“What do we need a bastion for?” Dazel said.

  “What do you mean?” she asked. “For one thing, we can route through it to attack the others.”

  “But that’s not necessary,” Dazel said. “Every other bastion we want to attack is already within range of Earth. You’re just going to make the [Runic Warp] slightly faster.”

  “We can also attack the bastions that are closer to the inner realms.”

  “The ones with increasingly higher-level enemies?” Dazel asked. “Assaulting those could not only get you killed, it could get you stranded. [Runic Warp] isn’t going to get you back to Earth if you end up having to bail on an assault past this point.”

  “Sure, sure,” said Ashtoreth. “But haven’t you always wanted your own demiplane?”

  “No, Your Highness” said Dazel. “In fact, if you’ll recall, what I’ve always wanted is to escape everyone’s attentions and enjoy an unassuming life in the Pit of Sorrows.”

  “Or so you say,” said Ashtoreth. “This place is loaded with buff that Set gathered from life harvest spells. There’s probably thousands of applications of a buff that grants thousands of stats.”

  “You’re crazy,” said Dazel. “This demiplane is the bridge to Earth, and you’re already too strong for any of the current invaders to kill you. None of the potential benefits of keeping it outweigh the benefit of destroying it. Blow this place, and it’s a guarantee that you limit the number of troops Hell can field on Earth in the crucial first steps of the invasion.”

  “Sure, sure,” she said. “And I think I’d agree with you if that was all there was to consider.”

  “Ashtoreth, you can’t seriously want to give up that effective a strategic maneuver just because you… I don’t know, want a flying metal castle that increases your stats.”

  “I can want something and still know that it’s a bad idea, Dazel,” she said. “And in any case, there’s something I think you haven’t considered.”

  He sighed. “And I’m guessing you’re going to tell me what that is, now.”

  “We can give the bastion to the humans,” she said. “It can not only reach Earth, but also all the other bastions approaching from Hell. And while we might not want to get stranded in the interplanar medium by attacking one of Hell’s bastions and then getting cut off while we’re overextended, humanity will have a lot of expendable soldiers. Soldiers we’re going to give millions of cores to.”

  Dazel blinked. “Wait a second….”

  “They’ll want to study this place anyway,” Ashtoreth said. “They can use it to reach the inner realms that are friendly, or at least not overly hostile. They can leapfrog off the bastion to reach the Abyssal Rift or the Vast Primeval to farm.”

  “Okay, that makes a little sense,” Dazel said. “But there’s no way to do that without leaving it vulnerable to Hell.”

  “Please,” she said. “They can always trigger it to destroy itself if it’s ever in danger of being lost. They just need to open a rift that warps to its entrance location, then give the spell ten times more power than it needs. That’ll rip this place to pieces right quick!”

  “I keep forgetting how many spellcasters you ate,” Dazel said.

  “But the real upside is diplomatic capital,” Ashtoreth said. “Either the humans will get a huge base in the middle of the interplanar medium that leads to the inner realms, or they’ll get to blow up something bigger than anything they’ve ever blown up before. Either way, we’re the ones who will have given it to them—and they’ll appreciate it.”

  “Okay,” said Dazel. “Just… will you promise me that when you hand it over, you let me make my arguments to the human commanders for why they should destroy it?”

  “Sure thing, Dazel!”

  “I feel like you’re making sense… but you’re still wrong,” he said. “With the right kind of antimagic spells, Hell could capture this place and set us right back to square one… except this time they’ll have much more time to prepare for you.”

  “You’re so cautious.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “It comes from not being royalty. Even the smallest chance that this place reconnects Hell to Earth once the planet has drawn closer and higher levels can pass through the warp network—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Ashtoreth. “As long as we can agree that we give it to the humans to make them like us more.”

  “We do.”

  “Great!” Ashtoreth said. She began to stretch on the side of the dome. “Frost should have made some headway with the bossmen back home.”

  “Home?” Dazel said.

  “Er, Earth,” Ashtoreth said, feeling a burning in her cheeks as she began to blush. “You know what I meant. Let’s set this place to drift parallel to Earth and destroy any rune circles so that they can’t warp their way back, than get back to check in with Frost.”

  “Sure,” Dazel said, flying back into her arms. “But listen… Ashtoreth?”

  “What?”

  “Some of the things your sister said back there… I’m going to want to ask you some questions.”

  Ashtoreth scowled down at him. “She got to you with all that ‘where does this end’ stuff, didn’t she?”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Perhaps.”

  “You just want to be free,” Ashtoreth said. “Why should you care if my quest ends in total disaster?”

  “Let’s say that I don’t,” Dazel said. “But that instead, I care about whether your quest is going someplace I haven’t figured. I asked you why you wanted to save the humans back in the tutorial. But I never asked you for the whole of your war plan.”

  Ashtoreth sighed. “Just don’t get into the personal stuff, all right?”

  “Uh, yeah. No need to worry on that front. But tell me, Your Highness. What’s your long-term plan for humanity versus Hell? Actually,” he said as she opened her mouth to speak. “Don’t answer that. I’ve can make the question more narrow.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Infernals outnumber humans substantially,” he said. “And they’re more used to waging war than you are. And they’ve had much more time to harvest cores and build up stronger and stronger fighters. Supposing you become the monarch, which seems very likely right now—”

  “I’d say so.”

