Infernals swarmed through the sky toward her, already reaching the platform of the tower below and landing there. Lightly armored, winged devils. Tall, bony skygorgers. Massive, four-winged goregliders with their overlong snouts, each accompanied by a swarm of shearbats.

  Ashtoreth floated above them all, making sure that most of them saw her before she conjured a glamour of a megaphone and spoke into it, amplifying the sound to carry across the entire top of the tower.

  “Okay, everybody!” she said. “Change of plans! Now, we’re still going with, ‘humanity must die and Earth must fall,’ but we’re going to mix it up a bit. I just came from Earth, and the humans really threw us a loop by getting it together a faster than we thought. They’ve got a stronghold in the sky, and from there they’re dispatching elite humans to all corners of their world to undermine our invasion.”

  She grinned. “But now that you are all my minions, you may fly proud! Because you get to help fix this problem by assailing humanity’s most potent bastion!”

  She spread her arms. “Now form ranks, my minions! Gather together so that my spell can sweep us all away and carry us across the gulf between worlds, toward humanity’s highest and most powerful bastion! You will be the vanguard that overturns human resistance and earns eternal glory for Hell!”

  She paused, looking down at them as they scrambled to land and form some semblance of organized assembly. “Get close,” she said. “Everyone get closer. Tighter—yeah, everyone pack in.” She put her hands on her hips, her voice echoing through the megaphone. “Look, I know it’s uncomfortable and I’m sorry about the short notice, but it’s an area-based teleportation spell and the top of the tower is our circle. Everyone make room for everyone, okay? Scootch. Bring it in.”

  What followed was more than a minute of Ashtoreth frowning down at the legions as they struggled to squeeze onto the upper platform of the tower.

  “Touching the ground, please!” she said. “Everybody touching the ground. I said form ranks, not fly in formation.”

  Hoping to speed things along, she picked a skygorger searching for a place on the ground, then incinerated it with a hellfire javelin.

  She lifted her megaphone to her mouth a moment later. “That’s what you get, see? I did that because he wasn’t touching the ground. Closer, everybody—get tight, ‘kay?”

  She saw a devil rising toward her a moment later, then put a hand on her hip and held her megaphone away from her mouth. “Someone’s brave!” she said, smiling. “Look at you, coming up here to talk to me. What’s up?”

  “Forgive me, Your Eminence!” the devil said as he beat his wings and rose to float just beneath her. “I only wish to understand why our orders have so suddenly been overturned!”

  “Uh-huh!” Ashtoreth said. “The humans aren’t quite what we expected, is all. They really sprang into action, you know what I mean?”

  The devil blinked. “We have been readying ourselves for decades,” he said. “And though I cast no aspersions on your plans, and I will never question your orders…” his eyes drifted downward to her gauntlet.

  Ashtoreth raised the gauntlet, and the devil flinched away from the light burning on the back of her hand. “You like my gauntlet?”

  “It’s… glowing.”

  “It’s nice, isn’t it?”

  “I… yes? Your Eminence, about our orders….”

  “Sec.”

  Ashtoreth looked past him, peering at the infernals assembling below her. Most of them were scrambling about chaotically, but the ones closer to her had packed in tight… and there were enough of them to really get the wave started.

  She began to charge a [Hellfire Blast].

  “Mercy, Your Eminence!” the devil cried. “I only wished to—”

  “Go away.”

  The devil blanched, then seemed to realize she wasn’t looking at him took the out, turning and flying away as fast as they could.

  Then Ashtoreth launched her blast at the tightest group of infernals she could see. It exploded, consuming dozens of them in a single, lethal blast.

  A wave of violet fire rushed out from where she’d thrown her fireblast, growing in speed and intensity as the infernals beneath her began to scream and flee. Almost all of them tried to take to the air, but they didn’t have the space to spread their wings, and there was no escaping the flames in any case: as more of them were consumed, the spreading fire grew faster and faster.

  Soon Ashtoreth found herself not only drowning in violet light and fire, but buffeted about by powerful, conflicting winds.

  “Wow!” she said. Normally there wasn’t much of a shockwave or even a real explosion to her [Hellfire Consumption], but with so much energy being released into the air and heating it, she supposed it had to move about in strange ways.

  “Anyway, harvest time!” she said, raising her scythe and spinning it through the air before sweeping up a huge amount of hellfire to channel into the novaheart in her gauntlet.

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  The explosion that a normal [Hellfire Nova] would create was massive, but her gauntlet uncapped the ability’s usual limit of 30 times her maximum [Bloodfire].

