“No one move,” Ashtoreth hissed, her eyes on the sky. She formed one hand into a claw because the points of her fingers allowed for finer, more precise manipulation of glamour, then began to weave an illusion about them, covering them in false bushes.

  It only took her a few seconds, but her heart thundered in her chest as she did it, her eyes on the dark shadow that was coming nearer to them, flying over the edge of the lava-lake.

  {Black Dragon Crucifect — Level 50 Boss}

  It came closer, close enough that she could see how its scales warped the reflection of the lava pool beneath it. It was a dragon with demonic, not divine, ancestry: it had the body of a great predator lizard, not a serpent. The humans would have called it a western dragon.

  As it came closer, she saw that it was male: she could tell on account of the metallic gray beard and the flared profile of the lower jaw.

  Closer still, and she could see the glint of his red eyes, make out the burnished black metal barb that had been hammed through his tail. He swept his gaze from side to side as he flew, eyes scanning the ground below him.

  At level 50, his truesight wouldn’t be strong enough to see through even a weak glamour like hers at such a great distance. He would need to have patrolled further out from the lava lake for that.

  Or so she hoped. She might be able to escape an attacking dragon, but the humans would be finished if they were seen.

  In silence, they watched him through a gap in the trees. He soared through the sky at the edge of the lava-lake, wings spread, occasionally angling them to shed some velocity, but never flapping them to gain more air.

  Interesting, Ashtoreth thought. She guessed that their environs were shielded from the lake’s heat by magic, but that the sky directly above the lake was not. The dragon was flying very silently by taking advantage of the hot air rising off the lake. In fact….

  Ashtoreth licked a finger and stuck it in the air. Sure enough, a light breeze was blowing toward the lake. Cool air being drawn into a zone of low pressure.

  Useful knowledge? Her wings weren’t very functional, physically, but maybe once her stats were high enough that her racial flight ability could do most of the lifting, she could catch an updraft and cut her way toward the central citadel.

  Provided the dragon was dead.

  She might be able to tire him out if she brought him away from the lava lake: a dragon’s flight was magical, like her own, but at level 50 he’d still need to do a lot of wing-flapping to stay aloft with no updraft.

  Soon the dragon had passed out of sight, and she could feel the tension easing out of her companions beside her.

  “Back to exposition,” she said, her voice a little lower than its old volume. “The dragon is a good example of how Hell prepares itself to metagame the system,” Ashtoreth said. “He’ll be a fairly young dragon, one raised in Hell for the express purpose of this invasion. That means he’ll be like me: he’s been kept classless for his entire life.”

  “Really?” Hunter said.

  “Yeah. I started from nothing today, just like you.”

  “But you, uh, seem to know what you’re doing….” Hunter said.

  “We’ll get to me in a minute,” she said. “See, the system controls travel between the inner realms and the outer ones.”

  “Like Earth,” said Frost.

  “Yep! And because everyone on Earth is starting at level 1, Hell has to start its invasion with low-level infernals. As Earth gets closer to the inner realms, the troops they can send will get stronger.”

  “To give us a chance,” said Hunter.

  “Uh-huh! The dragon and I were both trained to fight at various different power levels and with many different fighting styles using buff spells, alchemical items, and outright illusory realities so that we could drop into the invasion and proceed to power through getting our classes, then get ahead of the curve and destroy everyone. Of course, it got drafted in as a boss, maybe even the final boss, of this tutorial.”

  “Sorry, wait,” Hunter began. “There’s a chance that he’s not the final boss?”

  “Uh-huh!” Ashtoreth chirped. Then, seeing Hunter’s expression, she added: “Think about the silver lining—more power for all of us if there’s an even stronger boss!”

  Hunter seemed to ponder this, then gave a conciliatory nod of his head.

  “Not everyone has been trained from birth, though, right?” Frost asked. “The demons we’ve been fighting, they’re not even intelligent. Are they strong because they’re all just a higher grade race and class, or something?”

  “Not quite,” said Ashoreth. “The system would account for that, somewhat. There’s sort of a lot of things at play with them, but the main one is pack instincts—almost every low level creature in Hell that isn’t intelligent is something that tends to group up to attack others, then retreat when it’s alone.”

  “The hounds, the bats, the carnage demons and the beetles,” said Frost.

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  “Uh-huh!” Ashtoreth said. “That way when the system grabs a bunch of dumb brutes to form the horde of level 1 to 10s that it needs to populate a tutorial, the demons don’t just wander around solo waiting to get ambushed by a party. They’ll find allies and hunt as packs.”

  “Picking off the humans if they can’t quickly find allies themselves,” Frost said grimly.

  “Exactly!” said Ashtoreth. “Most of them are built for speed, not brawn, so they can form groups before the tutorial-goers.”

  “Those beetles were pretty fast,” said Hunter.

  “And as their levels get higher, they get a broader mix of abilities so that they can endanger even those with highly specialized defenses,” said Ashtoreth. “But that’s just one example. There’s also the fact that Hell has a wide enough collection of demons to always have a terrain advantage. And that’s just talking about the brutes. Once we get to the higher levels, we’ll start to run into monsters like Dazel.”

  “Uh. Me?” Dazel asked.

