Two shots rang out in rapid succession, and a set of shockwaves rippled out from the muzzle of her cannon as she lifted her eye away from the scope and peered into the distance.

  Her targets, two earth elementals that had each taken the form of stony crystal-veined quadrupeds, were obliterated a moment later, bursting into fragment-laced plumes of hellfire.

  Ashtoreth sighed.

  “You know something?” she asked. “I bet the ancient humans had it real nice. Like, Star Trek levels of nice—except if they built shields, they’d actually do something.”

  “I never watched it,” Hunter said.

  “I mean—no wonder the invasion was so extreme,” Ashtoreth said. “Of course my father wanted to seal the deal before any of the humans got to the secret cache of gear and teleporters and the giant farm-world that Hell can’t even get to.”

  “Yeah,” Hunter said.

  “I keep wondering why we haven’t seem him use any shards, yet,” she continued. “You’d think he would have popped one once he figured out what I was up to. You’d think he’d have had one ready in case things went wrong. More than one!”

  “Yeah.”

  “I wonder if it’s politics,” she said. “As powerful as my father is, my mother still managed to hide a shard from him. If the other Lords of Hell are doing the same thing, he probably needs to keep a reserve just to make sure he stays safe, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If he uses a shard, and they know he used a shard, it sort of implies weakness, you know? Shows that he’s been thwarted, that he’s not all-powerful. And that’s not even considering how it’s going to look when it gets out that his favorite daughter of this invasion’s generation of children betrayed him. Fiendish solidarity is sort of the cornerstone of the Hierarchy of Hell.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess this is all just wishful thinking,” she said at last. “I just want to think he’s having a hard time because of me—that Earth isn’t a single decision away from a horrific catastrophe.”

  “Me too, Ashtoreth.”

  “And that’s just my father,” she said. “I swear, if Dazel messes us up, it had better at least be good for humanity.”

  Hunter was quiet for a moment. “I doubt it,” he said at last. “He hid everything he could possibly hide from us for as long as he possibly could.” He shrugged. “When people hide stuff that’ll start an argument from you, it’s usually because on some level deep down, they know that they’ll lose. They’re protecting the illusion of knowing what’s best.”

  “You’re probably right,” she said plaintively. Then, as a point of light began to descend toward them from the clouds, she added, “Sec.”

  The point of light resolved into some hybridized fire-lightning elemental, an extremely fast orb of sizzling energy that approached them by flying along a jagged path.

  She conjured a volley of [Hellfire Javelins], launched them, then charged up a [Hellfire Blast] that she launched at the elemental as it began to dodge out of the way of the javelins. Within a few moments, it had been consumed by hellfire.

  “The fire elementals should be harder for you,” Hunter said as they were bathed in purple light.

  “Well they’re definitely the hardest,” she said. “But I’m telling you, these ancient humans filled this place with monsters that are easy and stupid.” She cupped her hands to her mouth to shout at the plume of hellfire. “I’ve been training my whole life for this, just so you know!”

  Hunter laughed.

  They continued to float over the landscape, until Ashtoreth narrowed her eyes at a rock formation below them. “Say… the mana in the rocks down there feels weird. I think something might be conducting heat differently—it’s pretty obvious with my hellfire.”

  She charged a [Hellfire Blast], launching at the rocks and observing the results with her magical senses as the flames consumed the stone. Then she landed in the midst of the flames, formed her claws, and hefted an oblong piece of stone.

  She placed the stone against the ground, then began scrubbing off the outer layer of rock with her claws, crushing and tearing it into gravel that she brushed away with about the same difficulty as it might take her to scratch an itch.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  Very soon she heard the horrid, ear-splitting screech of metal under her claws as they broke through a layer of caked rust to began scratching at a hunk of misshapen metal.

  “Well, would you look at that?” she said, beaming as she held the piece of stone-encrusted metal aloft with one hand. “It’s a metal beam!”

  “Huh,” Hunter said, landing beside her.

