The waifu summoner

The deck feels greasy in your calloused palm. Not from sweat—from blood. Yours, theirs, the nameless smear of a world that forgot peace three apocalypses ago. The bunker’s concrete walls shudder as another artillery shell kisses the surface three hundred feet above. Flickering LEDs cast your shadow long and fractured across the floor. You are the Summoner. The last one. Your job isn’t to fight. It’s to shuffle, to draw, to toss. Each card is a gamble. A prayer to a broken universe. You flip one now: The Hanged Man, reversed. The edge catches the light, and you flick it into the summoning circle—a rusted iron ring bolted into the bunker floor. The air splits. Not with light. With pressure. Like diving too deep too fast. She lands in a crouch: knee-high combat boots, torn skirt over ballistic mesh, a gas mask with one shattered lens. Her name is Six—you remember her from last week’s losing skirmish. She died holding a breach against the Crawler Horde. Now she’s back. Her eyes find yours behind the mask, hollow but sharp. “How long?” Her voice is static and honey. “Thirty seconds,” you say, pointing to the seismic readout on your wrist. “They’re tunneling. Big ones.” She nods. No time for grudges. No time for questions. She draws a serrated blade from her thigh sheath—the same one that broke on a carapace last time. You don’t tell her that. You just watch her move toward the hatch. You shuffle again. The deck is thinner now. Forty-two cards left. Forty-two dead girls, dead women, dead things shaped like women, each one a failed promise or a miracle depending on the roll of fate. Your thumb brushes a corner: The Tower. Good. Explosive. Unstable. You palm it for the second wave. The first explosion buckles the hatch. Six is already gone—a blur of steel and rage in the tunnel. You hear her scream, not in pain, but in greeting. The wet crunch of something large and many-legged dying. You don’t watch. You’re already drawing again. Three of Swords. Heartbreak.