“We should be able to make level 300 relatively quickly,” said Ashtoreth. “Maybe a month or so.”
“That long?” said Frost. “It only took a day to get you higher than 50.”
“Once we hit 60, we reach tier 2,” said Ashtoreth. “We’ll get an advancement every 4 levels until level 100, then every 5 levels until level 300, which is tier 3. There’s new advancements that we can get in tier 2, but the levels also come a lot harder.”
“So we’re going to be fighting level 300s at level 300 ourselves for 11 months,” said Hunter.
“Yep!”
“I don’t get it,” Kylie rasped. “What’s the point of doing this for that long, then? Why not just go to 300 and then quit?”
“Because we’re going to gather cores and magical items the whole time,” said Ashtoreth. “We’ll return to Earth with enough cores to level an army, and enough magical gear to equip one, too. We’ll also have optimal equipment—there’s a level-based limit on how much magical power you can bind in the form of items, and what we’re going to do will give us the optimal items.”
“Don’t leave out the last part, boss,” Dazel said from where he sat in her arms. “These three need training.”
“I’m willing to do what it takes,” said Hunter. “I’ll keep pushing every day to—”
“I won’t,” Kylie said, cutting him off. “This is ridiculous. What do you even mean by training?”
“Oh, all sorts!” Ashtoreth said. “I can give Hunter and Frost some weapons practice, spar with the three of you, teach you a little bit about mana manipulation… and of course, the main event will be the scenarios themselves. It’ll make the most sense to train you all to fight at level 300, but since we want to succeed in the scenarios right away, we should probably work on some basics once we’ve got the time.”
“I’m sure you’re a very encouraging teacher,” said Kylie.
“Thanks, Kylie!”
“I’m just going to figure things out on my own.”
Dazel groaned.
“You’re a spellcaster,” said Ashtoreth.
“Yeah, that’s true.”
Ashtoreth frowned. “You just want to keep your spell slots full of the same spells that they came with?”
“I mostly picked [Spellcasting] for the bigger [Mana] pool, anyway.”
“I’d tell you to explain how much we need her,” Dazel said. “But I think that would make things worse.”
Ashtoreth ignored him. “Once you’re a high enough level, we can get you a teleportation spell,” she said. “It’ll be essential for the defense of Earth. In the meantime, you’re not going to find any spellcasters willing to trade notes with you once we’re in the scenarios. And once we get back, Earth will be stuck on the tier 1 spells that people learn in the tutorials.”
“Uh-huh,” Kylie said disinterestedly.
“I don’t get it,” Ashtoreth said. “I mean, I get that circumstances for you three, uh, aren’t exactly ideal.”
“You forced us to come with you on a magical adventure to endless war,” Kylie said. “One where even death is no escape.”
“Yeah that,” said Ashtoreth. “But don’t you want to get more powerful? Even before you knew Hell was invading Earth, surely you had ambitions. Wanted things.”
“Wanting things has never gone so well for me,” said Kylie.
“Well that’s very sad, Kylie,” said Ashtoreth. “But maybe it’ll go better when you’re an archmage commanding legions of the dead.”
Kylie shrugged. “That sounds like one of those jobs where you’ve gotta be available twenty four hours.”
“But your minions are all dead,” said Hunter.
“But everyone will want something from me,” said Kylie.
“But,” said Ashtoreth. “Once the war is over, they’ll be too scared to be pushy!”
“Is that….” Kylie narrowed her eyes at Ashtoreth. “Are you trying to entice me by promising that when we’re done, I’ll be so powerful that everyone will be afraid of me and I can do whatever I want?”
“Is it… working?” Ashtoreth asked delicately.
Kylie looked away. “It’s a better effort than Hogwarts,” she muttered.
“Okay,” Dazel said. “I don’t think we need to spend any more time on Kylie’s retirement plan of hiding herself away in a flying necro-castle and spending her days smoking weed, listening to emo music, and binge-watching bad dramas on Netflix.”
“What the hell,” Kylie said stiffly. “That’s completely inaccurate. If I had ultimate power, it would be way different.”
“Cat’s right,” said Frost. “Let’s move on. I have a question—how does all of this work, exactly? The tutorials, or scenarios, I mean. Where are these enemies coming from? In the tutorial, they clearly started at certain levels—that dragon didn’t hit 50 by gaining cores on its own.”
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“Good question, Sir Frost!” Ashtoreth said. “Once it chose an environment for the tutorial, the system drafted denizens from across Hell to make up the other side. When it drafts enemies for a tutorial, they don’t always have to be exactly the right level—Pluto was probably made level 50 right when this one started. The dragon, too.”
Frost looked thoughtful. “So every time we do this, an army of other beings are going to be unwillingly teleported into a tiny world that exists just for the purpose of us killing each other.”
“Uh-huh!” Ashtoreth said. “And if they succeed in killing all of us, they can go home and we’ll never see them again—we’ll wake up in the next scenario.”
Frost reached up to rub at his temples with one hand. “Unwilling, Ashtoreth,” he said.
“Only sometimes!” Ashtoreth said. “It’s only unwilling if the system can’t find enough willing candidates—and since the rewards are so good, it usually can.”
“So what if it isn’t Hell?” Frost asked. “We’re just going to be reaving down some flock of elves who all wanted to get stronger and improve their chances of protecting their loved ones from the utter insanity of the multiverse?”
