As he did this, Ashtoreth braced herself against the ground by falling to her knees, then launched her sword toward the group of demons, the counterforce pushing her legs into the dirt. She dismissed her sword as it struck a demon in the oncoming horde’s midst, causing it to burst into a massive bloom of hellfire.
It would have been a devastating opening attack, but her [Hellfire Consumption] made it truly absurd: she ignited every corpse that Frost had already made as the flames touched them, and they added their power to the initial plume of flames, so that the whole group of carnage demons, even those that had already begun charging toward them, were totally engulfed in hellfire.
Those closest to the center of the blaze were incinerated, dying and then igniting themselves, adding even more heat and power to the inferno.
A few carnage demons made it out of the flames, their fur burning. Frost brought one of them down with his shotgun, at which point Ashtoreth ignited it and the ensuing explosion engulfed its fellows.
Soon they were all just staring at a wide inferno that covered the ground before them and had spread to the trees around them.
She heard Hunter swear as another one of the demons moved and she burst another corpse, engulfing it and the forest in even more deadly, violet flames that bloomed dozens of meters into the sky.
“Whew!” Ashtoreth cried. “Say, anyone else feeling like these 8d6 fireballs are a bit much?”
A carnage demon that was completely engulfed in flames ran free of the blaze, then was promptly dispatched by a blast from Frost’s shotgun.
“I mean, surely 6d6 would be a little more balanced, you know?”
There was no further motion from within the flames.
Hunter looked over, katanas seeming to hang limply from his hands. “Ashtoreth,” he said.
She grinned at him. “Uh-huh?”
“Just so you know… your class is bullshit.”
“To be fair, a lot of this was enabled by my race,” she said. “Turns out a [Vampiric Archfiend] isn’t someone that you can really threaten with a given number of low-strength demons.”
“It’s noticeable,” said Frost, staring at the flames. “I can feel the heat, but it doesn’t hurt me. It’s… a strange sensation.”
“Allright,” Ashtoreth said. “This is probably pretty visible from the sky, so I’ll suck up all this fire, maybe take a few hearts, and we can get out of here and distribute the cores.”
She looked at her system notifications to see that she had, indeed, just gotten more than 30 low-level cores. Frost had probably gotten another half-dozen and Hunter had… well, Hunter would be useful against bosses. Hopefully.
She looked over at Frost while she planted her greatsword in the ground and began to absorb the fire. “Maybe watch for that dragon?”
“I’m always watching for the dragon, Ashtoreth,” said Frost. “That’s why I spotted the shearbats first both times.”
Within a few moments it was done: they jogged away from the site of the battle, eyes on the sky, but the dragon didn’t emerge from the haze.
The cores weren’t enough to gain her a level, but that wasn’t surprising: the curve was steep, and the carnage demons had been low. Her last level had mostly come from the Huntsman’s boss core.
“I don’t get it,” Hunter said. “I thought I was strong when I soloed that boss. But you weren’t kidding at all when you said they were explosive barrels.”
“Nope!” Ashtoreth chirped.
“How is anything that isn’t a boss supposed to contend with… that? It’s just a chain reaction.”
She shrugged. “Mobility abilities. Minions that are strong enough to survive an explosion from an ally’s corpse. Minions that are spread out. Really, any tightly packed groups of enemies fares badly even against fire magic. Even fire magic that sucks.”
She looked over, and seeing his downcast expression, she added: “Hey, cheer up! Give it a couple of levels and you’ll have some overpowered synergies yourself. Plus, boss-killing is more important than crowd-killing anyway.”
“Right,” he said. “I’ve got a level now, actually. Uh, any advice?”
“Do you have anything that helps you regenerate resources?”
“I retained some stuff, yeah.”
“Go for those,” she said. “Unless there’s something you should obviously be doing anyway. You’ve got four progression paths, right? That means 33% more stuff to choose from than what I see. Pretty good.”
“I’m still not sure I understand it,” said Frost. “Four aspects does sound good when you talk about it… but to justify a full scale invasion of Earth from Hell? With all of the advantages you mentioned Hell having, it seems strange that the King would feel like Earth could ever threaten you. Hell, I mean.”
