouroborus though, which I would tell them not long after this.

"It’s half as strong as it was," Sera said. "And it doesn’t have its own will anymore. It’s mine now."

I looked between Sera and the newly colorful creature settling in beside her, and let out a long, tired breath, exhaustion from three separate deaths finally catching up to me all at once.

"We are absolutely talking about the Silver Core thing later," I said.

Sera, scratching Puppeteer gently under its beak like it was the most natural thing in the world, didn’t even look up.

"Sure," she said. "Later."