Pluto clapped her gloved hands together in front of her. “Bravo!” she said. “Is Ashtoreth ready to fight at last? Because all you’ve done so far is run from me—dancing from trick to trick.”

  But Ashtoreth could see through her sister’s performance, even at this distance. Pluto’s voice wavered.

  “I know you’re terrified,” Ashtoreth said. “And you should be. You’re not my match, Pluto.”

  Pluto brandished her magic rod. “You’re just like all the others—underestimating me!”

  “Pluto!” Ashtoreth said warningly. “Give me the shard!”

  “You think I’m not used to be the underdog?” Pluto shouted. “I’ll never give up! It wouldn’t matter if the odds were impossible—I’ll find a way to beat you! You’ll see!”

  Ashtoreth furrowed her brow. “Okay,” she said. “But Pluto, you’re still 3 levels higher than me.”

  “Quiet!” she shouted. “You’re the one who got all the training! All the attention! All the love!”

  “It wasn’t love, Pluto—listen. You’re strong. They’ve kept you alive all this time because they know you’re strong. Because you try so hard, because you fight no matter what.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” she asked. “That it’s all a game? That it’s just for results? I think I’d rather they really hated me than that they make me suffer just to motivate me.”

  “They don’t deserve you!” Ashtoreth said. “He doesn’t deserve you!”

  She began to float closer to her sister, taking one hand off her scythe to hold it outstretched. “Choose freedom. Choose yourself. You can suffer for them until you die for them, or you can take my hand and see what comes next. Join me.”

  But Pluto was shaking her head. “Haven’t you been paying attention?” she asked. “Father wants Earth more than he’s ever wanted an outer realm, maybe more than he’s ever wanted anything except the throne itself. Nobody has ever gotten the chance to give him what we can give him! What I will give him!”

  “We owe him nothing!” Ashtoreth snarled. “Least of all to go to some world we’ve spent our whole lives studying so that we can… we can wound ourselves, scar our souls by doing to them everything we do to each other. Pluto,” she pleaded, drawing closer to her sister, her hand still outstretched. “I want you to think of the worst thing that you’ve ever done.”

  “Don’t!”

  “What we’re going to do to them—we’ll make them raise their children the way we were raised.”

  “Stop it!”

  “Hurt each other the way that we do—”

  “Stop it!” Pluto shrieked. “It’s the way of the cosmos, Ashtoreth: the strong eat the weak. Don’t pretend you don’t know. The humans are swine. Weak, pathetic, numerous. Necks to be collared, souls to be fed to the Pits.”

  Ashtoreth’s grip on her scythe tightened. “Don’t.”

  “Your betrayal only ends one way,” said Pluto. “And if I join you, I’ll be the one he kills to teach you your lesson.”

  She held her hands out before her and began to charge another one of her massive hellfrost blasts. “So no, Ashtoreth. I won’t be joining you—and I won’t be losing, either.”

  “Pluto….”

  She gritted her teeth, her eyes gleaming with a fierce intensity as the light of her spell carved shadows on her face. “I told you before, Ashtoreth,” she said. “The wake of my passage will rearrange constellations! It doesn’t matter who stands—”

  Then, midway through charging her spell, she vanished into a cloud of ethereal, glittering crows.

  Ashtoreth, spun, searching the sky for her sister, then spotted Pluto above her an instant later. She’d abandoned her larger frost spell and quickly conjured several of her crystal swords, all of which now sped through the air toward Ashtoreth.

  It was a well-constructed ambush: cutting off mid-sentence, spending mana to charge the wrong spell, and launching the swords as soon as she came out of her teleport.

  None of it mattered.

  Ashtoreth’s new scythe was a much better spellcasting focus than her horns were, and she was combining both to give her an incredibly fine level of control over her hellfire. She swiped the scythe through the air and conjured two patches of dense violet fire in the path of the swords, two flashes of violet light, and the spell-eating effect granted by her ruby was enough to fray the magic of the conjured swords enough that they detonated harmlessly in the air between her and Pluto.

  She was already charging forward even before the projectiles met in the air, beating her wings to rush toward her sister with her claws formed. Pluto surged backward, retreating as she threw two more swords, but Ashtoreth swatted them out of the air just like she had the first two.

