She felt strangely weak, and a moment later she looked down to see why: she’d still been bisected through her abdomen, and the tumble against the ground had disemboweled her. Strangely, it hurt less than she’d expected.

  It still hurt, though.

  “Ow.”

  “Oh fuck,” she heard Kylie say from nearby. “Frost! Frost!”

  She still couldn’t regenerate any of the flesh at the edges of her wound. She didn’t even have a debuff about it: whatever Massemeliact had done to her, it was beyond anything she’d ever seen before.

  But she was regenerating her blood, and she was certain that was what she needed to stay alive. At least, she hoped. Ashtoreth was durable, yes… but she had no idea if this was past the limit of what she could survive.

  He hit me once, she thought incredulously. The beam had cut into her for perhaps a thirtieth of its duration. She’d known that the high levels were supposed to be strong—but this was insane. She couldn’t heal it, there was no debuff to remove to regain her regeneration, his accuracy had been perfect, and he’d somehow thrown the spell out right after being soundly beaten by an even stronger enemy.

  She heard Dazel’s voice echoing in her mind. I’ve got a fallen angel on a leash made of dental floss.

  “Oh God—Ashtoreth!” It was Frost.

  I think I’m good, she thought as Frost landed next to her and knelt. But just to be safe, maybe try everything you can?

  At first, the silver-blue light of Frost’s healing magic did nothing at all to her. Then, after a few seconds, she felt the familiar tingling of regeneration as her severed body began to repair itself… a tingling that was followed by a huge surge of relief. How close had she actually come to almost dying? If he’d cut her off at the lungs just below the heart, would that have done it?

  She found that she could heal her wound with [Bloodfire], and Frost’s healing was quickly supplemented by her extremely fast regeneration. Her dispensed entrails were reeled back into her abdominal cavity, and from there it took her only a few seconds to completely regrow her hips, legs, wings, and tail.

  She rose. “Is everyone okay?”

  At first, her glance at Frost seemed to tell her that no, they weren’t: he was pale and shaking, eyes wide with fear.

  “They’re fine,” said Kylie. “We just got scattered.”

  She realized that Frost had just been worried about her. “Sorry,” she told him, holding out her arms for a hug.

  He took her into an embrace immediately. “God damn it,” he said. “God damn it, I want to burn the sight of you lying there out of my brain. I thought…”

  “It’s fine,” she said. “And I mean, you can, if you want—but later. We should get moving, fast. If that fallen angel doesn’t finish dealing with Massemeliact, he could come for us. If she does, she could come for us. We have to find someplace safe, and then go over… well, everything.”

  Frost pulled away, then nodded. There was too much information to process back on Earth. So much had changed in the last twenty minutes that Ashtoreth couldn’t even begin to think through it.

  Hunter and Sadie warped next to Ashtoreth with a flash of light, joining them. “Oh good,” Sadie said. “She lived.”

  “So is there like… an old pair of legs just lying back in the market?” Sadie asked, peering at Ashtoreth.

  “More importantly, where are we?” Kylie asked. “This place looks a bit like an elemental confluence of air and earth, but it feels off. There’s usually more magical energy around and I haven’t spotted a single elemental.”

  Stolen story; please report.

  Ashtoreth looked around. It was dark out, and the craggy, rocky landscape bore no signs of life of any kind.

  “And you’d expect a dust problem if that’s what it was,” Kylie said. “Especially with no plants around. But we’ve got none.”

  “I don’t know where we are,” said Ashtoreth. “Honestly, I’m pretty sure we’re lucky to have landed in the same place. We might be fairly far from the outer market.”

  “How far is fairly?” said Kylie.

  Ashtoreth shrugged. “I don’t have much practical experience, here. We didn’t stop the normal form of deflection that an interdiction field creates, we just ran so much interference on it that we still warped away intact.”

  Kylie looked down, thoughtful. “Shit. I get it. Hunter’s warp was just the pitch. The interdiction field might have knocked us out of the park.”

