Within the confines of her illusory bedroom, Dazel passed her page after page of the contract he wrote out in diabolic script on conjured, translucent sheets of paper. Ashtoreth read them all through a pair of waspish glasses that she’d conjured with her diadem.
She couldn’t find anything duplicitous in the wording. As was typical, the fulfillment of the terms was partly reliant on her own perceptions: she couldn’t betray what she knew the spirit of the contract to be even if she found some loophole in his wording.
Neither could he: it was void if he tried to squirrel some secret clause within it, tried to bind her to his control in a way she couldn’t see. Hardly the sort of contract she’d been trained to read: most devils would find it an embarrassment for how meticulously it avoided exploitation.
His rules were straightforward and clear, written with a directness that made hiding any ill intent near-impossible. No matter how much she scoured the script for the sentence or phrase that would damn her, she couldn’t find it.
“It’s looking good,” she said. “But there’s nothing in here about you giving me the shard back.”
“I don’t have the shard,” he said. “Your sister does.”
Ashtoreth slumped back onto the chair. “Are you kidding me?”
“No,” he said. “I scrambled it when I did this, but that was the best I could do.”
“What does that mean? ‘Scrambled’?”
“It means she can’t use it for anything. Someone who knows what they’re doing will have to decode it first.”
“So what you’re saying is—I have to go get it back.”
“Yes.”
Ashtoreth sighed. “Pluto went easy on me last time.”
“Are you sure?” Dazel asked. “Because it looked to me like you let a mage stand at a distance and build up all her strength before you said something to piss her off.”
Ashtoreth shrugged. “Once I figured out that I couldn’t kill her claw to claw, it was over,” she said. “And the only reason I could fight her like that was because my [Mighty Wielder] and [Devoured Flesh], combined with my ability to move erratically with [Counterforce Telekinesis]. But as soon as I gained the upper hand, she just left.”
“A shot to the head from your cannon would probably take her out.”
“If she doesn’t have any spells to stop that,” Ashtoreth said. “But how am I going to set up the shot? She can fly. Given that her [Magic] will be very high, she can fly fast. And she can teleport. All that, and she’s still a well-trained mage: she’s going to have built defenses against surprises whenever she saw the chance.” She glared at Dazel. “Trust me, I wouldn’t have let you do this if I’d seen an alternative.”
“She’s almost certainly the final tutorial boss,” said Dazel. “And she has the shard. You have to kill her, Ashtoreth.”
“I know,” Ashtoreth said, frowning. “But I’m going to need some kind of boost to take Pluto out if things get serious. Even getting almost ten levels of stats from eating a boss heart didn’t do it.”
“What will?” asked Dazel. “Another hive of insects? The dragon?”
“Both and then some,” she said. “Ideally I could build some more Hellfire. Actually, ideally I’d get a faster conjure speed on my weapons and a spellcasting focus. Fighting her with no ability to counter her hellfrost is a death sentence—there’s too much of it and it’s too powerful. A single hit can immobilize me.”
She frowned in thought. Was he trying to distract her from the contract by getting her to talk shop?
“This needs more work,” she said, indicating the page she held. “Put something in about the shard—you’re giving it to me as soon as you have it, you’re not going to try to take it, you won’t interfere with its use… that sort of thing.”
“You don’t want to write that part?”
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“It’s your contract.”
Dazel sighed. “All right.”
“And something about not intentionally using my obligations to run interference on my plans. I don’t want you diverting me into some contrived quest for your freedom right when I need to be somewhere as a strategy for binding me into a greater contract.”
“Come on, Your Highness. I told you I wanted us to work well together. What happened to your big speech about trust?”
“Trust doesn’t coexist with contracts that bind the soul,” she said.
She expected that the real reason he was seemingly going so easy on her was because he was afraid of her father. The King could strip Dazel’s binding from Ashtoreth’s soul as easily as a hound stripping meat from bone. And while he might be upset by Ashtoreth’s betrayal, and even more upset by her failure to stop Dazel from binding her, he would also see cause to punish Dazel for what he’d done.
It would be a matter of family pride. And those were serious matters indeed.
