I need to talk to you. It was Matthews.

  Ashtoreth shouldered Rammschloss and sighed. “All right, guys,” she told Hunter and Sadie. “Maybe move to a lower level range for a bit. I gotta go talk to the general.”

  Sadie, hovering in the air nearby, sucked in a breath through her teeth. “Here we go.”

  “Be back soon!” Ashtoreth said, zooming toward the ground to find a spot to teleport out of.

  They’d found little of interest in the two days that had passed since Ashtoreth had begun farming on Orchard. Her [Hellfire Nova] had been as spectacular and devastating as she’d hoped… but no-one had come to check out the glass-encrusted waste she’d left only a short distance from the zone’s exit portal.

  They’d found mechanisms that looked like they were for trapping elementals, perhaps from realms that had once been nearby, but they hadn’t been able to figure out how they worked, or how the rest of the enemies were spawning. Kylie’s ghosts, encircling the globe, hadn’t encountered any other flares of light that led to ancient caches of weaponry… or, perhaps more importantly, any mana fluctuations that led to one of the so-called archives.

  Most important of all, Ashtoreth, Hunter, and Sadie had been searching the surface of Orchard for anything that might lead to Diadem or Pinnacle. They’d found nothing: just endless legions of easily killable monsters.

  All right, Sir Matthews! said Ashtoreth. Let’s talk. Meet me at the Eiffel Tower in two minutes.

  There was a pause before he answered. And what’s wrong with headquarters?

  Ashtoreth snickered. Come on, man, she said. Tower. Two minutes.

  Ashtoreth landed, then put her hands on her hips and smiled up at the tower. “Would you look at that?” she said. “You guys got it fixed up nicely, huh? I guess it would’ve been a pretty big priority.”

  A human landed a few dozen meters away from her, then pointed an assault rifle at her. More followed suit, until she was surrounded by two-dozen people with various weapons.

  “Some hospitality, huh?” she asked. “Say—how many millions of infernals does a girl gotta kill around here to get a sapient rat to cook her some pasta? You get me? You get me.”

  There was a flash of light next to her, and Matthews materialized there and glared. “What are you doing?”

  “...Meeting you?”

  “Where have you been, Ashtoreth?”

  “I told you,” she said. “I’ve been taking a break for my mental health.”

  “We know that you’ve barely been on Earth for the last two days.”

  “I was in the Marianas Trench. That probably messed up your spell.”

  “The Marianas Trench.”

  “Uh-huh! I was feeling really down, so I… went really down, basically. Did you know that the bottom of the ocean is mostly just gunk called marine snow? It’s kind of a deceptive phrase, see, because real snow is made of crystallized water and has a charming, picturesque cosiness to it—real snow falls softly on log cabins that have smoke rising from their chimneys while warm light spills from their quarter windows. Marine snow, though, is made of poop and corpses—sort of the exact opposite.”

  Matthews just stared at her.

  “It’s not that good for depression, is what I’m saying. Regular snow is much better.”

  Matthews continued to stare at her, then shook his head and sighed.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Before he could begin, however, Ashtoreth let her smile fall away.

  “I saved almost every person you’ve ever met in your life from slavery or death,” she said. “Every family member you’ve ever loved or hated. Every random kid you met once at a birthday party when you were eight before never seeing them again. Everyone who ever gave you an opportunity and everyone who ever stepped on you when you were down… everyone who’s left, I saved.”

  “Don’t do this like this.”

  She peered at him. “...No? Protecting Earth I understand. But you and everyone you work for has personally betrayed me.”

  “You found the gate.”

  “What gate?”

  “Don’t play stupid and expect us to play along.”

  “Play along? Like you didn’t want us both to play along with the idea that having me slow-farm some elvish primeval world for cores was anything but you guys making sure you had a gun to my head?” She scoffed. “You’re complaining because you lost by your own rules.”

