“You know,” Ashtoreth said to the rest of the teams once she was back in Nexus 001, “If I assume that this whole system was set in place under the assumption that nobody just spontaneously becomes human, it makes perfect sense as a failsafe—and it’s brilliant. Supposing that Hell wins the initial invasion of Earth, they still won’t have access to the other four realms. Even if they start liquidating the human population, all it takes is for a human to escape and eventually get to tier 4 to become a [Pinnacle Curator] and potentially start moving all the surviving humans into realms they can’t access—where they can gear up, farm, and eventually resume the war.”

  “Except you did become human,” Frost said.

  Ashtoreth beamed. “Yup! And I have no idea why. It doesn’t make any sense for that to be something that the ancient humans set into motion. Maybe the system—the big one—did it because it really doesn’t like the intended setup?”

  “I have to say, it’s unsettling to think that the precursors could have gone through all this work to ensure there was a backup plan in case their Cradle world was seized by an invasion… but that it wound up all being for nothing because the system didn’t like it.”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty terrifying,” said Ashtoreth. “I know the shards can get around its rules, but it’s still seemingly omniscient and omnipotent.” She broke out into a smile. “That’s why I’m always so polite!”

  Hunter spoke from where he sat on the porch to Ashtoreth’s house. “Could it be because of that thing Dazel was one about? Your supposed perfection? The tier 5 dragon said that humans were pure, right? Maybe it’s got something to do with that.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe. System thing seems a little more likely to me, though.”

  “We’re not going to know for sure until we go with one of two potential paths forward,” said Frost. “Which are that we try to ask the archival spirit, which we don’t want to do.”

  “Nope!”

  “Or that Ashtoreth dives headfirst, alone, into an unknown realm that we know for sure is infested with everybody's favorite kind of monster.”

  “Tourists from the Outer Chaos!” said Ashtoreth. “Normally, it looks like I’d be able to give you guys permission to come with me as long as you met the 2666 [Defense] threshold.”

  “Which is kind of strange, honestly,” Frost said. “For one thing, the number feels oddly round. For another—is the place on the surface of Venus, or something? Given everything we know, I would have assumed that Diadem was the seat of their government.”

  “Congress is more interesting if you hold it inside a giant oven, I guess,” said Ashtoreth. “But jokes aside, I’m sort of curious too. Right now the requirements are even steeper, though: you have to be level 650 for me to let you in.”

  “Not good,” said Hunter. “Not if we don’t know how dangerous it is. We can’t just throw Ashtoreth into a dark room full of eldritch horrors and hope things go for the best.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “As much as I’d love a real fight… it’s sort of a bad idea.”

  “But our next-best option is to level me to 650,” said Hunter. “I pop in to check things out. Same as we did it with this place.”

  “God damn it all," said Frost, reaching up to rub his forehead.

  “Sorry, Frost,” said Hunter. “But I’d rather volunteer than make Ashtoreth ask me every time. It makes sense.”

  “I know,” he said. “I know. It’s just… I took [Protection], you know? I took [Restoration]. When we all got together I thought that would mean that I could be front and center taking the heat.” He looked down at the floor and shook his head. “But the kids took [Warp], and so they’re the ones who are apparently going to be diving into dark water to see if it’s shallow or not.”

  “You’re safer than me in a firefight, I’m safer than you when scouting,” said Hunter. “That’s how it worked out. It is what it is.”

  “It is what it is,” Frost echoed tiredly.

  “Say, cheer up!” Ashtoreth said. “These circumstances are highly specific. We’re the only ones who can access these new worlds. In the future, we’ll probably be able to have, uh, other human minions to, um… okay, that wasn’t going to cheer you up—nevermind.”

  “Thanks for trying,” Frost said flatly.

  “In any case, I think we should get Kylie off Orchard.”

  Same, said Kylie. We’ve got a way forward, so there’s no need for me to be searching an entire planet for clues. And you guys know that I farm harder than a depressed person in Stardew Valley.

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  “Exactly!” said Ashtoreth. “We’ve got to bust out the big guns… which is Kylie watching tv while her army of ghosts ravages hundreds of square kilometers for cores.”

  Damn straight, said Kylie. My army won’t do as well as it did against the demons, unfortunately, Almost every monster above 400 in Orchard has enough magical firepower to negate the benefit of ghosts. At the same time, though… I can just overwhelm them with numbers. Ashtoreth’s farming up more than enough mana to keep me in minions.

  “You betcha!” she said, grinning. “Get over here and we’ll all boost you up to tier 4 in no time! I’ll jack you up with the cores I get off of adversarial shapes.”