  “Let’s not despair until we know where we actually are,” said Ashtoreth, fighting the urge to change into a baseball uniform. “But yeah. It could be bad.”

  “I’ll try and figure out where we are,” Hunter said. “But all I can really sense is nearby realms. Without a map to go by, it’s not going to be of much help unless we’re right next to Earth or the Eldunari.”

  “I’m gonna send out some scouts,” Kylie said, reaching into her bag to start pulling out handfuls of ashes. “If there’s other life here, I want to know their level ranges before they meet us in the flesh.”

  “Great,” Ashtoreth said. “And I’ll, uh… I dunno. Sit here and process, maybe.”

  “So I’m not the only one who’s reeling, yeah?” Frost asked. “You guys all seem less shocked than I am.”

  “I don’t even know how to start thinking about it,” Ashtoreth said. “You’re all angels, maybe? Uh… Dazel used to rule Earth, and humankind waged a war against Heaven before my kind were ever even made.” She scowled. “I didn’t press him about the rose he was mentioning because I thought he was trying to lead me into certain questions… but what if he did that on purpose? What if that was the thing I needed to know most and he said that to push me away from it once he realized I wasn’t going to let him manipulate me into asking questions about my dad?”

  “High Command and the Eldunari will help us make heads or tails of it all,” said Frost. “All I can think of now, though, is Heaven. We don’t know anything about what they want, really. I don’t want to fight any more angels… but it’s as if nobody knows anything about the greatest power in the cosmos. Are we a threat to them? A child they abandoned? A distant, unevolved ancestor?”

  “Ashtoreth.” It was Kylie, and her tone was urgent, concerned.

  Ashtoreth looked over at her. “Your scouts?” she asked. “What’d they find?”

  Kylie shot her an apologetic look. “Apollo had red hair?”

  She felt her heart sink. “Yes.” How could her sister have possibly found them this fast?

  “She’s got the other one with her, too. Haddad. Both just over 600.”

  That made even less sense. Apollo had sold Haddad into slavery.

  Hadn’t she?

  “They’ll almost certainly be able to follow us if we just hop to a nearby realm—which comes with its own risks anyway,” said Ashtoreth. She frowned, working her mouth. “It’s a fight, then.”

  “Shit,” Frost said.

  Ashtoreth reached out to contact the others with telepathy. Sadie, get right the fuck out of here as soon as you know which direction to run in.

  Uh. ‘Kay.

  The rest of you—Apollo fights a lot like I do, but Haddad probably has a reserve of lightning that will roast Hunter as soon as he pops in. Wait for my word.

  She turned to Kylie. “Point me?”

  Kylie pointed, and Ashtoreth was in the air a moment later. It took no time at all for her to make out two colored specks flying toward their position. They saw her as she saw them, and the three of them halted midair, a hundred feet of distance between them.

  {Apollo, Archfiend of Pride — Level 611}

  {Haddad, Archfiend of Pride — Level 604}

  She stared at them both and had to wonder how it was even possible. How had Haddad escaped? Why was she standing side-by-side with Apollo? Hadn’t she sold Haddad into slavery in the first place? More importantly, how had they both gotten their racial upgrades to Archfiends of Pride already?

  But most importantly, how was Apollo managing the incredible feats of teleportation that had enabled all of this? She’d somehow broken through the interdiction field to chase Ashtoreth, and quickly too. Just like her departure from Earth, it was both hard to explain and very troubling.

  For now, though, she had to focus on the coming fight. The first thing to worry about were the humans: any one of her sisters could think to hostage one of them to get the upper hand against her, but with Apollo, that strategy was almost guaranteed.

  She’d have to charge them, she decided: seize the initiative and demand their immediate attention. Normally, Apollo and Haddad would be the worst pair of her sisters she could have tried that against, as both of them were excellent close-quarters fighters.

  But Ashtoreth had four brand new spells, and every single one of them was perfect for this situation.

  “Your timing is perfect,” she called out, rolling her shoulders. “I really needed to blow off some steam.”