The citadel floated in the air at the center of the lake, a cluster of narrow spires and high ramparts that were clad in matte black steel.

  Anticipating a trap, Ashtoreth rose high into the air as the skygorger demons took a position some distance out from the walls and began to cast their spells, no doubt within the range of a great many diabolic archers.

  Rather than conjure her cannon to hopefully pick the skygorgers out the sky, she flew above them with her eyes on the battlements below her.

  She chose a high rampart with a squad of soldiers atop it, judging it to be the one that was least accessible to the soldiers below and would thus get the least support. Then she dove, conjuring her sword and launching it at the nearest soldier.

  One of the devils conjured a sparkling dome of green light. Her sword passed through the barrier and was dispelled, but this just meant that it burst into a plume of hellfire that engulfed the pack of soldiers.

  Once, her hellfire had been little more than a nuisance for the devils, but that was when they were a few levels higher than her. Now she was more than ten levels higher than them.

  Now, they burned.

  Their ranks broke as the hellfire of her sword covered their bodies, and their screams filled their air. Her flames drained their stats with [Energy Drain], converting them to more fire so that the flames coating her enemies only grew and grew.

  She landed a moment later.

  Soldiers such as these tended to build for [Defense], but the cores from the hive of vivinsects and the dragon had made her too strong now for it to matter. She rushed forward to those who hadn’t been stricken by her hellfire blast, easily moving faster than they could follow before forming her claws and shredding through their armor.

  Soon she’d conjured her sword and was laying about her, cutting them down with ease. Arrows from devils further down the rampart sank into her flesh, carrying with them paralytic or damaging magic, but neither was strong enough to slow her down or tax her [Bloodfire] too much.

  More skygorgers appeared above her, and she answered their spells with her own bolts of hellfire. They concentrated their efforts, throwing blasts of green flame in tandem, but she simply launched herself into the air to avoid them, then landed once more and resumed fighting the devils on the rampart.

  She cleared the battlement of soldiers, then turned to address the six skygorgers who had gathered as she’d fought. She launched her sword and the nearest, and it lurched to one side in midair. Then she braced herself against the battlement and pulled the sword back to her, simultaneously throwing a bolt of hellfire at the demon.

  It conjured a green barrier to shield itself from the bolt of hellfire, then was impaled by her sword as it returned to her. She caught the bloody blade, threw it further down the rampart, then leapt after it to take a new position as the rest of the demons’ spells came rushing toward her.

  The next skygorger demon turned to keep an eye on her sword as it flew past them, but Ashtoreth simply leapt and let the counterforce draw her up into the air, charging it and grabbing a hold of its back, where she sank her claws into its face and pulled away the front of its skull.

  She caught her sword a moment later, whirled in the air to face the next closest demon, and shouted, “Freeze!” before launching the blade again to take it through the chest.

  The rest of the skygorgers fell one after the other as devils rushed to take up supporting positions below them, none of them taking her more than a few moments to bring down. She burst most of their bodies with [Hellfire Consumption] rather than chasing them to the ground, absorbing the fire each time because she was unwilling to stop and collect the hearts.

  As she dispatched the last of them, she finally heard what she’d been wanting to hear since she began: a loud, dull klaxon began to emanate from one of the citadel’s towers, the warped sound of a horn carrying out across the lake of lava below them.

  The citadel below was a hive of activity, soldiers and demons now appearing out of seemingly every doorway to line the walls and fill the courtyard.

  “Oh, good,” she said, landing on the rampart. She tore three hearts out of devils that she’d killed on the rampart, loading each of them into her locket before launching herself into the air.

  She didn’t turn inward to address the growing army of demons, however. Instead she threw herself past the limit of the walls, out over the lake of lava, and let herself begin to fall.

  “Shouldn’t you be grabbing some of these hearts!” Dazel shouted as the wind rushed by her. “Your sister is coming!”

  “Priorities!” she said, spreading her wings and moving toward the base of the citadel.

  “What’s more important than surviving your sister?”

  Ashtoreth grinned. “Beating her, obviously!”

  The citadel was built upon a massive armored scaffolding that flared out to form its airborne foundation. Entrances both small and large dotted this foundation, each of them blocked by a portcullis.

  Ashtoreth chose one of these portcullises, then landed on it, gripping the gaps in its grating. It had two devil guards: one of them shot an arrow into her belly as she landed, and the other moved to thrust a spear at her.

  “Open it,” she commanded the devil with the bow.

  Her target’s eyes grew hazy, and they moved to grab a metal wheel set into one wall and heave.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  The portcullis lurched upward an inch. Ashtoreth set her feet onto the lip of the doorway below her, then pushed her hands beneath the bottom of the metal grate and heaved. Another arrow scraped across the top of her skull, and a spear took her in the neck, but soon she heard the sound of snapping chains and a resistance in the portcullis gave way. She slammed it upward to step into the fortress, snapping her attacker’s spear.

  A few moments later and she was tearing out the two devils’ hearts, then launching herself down the corridor beyond them, further into the citadel.

  Soon she emerged into a vast open area built for readying aerial troops, a room that was little more than runed metal support pillars and a floor.

  There were only a few dozen soldiers and a few more skygorgers around, but what caught her eye was the devil standing at the center of the room.

  He wore a heavy-looking set of black plate armor, polished to a mirror sheen and trimmed with gold. Two tall wings filled the air behind him, and in one hand he held a barbed spear made from a single piece of burnt black bone.

