Apollo and Haddad wore matching robes of heavy cloth, both a mixture of white and the respective archfiend’s personal color, red or yellow. Apollo, doubtless the leader between the two of them, calmly glowered at Ashtoreth, staying silent.

  Haddad, however, floated forward, crossing her arms and grinning, looking considerably happier than when Ashtoreth had seen her last.

  Ashtoreth suppressed a frown. Haddad was much more annoying when she was happy.

  “Hail to the treacherous kid!” Haddad said. “I guess Baphomet’s blood ran a little thicker in your veins than your performance level would have suggested, huh?”

  Ashtoreth didn’t even glance at Haddad, her eyes fixed firmly on Apollo. “If we’re going to talk, let’s at least try to make the conversation useful.”

  Apollo smiled faintly.

  “From what I can see,” Ashtoreth continued. “Father won’t exactly be shining with pride for any of us any time soon.” Her eyes darted from Apollo to Haddad, then back to Apollo. “You ran.”

  She wanted to keep them talking. The longer they talked, the more time Sadie would have to get away from the combat zone—and the more time she and her allies would have to think.

  How was she going to do this?

  Every one of the spells that she’d learned from Dazel shared a certain set of characteristics. For one, they were extremely expensive to cast, and inefficiently so: even if their effects were strong, their [Bloodfire] cost was still comparatively high.

  For another thing, they all took a very long time to cast—so long that using them in combat was actually ill-advised. With so many options for physical combat and spending her [Bloodfire] to conjure actual flames, it wouldn’t even have made sense for her to cast ordinary spells mid-battle. She was just too deadly doing almost anything else.

  But these two inhibitions, while seemingly extreme, had come as trade-offs for the spells’ other, more beneficial effects. Each and every one of them didn’t actually generate an effect right away: instead, they gave Ashtoreth a buff that she could expend to trigger the actual spell in question, allowing her to walk around with a set of four buffs that were each an instantaneous cast of a spell she’d already paid for.

  The idea was that she didn’t have to alter her normal fighting style, the one she’d trained so long in, too much: rather, she could just fight normally, then play each spell like it was an ace up her sleeve whenever she needed to escape danger or strike a killing blow.

  And all of this paired excellently with the final quality of the spells Dazel had made her: that their effects, while inefficient, were overpowered in their specificity.

  Ahead of her, Apollo spoke, her voice cool and confident. “Ran?” she asked. “Is that what you see here? Because what I see is that I’ve caught you at exactly the right time and in exactly the right circumstances.”

  Ashtoreth was quiet. Her sister had a point.

  “If I were running from you, Ashtoreth, I wouldn’t have chased you here. But the thing is…” She grinned. “I’ve never been more happy to see you in my life.”

  “And you?” she asked Haddad, mostly just hoping to keep the conversation going. “She sold you into slavery, but that’s all forgiven just to take a shot at me, is it?”

  But even as she spoke, she was looking at her spells. She had four, each of them a buff that she’d been wearing for days: [Ashtoreth’s Boonsurge], [Ashtoreth’s Curious Comet], [Ashtoreth’s Flamefray Barrier], and [Ashtoreth’s Bad Touch].

  The most difficult decision was regarding the comet.

  [Ashtoreth’s Curious Comet]

  Casting this spell will grant you a buff you can expend to release a long-range, high-power, controllable missile made of hellfire. You gain a sense of this missile’s surroundings as it travels.

  At any time, you may detonate the missile, causing it to explode and send many smaller hellfire bolts in every direction.

  If you successfully strike a target with this ability, they will be afflicted with a debuff that you can expend to gain some information about their class, race, resources, abilities, equipment, or ongoing magical effects.

  She didn’t know who to shoot first, or if she wanted to burst it and try to hit both of them with the spread. Apollo and Haddad had both had a fondness for teleportation back in Hell, so she decided she’d wait to see if one of them teleported, then try to read their [Warp Pool] if she could.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  The reason for this was quite simple: just like Pluto had, teleporters tended to rely on teleportation as their premier defensive strategy. If one of them was a teleporter, she could run them out of teleports and then execute them with her other abilities.

  Ahead of her, Haddad’s eyes danced with laughter. “Sold me, did she? You’ve figured it all out. Yes—we wanted some things from other people, and so we kindly paid them what those things were worth in the form of… me, enslaved.” She tutted and shook her head. “Honestly, Ashtoreth—you get the strangest ideas sometimes. I think you might be stupid.”

  “Try it sometime,” Ashtoreth said.