  30 times was enough to create an extraordinarily powerful explosion, but still not powerful enough for her spellfire to rip through and degrade the very fabric of the demiplane. For that, she needed more, and the sheer amount of [Bloodfire] that she needed to fill the novaheart meant that she’d need to fly around with her scythe for awhile and harvest the flames she spread across the top of the tower.

  Circle’s ready, Dazel said after a minute or so. Got my kill list, too.

  I’m almost done, she said. Like her [Bloodfire Boon], [Hellfire Nova] didn’t scale with her [Bloodfire Well]. Even though she had a maximum of 547,900 [Bloodfire] with her scythe out, the nova’s normal maximum was less than five and a half million [Bloodfire]

  Her current novaheart had more than 8 million [Bloodfire] in it. She was angling for 10, and it didn’t take her much longer before she was bringing the stored novaheart back to Dazel.

  Veelox and the others were still standing on the uppermost platform of the tower. The diabolic commander stood next to Dazel, looking anxious.

  “He’s not bothering you, is he Dazel?” she asked as she landed.

  “Nah, he’s great,” said Dazel. “Enjoy yourself?”

  “Well yeah,” she said. “Who doesn’t like huge explosions?”

  She reached out with her gauntlet and deposited the novaheart in the air above them, bathing the top of the command tower in bright light.

  “Your Eminence!” Veelox said. He glanced at the glowing orb and flinched.

  “Uh-huh?” Ashtoreth said, stepping into the teleportation circle and letting Dazel leap up into her arms.

  “I need know nothing of your plan, Your Eminence,” Veelox began.

  “You got that right,” Ashtoreth said, reading the runes on the outside of Dazel’s circle to see that they led back to Earth before she triggered her boots to cast [Runic Warp].

  Veelox fell to one knee. “But I must say, I’ve a sudden urge to seek advancement opportunities by pledging my undying loyalty to you!”

  “Great!”

  “Whatever your intentions,” he said significantly

  “Wow,” Ashtoreth said. “I really appreciate that, Veelox.”

  Veelox gulped. “Perhaps I could accompany you to wherever—”

  “Nah,” she said. “You were doing a great job, here!”

  Veelox sucked in air between his teeth and winced, glancing once more at the glowing orb.

  She narrowed her eyes. “You were doing a great job here, right?”

  He blinked, and his eyes widened. “Yes!” he rushed to say. “Yes, certainly, Your Eminence! And forgive me, please, for asking… but about the orb.”

  “Dude,” Dazel said. “Bro. Like, come on, guy.”

  “Oh, the orb?” Ashtoreth asked. “It’s really sprucing up the place, isn’t it?”

  Veelox looked back at the orb, his face despondent. The other infernals commanding the bastion didn’t look much happier.

  “You’re in charge while I’m away, okay?” she said.

  Veelox opened his mouth to say something, but in the very moment that he did, Ashtoreth warped away and triggered her hellfire nova.

  She saw a blinding flash of light—and then she had appeared hovering just above a busy city street. Within a moment, many of the humans that had been nearby were running away from her, doubtless having seen her level.

  “Did the nova work?” Dazel asked.

  She watched her system text. It was a blur of rewards: multiple armies worth of infernals were being annihilated, and she was getting the cores for all of them.

  “We did it!” she said, eyes widening as the text flashed by and she was given more than a hundred thousand cores a second. “Wow. We did it.”

  “Good,” he said. “Do it a couple more times, and I can triangulate the position of the nexus from within the bastion.”

  “Right,” Ashtoreth said. The humans could really use the cores, too. She looked and saw that the final tally was just under two million of them. Useless for her because they were all tier 1, but nice for a human army.

  Briefly, she thought of how much she’d enjoyed playing with them before she’d killed them all. The megaphone, the deceptions, the orb.

  “Dazel,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you… I dunno, do you think I’m weird because I like all the violence, domination, and mass murder?”

  “Ashtoreth,” he said. “You’re an archfiend. I definitely think you’re weird, but only because of literally every other thing about you. Those are normal.”

  She sighed. “Yeah, I guess.”

  She took a look at the city street around her. They were in a highly metropolitan area, and the dense crowd of people who had fled when she’d appeared had looked asian.

  “Say,” Ashtoreth said, looking around the city. “You think we can get some sushi?”

  “We’re in Seoul,” said Dazel. “But yeah, sure—if we look hard enough. Just, uh… don’t tell anyone that you thought they were Japanese.”

  “How do you know it’s Seoul?” she asked.

  “You can see the base script of the signs through the system’s translator if you focus hard enough,” said Dazel. “The script isn’t Japanese.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Okay.” She began to rise into the air over the city, searching the sky for rifts.

  Then she reached out with telepathy to the rest of the team.

  So how are you guys doing?