Heroine Creation: All My Summons Are Custom Made

Chapter 218: Goodbye, Princess Kestrel

Kestrel thanked Ugbard and left the mountain. Then, she studied every duelist she could find. She watched footwork in public tournaments. She memorized timing from mercenary captains, knights, noble heirs, and anyone who claimed to know the blade better than she did.

She traveled away from Crescent City to other Cities where she cleared Dungeons, slaughtered Demons and stopped Demon Breaks.

She sought out stronger swordsmen with the kind of single-minded devotion most people reserved for religion. If someone had a reputation, she wanted to test it. If someone had a title, she wanted to strip it away. If someone had never lost, she wanted to be the one who changed that.

Kestrel was obsessed.

She wanted to defeat every swordsmaster in the world. It wasn’t that she hated them.

She only loved the thrill, the yearning. Every time she held the blade and her life was on the line, she felt herself drift away from the protected life of a princess she once lived.

That escape became a drive, a drive to be the strongest Swordsmaster in the one.

In the eyes of many, she was still a princess. But Kestrel believed that if she could stand above all of them, then her life would finally be undeniable.

This obsession turned into the shape of her personality. She became blunt, direct, and almost offensively honest. She respected power only when it was earned. She was difficult to flatter because she never cared if people thought she was beautiful. She knew she was dangerous. She knew she was good.

What she wanted was not admiration, but resistance. A worthy opponent. A blade sharp enough to force her to become sharper.

When Crescent City began to face the first true tests of its purpose, Kestrel had to hurry back to protect her people and family.

The bastion wards were still being raised. The outer defenses were incomplete. Wards were being layered, tunnels reinforced, and anti-Gloom structures built into the foundations of the city itself.

But ten rifts opened at once, all around the city walls. The Demon Lords had found out what humans were doing so they were doing their best to stop them.

Both Beast Gates and Demon Gates appeared. Black mouths in the air vomiting horrors into the city’s unfinished defense lines. The wards shook. The outer districts screamed. Entire streets were forced into evacuation. It was the kind of night that could have killed the city before it ever became what it was meant to be.

Kestrel charged into battle despite her parents’ warning.

That night became legend because she did not behave like a noble daughter or a frightened civilian. She behaved like a Swordsmaster who had been handed the greatest duel of her life and was furious that anyone thought she might sit it out.

She fought on the walls, in the broken streets, on scaffolds, through smoke and ash, through demon claws and beast jaws and collapsing stone. She defended one breach while another burned. She crossed ruined ground to reach a wounded ward-caster. She cut down a Demon Head so fast witnesses later argued about whether they had seen her move at all. She held the city’s line long enough for the unfinished bastion wards to stabilize.

People remembered the silk of her gown torn with ash. They remembered the green of her braids coming loose in the wind. They remembered her blades flashing like a pair of white serpents in the dark.

That night gave her one of her first true titles.

The Unforgiving Princess.

Because she did not stop or hesitate.

Anything that entered Crescent City became her opponent.

After that, her fame spread beyond the city walls. People came to see her fight. Some came because they were inspired. Some came because they were curious. More came because they wanted to test themselves against the girl who had survived a ten-gate assault and emerged with blood on her sleeves and no mercy in her stance. Kestrel responded by beating as many of them as she could.

She became worse after each victory, in the best possible way.

Her style deepened. She learned to weave sword magic into her technique so the blade itself carried force beyond the physical cut. She learned how to make her strikes drift and curve like living things.

Seeking to forge weapons that could withstand her rapidly evolving Grace, Kestrel ventured into a Calamity Dungeon and hunted two legendary White Snake Dragons. She fought the twin serpentine beasts for three days and three nights, relying purely on her blade techniques to deflect their crushing coils and breath attacks.

When she finally stood victorious over their colossal corpses, she didn’t just harvest their materials—she bound the souls of the two White Snake Dragons into her twin katanas.

This birthed her signature sword magic. When Kestrel fought, her movements became impossibly fluid. Her dual-wielding style was silky and ethereal, looking more like a deadly, hypnotic dance. With every swing of her blades, the phantom projections of the roaring White Snake Dragons would manifest, coiling around her strikes and devouring her enemies’ magic.

