“Four aspects is good, then?” Frost asked, keeping pace with her. “Strong? And the invasion—it’s happening because the ruler of Hell is afraid?”

“Hold on,” said Dazel, weaving his way through the underbrush. “What did you mean by afraid, Ashtoreth?”

“I meant afraid,” she said. “I mean, he’s got to have some reason for putting so much into this one particular invasion of this one seemingly inconsequential world.”

“This invasion is different than others?” Frost asked. “Hell… invades other worlds?”

“Sure,” said Ashtoreth. “The system likes violence as a means of progress, and above all it likes tests. It prefers invasions as a way to integrate outer realms when they draw too close to the inner ones. It Anyway, the King of Hell is about three times more prepared for war with Earth than they ever have been for an outer realm. There are way more demons waiting in the summoning pool, and way, way more infernals were bred and kept classless for the purpose of forming the initial wave.”

“Okay,” Frost said. “I have a lot of questions.”

“Great!” said Ashtoreth. “Ask away.”

“The four aspects,” he said. “What’s strong about them? Why does that make humanity scary?”

“Well for one thing, it’s nice to be versatile. A wizard tends to have the [Spellcasting] aspect and then two other things—three other things instead is going to make for some pretty neat wizards, if you ask me. You’ll still get the same amount of advancements as me, but your class will be based on synthesizing four aspects, not three. Some of the hybrid abilities, like my [Consume Heart], are the strongest you can find. But that’s not really the whole of it.”

“How are his stats going to work?” Dazel asked.

“My stats?” Frost asked. “What should be different about my stats?”

“Your stats per level are determined by your race and class,” said Ashtoreth. “My S-grade race gives a total of 40, and my C-grade class gives 24. But with class, the stats that go up are determined by your aspects. So if you get a C-grade class, will it give 32 stats on a level? Probably not, but maybe you’ll get an A-grade class instead of a C-grade one.” She shrugged. “Who knows?”

“I suppose I should pick my last two aspects so I can find out,” Frost said.

“There’s more, though,” said Ashtoreth. “See, reproducing when you’re a magical species like me requires an investment in magical power. Even something like an elf, which is just an immortal with heightened senses, has to spend a lot of power to reproduce.”

“‘Just an immortal’,” echoed Frost.

“Immortality isn't that big a deal, trust me,” Ashtoreth assured him. “Not like an [Archfiend]. When you want to make someone like me, you’ve really got to spare no expense.”

His eyes flicked up to the sparkling diadem she was wearing. “I see.”

“Humans are a horde species. There’s no power investment to reproduction, and so there’s billions of you! If they got anything at all, it should have been something useful but weak, like darksight. Or something to do with your weirdly shaped ears.”

“Weird?” Frost asked, reaching up to touch one ear.

“And then there’s the fact that having a race that grants powers almost always narrows which aspects members of that race can choose. I was never going to get [Sacred], if you get my meaning.”

“Okay,” said Frost. “So we’re versatile and there’s a lot of us.”

“I guess that part got echoed into your fantasy and science fiction settings too,” said Ashtoreth. “But I never even thought about it. Anyway, there’s way more reasons to be worried about humans. I mean, have you seen all of the cool things you guys get up to without magic? For starters, you have the internet, and I mean—”

“Yeah, hold up,” said Dazel.

“What is it?” Ashtoreth said, looking around the forest to see if he’d noticed something.

“Nothing,” said Dazel. “I just figured you were about to go on forever about humans and I have questions of my own.”

“Hey!”

“Listen—why do you know that Hell is overprepared for this invasion in particular? What happened to operational security? The King wouldn’t just tell—” He paused, flicked his ears, then began again. “I mean, I don’t think the King would be telling just anyone how much force they’re mustering for….” Dazel’s voice faded suddenly. Then his voice grew low and suspicious: “Ashtoreth,” he said.

“Uh-huh?”

“Why does your shirt say ‘Pride’ on it?”

“You could have noticed that when I asked you how I looked, Dazel.”

“Ashtoreth.”

“Dazel.”

“Why’s he asking?” Frost said. “What are you two talking about? Is that her… favorite sin, or something?”

“Well yeah,” said Ashtoreth. “But it’s also my clan. If you’ve got it, you flaunt it, right?”

Dazel barked out a humorless laugh. “It’s a little more than her clan. It’s the rarest kind of infernal there is. She already told you that archfiends can’t just breed willy-nilly, right? The pride clan are the ones with the most possible power funneled into their creation. They’re also shameless eugenicists—they kill off the under-performing children so that the bloodline can only get stronger.”

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Well, okay,” Ashtoreth said. “It’s a little more than that. They don’t want the rest of us getting complacent. We’ll never reach our full potential if we think we’re so valuable that our parents won’t kill us! And I don’t actually have my race augment, yet—so in system terms, I’m just a regular archfiend. But since archfiend bloodlines are all meticulously, uh, curated….”

“To be clear,” Dazel said. “She’s talking about the part where they kill the children who disappoint them.”

“They… kill their children,” Frost said, voice quiet.

“Please, for a duke or a duchess of hell?” Dazel said. “Eating your kids is morally average.”

“Eating?” Frost asked, looking between them. “You only said killing.”

“Let me amend that, then,” said Dazel. “With archfiends, one tends to go with the other.”

Ashtoreth put her hands on her hips. “They don’t always eat us. But you have to think of things from their perspective! I mean, how many times in your life do you get to eat an archfiend? And no-one else is allowed to eat us, so are they just going to let the carcass go to waste?”

