“I can assure you, Hunter Wolfhard, the wave of charged motes of compressed mana was an unintended, if spectacular, side-effect of destroying the asymptotic spindle! Nice jump!”

  For the moment, Hunter ignored Icon. He could smell his own flesh burning. Fortunately, even with his low [Vitality], he was high enough a level that his burnt skin and missing hair would come back quickly enough.

  Then again the outsiders would come back quickly, too. He doubted the outer ring was much more than 100 kilometers in diameter—even the slower flyers would reach him, soon.

  Okay real quick, he said. The outsiders are still here, and I gotta talk fast because they’re coming back.

  ‘Kay.

  Time was stopped when I came in, but the archival spirit is here and she helped me break the timestop and also saved me by breaking the outsider presence into like, ten thousand level 1000 outsiders instead of one giant unkillable god-thing. They might be putting themselves back together, though, so maybe you should get in here? Except the archival spirit doesn’t know you’re an archfiend yet.

  Huh.

  Hunter spun in the air while he gave Ashtoreth time to think, looking around at the strange forms that seemed to be coming toward him from every direction. If Ashtoreth wasn’t coming, he probably wanted to leave—and soon.

  “Are you leaving?” Icon said. “I feel like you should leave. Or at least let me lead—”

  Hunter held up a hand to silence her, and she fell quiet. Ashtoreth was talking.

  You said she broke the big outsider into little ones? She sounds strong.

  Yeah—she’d been working on that for a few millenia, though.

  Hmm. Don’t tell her what I am. Push her to see if she can help you fight the outsiders to learn her capabilities.

  Right.

  And try and find out if being a [Pinnacle Curator] means I can give her orders.

  Right.

  Hunter blinked. How was he going to do that subtly?

  “Uh—Icon?”

  “Yes sir?”

  “The Queen wants to know what your capabilities are when it comes to fighting the outsiders,” Hunter said, talking quickly. “She can take them, but she’d prefer to engage if she has more than just me to rely on if things go south.”

  “South? A peculiar idiom—and I’m afraid my capabilities extend mostly to turning things off and on. We should do what we can to maintain the remaining integrity of the inner ring, but there are three different places on the outer ring where I can cause substantial explosions.”

  “Mark those. And mark where the Queen will come in.”

  From where Hunter floated, the outer ring was little more than a shadow blocking a field of stars, one illuminated by lines of light. Still, his superhuman perception found it easy enough to pick out the three red lights that Icon placed.

  “The entry conduit is that way,” she said, pointing. “If I place a flare, they might crowd it.”

  “One more question,” he said to the pointing spirit, still talking as fast as he could. “And I’m sorry if this is offensive after everything you just did for us, but you’ve been trapped here alone for so long… are you required to follow the orders of a [Pinnacle Curator]? I told her you didn’t seem to be malfunctioning, just a little eccentric, but she has to be absolutely sure she can do things safely for the sake of hu—”

  “Fear not!” Icon said. “I take no offense because I am eccentric. And in the absence of any other [Pinnacle Curator] to countermand her directives, I would be forced to obey any command to go dormant that she issued.”

  “Are there any other [Pinnacle Curators]?” Hunter asked.

  “I don’t know!” Icon said. “I didn’t even know there was one.”

  “Right.”

  To Ashtoreth, he said, She’s not strong enough to hurt you—and she says has to obey if you tell her to go dormant, Hunter said.

  Nice! Let me know when I’m good to pop in.

  Right.

  He beat his wings to launch himself in the direction that Icon was still pointing.

  Icon appeared beside him, effortlessly keeping pace once more. “I can only assume from your flight that your queen is coming—and again, I must caution that I find this course of action to be ill-advised.”

  He wasn’t very worried. The thing about outsiders was that they were frightfully strong in some ways, but inexplicably weak in others. Even if they often took forms that made it seem as if every slider had been randomized in character creation, they still tended to follow trends.

  A group of outsiders was likely to have strong psychic attacks, auras, and offensive abilities that were both high in [Penetration] and circumvented all common resistances. In terms of defenses, they were creatures of extremes: a low [Defense] score was usually supplemented by outright immunity to many forms of attacks along with a high [Vitality] and a total lack of vital organs.

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  Fighting any single given outsider was usually fairly easy, compared to other monster types. The real trouble was that long term, their tendency toward semi-random extremes made survival much less likely.

  As Ashtoreth had once put it: when a dragon rolls a natural 20, you take way too many d12s in damage. When an outsider rolls a natural 20, you turn into a bowl of petunias. One outcome is deadly, but survivable. The other is a reference to Hitchhiker’s Guide—and kills you.

  But while nothing could be a certainty when it came to outsiders, Ashtoreth was about as safe from them as one could be. She had high [Defense], high [Vitality], and the ability to surround herself with a magic-dispelling hellfire elemental.

  “She’ll be all right,” he said. “If the alternative is to form an army, re-create your shattering technique, and then come back in weeks or months, then the risk of waiting is worse than the risk of trying now. I can pull her out if things go bad.”

  “What’s the risk of waiting?”

  “I’ll tell you later!”

  His trip back was even less eventful than his trip toward the inner ring had been. Most of the outsiders had scattered when he’d broken Icon’s complicated machine, and the fastest ones had naturally wound up far away. By the looks of things, many of them had even wound up beyond the outer ring.

