{Advance [Drain]}

  {Choose an advancement to gain, then choose to retain or replace all other options}

  Upgrade [Aura] with [Aura: Thirst]

  Add 30m to the radius of your [Aura].

  Enemies affected by your [Aura] will have their [Mana] or other resources drained at a low speed, replenishing your [Bloodfire].

  Gain the [Bloodfire Efficiency] ability:

  Absorbing your hellfire to replenish your [Bloodfire] is now slightly more efficient.

  Upgrade [Energy Drain] with [Stem the Flow]

  Creatures affected by your [Energy Drain] cannot regenerate [Mana] or other resources apart from [Health].

  She blew out her cheeks. [Aura: Thirst] had seemed nice enough… but it was mostly strong against groups of enemies, and groups of enemies were something she had no problem with. [Stem the Flow] seemed like it would never actually turn the tide of battle. [Bloodfire Efficiency], at the very least, would help her to chain together novas if it were ever necessary.

  “I’ll take [Bloodfire Efficiency], please!” she said, choosing to replace the other options.

  {Gained the [Bloodfire Efficiency] ability}

  It was the last ability she’d be getting in tier 3. She’d taken [Hellfire Efficiency III] in the [Hellfire] advancement and the [Aura: Hellfire Tyrant] upgrade from her racial advancements. All in all, it was just more penetration to make sure that she could afflict her enemies with her debilitating hellfire.

  After all: anything that could resist her fire was substantially harder, if not impossible, to kill. If there weren’t any good utility abilities on offer, she might as well just take the penetration.

  She yawned, then reached out with telepathy. “That’s level 625 done, you guys. I think I’m gonna call it for today.”

  Grats, Hunter said as she began to draw her rune circle.

  “Thanks! Just one more big step to go and we can find out how many admin privileges I get at tier 4.”

  Kind of strange that they did it that way, said Frost. Makes it seem like their system was designed for multiple curators.

  Ashtoreth shrugged. “Maybe the ability starts getting passed out at tier 4 and I just got to cut the line because I’m the Monarch,” she said. “If the other humans were [Pinnacle Curators], I’m sure we’d have seen some of them by now.”

  After all, they’d had Kylie keeping watch over the ancient human cache ever since she’d moved into Core and started searching the world.

  The search had still largely been fruitless. She’d found several places that felt like the remnants of vast, ancient cities, albeit so old that it was hard to even spot them. Everything was simply too far gone: instead of the hollowed-out, skeletal towers that Ashtoreth was familiar with from human media, a lumpy topography hid weather-worn metal and stone. Searching it, even with ghosts, yielded little information apart from the fact that the ancient humans didn’t seem to use concrete as a building material.

  Still, her position on the ancient human cache meant that if any of the other humans had warped in using the Siberia sequence, she’d have spotted them. And if any of them had used some other buried gateway’s sequence, Ashtoreth suspected that they’d be assigned to Orchard Nexus 001 when they warped there—and they’d be easily spotted, as that was where her team had made their camp.

  With a flash, she warped back to the nexus. Frost, Hunter, and Sadie were all in the living room of Ashtoreth’s house, which had been crammed against one wall between two of the low-level zones.

  “Anything interesting happen while I was out?” Ashtoreth asked.

  “Kylie said she found another Ashtoreth impersonator,” said Hunter. “Sent us some videos of them getting hauled off.”

  Ashtoreth snickered. “So… not much has changed, then.”

  Hunter was the one who moved back and forth between Earth, Core, and Orchard. Kylie, who spent all her day managing her minions from her lonely place at the ancient cache, would often send him a list of media to collect for them in addition to the food he’d take for himself and Sadie.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  It was Kylie who kept tabs on the news: she had the time for it, after all. The human bossmen still hadn’t released much information about Ashtoreth, sticking to the same story they had at the start of the invasion: that they’d successfully turned one of the enemy’s agents against them by capitalizing on the chaos, poor discipline, and discontent that characterized Hell.

