Ashtoreth formed her sword-scythe, then swept it through the air to spend an entire base [Bloodfire] pool on a new [Bloodfire Boon]—one that gave a bonus exclusively to [Magic].

  It wouldn’t increase the power of her [Hellfire Nova], sadly: she’d need to channel the mana into the novaheart with bolstered [Magic] to do that. But it would make her even faster, which was the point.

  She launched herself forward, grinning as she felt the added speed. Hunter could still keep pace with her, and she had to wonder just how much faster than her he actually was, but for now it didn’t matter: she could already see that she would soon overtake many of the outsiders that had begun to run away from her when she’d first started charging her [Hellfire Nova].

  “Despite the circumstances, I must still be thorough in warning you, interloper!” the archival spirit said, keeping pace with Ashtoreth as she rushed through the air.

  “I preferred, ‘my liege.’”

  “There is a non-zero chance, perhaps even a high likelihood, that given a long enough timespan, the outsiders can re-coalesce into a truly unconfrontable being!

  “You think they’re running away because they want to run up the clock, then?”

  “Whether they are or not, the result is the same!”

  “You got that right!” Ashtoreth shouted. Scanning the world around her, she added, “Look at that—they didn’t all start running, just the ones that weren’t already far away! Don’t I feel lucky?”

  Her plan had worked just as she’d wanted it to. By running from her novaheart’s initial position, the outsiders had essentially packed themselves into one area as tightly as she could hope for.

  “You know, I get that the grade of my race and class mean I probably have higher stats than them even unbuffed, but some of these icky squiggles are downright slow!”

  “Icky…” Icon shook her head. “I’m telling you—they’re just trying to stay alive until they can reconstitute!”

  “But that’s a slow process, right? We don’t just suddenly die?”

  “Well it’s not instant,” she said. “But ‘slow?’ That feels generous.”

  “I am generous!” Ashtoreth said. “Watch this.”

  Sensing that she was close to the place where the outsiders were most dense, Ashtoreth angled her trajectory downward, then pulled herself to a stop with a few of the outsiders still nearby.

  She dumped the sizzling star of focused [Bloodfire] into the air. “Boo!”

  She enjoyed the sight of the fleeing outsiders as she resumed the process of pulling hearts out of her satchel as she channeled more [Bloodfire] into the novaheart. She’d timed it well enough, and the thirty second delay on detonating the novaheart once it was out of the gauntlet was almost exactly the time she needed to cap it off.

  She had to wonder at the outsiders. On one hand, it made perfect sense for any creature that could sense the mana in the novaheart to flee. On the other, it already had so much [Bloodfire] in it that running was a dubious prospect. It was almost like they were obeying some kind of animalistic instinct.

  “How much mana does that thing hold?” the archival spirit asked, appearing beside her.

  “Thirty times my base maximum!” Ashtoreth said.

  To her credit, the spirit’s eyes widened instantly. “You’re a [Vampire]!”

  “Right you are, my humanitarian librarian! We’ll say it’s a round eleven million!”

  The spirit’s eyes were wide with realization. “Even without any efficiency advancements, even as a first-rank power, even with a middling [Magic] score… the strength of that—”

  But the spirit didn’t get a chance to finish her sentence, and neither would she need to.

  As Ashtoreth’s nova detonated, they were engulfed in a blaze of violet light that intensified until it was a blinding, world-encompassing white. She could feel her aura expanding with the wave of burning, superhot hellfire, could feel it overtake first dozens of the outsiders, then hundreds of them, could feel them each withstanding the fire for mere moments before erupting in a blaze of fire themselves.

  For most of the outsiders, the nova was simply too powerful. She had [Defense] penetration in both her aura and on all her hellfire abilities, and the [Hellfire Efficiency] ranks that the archival spirit had mentioned didn’t reduce the overall cost, but rather increased the overall strength of an ability with a set capacity such as [Hellfire Nova].

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  When one considered the fact that the last 30 seconds of filling the novaheart with [Bloodfire] had also been done while benefiting from an extreme bonus to her [Magic] from her new [Bloodfire Boon], the outsiders mostly had no chance.

  The nova which she’d once used to tear apart the artificial reality of Hell’s bastions and kill two archangels was, unsurprisingly, too powerful for them.

  “You are a fiend,” she heard the archival spirit say.

  But Ashtoreth was busy surveying the destruction below her. “Huh—more survivors than I thought,” she said. “Oh—wait. There we go.”