“Look at you, critical of the system,” Dazel said. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“Actually, it’s called the cosmos, not the multiverse,” said Ashtoreth. “And not quite. Not unless the elves are evil.”
“You’re trying to tell me the system will only feed us evil people?” Frost asked dubiously.
“Exactly!” said Ashtoreth. “And animals. Remember, it wants us to fight each other. So it’ll send us places where we’ll have the least qualms about killing a selection of the inhabitants! It’s ethical farming!”
“You’re telling me that the system is going to send us after hundreds of enemy armies, and it’ll be sure I’m never bothered by killing any of them?”
“The cosmos isn’t the nicest of places for creatures like humans,” said Ashtoreth.
“You don’t say.”
“The system can find a lot, and I mean a lot, of enemy factions who won’t think twice about slaughtering us.”
“It’s them or us, right?” said Hunter. “We stand to affect Earth’s fate on too great a scale to have moral compunctions.”
Again, Frost reached up to rub his temples. “Sometimes, Hunter, you say things that are… very disconcerting.”
“Good,” he said. “It’s an uncomfortable truth, but I’m not against being the one to say it aloud. A couple hundred morally questionable slaughterings of some other realm’s inhabitants is a drop in the bucket compared to what we can stop back on Earth.”
“So were you always a wannabe ubermensch?” Kylie asked. “Or did that come with the samurai swords?”
“Look you guys,” Ashtoreth began. “We’re talking about warping in to a scenario filled with undead from the Deadlight Shard, or another Hell, or a wilderness full of wild beasts.”
“Hey, don’t forget the inter-realm empires of slavers,” said Dazel. “Plenty of those around to bring the spice of novelty to their respective cars on our murder train.”
“Exactly!” Ashtoreth said. She looked at the humans. “You guys’ll kill slavers, right?”
“She means other than her,” said Dazel.
“Hey!” She said, putting her hands on her hips. “Demons summoned to work in the Paradise Citadel are being given a big opportunity.”
“We’re being sidetracked again,” said Frost. “We’re going to get moved, soon—what can we expect when that happens? Will it be like this tutorial, where we all wind up in different places? Will it be stacked against us, like this one was?”
“I’m not sure if we’ll all be in the same spot,” said Ashtoreth.
“You will be,” said Dazel.
“Okay, what he said then,” she said.
“It won’t be as bad, even if it’s Hell,” said Dazel. “Hell puts a lot of work into making sure that their tutorials are especially deadly. They don’t maintain that standard for a scenario drafted for levels 50 through to 300.”
“No more of Hell’s cheats,” Hunter said.
“Hell will still play as unfairly as it can,” said Dazel. “But on a scale that runs from Dora the Explorer to Saw, the game we’re playing now just had its difficulty dropped a couple of notches. Swiper no longer has a robot with a chaingun and we got the singing map back.”
“You’re a real connoisseur of the arts, Dazel,” said Frost. “Look, clock’s ticking. Let’s figure out what we’re going to do once we get into the new zone.”
“Find a safe spot and plot our course from there,” Hunter said. He turned to Ashtoreth. “Right?”
“More or less,” she said. “The system’s going to throw more than some low-level hellhounds at us at first, but I’m sure it’s nothing we can’t handle. I emptied out my bag this morning because the hearts expired, but my locket still saved three for me—I’ll go in with my scythe and lay down some hellfire to start things off. That should give you guys some cover, keep you in my auras, and draw attention.”
“Hunter can teleport us as a group, now,” said Kylie. “So he’s our escape plan, right?”
“That’s a reasonable plan,” said Ashtoreth. “He’s got Frost’s strongest protection spell, too—so if things are chaotic as soon as we come in, start looking around for a better position to move them to.”
“We’ve got great debuffs against anything not immune to [Energy Drain],” said Kylie. “But nothing to keep enemies off us unless they’re vulnerable to our command spells….”
They talked for a while as the timer ran down. To Ashtoreth, everything they said was glaringly obvious—of course they’d want to retreat from unknown hostility and regroup to find a better approach, of course they’d use abilities how they were meant to be used.
She wondered if that meant she would be a poor teacher—she was overestimating what their basic knowledge should encompass, after all.
The humans circled the same topics more than once, and eventually Ashtoreth realized they were just nervous.
“Cheer up, everyone!” she said at last. “You can’t die! We get to train and grow stronger for a year with no consequences.”
“Except the consequences on our mental wellbeing,” said Kylie.
“Exactly!” said Ashtoreth. “Those can’t be that bad. Now I’ll tuck the house into its key and we can wait outside.”
Once this was done, they gathered on the bare, blasted landscape of the ledge with only a few minutes remaining. Hunter had a few more questions about combat, but they came further and further apart, until everyone seemed to watch the countdown in perfect silence.
Ashtoreth didn’t understand. They couldn’t die. There wouldn’t even be consequences if they all got taken out—they’d get to try again, right away.
There was no need to be nervous.
The timer hit ten seconds.
“I’m ready!” Hunter said to no-one in particular.
“I’m excited!” Ashtoreth said.
“Well, here’s for Earth,” said Frost.
“Fuck you all,” said Kylie.
The timer struck zero….
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