To the system, she said: “[Hellfire], please.”
{Advance [Hellfire]}
{Choose an advancement to gain, then choose to retain or replace all other options}
Upgrade [Hellfire] with [Hellfire Efficiency I]:
The cost of conjuring hellfire is reduced by 20%.
Upgrade [Hellfire] with [Hellfire Aura]:
Creatures in close proximity to your hellfire are affected by any auras you possess.
Gain a beneficial aura that renders allies immune to damage from your hellfire.
Upgrade [Hellfire] with [Hellfire Blast]:
When using the [Hellfire Bolt] upgrade for the [Hellfire] ability, you can spend time charging the bolt so that it causes an explosion on contact.
This costs a moderate to high amount of [Bloodfire]. The more time spent charging, the higher the cost and the larger the explosion.
“Oh, wow,” Ashtoreth said, momentarily regretting that she had allies. “Someone’s getting retained. You guys, I’m going to get to throw fireballs!”
“You don’t already?” Frost asked.
“Huge fireballs! But for now I’ve gotta start building my aura. I already took explosive bursts over protecting you from my hellfire once already—twice feels greedy.”
{You upgraded your [Hellfire] ability with [Hellfire Aura]}
“Thank you!” Ashtoreth said, turning to them. “Okay, you guys can see an aura in your buffs, right? Dazel, stick your head up.”
“Uh, why?” he asked cautiously.
“I can see it,” Hunter said.
“I can too,” Dazel said, his voice close to her ear. “But—ah!”
Ashtoreth had immersed him in a gout of flame. “Do you feel any pain?” she asked, speaking loudly to be heard over the rush of flames.
“Nothing physical, boss,” Dazel said.
“Great!” Ashtoreth said. “I don’t have to worry about friendly fire. Now to harvest these roasted bat hearts.” She hefted her messenger bag of hearts as she moved toward the closest corpse and tore its heart out. “This thing’s getting full. I might end up with so many hearts that I have to throw some out when they lose freshness.”
“Say, boss,” said Dazel. “The trail of torn-out hearts you leave behind you can be like your calling card. That’s how people will know they’re following the good archfiend.”
Ashtoreth tore free another heart with a squelch. “Exactly!” she said. “After all—they’ll see that they’re all infernal hearts. Speaking of—” She turned to Frost. “Are you hungry? I haven’t seen you drink anything since we started. I know those bullets aren’t free.”
Frost opened his mouth speak and seemed to hesitate for a moment. “They’re… not free,” he said. “But they’re cheap. I’ll be fine.”
Ashtoreth tore another heart from one of the vivinsects. “But you don’t regenerate [Blood] the way that the living regenerate [Health]. Here: I’ll leave that one with its heart still in, and then you can drink yourself up to full! Dig in!”
She indicated a nearby vivinsect corpse whose head she’d pulverized with her greatsword. It lay with its legs askew in the air, guts oozing from the hole where its head had been.
“Uh… no thanks.”
“Do you want me to tear away some of its armor plating for you?”
“Actually, my class makes it so that all my buffs grant me regeneration,” Frost said. “It’s slow, but it’ll suffice.”
“Look,” Ashtoreth began, resisting the urge to put her hands on her hips. “This is all important, remember? Try it! You’ll love it. You’re made to love it, now.”
Frost’s eyes were still fixed on the dead giant insect. “I’ve never drank a creature’s blood before… and it wasn’t because I wasn’t getting resources for it.”
“Look, I get that it’ll feel a little weird at first. Right now… it’s like you’re a blood virgin.”
“No, nope,” Frost said, shaking his head. “Just never say that again, Ashtoreth.”
“I don’t get it,” she said, frowning and putting a hand on her chin. “I’ve seen human food. How can you like stuff like hot dogs and jell-o, but not the still-warm blood of the enemy you just killed to grow in power?” She gestured to the corpse. “Just think of it as farm-to-table!”
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“Listen,” said Hunter. “I’d probably drink it if I were a vampire—”
“Not helping,” said Frost.
“—but drinking demon blood tends to go very badly in human lore,” Hunter finished. He paused, then added: “By which I mean Warcraft lore.” He paused again, then added: “But probably any other lore where it happens, too. You know technically, in Warcraft, it actually happens twice. Once when—”
“Thank you, Hunter,” Frost said brusquely. He turned to Ashtoreth. “Look: you like humans, right?”
“Heck yeah!”
“Well Hunter said it best: we’re against drinking blood. Even of our enemies.” His eyes flicked over to the dead insect. “Especially of demons.”
“But it could—”
“Drop it, Ashtoreth,” he said firmly. “I know you mean well, but I’d like to stay as human as possible from here on out.”
“Fine,” she said. She wondered how long Frost’s strange compunctions would last. She doubted that his buff-spell regeneration would keep him from ever getting hungry. And then….
“Oooh,” said Dazel. “Are you gonna take that from him, boss?”
“...Yes?” she said confusedly. Why wouldn’t she?
“Oh,” said Dazel. “Okay then.”