  Hunter’s flight speed was reliant on his [Dexterity], naturally high from his race and class and then enhanced further by his [Nimble] aspect. A few of the fastest, flying outsiders caught up to him before he reached the outer ring again, but none of them had the ability to teleport like the one he’d so swiftly killed earlier.

  Now, Hunter said, stopping in the air before he reached the point that Icon had indicated.

  He pivoted, then teleported to avoid a green, tendril-like whip wielded by a nearby spherical creature that looked to be a tumbleweed made of bones. For a few seconds, he danced and blinked around in the air as more of the outsiders converged on his position, focusing only on survival.

  Then he felt it: magical warmth spreading through him, bolstering his power. A light buff to all his stats—and a massive buff to [Defense].

  The world became awash in purple light as Hunter rushed toward the source of the buffs. Shadows shifted across the irregular metal landscape below him as Ashtoreth launched a volley of hellfire javelins through the sky. A split-second later, he felt the air-rending shockwave that came whenever she fired her weapon.

  He rushed upward to take a position a few dozen meters away from her: close enough that he could warp in and grab her in case she needed it, but far enough that she didn’t have to worry about hitting him with any of her physical attacks.

  Icon appeared next to Ashtoreth as the latter expended her magazine, then brought her sword-gun around to take aim at a nearby outsider.

  “My l—”

  But Icon was only beside Ashtoreth for a fraction of a second; a moment later the weapon was launched out of Ashtoreth’s hands, shearing through the air to slam into the enemy and explode in a burst of hellfire.

  The outsider survived, protected by some kind of dispersal ability that saw it break itself into fragments and then begin to reconstitute. The outsider directly behind Ashtoreth, however, was shoulder-checked by the archfiend as she was sent careening backward by the force of her strike—and Ashtoreth simply tore through its body of knotted musculature and fleshy petals, igniting it into a cloud of hellfire and then grinning as she flared her wings, halted her momentum, and closed her fist as she converted the plume of fire into an elemental.

  “My liege!” Icon said, appearing next to Ashtoreth. “While I can only commend your—eh—uhh?!”

  Her face had become a mask of horror and disbelief. Ashtoreth flashed her a smile.

  “Don’t fear it, spirit! I’m human, too!”

  “You’re… a fiend!”

  “Oh, come on. I gotta little more integrity than just a fiend!”

  Icon just stared.

  “This way!” Ashtoreth said, launching herself to the right. Hunter fell in behind her as she flew high along the ring, launching volleys of her javelins at any enemy that threatened to get too close. “These guys feel weaker than they should!” she shouted back at Hunter after a few seconds. “I can see you outrunning them all, but me?”

  “They’re in remissions, or something!” Hunter shouted.

  Then, to Ashtoreth, he thought, If you go much farther, you’ll be in one of the few areas that Icon said she could blow up.

  Dang. Well, this is far enough, I guess.

  A moment later he both heard and felt Icon’s voice, louder than she’d ever spoken. “How is this possible?!”

  “We’ll talk after I clear the infestation!” Ashtoreth said. “Okay—stop here.”

  She pulled up with he wings, then made a dramatic gesture with her gauntletted hand and conjured an incandescent sphere of light.

  Icon appeared next to them. “What’s that?”

  “You’ll love it,” Hunter said. Then he frowned as he looked at the outsiders that had been pursuing them. “They’re fleeing.”

  “Would you look at that?” Ashtoreth said, cocking her head at the outsiders as they began to move away from the purple orb. “Eldritch abominations always figure out the weirdest things.”

  Hunter watched them go with a tinge of disappointment. “They knew to avoid the resonance cascade explosion, too.”

  “I wonder what it is about them,” she said. “They don’t fight as one, but they can pass word along about the incoming explosion.”

  “No!” Icon said. “No! You cannot be the only [Pinnacle Curator]—it’s absolutely unacceptable!"

  “I said it before already, but to be clear, I am human. It’s just that I’m an inclusive human. Which is to say that I’m not exclusively human. Which is to say that I’m also an [Archfiend] and a [Vampire].”

  Hunter had to squint as the miniature sun before them grew brighter and brighter.

  Ashtoreth began pulling hearts out of her satchel and eating them as quickly as possible, her hands quickly becoming soaked in blood. “Trust me—I’m the good archfiend,” she said to Icon.

  “This is my life’s work!” Icon said despondently. “It can’t go like this!”

  Hunter flew to the archival spirit’s side. “Icon, Ashtoreth has saved billions of human lives. She’s on humanity’s side and no-one else’s. She saved Cradle and she’s trying to keep it saved. Trust us.”

  “Yeah, and also: I wish there were a better time this, but how do you feel about extensive collateral damage?” Ashtoreth asked. “Because this whole place looks like it’s made of pure steel?” She sucked in a breath through her teeth. “Not exactly durable.”

  “Are you sure you’re going to get many?” Hunter asked, eying the retreating outsiders.

  “Yep!” Ashtoreth chirped. “The nice thing about the shape of this place is that when they run away, it’s in the same general direction.”

  She closed her fist, sequestering the novaheart in the jewel on the back of her gauntlet. “Let’s move!”