  “Stupidity?”

  “Paying for something. It’s more fun than you’d think.”

  She quickly glanced at one of her more offensive spells, unsure of how to use it.

  [Ashtoreth’s Bad Touch]

  Casting this spell will grant you a buff you can expend to launch a short-range, fast-moving missile that will afflict its target with a momentary debuff that grants you 50% penetration against them.

  She decided it would be best just to bait out defenses or to scare one of them away. She wouldn’t try to set up a combo with it, because a combo would be overkill: whether they were level 600 or not, a solid hit from her cannon or sword would either be lethal or so damaging that the fight would end moments later.

  The real kill would come from Dazel’s much-hyped buff flare.

  [Ashtoreth’s Boonsurge]

  Casting this spell will grant you a buff you can expend to momentarily increase the effect strength of your [Bloodfire Boon] or your [Consume Heart] buffs by 15,644.

  It was an utterly bullshit spell, one that had come from the man she now knew was perhaps the cosmos’s greatest metaphysical bullshitter. With her usual buffs giving her stats that were way above par for her level, even at her race and class grades, she could hit so far above her weight class it was absurd.

  Perfect for a sudden, shocking execution of one of the archfiends currently facing her down.

  “You said you wanted this conversation to be useful,” Apollo said. “Well: I have only one use for you beyond what’s about to happen, Ashtoreth. Is Freyr dead?”

  All her combat calculations stopped for a moment as the question caught her off-guard. What could Apollo want Freyr for?

  “The human rulers have her,” she said.

  “No,” Apollo said. “They don’t.”

  Apollo was like Ashtoreth in that her base elemental affinity [Hellfire], but Haddad was one of the rare fiends with [Blightning]. High-cost, low-range, extremely fast power: that was [Blightning]. It wouldn’t be enough to beat Ashtoreth’s [Defense] and kill her outright, but as a way of throwing her off so that Apollo could land a kill-shot or charge the humans, it was perfect.

  [Ashtoreth’s Flamefray Barrier]

  Casting this spell will grant you a buff you can expend to momentarily encase yourself in a lattice of defensively-purposed offensive magic.

  The barricade has 25,812 [Defense], and will attempt to deconstruct all unfriendly [Mana]-based abilities that it comes into contact with, converting it into your hellfire.

  She suppressed a smile when she looked at the barrier. It had been Dazel’s attempt at giving her something resembling Frost’s temporary near-invincibility, plus some extra bells and whistles that he assured her would come at negligible cost on account of how they resonated with her [Drain] and [Hellfire] aspects.

  As for her sisters: as long as she was fast enough in cracking her barrier buff, she could block Haddad’s lightning and even potentially one of Apollo’s attacks—throwing them both off and hopefully putting them on the defensive.

  “Ashtoreth,” Apollo prompted. “You have no reason to lie, here. Do you have Freyr or not?”

  Ashtoreth was silent for a moment. “She’s not dead.”

  “Then I’ll make you this promise,” Apollo said, voice rising. “One sister to another. Once you are dead, Haddad and I will forgo the murder of your human pets… so long as Freyr is returned to me.”

  Ashtoreth let out a humorless laugh. “Want to sign on it?”

  “No, Ashtoreth. I don’t.”

  “Thanks for the promise, then,” she said. “I’ll tuck it right into the same septic tank where I keep the rest of Hell’s bullshit.”

  Apollo just gave an amused little nod, as if this was all she expected.

  “How about this, though?” Ashtoreth said. “Since you think you’re about to kill me, and if you don’t you’re about to die—tell me: how’d you do it?”

  “Oh?”

  “You know what I mean,” Ashtoreth said. “How’d you get away from Earth?”

  “You’re right,” Apollo said. “I do think I’m about to kill you.” Her smile broadened. “But let’s not act like foolish children, Ashtoreth. Of course I’m not telling you anything.”

  “Yeah, kinda figured,” Ashtoreth said, giving a shrug.

  “I take it we’ve all lost our patience for conversation?” Apollo asked.

  “Sure thing, sis,” Ashtoreth said, enjoying the way the last word made Apollo’s nose wrinkle. “But we should probably address one last thing, first.”

  Apollo gestured in a way that said get on with it.

  “You’ve got hundred-level leads and there’s two of you,” Ashtoreth said, mouth curling into a smile. “So you tell me, Apollo: what exactly do you intend to do to overcome your profoundly crushing disadvantage?”

  Then, without even waiting to conjure her weapon, she lunged.