“This was your plan all along?” Frost asked.
“Uh-huh,” she said quietly.
“And you said nothing!” he said. “You weren’t going to ask us until the very end?”
“Come on,” said Kylie. “Use your head, Frost. She was never going to ask. She’s probably going to use whatever her stupid thing is whether we said yes or no.”
“Why would she have told us this way if she didn’t care what we thought?” Frost said to Kylie. “Why bother with the honesty when pressed at all?” He turned back to Ashtoreth. “Right, Ashtoreth?”
Ashtoreth sighed and looked away. “You want me to be honest, right?”
Frost tilted his head, regarding her with disbelieving eyes. “Ashtoreth?”
“That’s one of the things I like most about humans,” she said wistfully, staring up at the hazy red moon. “When they start to trust each other, they stop having to watch their own backs and only watch each other’s… cooperation becomes much more efficient that way. The advantages of complete trust must be extraordinary. Or so it seems.”
“Ashtoreth, if I tell you that I don’t want to spend a year in this place, that I won’t be one of your soldiers….” he let the sentence hang.
“I want you to like me,” she said, looking at him apologetically. “I want it so much, you have no idea. I’ve dreamed of making friends with humans since I was a girl. But trust is more important.”
“Ashtoreth, what are you saying?” Frost asked.
“The closer that Earth comes to the inner realms, the more powerful the entities that assault you will be,” she explained. “Even if somehow humanity manages to fight off Hell… well, that will take years of constant war. And it’ll change Earth and humanity forever. Then, once you’re finished, assuming you win… you’ll be easier pickings for the rest of the inner realms.”
She lowered her head to look Frost in the eyes. “But you won’t win. My people will kill most humans, then take the rest as slaves to be traded to the other realms or converted into demons in the Pits of Hell. The best possible outcome for a human will be to escape Earth and flee to one of the more peaceful inner realms… but there they’ll still be weak compared to the other inhabitants, and likely live lives of exploitation even if they aren’t made slaves, which many will be.”
Her voice was steely, firm. “The tutorial either ends or it doesn’t, Sir Frost. We either all leave, or we all stay. I can’t send you home and remain myself… which means you’re staying.”
Kylie sneered, turning to Frost. “Told you,” she said.
“I’m not giving you or anyone else who survives a choice,” Ashtoreth said.
“Like Hell I am,” Kylie said, raising a hand.
“No!” Frost roared, so loudly that she started. “No one is fighting one another—are you insane? We need to talk about this.”
“Talk about the fact that we’re all following a fucking demon who lies to us when she sees fit and doesn’t care about our free will?” said Kylie. “Sure, let’s talk—but what possible conclusions are there to be made, here?”
“She’s right.”
It was Hunter. Frost and Kylie both stopped, then turned to him.
“She’s right,” he repeated, looking someplace past them. “Do the math. The free choice of a handful of us isn’t more important than the survival of our species. The system itself told us that we were in our own separate time.”
“How very self-sacrificing of you, Hunter,” said Kylie. “Condemning me to a year with you lot just so you can better live out whatever gross fantasy you’re clearly enjoying right now.”
“My mother and girlfriend are back on Earth,” said Hunter. “And I’d cut your throat to increase their chance of survival by just one percent.” He rested a hand on one sword-hilt.
“Oh,” said Kylie, her voice dripping with sarcasm as if she was about to let loose an insult. Then she seemed to fully realize what he’d said, and her eyes widened. She blanched.
“Relax, you two!” Frost said. “And Christ, Hunter—don’t say something like that.”
“But it’s true.”
“We need to have a calm discussion about this,” said Frost. He looked from Hunter to Ashtoreth. “Look,” he said. “I’m not saying that what you’re saying doesn’t make sense. I’m not saying that you’re not right if you’re telling the truth.”
“I’m saying that!” Kylie said. “We already know that she hides whatever it’s convenient to hide. What happens a year from now when we find out that time wasn’t actually frozen, when we come back to a ruined Earth because Ashtoreth already knew that was the best possible outcome and decided to lie? How many other places is she lying to us to get her to play along with her real plan?”
“This was it,” said Ashtoreth. “I swear.”
“God damnit, Ashtoreth.” Frost shook his head. “I felt sorry for you, before,” he said, hurt in his eyes. His face contorted with anger for a moment, and then even that expression faded. He just looked tired. “Is this the real you? Calculating? Deceitful? The smile gone from your face as soon as you’re not getting exactly what you want?”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
She winced. “I’m sorry, Sir Frost. I swear to you—my smile’s never fake.”
“But it is conditional,” Kylie said.
“I don’t understand you two,” said Hunter. He shrugged. “She’s right. It made sense not to tell us right away. If we’d left her to go on our own, we’d probably all be dead—she’s done everything she can to save as many humans as possible.”
“If she’s telling the truth about everything,” said Kylie. “Which is clearly unlikely.”
“Oh, be quiet, all of you—you’ve had enough time to process and bicker.”
