Almost a minute later, her [Blood] was full. She’d swallowed a lot of air, and once she sat up she let out a loud, boisterous burp.
“Okay,” Ashtoreth said, wiping her mouth from where she knelt over the corpse of the hellhound. “That took longer than I liked.”
The trick was probably to drink from still-living creatures, ones with pumping hearts. Then she could kill them and eat some flesh.
A moment later her thought process was interrupted by a swift shadow moving in her peripheral vision. Another hound had sped through the entrance at the end of the hall. It hadn’t even stopped to growl at her, just charged.
Ultimately, it was good news.
But for now it had caught her off-guard.
The hound’s weight barreled into her just as she lifted a wrist to cover her neck. She felt the back of her skull slam into the stone beneath them as the hound grabbed at her wrist with its superheated teeth, each of them sinking into her arm and scraping across the bone with a quick flash of agony.
She turned her palm toward the creature and conjured a gout of hellfire, scorching its face. It released her arm, leaping away from her, and she loosed two more plumes of fire to keep it at bay as she scrambled to her feet.
As soon as she had her balance, she let out another small flash of flame to distract the hound, then lunged, dropping onto the dog and pinning it under one knee.
For a moment the hellhound was in a frenzy, thrashing from where it lay sideways on the ground—then Ashtoreth punched a clawed hand into its neck, spilling its blood across the dark stone.
{You gain 1 [Hellhound Core]; Tier 1}
“Eugh,” she said, her regeneration closing the wounds on her arm. “Just eat all the tier 1 essences.”
{You absorb 1 [Hellhound Core]; Tier 1. You are 66% of the way toward advancement}
No sooner had she done this than she looked up to see another hellhound in the doorway. This one had the sense to pause and regard her now that she wasn’t distracted with her teeth in something’s neck.
“Say,” she said to it. “Do you have a friend, by any chance?”
Two more hounds joined the first.
She yanked a bloody hand out of the dead hound beneath her and grinned. “Works for me!”
The three hounds came all at once, and she cupped her hands before her and released a large plume of hellfire once she was sure their momentum would take them into the worst of it. The central hound took the brunt of the blast, most of its fur bursting into flames as the other two veered around it.
Ashtoreth was moving to bodycheck one even as she shot her flames, careening into it as it moved to one side and pushing it into the wall of the corridor. It struggled under her weight, and she thrust her clawed hand into its neck, twisted, then ripped out a fistful of hot gore.
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{You gain and absorb 1 [Hellhound Core]; Tier 1}
She felt a sudden, sharp pain in her tail, then was dragged backward as one of the hounds—the one not on fire—yanked her backwards, then bit clean through the thin appendage. She spun just in time to see the hellhound slam into her, its weight bearing her to the ground.
Its jaws gnashed as it went for her neck, its clawed front paws shredding the flesh in her shoulders. She grabbed it by the neck with both hands to keep it at bay, then squeezed, gouging deep holes into its neck as its breath steamed from its mouth and flecks of its hot spittle struck her face.
Her claws sank deeper and deeper, until:
{You gain and absorb 1 [Hellhound Core]; Tier 1}
{Congratulations! You’ve absorbed enough power to choose your first Class Aspect!}
She smiled, then turned to see that the first hound had run a ways away from the fight, then simply begun writhing on the ground in pain. Most of the flames had been extinguished, but it was still hideously burned.
She pinned it under one knee and roasted its head until its eyes boiled and she got the system notification:
{You gain and absorb 1 [Hellhound Core]; Tier 1}
“Well that went well,” she said, standing and looking around at the corpses. “I could really use a weapon, though.”
She looked at the corpse of the woman she’d spawned near to. Even though the system had implied that everyone who didn’t have demonic claws would be armed, the woman had nothing.
Perhaps she’d been given a choice of a weapon, but failed to respond to it. She’d seemed pretty addled.
Still, Ashtoreth would have greatly appreciated it if the woman could have picked up a nice, fat sword before she’d fed her throat to a common dog.
She walked back to where she’d fought the other two hounds while her wounds healed, grabbed half her tail off the floor, then reattached it using regeneration.
All the while, she could feel her excitement growing at the prospect of choosing her first class aspect. Each aspect would grant her a new ability. When she had three, they’d form a class together—and each one of them would become one of that class’s three progression paths.
She’d never gotten to choose even a single aspect. She’d been bred and raised for the invasion of Earth, after all, and only the weakest infernals could be sent through the initial portals. As time went on and Earth drifted closer to the inner realms, stronger infernals would be able to make the journey.
Ashtoreth and her sisters had not just been meant to join the invasion as soon as possible, but to join the tutorials that the humans would get. That had meant keeping her classless.
Still, she’d practiced combat using a lot using buff spells, magic items, and in some cases outright illusory training simulations in order to grow accustomed to various stat benchmarks and abilities. The idea was that while the humans were all bumbling about and figuring out how to handle new levels and tiers, Ashtoreth could be on the ground, a skilled fighter capable of commanding the legions of Hell.
At least until the older archfiends could arrive.
Normally this should have been her chance to finally make her mark after all her years of training… and technically, she was.
Just on the wrong side.
The humans in this place would be choosing from a very broad set of aspects that were based on their accomplishments and personalities. Ashtoreth would be no different, but her powerful race would affect her options as well. She’d get a much narrower selection.
“Okay,” she muttered to herself, rolling her shoulders and psyching herself up. “Here we go. Show me what you got:”
A moment later the system message appeared:
{Choose an Aspect}