They were jogging through the forest, making a lot of noise as they crashed through the underbrush toward the site of the battle.
“So your kind are infighting?” Frost asked. “I mean, other than just you? You think some of them are also on our side?”
“No,” she said. “The only explanation I can think of is undead—some of the humans built their class for necromancy and raised an army to defend themselves and hid in a nearby tower.”
“How many humans, do you think?” Frost asked.
“Hard to say,” she called back. “Minion builds are pretty strong, usually, and necromancy builds take that to a whole new level! If they’re a high enough level, it could just be a few people!”
“If that’s the case, we have to protect that tower,” Frost said.
“Agreed, but be careful. We’re already farther from the lake than we’ve travelled yet—everything we’re about to encounter is a higher level than we’re used to, and some of the demons I saw were huge.”
“I can deliver a lot of damage to a single target,” said Hunter.
“If my flames light up the battlefield, though,” Ashtoreth said. “Won’t that shut down a lot of your abilities?”
“Don’t worry,” he said, his voice sounding intense and determined. “I’ll handle them, hellfire or no.”
Ashtoreth wait a moment. When it became clear than no explanation was forthcoming, she said: “Okay, but how? You should probably tell us.”
“Oh,” he said. “I can use my [Embrace of the Shadowflame Dragon] again. Because the fang of flame lets me use all my shadow abilities within the light of my shadowflame, it basically means my shadow abilities are always on.”
“Great!” Ashtoreth said. “Frost and I will handle the minions in a way that distracts the big guys to give you an opening. Before we know how tough they are, don’t strike until you have a way of getting yourself out.”
“Right,” said Hunter.
“Can we expect friendly fire?” Frost asked. “The other force—the undead. Will they attack us?”
“No idea!” Ashtoreth said. “But if they do, then they’re not getting included in my aura.”
“Right.”
The forest grew sparser, and soon they emerged onto a small slope that overlooked a sunken field, dotted by other bloodleaf trees and bushes. A little more than a half-mile ahead of them, still somewhat obscured by the omnipresent haze, was a steep, rocky hill with a ruined tower atop it.
In the field between them and the tower were clusters of fighting infernals. Ashtoreth took in a group close to them and saw that one side was definitely undead; a few of them were even skeletons.
What was more, she saw that some of them were armored humanoid figures wielding wickedly curved swords and spears. Some of them had horns curling around their heads, and a few even had wings, though none were flying
Devils. They’d have higher profane resistance than demons—it wouldn’t negate her chain-reaction area-of-effect, but it would make it harder. These lower-level devils would most likely be young and barely trained, but that still meant they were trained.
“Watch out for the devils,” she said, leaping down from the top of the hill they stood on to glide toward the nearest battle.
There was no hulking, armored demon in the group she was attacking, but Ashtoreth was still able to get a good look at one of them in the distance as she charged into the fray:
{Shiverhulk Demon — Level 14 Elite}
It almost looked like a cross between a carnage demon and a hellhound, if they’d also spent about a century bulking up. It was quadrupedal, and covered in hammered metal plates that had been bolted to its skin, scraggly lines of fur growing out of the cracks between them. Its eyes glowed with a harsh, white-blue light, and it moved slowly, spending more than a second to take a single step, looking as if it were never meant to grow to its current size and struggled with its own weight.
“They’re underestimating the undead,” Dazel said in her ear as she charged. “Have to be. They’re trying to clean up the battlefield, but their losses are too heavy.”
Ashtoreth blinked, looked around, and realized that he was right. Fresh demons and devils were entering the fray from a distant field somewhere past the tower, to her left. Bodies littered the ground, the signs of continued fighting.
She guessed most of them were the bodies of the undead. With necromancers around, the corpses of the living tended not to stay where they fell.
Still, this sort of scattered fighting could only be the result of a battle gone wrong. Clearly the infernals couldn’t retreat and regroup to try for the tower again, or they’d have done so. They must have come at it from what looked like a great many angles, but had their force substantially whittled down. Even with their massive hulks, they were apparently fighting for their lives.
It took her a few seconds to notice and surmise all of this, and then she reached the first cluster of enemies. One of the devils saw her as she charged, and his eyes widened as he pulled himself away from the fighting to meet her.
“Your eminence!” he said in a clipped, hissing voice. “We are routed—Gethernel has abandoned us!”
Sensing an opportunity, Ashtoreth skidded to a halt before him instead of attacking outright. “I’m not a part of your corps—who’s Gethernel and what’s going on here?”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“Gethernel is our commander,” said the devil. “He claimed he was working on a siege—”
But her conversation partner looked past her, eyes once again widening. “Humans, Eminence!” He turned to bark a command over his shoulder—
“Halt,” Ashtoreth commanded, calling upon her [Command Infernal] for a high cost in [Bloodfire].
The devil froze momentarily, and Ashtoreth planted her feet, brought her sword back, and then struck him with a [Mighty Blow] that sheared him in half.
The strike was angled upward, so that while the devil’s legs were knocked away from her, his torso spun through the air to land amidst its comrades. Seeing her chance, Ashtoreth let loose a hellfire bolt, allowing it to ignite the slain devil’s bloody torso.