  As she watched, several of the outsiders that appeared as little more than tufts of mobile hellfire succumbed, bursting into larger plumes of purple. Short-term protection abilities like her barrier spell or Frost’s momentary invincibility were too brief to keep a creature alive through the nova. The heat and flames persisted for too long—and she had them burning away [Defense] and [Vitality] by applying her [Energy Drain].

  Even so, there were still survivors. 1000 was simply too high a level: they’d all picked up more than 10 tier 4 advancements, even if their race and class grades were probably low. She saw some outsiders that had seemingly retreated into cocoons, some that had dispersed and then re-integrated, some that were simply popping into existence now that the flames were gone, a few that gave no visual cue as to what they’d done to survive, and even one that was now wreathed in an aura of violet energy that it had seemingly absorbed.

  But by Ashtoreth’s guess, more than nine-tenths of them had been destroyed—possibly less, given that some might have teleported out. And every one of them had left its own pool of burning hellfire where their lifeforce and mana had been converted to [Bloodfire] and ignited. The pools all overlapped, so that Ashtoreth, Hunter, and Icon looked down on a field of flames, some of which rose hundreds of feet into the air.

  More of the survivors began bursting into flames as their abilities wore off, adding to Ashtoreth’s inferno. The air filled with a strange scent: she could only assume it was metallic vapor from the structure of the ring below.

  She conjured Wanderschloss and swept it through the air, completely filling her [Bloodfire] pool by reaping a small circle of the hellfire below her.

  Then she began to create another [Hellfire Nova], conjuring the novaheart beside her in the air and beginning to channel more [Bloodfire] into it while they were safe within the inferno.

  “Is something amiss, Icon?” Ashtoreth said. “You look like something’s amiss.”

  Icon gaped, her eyes two gleaming pools of reflected hellfire.

  “Don’t worry!” Ashtoreth grinned. “I brought enough to share with the whole class!”

  Icon continued to just stare.

  “Come on, Icon,” Hunter said. “I barely know you, but I know you love explosions.”

  Ashtoreth cocked her head, examining the spirit. She loved explosions, did she?

  Her gaze snapped to Hunter. “Correction: I love explosions that serve the best interests of humanity.”

  “I did say you were a humanitarian librarian.”

  “I will not be bewitched by hellfire and rhymes!”

  “Look, I understand your reservations about my species. Heck, I’d be worried if I were in your shoes!” She spread her arms to indicate the flames below them. “But hey: give credit where credit is due, am I right?”

  “Even with [Armament] and [Spellcasting] both, you should only be able to manage eight times your base [Blood] pool,” said Icon. “How did you fill a—is that when you’re pulling out of that bag? Just… organs?”

  “Quality beast hearts straight from Orchard!”

  “And you convert them into [Blood]?”

  “Something like that!” She swept Wanderschloss through the air once more, enlarging the circle of hellfire free ground beneath them as she replenished her [Bloodfire] pool.

  Icon looked from the ground to Ashtoreth. “You’re using the outsiders to fuel another nova—another 11 million mana nova.”

  “It’s a good build, I agree.”

  “That’s so powerful…”

  Did Ashtoreth detect a little bit of admiration in the spirit’s voice?

  “You’d think she’d be weak at single combat,” Hunter said. “And I guess she’s not stupidly overpowered at it, but she sort of still just has infinite resources and a half-dozen instant kills.”

  Ashtoreth beamed. “And you know what’s upsettingly disappointing? I made this utterly bonkers build to help me snowball through the tutorial and then tear all of Hell’s bastions out of the sky, and as soon as that’s done, what happens? Single combat, single combat, and then—for a bit of a change of pace—more single combat!”

  She swept her weapon through the air once more, harvesting another lake’s worth of hellfire to funnel into the nova. “I swear, I fought an invincible dragon on top of a pyramid for like five minutes so we could free some slaves and cut through elf territory. It didn’t exactly suck, but it definitely wasn’t my best showing. Anyway, I’m about ready to go here.”

  The archival spirit was still looking between Ashtoreth, Hunter, and the ground. “You’re not even fighting!”

  “They’ve got a window to stop her,” said Hunter. “They’re just not taking it.”

  “Because they’re fleeing the glut of eleven million mana!”

  “I’ll put it this way,” Ashtoreth said. “War’s not fair, and do you know what the King of Hell never once said when he was designing his perfect weapons of war? He never once said, ‘Pass the weaksauce.’”