  “Right. Supposing you become the monarch, you can significantly curtail the rate at which Hell can assault Earth. You can give humanity a fighting chance… for a time. But long-term, Hell isn’t going to run out of resources. And if they’ve put this much into the initial assault of Earth, then your father will care enough to keep assaulting Earth even if it takes a thousand years. Humans being humans, someone is going to betray them from the inside eventually, and that’s even if you don’t fall to challengers before then.”

  “This is all building to a question, right?” she asked.

  “Sure, I just want it to be clear what I’m asking,” said Dazel. “And I don’t want to limit your answer. Because there’s another thing I want you to address.”

  “That being?”

  Dazel sighed. “Look. Ashtoreth. I like you.”

  “Thanks, Dazel.” She reached out and pet him. “Despite everything, I like you too.”

  “Great,” he said. “But I suppose that sentence beginning with ‘despite everything,’ is the best I can hope for.”

  “You know, feeling sorry for yourself is just a form of self-obsession. It’s even worse than outright pride.”

  Dazel let out a derisive laugh. “Sure, Your Highness. I’ll file that away under ‘wisdom from the royal family.’”

  “Really? And what sort of other things exist in that category?” she asked.

  Dazel flashed her an annoyed glare. “What I was getting at,” he said. “Was that—look, I really don’t want to let you down with this, okay? But the humanity you fell in love with is already gone, Ashtoreth. I hope you understand that.”

  “Hmm,” Ashtoreth said. She began to float above the dome, taking position at its center so that she could look down on every point in the city. “I don’t agree.”

  “Every one of them is going to have people they knew who just… don’t come out of the tutorials,” said Dazel. “Infernals are collapsing buildings in all their cities to farm the people inside for cores. And what they’ll have to do in order to get the power to save themselves… it’s war, Ashtoreth. The system insists on it.”

  “I know,” she said quietly.

  “I know you love them,” he said. “But what our people are doing to them right now, it’s going to break them. The human mind can only take so much trauma. I mean, they’ve made generations of art just warning about how the experience of war breaks even the soldiers on the winning side, let alone the civilians on the losing one. What’s happened today in their cities… what’s going to happen no matter how well we do with our objectives… I don’t know if there will even be any humans left. Not the way you know them.”

  Ashtoreth considered his words carefully. Faintly, she smiled. “Yeah,” she said. “I sort of disagree with you, there.”

  “Uh… I hope you care to explain that.”

  She stared down into the empty city beneath them. An army of a million, eaten by her sister’s spells. How many seconds, minutes, hours of life had Set extinguished just to get ahead? It was incomprehensible to her.

  And yet that was the scale that she was playing on, now. Billions of lives and trillions of days to save.

  “You know, Dazel… for all your theories about power and demons and the unfairness of Hell’s hierarchy… you’re thinking a lot like a fiend yourself.”

  “Hey! I take offense to that.”

  Ashtoreth smiled. “We fiends needed to learn what kind of creature humans really are in order to crush them. So what did we do? Where did we look? We looked to all the humans who have narrative power, the people among them who get to tell stories. And why? Well, we’re the ones who get to tell all the stories in Hell, right? And we never get it wrong, of course.”

  “I don’t think I’m following.”

  “We looked to what the artists in their most powerful civilizations were saying about human beings,” she said. “Because that’s where we would be. Fiends, I mean. And the human artists filled their world with depictions of soldiers who go to war and come home broken. They tell that story again and again because they hate war—and you can hardly blame them on that front. For them, it doesn’t even grant cores….”

  She shrugged. “The artists tell that story because they have a political point to make. We fiends believe that story because we like the story of human fragility. And sometimes, that story is true.”

  She looked at Dazel where he floated beside her. “Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I don’t think it’s actually true. I think the rates of PTSD in soldiers are actually fairly low, all things considered, and I think that humans will adjust much faster to lives of total war than any other race we’ve seen. Most humans who go to war don’t love it, but the number of them who can commit horrific atrocities and then go home and sleep soundly at night is, given a closer look at their history, quite staggering. That is closer to the human normal.”

  “And here I thought you just liked them for french fries and memes.”

  “Heh,” Ashtoreth said. “We’ll break them, but not in the way that we think we will. We think they’ve never seen anything like us, but they’ve never seen anything else. And in the end….”

  “Come on, boss. Tell me.”

  “At the start of World War One,” she said. “They were handing out cardboard boots and a rifle to kids with barely any training. And by the end… infantry were advancing after a barrage of forward artillery fire from meticulously tracked and measured guns, with the aide of scouting from rudimentary aircraft, with cavalry and tank support, and with portable radios and personal gas masks. They invented an entire new age of warfare in only a couple years, Dazel. A generation later they did it again. We just have to buy them a little time.”

  Dazel was quiet for a long while. “Your sister said that you were your father’s favorite,” he said at last.

  “Who knows?” she asked. “Maybe I still am.” She waited, then when he didn’t say anything, she asked, “Are you going to ask something?”

  “No,” he said after a moment’s pause. “No, I think I’ve learned enough for now. We can continue this conversation later.”

  She grinned. “Really, Dazel?”

  “Yes, really. I can see this conversation is going to take a little longer than I’d like to spend right now… and you clearly have some idea of what you’re doing.”

  “Great!” she said, grinning. “Now let’s rig this bastion and pop down to meet Earth’s bossmen!”