{You gain 12 DEX, 12 STR, 18 VIT, 14 MAG, 7 PSY, 7 DEF}
{Reaching level 100 has granted you advancement. Choose one of your progression paths other than [Armament].}
{Reaching level 100 has altered your advancement progression. You will now be granted advancement every 10 levels.}
“Ding!” Ashtoreth cried. “Level 100! That took us what, 8 days?”
“Eight days,” Frost echoed.
They were in the Deadlight Shard, having set up camp once the scenario was complete before moving on to the next. She’d conjured her house on the roof of a temple that stood at the highest point of a dead city. Below them, illuminated by the wan light of a blue half-moon, the crumbled, overgrown necropolis sprawled.
Each of them sat around a burning orb of hellfire that served as their campfire. Hunter was using a pair of chopsticks to eat from one of the cardboard boxes that his loot parcels and boss chests often gave him, but the other two ate nothing, as usual.
“That’s the first ten advancements of tier 2 down!” she said. To the system, she added: “[Hellfire], please!”
{Advance [Hellfire]}
{Choose an upgrade to gain, then choose to retain or replace all other options}
Upgrade [Hellfire] with [Hellfire Rune]:
You can emblazon a hellfire rune onto a surface, which you may detonate to create a blast of hellfire at will.
[Bloodfire] spent to cast this ability is reserved and cannot be replenished until the rune has been detonated or dismissed. You may only have a third of your [Bloodfire] reserved in this manner.
Upgrade [Hellfire] with [Hellfire Blast II]
Increases the power of your [Hellfire Blast] per point of [Bloodfire] spent, and allows you to spend up to a very high amount of [Bloodfire] to use the ability.
Upgrade [Hellfire] with [Hellfire Javelin]
Replaces the [Hellfire Bolt] upgrade with [Hellfire Javelin]. A javelin has a longer range and can be guided by the will of the caster or directed to home in on a target of its own accord.
She wanted them all. And she knew she’d get them all, soon. She didn’t need to worry too much about the consequences of choosing of wrong, because there barely were any.
But [Hellfire Javelin] would let her light enemies on fire from a great distance… enough to kill things with [Vampiric Flames] without spending the resources that firing her cannon required.
“I’ll take the Javelin, please!”
{You upgrade your [Hellfire] ability with [Hellfire Javelin]}
“Thanks!” she said.
More than a week for ten levels. The next two hundred wouldn’t be coming any easier, but at the same time, the humans were getting a lot faster at taking the system’s scenarios.
Then she queried the system to examine the gains she’d made since reaching the second tier:
64: [Aura: Obedience]
68: [Armament Speed III]
72: [Hellfire Penetration]
76: [Command Undead]
80: [Wanderlust: Bloodfire Well]
84: [Satiated]
88: [Rammstein: Extra Capacity III]
92: [Blood Aptitude]
96: [Luftschloss: Hellfire Blows]
100: [Hellfire Javelin]
She lorded over them all fondly. [Aura: Obedience] and [Command Undead] made her ability to freeze enemies with her command more effective… and gave her normal aura the same range extension that almost aura abilities gave. [Armament Speed III] made swapping her weapons almost instantaneous.
[Wanderlust: Bloodfire Well] let her stock up on twice as much [Bloodfire] for when she was fighting with hellfire only, usually when she was in the air. [Satiated] made the buff she got from [Consume Heart] last 18 hours instead of 12, and made it so that the buff it granted didn’t decay.
She could now load four rounds into her cannon, and her sword dealt hellfire damage on every hit. As with the [Energy Drain] on hit advancement, the hellfire was much more powerful when she used [Mighty Blow] and [Mighty Strike].
Then there was [Blood Aptitude]. She hadn’t gotten many chances to use it, yet, and potentially pick up the fighting skills of her enemies. But she’d used it enough to know how it worked.
On animals like insects and dinosaurs, it gave her a sense of how their instincts guided them. On the interplanar slavers they’d fought the previous day, it had given her a broad overview of their weapon fighting styles, which had mostly been firearms and spears. In both cases, the knowledge had been useful in helping her fight the enemies rather than something she used herself.
She joined the others where they sat around her fire, sitting on an ancient stone bench across from where Hunter and Frost were talking. Kylie, as usual, was saying very little.
“Great hustle today, everybody!” she said.
“We know,” said Kylie. “We can tell because nobody’s dead.”
“Sure,” Ashtoreth said as she sat next to Hunter. “But there’s a difference between noticing something and complimenting it—and I think everybody did great today. We should all take a moment to appreciate how well we did.”
“Great,” Kylie said. “Thanks.”
The scenario had culminated in a fight with a handful of powerful vampire lords along with their undead minions. A dread knight riding a bone dragon had interrupted them and threatened to turn the whole thing out of their favor; Hunter had crossed his katanas, activated the [Embrace of the Shadowflame Dragon], and taken to the air to keep the dread knight and his mount occupied while Ashtoreth and the others frantically dispatched enough vampire lords to keep the knight from turning the tide.
There had been a lot of teleportation on the part of the vampire lords. But despite how frustrating it had been to deal with, everyone had kept their cool and they’d ended the bosses with no losses.