  “Dazel is probably ten times older than all of us put together,” Ashtoreth said. “And he has knowledge of an extraordinary number of things, even if he’s not sharing it.”

  She felt him shrinking a little from where he sat on her wings with his paws on her shoulders. “Uh, I do?”

  “The way that the hierarchy of Hell works means that as infernals fail their superiors and fall out grace, they’re stripped of their power and cast down into the lower ranks, usually one of the pits. Once there, they have a chance at rising through the ranks again… but no matter how high they rise, they can always fall.”

  “So the low levels that the system will pit against low-level humans are like specialized forces?” Frost asked. “Demons who know much more about the system, about fighting—hell, about everything—than us?”

  “Exactly!” she said, giving him an encouraging smile. “It’s something Hell is known for, sometimes even in human media. Summoning takes more resources the higher-level something is, but if you just want information? Well, Hell is full of easily-summonable infernals who have lifetimes worth of knowledge to trade. Across the realms, it’s fairly well-known that demonic and diabolic tutors know how to get you pretty much anything you want.”

  “Heh,” said Hunter.

  Ashtoreth smiled at him. “If you’ve got questions, they’ve got answers,” she continued. “But what that means when Hell is populating a tutorial is that once you get past the brutes with bestial intelligences, you wind up fighting infernals who know exactly what they’re doing.”

  “Like the huntsman,” Dazel added. “Tell them about the huntsman boss.”

  “Good idea,” said Ashtoreth. “You weren’t here for it, Hunter, but the last boss I fought had a defense-stacking build that controlled a whole lot of hellhounds. Because the hounds were already trained, and already doing something close to their nature, he only needed minimal psychic power to control a large number of them. And because he was defense-stacking, anyone who was likely to have the crowd-management and area-of-effect abilities to deal with the hounds was unlikely to be able to hurt him.”

  “Huh,” said Frost. “So that’s how that guy worked.”

  “It was a fully functional build,” said Ashtoreth. “One that was tailored to killing people new to the system. He wasn’t much higher in level than the first boss I fought, but he was much harder. And you can expect that sort of difficulty from almost all the low-level intelligent creatures that come out of Hell. Instead of being the youngest, least experienced people from a given realm, it’s all the infernals who… well, it’s sort of like the people who most recently lost their jobs.”

  “And the system doesn’t care enough about this to fix it?” Hunter asked. “I mean sure, Earth isn’t as militaristic as it could be, but we don’t even know the system exists. We can’t possibly have given ourselves these advantages—it’s imbalanced.”

  Ashtoreth shrugged. “I’m sure the system makes some adjustment for the fact that they’re more skilled and knowledgeable than any other type of creature at that level, but it’s not a big adjustment—in a way, the system appreciates and rewards that kind of manipulative strategizing.”

  “Okay,” Frost said, nodding his head and considering this. “There’s something I still don’t understand. If all of this is true, then why would the Devil be afraid of us? Humans, I mean?”

  “I also want to know that,” Hunter said. “Honestly, you make it sound like we’re, uh… doomed.”

  “There’s a few things that work in your favor that I haven’t told you about, yet,” said Ashtoreth. “Also, the King of Hell is a fiend, not a devil.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  Dazel snickered.

  “Okay,” Ashtoreth said, holding up her hands. “O-kay. That’s definitely another thing we need to get to. Infernals are classified as demons, devils, or fiends, and fiends are a mix of the first two—but there’s more to say about that. For now, we should talk about humans. See, Frost says he’s got four aspects as a part of his class.”

  “Yeah,” said Hunter. “Me too. It’s the human racial. Is that strange?”

  “Yep!” said Ashtoreth. “Strange and wonderful for you. The thing is, all other races I know of will only get three. And I wasn’t just making stuff up to push you out of the decision making process earlier when I was talking about versatility. Classes made of four aspects are probably much more versatile than the rest.”

  “I wouldn’t be able to heal if it weren’t for my fourth aspect,” Frost said.

  “Exactly. You might even be getting more stats per level than everyone else, but I doubt it.

  “I have a C grade class granting 24 stats a level.”

  “Okay, so same as me,” said Ashtoreth. “But still, the fact that you all get that ability without any magical investment to reproduce means that you can add even more power onto your existing race. Theoretically, the potential that every human has is higher than—” She frowned suddenly, cocking her head to listen. “I think I hear something.”

  Moments later they crested a small hill and she saw that she was right: she’d definitely heard something.

  Below them, gathered in a small clearing along the banks of a tiny brook, were dozens of carnage demons. They were fighting one another to get at something, but there so many carnage demons heaped atop it that it was hard to tell what it was.

  The demons turned toward them as they crested the hill. One of them distended its jaw to howl at them with a hungry fury, and then the rest of the followed suit. They began to move toward the party, revealing what they’d been eating: it was the corpse of an animal that was the size of a minivan, unrecognizable on account of how much of it had already been eaten. Blood covered the ground around it and was smeared across the claws and mouths of the pack of predators.

  “That’s a lot of carnage demons,” Hunter muttered.

  “Is that what those are?” Ashtoreth asked, letting out a giggle as she unshouldered her greatsword. “Because to me they just look like huge group of explosive barrels with power cores inside them.”