Making sure Ashtoreth didn’t fail to accomplish her goals was in his best interest. If their enemies dragged her back to Hell, it would end badly for Dazel.
Besides. With the knowledge he’d shown so far, it was at least plausible that he had no use for her apart from his freedom, and no cause to interfere with her plans. Mutual cooperation until he could go his own way probably was the best option.
Or so she hoped.
She read over the contract for what might have been another twenty minutes, unable to find any hidden shackles in its wording. Her paranoia led her to insist on a whole handful of extra phrases insisting that he not abuse his power in various ways… but in the end she had to move on.
Besides. She knew he was about to be very disappointed, in at least one sense.
She formed a claw, took a moment to glower at Dazel, and signed. The contract erupted into flames before her, and she felt the binding burrowing down into her soul’s substrate like it was a snake wriggling through her intestines.
She shuddered, gritting her teeth and then standing. “All right, Dazel. Take us back.”
Dazel lifted himself into the air with a flap of his wings, then began to weave his front paws through the air in a manner that was most uncat-like. A red circle appeared on the ground before him, then was surrounded in fiendish runes.
Ashtoreth cocked her head. Did he ordinarily cast with fiendish runes? Or was he just doing this to confuse her?
She found herself wondering something she was probably going to spend a lot of time wondering: just who or what was Dazel?
“I’m going to need you to funnel some [Mana] in here.”
She touched the relevant rune on the circle and began to channel into it. “I’ve got [Bloodfire], remember? Might change things.”
“I can adjust. It’s all just power in the end.”
“Are you putting me back where I left?”
“Near there, yes.” he said. “But you disappeared and your sister got the shard, so my guess is that she’s assuming you’re dead.”
“Let’s hope so,” said Ashtoreth, scowling and thinking about what she’d do when she got back. She needed to level up—enough to fight Pluto. But she also need to find and assure the safety of the humans.
She had to eat two hearts out of her bag and spent almost twenty thousand [Bloodfire] before Dazel finally said:
“Ready?”
“Do it.”
There was a red flash of light, and Ashtoreth felt the familiar sensation of a warp spell: she simultaneously felt like she was dissolving and being jerked in one direction.
A moment later she was tumbling toward the forest floor, where she rolled and came to her feet before looking around to see that she was standing on a hillside in the tutorial.
It was easy to tell that she was near to where she’d fought Pluto. The stairwell that led to the tunnel network was visible, even if it had been collapsed. Even more obvious than this clue was the fact that the brush along an entire hillside had been shredded and frozen by Pluto’s extraordinarily powerful attacks: most of the frayed bushes and barkless trees that had been left behind were still encrusted in ice.
“Pluto’s probably hunting for the humans,” she said, looking at the collapsed tunnel. Had Hunter brought them into the tunnel, then fled underground? It was likely the best choice—but how had they collapsed it?
Unless that had been Pluto.
She banished the thought. She’d only been gone so long, and she herself hadn’t known how to navigate the old tunnels. Pluto likely wouldn’t either, and so the humans would be safe hiding in them.
Or so she had to hope. She still had Frost’s buffs on her, and that meant he was still alive.
“Well, you’ve got what you wanted,” she told Dazel. “It’s just me for a while. Better to farm enemies until I can fly than fight Pluto now.”
She wove another glamour about herself, one to make her look like an armored devil. Then she began to sprint and bound up the side of the hill until she crested it.
She looked out at the landscape below her. In the distance she could just barely see the beginnings of the great stone bridge that led to the citadel floating at the center of the lake of fire.
“Better get going,” Dazel said. He leapt up onto her back.
Ashtoreth bounded down into the forest, her racial flight and highest stats making it easy to move quickly. “With any luck, the enemies near that bridge will be stronger than what we’ve found in the rest of the forest. I can gain my two levels fast.”
“Sure, sure,” said Dazel. “And don’t let me interrupt the farm—you know I want you to level quickly.”
“Good. We’re in a tight spot.”
“I know, I know,” said Dazel. “Anyway, while you work, I hope you don’t mind me asking you some questions….”
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