  “I wonder what sort of structure they built here?” she asked. “You think they had little support gazebos built all through Orchard in case people needed medical attention? It’s probably something like that. They could have made this even less risky than it already is.”

  “I dunno.”

  “You could probably staff the whole place with constructs, too,” she said. “It’d take a lot of constructs, but with the resources these ancient humans had, they could manage it. ‘Course, you’d still have to give your soldiers a lot of training since they absence of deathly peril would make them turn out soft.”

  Hunter shrugged. “Didn’t make me soft.”

  “Yeah, but you had saving the Earth to motivate you.”

  “Sure, but mostly that meant thinking about the four or five people that I actually care about.”

  You guys doing okay? Kylie asked.

  “Yep!” Ashtoreth said.

  Great, Kylie said. Question, though.

  “Uh-huh?”

  What’s our plan for Matthews, exactly? You’re not going to be able to farm up levels without them noticing.

  “Definitely not!” Ashtoreth said. “But who cares? Hunter brought up a really good point when he said that we could kill their mothers by the dozens.”

  Hunter made an uncertain noise. “That’s not really—”

  I’m not really sure I like where the new plan is going, Ashtoreth, said Kylie. And neither does Frost.

  “You guys are together right now?”

  No. But if I don’t like it, he won’t either.

  She’s right, Frost said. You have a point that our power is a deterrent, but we’re still inviting them to escalate and burning a bridge at the same time.

  “Don’t worry—we won’t actually nuke any cities.”

  Okay, said Kylie. But what about in the worst possible outcome?

  “Worst possible outcome, they take me out of commission somehow. But Hunter will go on a killing spree of top-level officials.”

  “They won’t be able to hide from me,” he said.

  Right, so that’s our deterrent, said Kylie. But in the meantime… what are we doing about access to these two new realms? Are you telling Matthews? Are you letting the scientists in?

  “Matthews, I think, will be able to figure it out on his own when I’m persistently truant,” she said. “But no, I don’t want to tell him. Or let anyone in. I think we should just pull trigger, move everyone you into the new realm so that your ghosts can explore it, and not even try to hide the fact that we’re hiding stuff from them.”

  This is what I meant about burning bridges, said Frost.

  “We don’t have a choice!” Ashtoreth said. “The choice is whether or not we want to bring them in. And everything they’ve done so far just goes to show that every inch we give them is an inch they’ll use against us. So we shut them out.” She shrugged. “I would have thought that the human bossmen wouldn’t want to be so distrustful of me when they’ve got to rely on me, but hey! What do I know? I’m just the fiend who’s monarch of Earth and has to find a way to live with all the Earthlings, you know?”

  I’m not saying you’re wrong, here, said Frost. But this might cause a permanent rift with you and high command. Worse even than what we’re dealing with now.

  “Eh,” she said. “They’re the ones who wanted to do it this way, not me. But hey, if that’s what they want, I know how to play along.” She put a hand on one hip. “I’m a fiend. This sort of relationship is my home turf, you know? So we’ll shut them out while we go after our immediate objectives. Reasonable?”

  What are our immediate objectives? Kylie asked.

  “One, find a way into Pinnacle and Diadem—and be sure that we aren’t opening the way for Dazel when we do. Two, find the physical location of the archive that’s referenced in the [Archive Consult] items that Hunter found. Three, find out what Dazel’s been up to.” She frowned as she said the last item. “I gotta say, I really hope that the EDA and the Eldunar are ahead on that last item, because we don’t have the resources or the connections to search the cosmos for him.”

  So you want me to pop on over and start blanketing the worlds with ghosts? Kylie said. Orchard first, or Core?

  “Core,” she said. “Find its north, then search along the lines of longitude and latitude that the cache we found exists on. If there are more caches, they might be placed in a grid pattern.”

  All right. You want me to go now?

  “Not until I’ve spoken to Matthews.” She frowned. “And I can’t do that until I set off a [Hellfire Nova] here.”