  “Do you think it’s unreasonable that the leaders of Earth want to keep you in check? That they’re afraid of you? You have more power over humanity than anyone—human or not—should ever have. Even if we do everything we possibly can to curtail you, that will still be true.”

  “That’s the way the system wants it.”

  “Well that’s not the way it has to be.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “And for the record, I can stomach having a gun to my head. But you did more than that. You tried to shut me out. Whatever Earth you thought you were building, I wasn’t supposed to be part of it.”

  “And you’re so offended that you’re going to risk all our lives?” Matthews asked. “Humanity owes you that, does it?”

  Ashtoreth let out a humorless laugh. “Your whole job is to deal with me—and you’re not even good at it! If you think that what I’m doing is a security risk, then why did you leave me to make all the decisions by myself, with my own team?”

  “We didn’t and you know we didn’t.”

  “Oh you did,” she said, “you just didn’t know it. You thought you were cutting me out, not the other way around. We could have talked about it, but you figured you’d keep what you found in Siberia a secret and that would give you full control.” She held her hands out, palms-up. “Whoops!”

  “Even if shutting you out was the wrong call, keeping us in the dark just to spite us is insane. You’re putting humanity’s safety second to carrying out your grudge.”

  “Are we just going full ham on hostile framing?” She shrugged. “Okay. Well in that case: I don’t care how much you hate immigrants.” She crossed her arms. “Earth is my home now.”

  Matthews just shook his head in seeming disbelief. “You won’t be able to come from this,” he said. “You realize that, don’t you? This… move you think you’re making. It’s going to make you permanent enemies.”

  Ashtoreth only smiled. “You want to know why I love humans, general?” she asked. “There are so many places where you seem to have all the things I never did—so many flavors of trust, friendship, togetherness, love…” She sighed, and her smile became a grin. “But it’s not that you have those things instead of everything that I grew up with. It’s that all of those things can co-exist alongside everything that I, as an archfiend, am supposed to be. You throw your kids birthday parties, sure—and when they grow up, you send them off to kill other people’s kids in your wars.”

  The entire time she spoke, Matthews glared at her, clearly unmoved. He just didn’t understand. “And all that justifies… what, exactly? Humans aren’t perfect, so you’ll take us all for a ride?”

  “I’m not justifying myself,” she said. “I’m telling you that you’re wrong. Listen: my power fantasy was that we’d trust each other. But since that won’t work, I’ll do what will. I wanted the cosy log cabin, but I’ll take the poop and corpses.”

  “You’re still not explaining yourself.”

  “Here,” she said. “Your leaders didn’t make deals with your geopolitical rivals and sell weaponry to warlords because they love the sound of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Imagine. They do it because power has a kind of gravity. It comes with laws that must be obeyed. Sure, I’ll have enemies. But as long as I’m the one who brokers access to all the Five Realms, and as long as I can keep any of you from killing me and taking my place, your leadership will learn to like me in the same way they like each other. You’ll see.”

  “So you want to do things the way that Hell does things?” he asked. “Have Earth be no different than the Hierarchy?”

  She flashed him a smile. “If that’s the way you want to frame your decisions, then sure! But has it maybe occurred to you that the thing that best serves my father’s interests is how you’re acting now?”

  Matthews grimaced, then reached up and rubbed his forehead with a hand. “Yes, Ashtoreth. I have, in fact, thought that far.”

  “I’m glad!” she said. “Now: relations with me have deteriorated, disastrously, and we can hardly say that your side of things bears no responsibility. That’s where we’re at, and I don’t really see any reason to talk to you about this any more, and it’s my decision.” She glanced at the soldiers surrounding her, all of them still seemingly poised to attack. “Now am I killing these people before I leave, or not?”

  “Don’t joke about that,” Matthews said in a tired voice. “Just… not about that.”

  “It wasn’t a joke, I was asking if you were going to try to stop me.” She shrugged. “Anyway, peace. You probably won’t see me again for a while. I’ll let you know if, uh…” She gestured vaguely. “I want to.”