“All right, troops! Listen up!”

  Ashtoreth looked over where Frost, Kylie, and Hunter were lounging on the couch that they’d dragged outside. She wore a military uniform, complete with a black helmet that had two holes for her horns. As she spoke, she pulled a telescoping pointer from her belt, extended it, then conjured a glamour of a holographic image of earth and pointed to it.

  “This,” she began, “is Earth.”

  “You got the landmasses wrong,” said Kylie.

  Hunter leaned forward and squinted. “You can kind of see how she pictured a map and tried, though.”

  “Cut the chatter!” Ashtoreth cried. “In just 24 hours, we’ll be boots on the ground! So we’re going to go over the mission in full and make sure that everybody knows their part before we make sure all the spells and communication are working.”

  “I’m glad your tiara helped you get into costume for the occasion,” said Kylie.

  “So am I!” said Ashtoreth. “Now: Earth is still fairly distant from the inner realms, in terms of interplanar space. As it gets closer, Hell will be able to warp stronger and stronger infernals there to attack. At first, those will only be from tier 1, which is on par with the humans leaving their tutorials.”

  She conjured a glamour of a tiny fleet of a red circles next to the Earth, a collection of dots that flared outward the closer it got to the planet.

  “There’s a reason that Hell can warp its troops to Earth now, but no-one from Earth will be able to warp to the inner realms until it gets closer. And that’s these—demiplanar bastions. If you think of interplanar space as the ocean, these are the attack ships that Hell sent sailing over it to bring the invaders to your door.”

  “Question,” Frost said. “Is interplanar space an actual space? Or is that just a simplification?”

  Ashtoreth opened her mouth to say that it was a simplification, then paused. The void that Dazel had brought her to after her first fight with Pluto flashed in her mind. “Uh….”

  “It’s a simplification,” Dazel said from where he was lying on the back of the couch, smoking. “The ‘distance’ between realms is more of a resistance. More resistance tends to get modelled as longer distances. With the right magic, you can blow a single point up into a physical space.”

  “Oh,” said Frost. “Okay.”

  “Hell moves its demiplanes closer and closer to an outer world as they approach,” said Ashtoreth. “Then, because they get close to its demiplanes before anything else, it can invade them in peace.”

  “So they’re troop transports,” said Frost.

  “Yup!” said Ashtoreth. “Each of them will be dispensing infernals all over the Earth. And each of them can reinforce the others as long as they stay close.”

  “And while we zip around on Earth, you’re going to destroy them all,” said Kylie. “I think we pretty much know the plan.”

  “I’m not going to destroy all of them!” Ashtoreth said. She pointed with her stick to a lone red dot that the others seemed to funnel toward. “See how it looks like an hourglass? Lots of demiplanar bastions in the front, then it gets narrower back here?”

  “The bottleneck. This bastion doesn’t carry invaders physically. It’s basically just a giant warp relay for the forces of Hell. As time passes and the Earth can be attacked by stronger and stronger infernals, they’ll get channeled through this one and then spread out to the others.”

  “It’s like a transplanar airport,” said Dazel. “There will actually be a long chain of them, but we only need to take out the first. As long as it’s up, they can reestablish themselves quickly.”

  “But once it’s down,” Ashtoreth said, smiling. “Hell will be cut off. Most of the power they use to warp infernals to the surface of Earth isn’t in the forward bastions, but further back in this chain of lone demiplanes.”

  “Kill the airport, and then they’re all locked in with us until Hell can get its shit together again,” said Kylie.

  “Which will take more than a month,” said Dazel. “And give humans a chance to level well into the higher tiers by killing wildlife and even potentially making contact with the inner realms. And it’s not an airport, it’s a nexus. You know, if you care about the right terms.”

  “Sure,” said Kylie. “Nexus.”

  “But all of that still leaves us with the initial invasion force,” said Frost. “Which, even if it’s just tier 1’s, was made to overwhelm humanity.”

  “That’s what you guys are doing!” said Ashtoreth. “First, you secure all your loved ones, because obviously you’ll fight more effectively if you’re not stressed about them.”

  “Interesting way to frame that,” said Kylie.

  “Why argue about morality when we can agree on usefulness?” Ashtoreth said. “Anyway, you’ll all be in contact with Dazel from the get-go, but the best thing we can do to help fend off the invasion is to establish human communications and transportation networks as fast as possible.”

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  “Reasonable,” said Hunter.

  “Frost is the party face, here,” said Ashtoreth. “Because the boss humans probably won’t take Hunter or Kylie nearly as seriously as they will an older police officer.”

  “True,” said Hunter.

  “Fair,” said Kylie.

  “And because his abilities are better for protecting huge groups of people anyway!” said Kylie. “So anybody he does meet is likely to survive!”

