{You lose ability [Summon Demonic Familiar]}

  “Well,” she said. “There it goes. I suppose I should call up the labcoats and tell them he’s gone.”

  She’d spent almost a dozen hours that day being fussed over by scientists in a facility whose location she hadn’t been told. The scientists had spent a lot of time arguing on how to proceed, and Ashtoreth had been annoyed by the waste.

  The elves, however, had apparently volunteered the services of the highest-level soulweaver they could find to fit through Earth’s travel restrictions, as a level 60 had soon shown up to begin courteously ordering all the humans around.

  From there, it had been hours of lying still while all of them hovered over her, occasionally asking her to report how she felt while they tried various things to poke her in the soul.

  All to no avail. Ashtoreth had left the lab thinking that if they’d found a way to use her to locate or harm Dazel, they hadn’t told her. And now she sat on the roof of her house, frowning down at the system text indicating Dazel was no longer bound to her.

  She doubted it was because the scientists had somehow taken him out. They’d have needed her, for that, she was sure of it.

  “I didn’t even get a new advancement,” she said. “I don’t even get my old racial back!”

  She sighed. Nearby were the ruins of Machu Picchu, and all around her was a gorgeous view of the Andes. A few figures hovered in the air above the ruins: human guards from the Earth Defense Alliance, there to make sure that nobody among the newly-initialized population came to vandalize one of humanity’s most precious heritage sites. Apparently they’d had problems… though mostly with religious monuments.

  It was all quite sad. The guards had actually tried to get her to leave when she’d first decided to spend the night here… but when they’d learned she was the Monarch of Earth, they’d asked some questions to their superiors and then simply requested she not plop the house down on any of the nearby summits.

  General Matthews, she thought with telepathy.

  Go ahead.

  I lost my [Summon Demonic Familiar] ability. She shrugged. Nothing else to share, unfortunately.

  Understood.

  She raised a hand, examining the thin copper wristband she now wore. It was her new telepathy item: they’d gotten rid of the rings that Dazel had given them even if nobody could detect anything wrong with them.

  “Finished with you, did they?”

  Frost had floated up from somewhere below and landed on the rooftop next to her.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Not that it helped. He’s gone—and I don’t think it’s because they got him.”

  “Damn.”

  “I keep thinking about him,” she said. “Those spells he gave me were everything he promised. They’re the best. Shame I had to get the aspect for them right before he left.”

  “Yeah.”

  She sighed. “If he were here, he would’ve said something about how I’d been betrayed by the ancient Emperor of Mankind and all I could think about was how it affected my progression.”

  “Heh. I’m afraid I can’t fill in for Dazel, Ashtoreth. Maybe Kylie’s your best bet.”

  “I promised her that I’d never ever work with him again,” Ashtoreth said, thoughts drifting. “You know… I wonder if being a demonic familiar let him stay up-to-date on magical theory. He probably spent all that time studying and practicing. But… I can’t even wrap my head around it. Hundreds of times my lifespan. Who can commit themselves to slavery for that long?”

  “People can do extraordinary things to survive,” said Frost. “And what’s this about a promise? Would you seriously think about trusting Dazel again after all this?”

  “Not trusting him, no. But working with him? Maybe.”

  Frost made a sound of disbelief and shook his head. “Ashtoreth.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know.”

  “He wants to kill you.”

  “He wants to sacrifice me. You know the sad part? He actually asked me whether I’d die to save the Earth on the same night I decided to betray him.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said yes. But it’s one thing to say it to win a conversation, and another thing to really think about it, you know?”

  Frost tensed. “You’re not… really thinking about letting Dazel sacrifice you, are you?”

  “Of course not!” she said. “For one thing, I promised Kylie. For another thing, he wasn’t clear about what he was even gonna do with my life. He just… I mean you were there—he dovetailed immediately into a bunch of guilt over how creating my race has caused more suffering than he’s even capable of comprehending.”

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  Frost seemed to relax. “He really did live in Hell, didn’t he?” he asked. “Watching across thousands of years as the fire he started burned across the entire cosmos.”

  “Yep! I’m thinking he just wanted to use me to genocide us all. Archfiends, I mean. Back in the tutorial, he mentioned that you could use a shard to effect or change an entire race when he was berating me for the way I wanted to use mine. So I’m thinking I’m a genocide-enabling voodoo doll in his eyes.”

  “That’s…”

  “Honestly, kind of hopeful,” she said. “But I’m hoping it’s something big, you know? I’d hate to think he was going to trade me away for something meager.”

  “But as long as it’s the genocide of your entire species, that’s more acceptable?”

  “Hey! That one was a little more Dazel-y.”

  Frost laughed, but quickly stopped himself. “Still, Ashtoreth. Matthews was right about our species needing moral standards. Killing ourselves just to deal a blow to the enemy… we should all be afraid of where that path will take us.”