Ashtoreth shrugged. “Well, who knows? Maybe there’s something else, something to do with Earth itself. I mean, knowing humans, it could be a lot of things.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you guys sure got a lot done without magic already—I don’t think any of the other outer realms that got integrated had the internet and computers, not like yours. And you’ve got atom bombs but didn’t destroy yourselves, which is pretty impressive. And the stuff you do with molecules sure gets a lot of buzz in hell.”
“Molecules?” Frost asked. “You mean like how we make plastic and vaccines and stuff?”
“Exactly!” Ashtoreth said, happy that he was getting it. “Have you seen all the nerve agents? I mean, barely any amount of sarin at all can kill someone in as low as a minute!”
“Uh, okay,” said Frost.
“And thermobaric weapons! Have you seen those?”
“Fortunately, I haven’t.”
“There’s more, too. I mean, your average human is frail, unimpressive, flabby, and unmotivated, right?”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Sure, Ashtoreth.”
“But if you look at the humans who are the best at things like gymnastics or video games or sculpting, it feels like they’re not even the same species. The upper bound for humans is insane! But it’s more than that, even.”
“What do you mean?” Hunter asked.
“I mean, you guys built airplanes and rocketships within a century of each other. And have you seen how tribal you can get, how completely crazy you are sometimes? Just look at the witch trials: eventually the people they were torturing would name other people just to get the torture to stop. You guys were killing each other for no reason at all, and using torture just to find yourselves more people to kill!”
“And that’s… impressive to you?” Frost asked.
“Well it’s not good,” said Ashtoreth. “But my point is this: what’s gonna happen when that species figures out—well, figures out that there are other species? There’s eight billion of you. Integrating that many humans into the inner realms is a pretty scary prospect, especially when you’ve got a powerful racial ability to go with your numbers.”
“You mentioned them before,” Hunter said. “But the inner realms—what are those?”
“They’re the systematized realms,” said Ashtoreth. “A loose collection of worlds and pocket-dimensions, all of them interconnected. You can probably find almost all of the fantasy elements that the human race has been honing in on for the last little while on any of those worlds. You know: mermaids and stuff.”
“Mermaids?” Hunter asked dubiously.
“You know, the fish people. Mermaids.”
“Yeah, it’s just… I guess I was surprised that you would pick that one, of all things. Are there like… elves?”
“Yeah,” Ashtoreth said. “In fact, they’ll probably get along with humans since you look so similar. Elves have normal-shaped ears, though.”
“Why do you ask?” Dazel said, leaping down to pad along the ground beside Hunter.
“No reason, just curious,” said Hunter.
Dazel walked up beside him and then nudged him in the ankle. “Looking to wife yourself an elf maiden, huh?”
“Uh, no,” said Hunter. “I have a girlfriend, actually.”
“Wow,” Dazel said, blinking in surprise. “Wow. Interesting dialect.”
“Huh?”
“It’s just, I’ve never heard someone pronounce ‘tulpa’ that way before. Girlfriend. You must be from a pretty remote—”
“Ugh,” Hunter said. “You know, for a talking cat who calls himself an asshole, you sure keep trying to act like I’m the stereotype between us.”
Dazel stretched out his wings. “Like I said, it’s how I show affection. And I never said that I wasn’t a hypocrite. Say, boss: apropos of nothing at all, how about glamouring me up some cigarettes?”
“Sure Dazel, you just gotta lay off of Hunter. I don’t think he likes your affection.”
“Ugh, fine.”
Ashtoreth wove some of her glamour into a small cigarillo wrapped in black paper and passed it to him. Dazel took it, stuck it in his mouth, and lit it with a claw. “How’s this for stereotypes, Mister Wolfhard?”
Hunter stared down at him, perplexed. “How… how can you do that? Your paws?”
“‘Cat’ was more of a suggestion than a schematic,” he said, raising one forelimb and wiggling his thumb. “I’ve got no interest in holding chalk with my mouth. Say boss, can I ride in the wings again? The ground is dirty.”
Ashtoreth laughed as she lifted him onto her shoulders. “I don’t know why you’re worried about what you use to hold chalk,” she said. “You’re not doing any magic for me at all.”