  Frost’s aura now provided a barrier of protection to everyone in its nearly 500 meter radius. He effectively had a pool of energy that would be depleted whenever anyone he was protecting was attacked. The real benefit was that until it was depleted, the subject would use the higher of either his or their defenses.

  Against tier 1 infernals, any human near him, even humans he didn’t know about, would essentially be invulnerable. Perfect for putting together an Earth defense command, given how much Ashtoreth knew her fellow infernals would be focused on keeping humanity disorganized.

  “Kylie is going to establish teleportation circles everywhere she can, building the network bigger and bigger.”

  “I draw circles and give cores to very important people I don’t care about,” she said flatly. “That is my new purpose in life.”

  “Circles all over the world!” Ashtoreth said. “People who will be super grateful!”

  “I never got to travel much in my last life,” said Kylie. “I can’t wait to draw circles in a demon-infested Paris.”

  “That’s the spirit! And Hunter’s job is to teleport across the world very quickly and kill every demon that Dazel tells him to. I’ll be figuring out the details of who all is in their command structure as I eat the hearts of… well, their command structure. We’ll relay that information back and he can get to work speedrunning assassinations.”

  “I can’t wait,” said Hunter.

  “Remember,” said Dazel. “You’re not killing every demon you see. Get in as fast you can, kill the targets, and then move on to the next targets. The list might as well be infinitely long—the more you can keep them from regrouping, the better.”

  “Killing infernals is more important than saving people,” said Hunter. “I got it.”

  “Hold on,” said Frost. “I don’t if know if that’s exactly what he meant.”

  “Nah, that’s what I was getting at,” said Dazel. “Just tactfully.”

  “See?” said Hunter.

  “Once we really start pushing the invasion back, it’s crucial that they struggle to regroup,” said Ashtoreth. “We’re optimizing the number of people we save with machine-gun assassinations!”

  Frost sighed. “Sometimes the things you say are… uncomfortable.”

  “Think of Hunter as an endless series of drone strikes,” said Kylie. “That’s comforting, right?”

  “You know what? If it’s against infernals, then sure.”

  “And remember,” Ashtoreth added. “All of you, but mostly Frost, will have a large number of cores to distribute. Remember the guidelines.”

  The guidelines were just a set of numbers for determining how many cores of whichever tier they would give away to other humans they met. In general, one of the most important things to do with survivors they found was level up the protectors, like Frost, and the teleporters, like Kylie and Hunter.

  The three of them all had extradimensional spaces, and all of those had instructional pamphlets on connecting to the warp network that they would be establishing. They were also packed with useful magical items to be given out to the humans as needed.

  “Dazel and are going to be hopping around a lot between Earth and the bastions,” she said. “But while I fight, he’s be managing communications. It’s a pretty big job!”

  “I’ll say,” said Dazel.

  “He’ll be coordinating you and me and all of the humans that Frost brings into the resistances. The whole teleportation network! Everyone will stay in contact with our telepathic bond as we go. The most important thing is to take out the nexus bastion, so if I run into any trouble, we’ll call some or all of you three in to reinforce me.”

  “Aren’t they underleveled compared to you?”

  “They’ll get stronger as I get closer to the nexus,” she said. “But yeah—I don’t think it’ll be much trouble. Once that’s done, it’s back to Earth to kill as many infernals as possible. With any luck, we can trigger the election before Hell can regroup after the nexus bastion is destroyed.”

  “‘The election’ meaning the completely undemocratic process by which a monarch is chosen,” said Kylie.

  “It’ll probably be a tournament!” Ashtoreth said. “Isn’t that exciting?”

  “No,” said Kylie.

  “Kylie’s wrong,” said Hunter.

  “Let’s not count our chickens before they hatch,” said Frost. “We need a stable government defending Earth, and we need to take out that nexus bastion. Any plans we make after that will involve more human input.”

  “Right you are, Sir Frost!” Ashtoreth said. “So let’s go over the finer details. Starting with you, Sir Frost. You’re going to establishing and protecting the heart of our teleportation network….”

  They wound up talking over the details for hours, Ashtoreth getting more and more anxious as time went on.

  It was finally happening. After almost a year of grinding, they were ready to go back to Earth.

  She had to keep taking a deep breath and assuring herself that everything would work out. But whenever she had doubts, she banished them by opening her stats.

  Level: 300

  [Dexterity]: 4474

  [Strength]: 4219

  [Vitality]: 7058

  [Magic]: 5108

  [Psychic]: 3120

  [Defense]: 9111

  [Bloodfire]: 182300 / 182300

  182 thousand [Bloodfire] to get started on a [Hellfire Nova] with. She was much, much stronger than any of the invaders would be.

  Really, she was looking forward to tomorrow.