“Listen,” said Frost. “Before we find another flock of demons, I’d really like to get to some of my questions about everything that’s going on.”
“I uh, also have questions,” said Hunter. “Like….” He peered at Frost. “Well, you’re a vampire.”
“Yes.”
“How’d you become a vampire? I thought you were a cop.”
“He’s a paladin,” Ashtoreth said. “It’s sort of a long story.”
“It’s not,” said Frost. “I arrested her on Earth for… well for being herself, then she shot me in the head when the apocalypse started because uploading into the tutorial while between life and death grants you an undead augment. I chose vampire.”
“Oh,” said Hunter. “Huh. So if I’d shot myself when the tutorial was starting, I’d have been stronger?”
“Uh-huh!”
“If you think becoming undead is worth it,” said Frost.
“I’d have been stronger, though,” Hunter said, as if this explained, inarguably, that of course it was worth it.
“Back to Frost,” said Ashtoreth. “Ask your questions, and I promise that this time we won’t all start talking about something else. I’m sort of easily distractible sometimes.”
“Thanks, Ashtoreth,” he said, smiling a little. It might have been the first time she’d seen him smile. “Explain the invasion, please. You said that the devil was afraid of humans?”
“Afraid of us?” Hunter asked.
“Uh, not really the devil,” Dazel said.
“Okay, I’ll get to those things,” Ashtoreth said, holding up a bloody hand to quiet them. “I got my hearts—let’s head out when I explain.”
They continued moving along the edge of the forest, keeping the lake of fire in sight and searching for more flocks of demons.
“I suppose I should explain the system first,” Ashtoreth said. “I know that to you guys it looks like a video game, but really you can just think of it as a near-omnipotent cosmic entity that brokers power. The best theory as to why it does this by passing out discrete quantities through universally understandable entries of information is that it’s somehow antithetical to the incomprehensible eldritch entities of pure chaos that lurk at the edges of the multiverse.”
“O-kay,” Frost said. “Certain new questions have been raised, but go on.”
“The thing to understand is that the system wants balance. It wants two forces to collide, violently, but in a way where the winner has won by proving something. Now, balance doesn’t mean fairness: the strong getting stronger will always be a law that’s hard-baked into reality, system or no. But the system does what it can to make it so that skill plays a factor, almost always. It wants the high-level, multiversal superpowers to have gotten there because they can contend with strife.”
“And that’s why we’re getting a tutorial?” Frost asked. “I have to say, this hasn’t seemed very balanced. I….” His voice grew frayed, distressed. “Honestly, this doesn’t seem anything close to fair, Ashtoreth. I think that most of the people who started here have been slaughtered.”
“I’ll get there,” she said. “One thing you need to know is that the system’s desire for balance can be… I don’t know, metagamed. It can be manipulated, but only to a point. But that makes sense: using the system to get ahead is itself an expression of skill, right? So that’s what Hell does.”
“I guess it’s not surprising,” said Hunter. “Hell plays as unfairly as it can get away with, right?”
“Right,” said Ashtoreth. “But all of this inferred from how the system behaves, not something it told anyone. And I should probably also mention that a lot of what’s balanced is between potentials, not what actually happened.”
“Potentials?” Hunter asked. “What does that mean?”
“If the system makes two people fight, and only one of them has any combat knowledge, but both of them could have learned combat knowledge, then the fight is fair. The fact that the person who knows how to fight will win doesn’t matter.”
“So it doesn’t force fifty-fifty outcomes,” said Frost.
“Nope!” said Ashtoreth. “Which is important for understanding what’s going on now. Earth couldn’t be a militaristic multiversal superpower that aggressively games every part of the system that it can, because it had no way of knowing the system existed.”
“But it could have been more prepared than it is,” Frost said, his tone shifting to one of dismay.
“Right. It could’ve been far more militaristic and invasion-ready right now. Surely in some histories, humans could have landed in a place where almost all of them had military training and access to firearms.”
“In some places, they do,” said Frost.
“Exactly. So if Earth is at a disadvantage because it’s not optimized for inter-state war while Hell is, the system won’t care. Now the system does do a lot to balance the scales on account of Hell’s foreknowledge of the system, but Hell games all of them as hard as it can. I don’t know about you two, but before we came here, the system told me that it was populating a list of potential tutorial zones… and Hell was the only item on that list.”
“Same,” said Hunter.
“Really?” Frost asked. “Mine had two others on it. Uh… ‘the Abyssal Rift’ and ‘the Deadlight Shard’.”
“Okay, so Hunter’s bloodline made the system consider him baseline stronger than you,” said Ashtoreth. “But there’s a reason that Hell was the tippy-top of the list, with no equals. Hell is deliberately constructed and ordered so that when a bunch of its lowest level infernals are drafted into a tutorial, they’re horrifically effective. It’s a point of pride among the aristocracy that ‘Hell’ is synonymous with the hardest difficulty… something humans have picked up on through the—”
“Dragon,” Frost said, his voice suddenly a whisper.
“No,” said Ashtoreth, frowning. “The—oh, wait.” She looked up into the sky. “You meant the dragon.”
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