It was Dazel. He beat his wings, slowly rising into the air until he was on a level with Ashtoreth, then moved to hover right in front of her so that they were, for the first time, face to face.
“You expect me to shut up because you tell me to?” Kylie asked.
“Wait,” said Frost, peering at Dazel.
Dazel spoke, and his voice was deeper, steadier, more commanding. “Show it to me.”
Ashtoreth raised an eyebrow. “Done playing around, then, Dazel?”
“Show it to me,” he said in an intense hiss. “If you have what I think you have… the things you could do….”
“I know what I can do,” she said.
“Oh, Ashtoreth,” he said. “You couldn’t possibly know what one can accomplish with even the weakest of shards. Show it me; I want to see just how much power you stole.”
“Maybe you give me too little credit.”
“I’ll give you more credit than I’d guess most of the infernals in Hell would give,” he said. “I know what you are. I can see what you’re capable of. Believe it or don’t; it matters little to me. But if you stole what I think you did, you don’t know what you’re holding. Ashtoreth.”
She reached out with one hand and grabbed him by the neck. “Freeze,” she commanded.
Dazel stiffened in her hand.
Then, raising her other hand, she called forth the thing she’d stolen from her mother when she’d fled the Paradise Citadel.
A small collection of glowing orange splinters appeared above her palm, glimmering like the fragments of a broken crystal. The splinters had strange, alien geometries shifting inside them.
An antithesis shard.
She held it out for only a moment, quickly stowing it by absorbing it again before her command wore off.
Dazel blinked, pulling himself out of her grip to resume hovering in the air and staring at her.
“So you know what that is, Dazel?” Ashtoreth asked. “Is that why you and I were paired together?”
“Do you know how much of a waste this is?” he asked. “The things you could be doing with that shard….”
“You lack the proper perspective,” she said. “Hijacking a tutorial demi-realm is worthwhile if it saves Earth.”
“That shard—do you have any idea what your mother wanted it for?”
“To hurt dad, probably.”
“That thing could reverse one of the currents of the cosmos,” he said. “Rewrite the rules of a whole species. Fracture time itself….”
“—Or save Earth,” she said, letting a note of finality enter into her voice.
“No,” Dazel said.
“No?” she asked.
“You want something else, don’t you?”
Slowly, Ashtoreth shook her head. “It makes me sad that you don’t believe me, Dazel,” she said. “But I’ve told you the truth this whole time. I want to save them.”
“No!" He said again. “There’s no way you’d waste that shard on this! That much power? No, somehow this tutorial is about something else. You have some other game, Ashtoreth. What do you want to do with that shard?”
Ashtoreth and Kylie both began to speak at once, but they were interrupted almost instantly—by a newcomer.
Bright, white light shone down into the small valley they stood in, and a clear, female voice rang out in the air around them:
“You’re asking the wrong questions!”
Ashtoreth felt a surge of pure terror emanate out from her gut to the rest of her body as she heard, and recognized, the voice.
She turned to the humans. All of them had raised a hand to shield their eyes as they turned toward the source of the voice somewhere behind her. “Run,” she told them. “Run, now!”
Then she turned to regard the speaker: the silhouette of a teenaged girl standing on a stony outcropping that jutted from the hillside, illuminated by a set of conjured floodlights.
“So anxious to get going?” she asked, raising a hand to conjure the outline of a top hat. “Don’t worry—you’ll be leaving soon!”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Kylie said from somewhere behind Ashtoreth. “Don’t tell me that’s—”
“—But first, one tiny correction!” The silhouette drew a long rod out of her top hat, then twirled it in the air before abruptly stopping.
Three identical top hats with question marks emblazoned on their fronts appeared in the air before her.
“The question isn’t what her mother wanted with it!” the shadow said. She waved her wand and one of the hats was sliced in two, spattering blood across the forest as the air filled with the sound of Ashtoreth’s mother screaming.
“It’s not what Ashtoreth wanted with it!” Ashtoreth heard her own voice let out a sharp howl of agony as another of the hats was shredded, releasing a fine mist of illusory gore filled with gleaming strands of violet hair.
“No, ladies and gentlemen of the audience—it must be seen to be believed, but the only person here who matters… is me!”
The silhouette raised her arm, pointing the rod at the final top. Both she and hat burst into a flock of sparkling crows that scattered into the forest around them… but as this happened, a figure was catapulted out of where the top hat had been, backflipping several times to land where the silhouette had stood, arms spread wide.
Fearful of the number she was about to see, Ashtoreth checked her sister’s level:
{Archfiend Pluto — Level 51 Boss}
“No….” she whispered. Pluto was 23 levels ahead of her.
Ashtoreth’s youngest sister ran a hand along the brim of her magician’s top hat and flashed them a toothy smile as her tail cracked at the air behind her. Her hair was a perfectly straight curtain of azure, a color matched by her sparkling tailcoat.
“Ask yourselves, ladies and gentlemen!” she cried, her voice booming out across the clearing. “What am I going to do with that antithesis shard?”
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