By this time, she had finally ascended to Grandmaster and was ranked at 7 Star with a Brilliant Talent.

With power like that, Kestrel refused to let her obsession fade.

She sharpened it.

She climbed until she stood among the Grandmasters of the Blade, one of the few women in her era whose name could be spoken alongside the highest sword legends without sounding like mockery.

But the thing that made her most dangerous was also the thing that made her most vulnerable.

She believed in the duel.

She believed in fair challenge.

She believed that if a Swordsmaster was worthy, they would face her openly.

That belief eventually killed her.

It happened during a diplomatic conflict tied to one of Crescent City’s outer bastion contracts, when an old rival house that feared her influence arranged for a blade duel that was never meant to stay a duel.

House Blaze greeted her with smiles. They praised her accomplishments. They spoke of reconciliation and mutual respect.

The terms were simple. This was a ceremonial contest meant to symbolize the end of bad blood between the houses.

Kestrel took her position in the estate’s grand courtyard, twin katanas sheathed at her hips, the phantom white serpents coiled and waiting in the steel. Her opponent stood across from her, blade raised. He was good, for a noble’s son. Not good enough to beat her. Everyone in that courtyard knew it.

The duel began, and Kestrel moved to end it quickly. One clean stroke, a flick of silver, and she drew a line of red across his shoulder. First blood. The match was over.

But her opponent did not lower his sword.

Instead, he smiled.

And Kestrel felt the poison.

She staggered for a moment as both her swords fell from her hands. Then, her eyes widened with realization.

They had poisoned her before the duel ever began.

The wine! The toast to seal the peace. A rare vintage brought out by House Blaze in crystal glasses, handed to her and her family by smiling attendants.

Kestrel had drunk it without suspicion and so had her parents.

The poison was slow. Designed not to kill but to unravel. It crept through her channels like silt through a river, clouding her Grace, dulling the connection between her will and the twin serpents coiled in her blades.

She looked up at the heir across from her. He was smiling dreadfully.

"You were never going to fight me," she said.

"No," he agreed. "We were not."

The archers rose from the balconies. The ward-piercing bolts were already nocked. She reached for her blades, but her hands were slow, her Grace sluggish, the white serpents in the steel writhing weakly as though drowning in murk.

The first bolt took her thigh. The second her shoulder. The third below the ribs.

She fell to her knees. The courtyard stone was cold and white and beautiful, and her blood spread across it like spilled wine.

Then, up above, she watched as guards walked over to her family and slit their throats, murdering her parents and her little brother.

"Noooooo!!!" Kestrel screamed. "Noooo!!!!"

The poison was too powerful, even the arrowheads were tipped with them. It had to be Gloomflower.

The Blaze heir stepped forward, wiping his hands though they were already clean. He looked down at her with something that was not quite pity.

"You were too dangerous to duel," he said. "So we didn’t."

"Coward," she spat. Blood flecked her lips. "All of you. Cowards."

The heir smiled. "Goodbye, Princess Kestrel."

He turned and nodded to the archers. They stepped out of the way for a man wielding a giant crackling spear.

He was a Dark Dragoon.

And on his hand was a spear an Awakener shouldn’t be holding. An actual Gloom Spear.

With a lunge, the dark lance took her through the heart.

She fell forward. Her cheek met the stone. The sky above the courtyard was a pale, indifferent blue, so like the sky above the Mountain of Moon on the morning she had beaten Ugbard.

She had been so happy that day. So certain of the path ahead.

She had never accomplished her dream to be the greatest Swordsmaster alive. And even worse, she had failed the second dream.

If she was going to die, she had wanted to die in a duel. Steel to steel. Grace to Grace. A worthy end.

But such a rubbish end to her promising life. Could she accept it?

*********

"Miss Highcastle?"

"Mhm?" Kestrel looked at the boy, still overwhelmed by the fact that she was alive again.

"Did you hear what I asked?" Lancet said. "Such an end to your life..."

"Can you accept it?"