“True, that,” he said. She felt a light puff of air against the point of her right ear, and a cloud of smoke appeared a moment later. “Say, this fake cigarillo aint bad. You’ve got experience.”
“Don’t blow smoke in my face, Dazel,” she said.
“Sure thing, boss. Hey, while we’re on the subject of Hunter’s girlfriend—”
“We’re not,” Hunter said flatly.
“—What about you, boss?” Dazel asked. “Been cultivating any romantic fantasies while you look forward to betraying Hell and wowing Earth with your heroism? Is there a billionaire pirate vampire angel whose daddy forbids your relationship living somewhere amidst your countless, clearly pathological daydreams?”
“Nah,” she said. “I’m not here for… romantic opportunities.” She sighed, then added: “I mean, I’m not saying I wouldn’t like to meet somebody someday—humanity really sold me on the romance thing. You do it way better than we do it in Hell.”
“How do you do it in Hell?” Hunter asked.
“You know what?” she asked, raising a finger. “Let’s change the subject. Right now!”
“I’ve got a question,” said Frost. “That cigarette.”
“Cigarillo,” Dazel said.
“Sure,” said Frost. “It’s fake. But he can taste it?”
Ashtorth heard a steady exhale from behind her. “To my pleasure,” he said. “Our girl Ashtoreth has clearly done her fair share of smoking.”
“Dazel—don’t tell Frost that. He’s a cop.”
“I—” Frost spared Ashtoreth a befuddled glance, then seemed to turn back to Dazel. “I don’t understand,” he said. “You can conjure illusions, but they’re real?”
“Glamours are illusions that can deceive all senses,” Ashtoreth said. “It’s the art of making things seem like something else. But it still isn’t real. They don’t have the substance to survive any kind of forceful interaction—I couldn’t weave a bridge that we could walk over, for instance, because we’d be too heavy. And anyone who actively disbelieves something like a glamoured fire won’t feel its heat. Dazel’s chosen to embrace the illusion.” She paused, then added: “if you focus a bit, you can probably see that I’m still wearing a blood-stained robe, not a baseball uniform.”
Hunter and Frost both stared at her for a second, and she watched their expressions change to those of surprise.
“Huh,” said Frost.
“Trust me,” Ashtoreth said. “You’ll appreciate it later. We’ll probably be sleeping on piles of leaves tonight, but your mind won’t care so much if I trick it into thinking you’ve got a nice feather bed instead. You’ll fall asleep faster, even if you still wake up a little sore.”
Frost slowed for second and stared at her. “Sleeping?” he said. “Wait a second—just how long are we supposed to spend in this tutorial? I didn’t know we’d be here for a whole day.”
“Oh no,” said Ashtoreth. “The tutorial can cover the whole first tier, or even more. We could be in here for a lot longer than a single day.”
“Oh.”
“Just remember that the system has put us in private time,” Ashtoreth said. “We’re going to come out in the exact same moment we left, same as everyone.” She flashed him a smile. “Just think: if we spend a week in here instead of two days, well then that’s just more practice and power to save Earth with!”
“We should stay and farm as long as possible,” Hunter said.
Frost looked unenthused. “I’d really like to return to… whatever will be back on Earth.”
“But remember,” Ashtoreth said. “No matter how long we stay here you won’t miss even a single second of the invasion.”
“Great.”
Ashtoreth didn’t say any more. With any luck, she’d have a little more time to work on Hunter and Frost before she brought them in on the full scale of her plan.
She wanted to tell them, of course, but they needed to be eased into the truth, coached and goaded like flighty animals.
After all, Ashtoreth had a secret.
Affixed to her very soul was a shard of something that she’d stolen from her mother before she’d fled the Paradise Citadel, the seat of utmost power in Hell. With it, she could tamper with the tutorial’s ordinary constraints so that she and everyone else who survived could return to Earth with more power than the early infernal invaders could possibly hope to contend with.
But that kind of power would take time to gather, and she’d need even more time to train the humans in using it properly.
She wasn’t telling him that if things went her way, they wouldn’t be staying in the tutorial’s private time for a week.
They’d be staying for much longer.
Surely, if she told them at the right time and in the right way, the humans would be thrilled….
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