  Sure, she said. It might take me a few trips to bring all my stuff. The satchel’s only so deep and I’ve been living here for weeks.

  “I’ll help,” Hunter said. “It’ll go a lot faster that way. Sadie would too, but she’s sort of half asleep right now.”

  “Mmm,” said Sadie, her head resting limply against the couch’s armrest.

  “I gotta choose an advancement anyway,” said Ashtoreth. “Let’s take a bit of a break, then—we’ve got more to decide once we’re done.”

  “I’ll tidy up the spare room,” said Frost, standing and heading toward the house.

  Ashtoreth took his seat a moment later, then frowned as she considered which aspect to choose for her advancement.

  “Okay,” she muttered. “[Drain] is out, and I’m looking for preventative measures and utility more than offense. Usually that means to go for racial advancements… but spell slots also do the trick. Anything that keeps my boons from getting wiped would be the highest priority.”

  If you want a new spell and you’re not taking one of mine, we’re going to have to make it, Kylie said.

  “Yeah,” Ashtoreth said. It was a fairly intensive process, spellcraft, and everything she knew of it was what she’d absorbed from eating spellcasters. She could make a dispel sink that would absorb a dispel effect first, but it would cut time out of her farming… and it wouldn’t have nearly the efficiency of Dazel’s handiwork.

  “I’ve got a decent list of [Hellfire] advancements I’d like to rank up,” she said. “But that’s just offense.” She sighed. “All right, let’s just go racial and see what I get. Archfiends were built to get all the good utility. Advance [Vampiric Archfiend of Humanity], please!”

  {Advance [Vampiric Archfiend of Humanity]}

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

  Upgrade [Aura] with [Aura: Human Supremacy]

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

  All beneficial effects of your aura are 25% more effective when affecting humans.

  All detrimental effects of your aura are 25% more effective when affecting non-humans.

  Gain the [Hellfire Efficiency IV] ability:

  The cost of conjuring hellfire is reduced by 55.55…%.

  Upgrade [True Sight] with [True Sight III]

  Increases the efficacy of your [True Sight] by a further 50%.

  Furthermore, when determining the efficacy of your [True Sight], the lower of your [Magic] and [Psyche] stats will be replaced by your highest stat, current [Defense].

  “Uh, okay,” she said. “Not bad, not bad. Obvious choice will be true sight. Still…”

  Her aura was already getting very strong—just as an archfiend’s should be. She granted fractions of her [Bloodfire Boon], her [Consume Heart] buff, and her fiendish resistances to all allies, as well as letting them drink her flames for mana. For enemies, it blocked teleports and lowered resistances to her hellfire and her [Profane Command].

  “Any chance I could get you to rename that something like ‘Human Pride,’ though? Its current name is sort of culturally insensitive.”

  The system gave no answer.

  “Your call, I guess.”

  The new [Hellfire Efficiency] would be nice to take, as well—every previous rank had been a cost reduction that gave her a further 25% increase to the overall amount of hellfire she could conjure with a given amount of [Bloodfire]. This was jumping by 50%, making all her [Bloodfire] spend for 125% more.

  The [True Sight] buff, though, was absurdly well-tuned to her build… but also very peculiar. Replacing stats in a given ability’s power calculations with your highest stat was something seen in a lot of [Archfiend of Pride] abilities. Did tier 4 archfiends get to do the same thing, and the Pride Clan simply did it more often?

  Regardless, her [Defense] was stupidly high. It fluctuated based on the biggest heart she’d recently ate, of course, but at level 650 it generally didn’t dip below 22,000.

  She’d been keeping pace with her increasing binding strength by adding in more and more of the human stat straps that they’d found in the equipment cache as she’d leveled, and had so far added another 3,000 over the 600 she’d had when they’d first come to Earth.

  In any case, she was replacing 6,219 [Psyche] with something almost four times as high. Combined with the percentile increase, her [True Sight] was tripling in effectiveness.

  “I’ll take the [True Sight], please!”

  {You upgrade your [True Sight] with [True Sight III]}

  “Thanks!”

  It was a few more minutes before Hunter and Kylie both appeared with her things in extra-dimensional storage bags.

  Kylie took the room in with a sweep of her gaze. “Who makes a lobby out of brushed steel?” she said at last. “Anyway, what else do we need to talk about?”

  “Humanity,” Ashtoreth said. “As part of my new curator privileges, I can now fix settings for transit between the worlds en masse. Basically, we should decide whether or not to let the rest of Earth into Orchard—because I think we should.”