  She charged a hellfire blast as she chased her sister, dodging a few haphazardly conjured and tossed shards of ice before throwing her searing missile at a point behind Pluto.

  Pluto dove to one side to avoid the explosion of hellfire, and Ashtoreth spun her scythe, quickly gathering the flames into another searing bolt that she threw at her sister.

  Pluto barely dodged the second blast, rushing toward Ashtoreth instead of away from her.

  Ashtoreth took her opportunity, surging forward to catch her sister in the air, sinking one clawed hand into Pluto’s ribs while she dismissed her scythe to engulf them both in hellfire than she used to begin forming her cannon with her other hand.

  Pluto snarled, then dissipated into a flock of shimmering birds.

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

  Ashtoreth quickly wheeled about, searching for her sister.

  Pluto reappeared a moment later, directly below Ashtoreth, pointing her baton….

  But Ashtoreth’s cannon had finished forming in her hands. She fired the weapon just as their gazes met, and the sound of thunder accompanied a blast of light from the muzzle.

  For just a moment, the air in front of Pluto seemed to crack, as if an invisible pane of glass had become visible by shattering. Her sister was sent careening through the air, down toward the lake of fire below.

  Ashtoreth dove after her, dismissing her cannon and forming its hellfire into her scythe once more. She collided with a dazed Pluto a moment later, snarling and trying to sink her claws into her sister’s face as she bore her further downward toward the lake of fire.

  Pluto became nothing but a flock of dissipating birds again a moment later, and again Ashtoreth wheeled around to find her sister.

  She spotted Pluto reforming on the stone platform of the bridge below them, then rushed down toward her, considering how best to approach killing her sister.

  She’d seen the air warp and fragment as her shot was deflected. Pluto had some kind of mana barrier protecting her. That was why she’d been fine after the ignition of the dragon’s corpse, and why she’d been able to fight so close to the inferno of the sinking citadel. It had to be a powerful one if it was able to absorb so much damage.

  She launched a hellfire bolt at Pluto as she dove, and her sister responded by conjuring a thick wall of hellfrost to absorb the power of the spell. The initial wall was followed by several more, so Pluto was encased in an icy pyramid.

  But with three spinning swipes of her scythe, Ashtoreth conjured the hellfire that she needed to gouge out a segment of the wall of hellfrost. Pluto was inside charging her massive frost spell, and as Ashtoreth dove into the pyramid to engage with her claws, she teleported away again.

  As Pluto became another flock of glittering birds, Ashtoreth converted her scythe into hellfire which she used to conjure her sword, spinning to search for Pluto and seeing her reform further along the bridge.

  She pushed the sword away from her to throw herself at Pluto, dismissing it once she had enough momentum and beginning to conjure her cannon….

  Pluto threw a half dozen shards of hellfrost at her, but Ashtoreth threw a single firebolt at one of the shards, destroying it and diving through the gap she’d made to slam into her sister and bear Pluto to the ground.

  Pluto teleported once more as Ashtoreth’s cannon finished forming, and she brought it around to find Pluto forming on the bridge further behind her.

  She fired, and once again her round struck Pluto’s reactive barrier, sending her sister tumbling back across the bridge.

  But Ashtoreth had dismissed the rifle and begun to conjure her sword as soon as she’d seen the flash from the muzzle. With her free hand, she conjured a heart out of her locket and consumed it to make sure she had enough [Bloodfire]....

  She took careful aim across more than a hundred meters, trying to judge where Pluto would finally come to her feet. She launched her sword with a [Mighty Strike] as soon as it formed in her hands, sending it tearing through the air as she was sent careening backward, off the bridge and into the air above where the citadel had sunk.

  She righted herself a moment later, consuming another heart to rush toward the bridge, searching….

  She didn’t spot her sister, and so she wheeled and looked about her, trying to see where she’d teleported to. Finally she looked at the distant cliffside, wondering if perhaps Pluto had fled.

  Then she spotted her.

  She dove, soaring toward the cliffside as fast as she could.