At Frost’s horrified expression, she added: “Look, I know it’s bad that they do that, okay? I’m just adding context.”

“Anyway,” Dazel continued. “The rest of the archfiends get to fight over who becomes what sin they’ll be for their whole lives, even though the racial upgrade is something most of them will never see. But pride? You have to be born to pride. You have to be made for it.” He sighed. “I should have figured you were pride.”

“Should have figured? Why do you say that?” Frost asked.

“Because I wrote it on my clothes three times?” Ashtoreth suggested.

“Not that,” said Dazel. He sighed. “Archfiends of pride are….”

“We’re the best,” Ashtoreth said matter-of-factly.

“...You eat your children,” said Frost.

“...Okay, that too.”

Dazel sighed. “I’d say that’s not helpful, but it’s actually fairly illustrative of what your kind is like.”

“Oh, my kind,” Ashtoreth said. “As if a demon from the Pit of Sorrows has met enough of us to form opinions.”

“So is that.”

She eyed her familiar sidelong—she’d been trying to bait him into telling her if he’d met any others with her last comment, but he hadn’t fallen for it.

So she was left to wonder: Had he met another archfiend? Just how old was he, and what was he doing before the Pit of Sorrow? Earlier he’d corrected himself in a way that had almost made it sound like he knew the King… but that was too ludicrous an idea to even consider, surely.

Surely….

“Look, I still have a lot of questions,” said Frost. “I don’t know Hell’s politics, but I want to. And I want to know more about this invasion. All of this information could be important, and—hold on. Bats.”

He pointed above them, at where a flock of giant bats with bladed, meter-long wings was passing above them, silhouettes against the blood moon.

Ashtoreth and Frost both froze. “Doesn’t look like they’ve spotted us,” he whispered.

“You’re right,” Ashtoreth said, frowning. She threw a firebolt at the crowd of bats, just grazing the one in the lead. The flock let out a series of ear-scraping screeches and turned toward them, diving.

“Got ‘em!” she said happily.

“I—you….” Frost spluttered.

“What?” Ashtoreth asked. “You’ve got a sacred shotgun and shearbats aren’t exactly the ninjas of the sky. Just waste them and if they get close, I’ll burn them out.”

“Right,” he said. “Stand clear.”

He raised his gun and she watched as blue fire flashed from the muzzle. He repeated this five times, striking five of the bats and knocking two of them clear out of the sky.

“Hmm,” Ashtoreth said, a little disappointed. He definitely hadn’t chosen his class yet. It was clear by their incredibly grating screeches that they were certainly feeling the sacred damage, but most of the bats still remained.

The cluster of bats was almost upon them, now, each of them flying close together. “Get back and take cover,” she told Frost.

Then she fell to her knees, unshouldered her sword, aimed carefully, and launched it at the bats. The counterforce pressed her knees into the mulch at her feet, and the sword gleamed red in the light of the bloody moon as it rushed toward the flock of their enemies.

The shearbats broke apart a little as the blade came, but not fast enough: sparks flew as it one of the bats in the middle, shearing through both the blade on its wing and its skull.

Then Ashtoreth caused the sword to burst into hellfire, engulfing the oncoming flock in a plume of heat and flame that caused their fur to ignite. She used her new [Hellfire Consumption] upgrade to ignite the flesh and blood of the bat she’d killed with her first blow, adding to the sudden cloud of flame.

{You receive 8 [Shearbat Core]; Tier 1}

Engulfed in violet fire, the remaining bats fell from the sky and into the forest in front of them. Not one of them survived the explosion.

“What the hell was that?” Frost asked, shielding his eyes and turning away from the wave of intense heat.

“A pair of ignitions,” Ashtoreth said, feeling the heat of the fire in her eyes as she stared at it and smiled. “Wasn’t it wonderful? Sorry if it’s too hot—there’s an aura ability I can take that will give you immunity, soon.” She paused, looking out at the burning swathe of forest where there had once been a flock of shearbats. “I took that ability instead. You probably understand.”

“Uh, sure.”

“I’m gonna go put those fires out and steal some hearts,” Ashtoreth said. “Come on.”

“I think I just lost my eyebrows,” Frost said.

“Sorry!” Ashtoreth said. “But like I said, I didn’t take the upgrade that would let me protect you because there was one that granted a bigger explosion. You get it.”

Soon she was absorbing the flames from the bats to fill her [Bloodfire] and store the rest within her locket.

“I suppose it’s not good if we burn the forest down, huh?” Frost asked, watching her suck the last of the fire into her sword.

“Definitely not,” Ashtoreth said matter-of-factly. “It’ll draw attention, there could be people in it, and I might need it later. The forest, I mean.”

“Need it later? For what?”

“For the dragon,” she said, rolling her shoulders. She turned to Frost. “Did you choose your aspects yet?”

“No,” he said. “I got distracted by… everything. I’ll do that now.”

“Great!” she said. “I’ll give you three more cores so that we’re even, too. Here.”

He took the cores, and she absorbed the rest:

{Absorbed 5 Shearbat Core; Tier 1}

{Ding! You level up and gain 11 DEX, 11 STR, 15 VIT, 13 MAG, 7 PSY, 7 DEF}

{Reaching level 6 has granted advancement. Choose one of your progression paths other than [Hellfire].}

“Well hey,” said Ashtoreth. “What do you know. I guess the boss core put me closer than I thought—I’m level 6!”

Time to see what she’d gotten.