The rest of the squad was just turning toward the meteoric noise she’d made with her greatsword when they were engulfed in the burst of Hellfire.
She charged in after it.
Pained shouts of surprise filled the air, but Ashtoreth magical sense didn’t detect any more corpses that she could ignite with her hellfire. Instead, when the plume of flames cleared, she saw that the effect of her attack had been mixed.
They had demons with them: more carnage demons and hellhounds. These had all been badly burned, with some of them still engulfed in flames. They were a higher level than those she’d encountered before, and so their [Defense] would be higher, as well. A single burst of hellfire wouldn’t kill them… but a few might.
The devils, on the other hand, were fighting through any burns they’d sustained. They had at least a little profane resistance, and would also have higher stats than their demonic companions. Her hellfire had hurt them, surely. Moderately wounded them, even. But they didn’t burst into violet flame the way that some of the hellhounds did.
That was what her sword was for.
She rushed toward the nearest devil, who was already charging her.
She leaned forward, extending to thrust at the devil with a [Mighty Blow] that punched a hole in his breastplate and igniting his corpse as her blade pierced his heart. Then, seeing a hellhound leaping for her as they were both engulfed in the flames, she dropped her sword, spun to avoid her attacker, and reached out to slash the hound’s neck with a clawed hand as it sailed by her.
Two more devils were next, thrusting for her chest with spears from both sides. She pulled on her sword, the counterforce yanking her down toward the ground faster than she could have fallen, bringing her under their thrusting spears before she drew the flames around her into the blade as she pushed herself up onto the knees and struck out with another [Mighty Blow] to shear through both devils at the ankles.
They fell screaming to the ground.
She threw herself to one side to avoid a lunging carnage demon, then planted her sword in the ground to block a hellhound that had thrown itself at her. She threw a hellfire bolt at it a second later to distract it, then pulled her sword free and spun to cleave the carnage demon in two as it lunged for her yet again.
She was low on [Bloodfire], so she ignited the carnage demon’s corpse and immediately sucked the flames into her body.
Another devil rushed her, then was knocked flat by a blast from Frost’s shotgun before being quickly dispatched with a second shot. This gave Ashtoreth enough time to execute the two who were still writhing on the ground, legs severed, with a pair of thrusts that crushed their skulls.
As she did this, however, the hellhound she’d thrown a hellfire bolt at bit her in the ankle.
She spun and sliced it in half, sensing that something was wrong immediately. It should have been in too much pain to come at her again so quickly: it had been engulfed in profane flames.
Not only that, but she couldn’t sense its heart even though she’d killed it. She couldn’t ignite its flesh with hellfire, either.
She checked her system text—past the messages about gaining cores, she read:
{Resisted [Energy Drained] debuff; you are immune.}
“Oh wow!” she said, smiling. Did all of these undead have [Energy Drain]? If so, the fact that the necromancers could raise the corpses of the fallen living meant that the infernals were sure to lose any battle of attrition. No wonder this battle seemed to be going so poorly for them.
At the same time, the undead were making no distinction between her and the other demons. But that made enough sense: what she really had to worry about was the humans.
She saw Hunter ahead of her, pulling one of his blades out of an armored devil’s back like its armor was paper. Two more hounds ran past him, ignoring him completely, and identified both:
{Fallen Hellhound — Level 7 Minion}
{Fallen Hellhound — Level 8 Minion}
She dispatched both of them with her sword, then turned to look at Frost. She couldn’t tell if they were attacking him or not because he’d engaged from a distance, putting her between him and most enemies.
“The dead are ignoring us!” he said. “But not you!”
Oh good, she thought. He checked, too.
“It’s fine!” she said, pulling a heart out of a nearby devil’s corpse and devouring it with a squish. “They all have [Energy Drain]! The humans might not even need our help out here!”
She stopped talking as she saw a devil rushing Hunter; she threw her sword at the enemy, falling into a crouch and digging her claws into the ground to keep herself from flying back from the counterforce.
Her sword didn’t strike the devil hard or precisely enough to pierce their armor, but it knocked them onto the ground so that Hunter could dispatch them with a quick, awkwardly-delivered swipe of one of his katanas.
Ashtoreth let her blade continue on its trajectory until it struck the ground almost fifty meters away. A quick glance around showed her that the rest of the infernals here were engaged with the undead, and would fall soon.
“You two should get to the tower!” she said. “I’ll escort you most of the way, then divert to cut off their reinforcements! This shouldn’t take us—”
As if in direct response to her hopeful thoughts, a low, dolorous klaxon sounded from far across the battlefield—in the direction the infernal reinforcements were coming from.
Distantly, coming out of the omnipresent haze, she saw a massive, hulking creature that seemed to be made of angular shapes and darkness, perhaps fifty feet in height.
Its sheer size meant that even at this distance, she could identify it:
{Demonic Chorus Golem — Level 20 Boss}
She felt Dazel leap back up onto her tail, then clamber up her back to perch on her wings. “That, uh, might be pretty decisive, here.”
The klaxon rang out across the battlefield yet again, the sound like that of an oversized church bell that had been slowed down and heard through a great metal pipe.
But Ashtoreth couldn’t be more thrilled.
“O, happy day!” she cried, clasping her hands together before her. “O joy of joys—you guys, they brought us a boss!”
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