  Her sword had stricken Pluto, knocking her off the ledge where Crucifect’s spell had blasted the bridge away and then impaling her against the cliffside. Ashtoreth closed in on her sister, ready to conjure a new weapon, but there was no need.

  The blood-soaked sword had taken Pluto through the chest, caving in her ribcage and destroying her lungs and heart. Even so, Pluto was struggling to use her racial flight ability to pull herself along the length of the blade, straining to get off it.

  Her teeth were gritted, and blood ran from her mouth. Her eyes, filled with hatred, locked on to Ashtoreth’s.

  Her mouth moved, but no sound came out.

  Then she burst into a cloud of blue ether and dissipated.

  {You gain [Archfiend Pluto Core]; Tier 1}

  {Warning! You acquire an antithesis shard}

  Ashtoreth stared at the bloodied cliffside for an indeterminate amount of time.

  Then she rose, turned, and saw a polished black chest resting on the remnants of the stone bridge. She floated to land in front of it, staring at it and wondering what to do.

  She opened the chest.

  Inside was Pluto’s glitter-coated top hat.

  Ashtoreth didn’t bother identifying the hat. Instead she simply closed the lid, then slumped down and sat with her back to the chest. She drew her legs toward her.

  Dazel glided down to land beside her a moment later. He stared at her, quiet for a moment. “You okay?” he asked softly.

  Her voice was hoarse. “Why couldn’t it have just been the dragon?” she asked. “Why Pluto? Am I going to have to—” she cut off and shook her head.

  Kill them all.

  “If it helps… she was probably soul-tethered. Even if they said she wasn’t… an archfiend is a big investment.”

  “I know,” Ashtoreth said despondently. “So either she’s dead and gone forever… or she’s going back to Hell. Back to her mother and our father. As a failure.”

  “Oh.”

  Ashtoreth pressed her head into her knees for a moment. “The other five went straight to Earth,” she said. “Once all is said and done here, we’ll return to the moment the invasion begins. And even if we act as fast as possible, they’ll all be mass murderers by the time we find them. I won’t be able to convert them. Or spare them.” She let out a humorless laugh. “A few of them don’t even deserve it, that’s for sure.”

  “Maybe,” Dazel said. “With the right tools, we can imprison them until the war is done. It’s actually the best option, considering they’ll almost certainly be tethered.”

  “Yeah,” Ashtoreth said, her voice thin.

  “Come here,” Dazel said.

  He nuzzled her side, and she reached down to pet him, finally picking him up and pulling him close.

  “You did it, Ashtoreth,” Dazel said. “You’ve got the shard, and you finished the tutorial. The humans are still alive. Probably.”

  “Frost is,” she said, checking her buffs. She frowned. “Were you just trying to cheer me up?”

  “Uh. Yes? Look, you know more about looking on the bright side than me. It’s pretty surprising they survived.”

  “There’s a silver lining to every cloud,” she said tiredly. Then she rose, Dazel still in her arms and shrugged. “Sucks about Pluto, but hey? What are you gonna do? Can’t save ‘em all.”

  “...Yeah,” Dazel said quietly.

  “I was born for war. I’m built to handle the loss of even those closest to me, let alone my enemies.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I want to kill my father, Dazel,” she said, her voice emotionless. “But I can’t see how. Even if everything I want comes to pass, the best I can do is keep him away. He’s too powerful. No-one even knows how to become that powerful anymore. I… I just want to kill him so badly, but I never can.”

  “Never say never,” Dazel said quietly. “Just… keep going, Ashtoreth. Who knows? Maybe the further you go, the more things will fall into place.”

  She eyed him. “Dazel.”

  “Mm?” he said. He snuggled against her chest. “You know it’s quite cosy, getting carried up front instead of riding in back. I might take a nap while you go looking for the humans.”

  “Dazel.”

  “Mm?”

  “Who are you?”

  A pause. “Me? I’m just a lowly, cretinous demon from an unspecified crevice in the Pit of Sorrow.” He yawned. “Good with magic and runes, though.”

  Ashtoreth sighed and rose into the air. “Let’s go find the humans,” she said. “We have a lot of preparations to get through.”