  But Ashtoreth was shaking her head. “Look… you’re a cop, right?”

  “Was a cop,” he said. “The police force still exists, but I’m doing this now. I think I’m an associate of the military or something—I don’t know, they figured it out.”

  “Okay, but when you were a cop, if someone pointed a gun at a flock of babies, you shoot them, right? And even if it turns out that their gun wasn’t loaded, and that was just their way of committing suicide, you did the right thing.”

  “This isn’t the same thing at all,” said Frost. “You’re talking about shooting someone waving a gun around, but we’re talking about sacrificing an innocent to potentially save others. Defending others isn’t the same as trading lives.”

  “Isn’t it though?” Ashtoreth said, exasperated. “You don’t get to be so morally vain that you have Batman’s rules, you have to have the rules that make tradeoffs. When Captain America says that the Avengers don’t trade lives, he’s admitting that he’s woefully inadequate to the role he’s playing, the position he’s assigned himself. He’s saying, out loud, that he’s too morally infantile to even do your job, let alone save the world.”

  “O-kay. Maybe these examples are a little better suited to Hunter…”

  “Oh come on. You didn’t see Infinity War? You saw Infinity War.”

  “Well… okay, yeah.”

  She held out her hands. “It was a good movie!”

  “I think we’re getting sidetracked.”

  “Look,” she said. “I don’t want to die and all… but I sort of backed myself into a corner on this one. I talk the talk, and so I gotta walk the walk.” She shrugged. “And if I could sacrifice you instead of me, I’d do that because you’re less valuable to the survival of your species.”

  “Our species, now.”

  “Thanks. And if it had to be a schoolbus full of babies, I’d kill them instead too.”

  “O-kay. Maybe you didn’t need to volunteer that particular piece of information.”

  “If it’s got to be me, it’s me. And I don’t care what Matthews says… if the Charter of Human Rights gets rewritten to forbid spending us as resources to fuel our spells, we can make an exception if it means scouring all fiends from existence.”

  “I won’t say that you don’t have a point,” he said. “Because clearly you do. And if it were a perfectly sure thing, one innocent’s life against billions, I’d have to agree with you even though I’d hate to.”

  “O-kay…”

  “But the other side of the equation, even in your made-up example, is just another shovelful of more death than any mind can comprehend. Your whole species? Sure, you’d get your father—”

  “Probably not him, honestly,” Ashtoreth said. “Who knows what kind of protections he’s built for himself over the years? But if all the other fiends drop dead? Let’s just say the resulting power vacuums will give Hell a real deep clean.”

  “And the fiendish children?”

  “All dead.”

  Frost was quiet for a moment. “Ashtoreth—”

  “—How much worse for them do you think that is, really? If they live, they grow up to be fiends.”

  Again, Frost hesitated before answering. “If you can break free of your conditioning…”

  “Some of them could, too.”

  “You don’t even know how many innocent people you’d be condemning to die.”

  “I don’t,” she said. Then she turned to meet his eyes, her expression perfectly neutral. “But I’m right about this—and I know that I’m right about this. And knowing that I’m right about this makes it a lot easier to think about dying, because I can see that it’s not just my life that humanity needs, but my wisdom.”

  Frost shut his eyes for a moment. “You think they’re going to find a way,” he said. “You want them to. You want them to figure out how to do whatever it was Dazel was going to do.”

  “No,” she said. “But I’m ready if they do. Look—sometimes I worry about humanity because I wonder if they believe, really believe, they can lose. You guys… you haven’t lived in a cosmos where entire worlds and all their history can be eaten by Hell’s endlessly hungrering machinery. But you’re not the main characters of reality, even if—”

  She paused, then frowned. “Okay. Well, it sort of looks like you are really important even on a cosmic scale… but don’t let that go to your head.”

  “I’ll try not to,” he said, voice a little cold.

  “Just think,” Ashtoreth said. “No Julie Andrews, no birthday parties, no bedtime stories or peanut butter… none, nothing, ever again.” She smiled, giving a little half-shrug. “I’ve killed my kind by the millions already,” she said. “Hell’s innocents can pay the price for the war that Hell started, not Humanity’s.”

  Again, Frost was quiet awhile. He spoke softly. “You’re right, aren’t you?”

  Ashtoreth said nothing.

  “This war will last too long,” he said. “You’ll get too many chances to trade yourself away. And you will.”

  “Will it help if I say that I’ll try not to?”

  “No,” he said, standing. “It’ll help if you live.”

  “I’ll try to?” she offered. “Look, you don’t have to motivate me to try to survive, it’s just—”

  “Don’t,” he said. “I don’t want to argue anymore.” He stood. “I don’t even want to be here. I’ll see you tomorrow?”

  “Uh, okay. We’ll get to that primal world and farm some cores.”

  For Kylie’s sake, she hoped it was mostly dinosaurs.