  This new girl was very dramatic, said Kylie. Flying around with a cape that fell down past her heels, speaking in some bastardized version of Ye Olde English. Stuck to the bit even as they were dragging her away.

  “I don’t get it,” said Sadie. “They have to know they’re going to be caught.”

  “Unstable, charismatic people are very dangerous,” said Frost. “And one of the reasons why is that long-term, their behaviour really doesn’t make rational sense.” He shrugged. “At this point, it feels like the whole world wants to hear from the person who won the election. Eventually, certain people are going to step up and just try to fake it.”

  “She at least got her fifteen minutes of fame,” said Hunter. “Had a bunch of people act like she was the most important person in the world. Maybe even capitalized on it to set something up for her loved ones. Who knows?”

  Ashtoreth sighed. “You know, it sucks that I have a day job. Reading what people say about me on the internet all day would be like, super interesting.”

  No one tell her, Kylie said, sounding amused even through telepathy.

  Ashtoreth frowned. “Tell me what?”

  “Nothing, Ashtoreth,” said Frost. “You’re fine.”

  “Okay, but what are people saying? You guys said it was mostly just speculation.”

  “It is,” said Hunter.

  They don’t even know you, said Kylie. Everything they say is based on the system announcement, that’s all. They’ve just got [Vampiric Archfiend Ashtoreth] to go off, along with the governments saying actually, that’s fine, don’t worry about it.

  “Plus those pictures of me,” she said. There were definitely a few poorly-angled, poorly-lit photographs and frames of video of her fighting in New York. She’d seen them. The best shot among them was of her aiming her cannon, though it wasn’t obvious that she was aiming at a leviathan and not a bunch of humans.

  “They’re not great pictures,” she said. “But they’re still there. And people tagged me, I’m sure.” She looked down. “I should have stopped to pet a cute dog or something...”

  One day I’m sure they’ll let you kiss some babies, said Kylie. But the pictures don’t mean anything in the vast sea of bullshitery that is in the Internet. Even the post-initialization Internet, which is way more lame.

  “So nobody knows anything about me still?”

  “We told you,” said Frost. “[Vampiric Archfiend Ashtoreth]. Almost every mention of you online just runs off that.”

  “People don’t like it,” said Hunter.

  Hunter.

  “What?” he said. “She could’ve guessed that people wouldn’t like it. I’m not gonna lie to her.”

  Ashtoreth sighed. “Yeah, I guess…”

  “I did tell you not to worry about what giant masses of people think of you,” Hunter said. “Giant masses of people suck. It’s kind of their thing.”

  Frost, sitting next to him, gave a conciliatory sort of nod. “He’s not wrong.”

  Discussions about you aren’t about you, per se, said Kylie. They’re about humanity. Some people trust the governments completely, because they need something to cling to. But a lot of people… and I mean a lot of people, don’t trust them at all. There’s a very popular conspiracy theory that despite what our leaders are telling us, Hell really did win the invasion.

  “But the travel restrictions!” she protested.

  You think raw, observable facts are going to get in the way of a conspiracy theory? Kylie said. I thought you studied us before you invaded.

  “Yeah, good point.”

  Look, don’t worry about your reputation. Nobody knows anything about you but you’re still the most famous person in the world.

  “And the bossmen haven’t tried to turn the world against me for cutting them out because it’ll make them look incompetent—well, and they might be worried that I’m self-absorbed enough to start breaking things if they make me unpopular.”

  Great strategy. Defensive narcissism. Does Sun Tzu have a quote for that one, Hunter?

  “‘Know thy enemy, but above all, know that if you mess with Ashtoreth’s follower count, she’ll go so nuclear it’ll make Tsar Bomba look like a sparkler on New Year’s Eve.’” He shrugged. “Something like that? There’s always a few translation inconsistencies, so you might find it said a little differently by other sources.”

  Ashtoreth grinned at him. “Okay guys, thanks for being so cheery—I’m going to bed.”

  They said their goodnights, and Ashtoreth crawled into her big bed and let her body remember just how exhausted she was. It had been like this every day—exhaustion to the point of passing out almost as soon as she hit her pillow.