  {Captain Zhorak — Level 35 Boss}

  He was giving orders.

  “Spread out!” he shouted to the few other devils in the room with him. “Get back! The brat makes corpse explosions!”

  He looked over at Ashtoreth as she landed on the ground nearby and inclined his head in a curt nod. “Another child of Pride,” he said. “Tell me: do you know what this place’s purpose was before it was taken for this tutorial? Have you any inkling of my true mandate?”

  “Sorry!” Ashtoreth said, conjuring her sword and letting its tip fall to make a dull boom against the metal floor. “I’m overleveled for you and I’m in a hurry! And honestly, I don’t care about the lore.”

  “We are evenly matched!” Zhorak barked, lowering his spear. “Come!”

  Ashtoreth launched her sword at him, kneeling and grabbing at the floor so that her claws scraped against the metal to keep her from being launched backward.

  Zhorak moved to bat the flying sword out of the air with his spear, and she pulled hard on her sword, launching her forward across the floor and throwing off his timing.

  She burst her sword a moment later, engulfing both herself and Zhorask in a plume of [Hellfire] as she sped toward him.

  “Think!” she commanded. An old trick: she might be able to make Zhorask freeze for a split-second, but if she started him on a train of thought, had him try to consider what she was doing and where she would strike from, he’d still be thinking even when the command expired, still be deprived of his instincts for a moment longer.

  The spearpoint came for her through the flames, and she threw herself beneath it, abandoning any effort at a fighting stance as she slid beneath his attack, then rolled past him while forming the hellfire in the air into her cannon.

  Zhorask’s feet moved perfectly as he reversed his stance and brought the spear around to jab it into her chest. A surge of green power flowed down the length of his spear and into her body, filling her with a deep ache.

  Then Zhorask’s eyes widened. He was staring almost straight into the barrel of her cannon.

  She fired.

  The sound of her weapon rang through the great chamber, a thunderous note of finality as Zhorask’s head was turned to mist and his body sent flying backward to land and skid across the floor.

  She reached out with her magical sense and ignited his body with [Hellfire Consumption].

  She’d never ignited a boss before, and the results were anything but disappointing. Fire bloomed from the center of the massive chamber, spreading to fill every corner of it and continuing to burn on the floor and rune-carved pillars even after the initial rush of flames subsided.

  The room’s few other occupants, who had at first been positioning themselves to give ranged support to their commander, then rushing to flee from Ashtoreth once he’d been killed, burst into flames, screaming.

  Ashtoreth laughed as she pulled a heart from her locket and consumed it to replenish her [Bloodfire], then dismissed her cannon, ignited the corpses of those who had fallen in the flames, and rushed to leave the room from the way she’d came.

  Dazel spoke. “Okay, good fight and all, but—”

  “I agree!” Ashtoreth chirped as she sped out into the open air again.

  “Shouldn’t you be harvesting more hearts? Levelling? You’ve got cores! A boss core, even. You’ll get the one level you need for another advancement!”

  “No time!” she said, conjuring her sword so that she could launch it away from her and rush up the walls of the citadel even faster. “Hearts first!”

  The small army of soldiers that had been assembling on the ramparts when she left was somewhat scattered once more. Many of them had apparently been called into the depths of the citadel as she’d attacked its lower reaches.

  She chose the most vulnerable rampart, then dove into the midst of its devils and conjured her sword. She struck one devil dead, cleaving them and their spear in half and causing them to burst into a cloud of hellfire that she used to cover herself as she went for the others.

  This time, though, as she lay about her with the blade, she was sure to stop and tear the heart from everyone she killed, hastily stuffing them into her bag once her locket was full. If she could fill her bag, she’d have the resources to counteract the massive [Mana] pool that Pluto had. Then she could spend some time levelling, gain at least one more advancement….

  Ashtoreth saw the crystal sword with her magical sense as it pierced her cloud of hellfire to strike the ground at her feet. She leapt from the battlement, beating her wings to fly high into the air and reaching out to sense yet more swords shooting toward her.

  She couldn’t dodge in time, not with her flight: she launched her sword away from herself so that the counterforce pushed her back through the air as another of the weapons exploded into a small mountain of ice mid-air.

  She was in the air and moving fast, and the next two swords that came for her were easier to dodge. She soared over the courtyard below her and landed with her feet against the conical roof of the citadel’s tallest tower, then looked up into the air at where Pluto floated more than a hundred feet away, seemingly lit a by a floodlight that shone from somewhere behind her.

  “Is this what you wanted?” Pluto asked, her voice ringing out across the towers of the citadel.

  “No!” Ashtoreth cried.

  “But you’ve set our stage so perfectly with such a splendid opening act!” Pluto said, slowly descending to Ashtoreth’s level. “You, the favorite—and me, the runt.”

  “Pluto, just talk to me!”

  But Pluto called the antithesis shard to hover above her palm, the orange splinters glimmering. “A trophy most precious to act as our prize!” she cried. “And the venue? One dark citadel above a burning lake of fire!”

  Her hat rose and flew off her head, spinning around her and flipping so that she could draw her baton from its depths. She gave it a twirl and a spotlight shone down on where Ashtoreth stood against the tallest tower.

  “Talk to me,” Ashtoreth said as Pluto came closer. “Please?”

  But Pluto’s insane grin never faltered, her teeth gleaming in the light. “Be dazzled! Be amazed! Come from here, and come from away! One sister rises, one sister falls! Two champions battle—and winner. Takes. All!”