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Ashtoreth sat next to Hunter, pulled out one of the few hearts she had, and took a bite.
“Do you have to eat that like that?” Frost asked.
She raised a hand to cover her mouth while she spoke. “No. But I really want to.”
“It’s… disconcerting.”
“It’s delicious!” she said. “[Devour Flesh] and [Drain Blood] both alter my sense of taste—hearts are peak eating. Am I to abstain forever from the gustatory pleasures that life has to offer?”
Frost sighed. “It doesn’t bother you at all, does it?”
“Delicious food?”
“Being a vampire. You shot yourself in the head at the drop of hat and became an undead monster who craves blood—all for power.”
“Well yeah,” she said. “With everything at stake—”
“I know, I know,” he said, raising his hands. “I’m not saying it doesn’t make sense. Earth is in danger. I get it. But I mean… it doesn’t bother you. You’re undead. That’s not going away.”
“She was already an archfiend,” Dazel said from where he was scratching out some glowing runes on a paving stone nearby. “So who cares? If you tell somebody there’s an unholy monster coming, do they go, ‘Yeah, but how much of an unholy monster? Because it’s merely a sovereign of Hell, how bothered should I be?’”
“Fair point,” Frost said. “It’s just…” he frowned, then looked over at Ashtoreth. “You chew very loudly.”
She gulped down the bite she’d been eating. “Sorry. Hearts are very sinewy. If you want, I’ll put it away.”
“No,” he said, sparing a longing look for Hunter’s takeout container. “I suppose I can’t fault you for enjoying a meal.”
She felt a pang of sympathy for for him. He’d tried eating some of Hunter’s supply of noodle and rice based meals shortly after their first day only to discover that his vampiric appetite had no interest in normal human food. He didn’t drink blood; his class let him sustain himself through the regeneration provided by his buff abilities.
“Those vampires we fought today,” he said. “Am I going to look like them in a hundred years?”
“Nah,” said Dazel. “The nosferatu vibe is a whole ability chain that you can only start if you never take [Daywalker].”
“And is there any way to eat food again? To stop being an undead?”
“Nah,” said Dazel. “Just [Daywalker]. If there’s a way to cure vampirism, it’s gotta be so much trouble that nobody bothers.”
“I see.” He looked down, his expression sad and tired. A few seconds of silence passed.
Then Hunter spoke. “I don’t know if this is a good time to ask or not, but about, uh, vampirism….”
“Nope,” said Dazel.
“You didn’t even know what I was going to ask,” said Hunter.
“Sure I did,” Dazel said. “Boss and I already talked it over. She said no.”
Ashtoreth frowned. “Wow, Dazel. Right under the bus.”
Dazel glanced up from his runes, then back down. “That’s the burden of command, boss. Everything’s your fault.”
“You don’t want to turn me into a vampire?” Hunter asked. “Why not?”
“Because we want a team member who isn’t undead to deal with all the anti-undead abilities that Hell is going to throw at us once they get a bearing on who we are.”
Hunter blinked, then nodded. “Yeah, okay. That makes sense.”
“Plus, you’ve got the most impressive two fangs around already,” Dazel said. “Don’t want to overdo it with four fangs.”
“I can handle the power of four fangs, Dazel.”
Ashtoreth peered at Hunter. Sometimes it was hard to tell if he was serious, or just very good at acting serious for the purpose of joking.
She took another bite of her heart, and Kylie rose to move toward the edge of the temple’s roof.
“Where are you going?” Ashtoreth asked.
“Just to look,” Kylie said, standing to look out over the city.
“You did great today, by the way.”
“You said that already,” Kylie said. She tilted her head to look over her shoulder. “And yes. I did do great.”
One of Kylie’s [Drain] abilities allowed her to eat her minions for [Mana], and she’d been upgrading it substantially. Because she’d also been upgrading her [Command Undead] so that it could permanently subjugate undead into minions, she’d spent the whole day stealing the most powerful enemies and then eating them.
Ashtoreth’s [Consume Heart] didn’t work on almost anything in the Deadlight Shard, but Kylie had something that was almost just as good.
“What is this place?” Kylie asked, looking up at the half-moon.
Ashtoreth glanced at Dazel, who rose and flew to rest on the ledge next to Kylie. “The Deadlight Shard is what happens when the necromancers win,” he said. “A powerful lich once completely drained this world of life with a spell that converted the world into a kind of interplanar bastion. One they ruled like a god.”
“They killed everyone,” Kylie said, staring out at the empty city.
“Everyone,” said Dazel. “And they rewrote the local rules of reality itself. This place isn’t really a single world, anymore. The Deadlight Shard is divided into demiplanes the way a palace has rooms.”
“They’ve got special rules, too,” said Ashtoreth.
“I was getting to the special rules,” said Dazel, flicking his tail at her in annoyance.
“Is that why my magic is stronger, here?” Kylie asked.
“You got it,” said Dazel. “This whole place is unhallowed ground. Sunlight isn’t sacred here, and remains can be reanimated more than once.”
“Because someone murdered an entire world,” she said, her eyes still fixed on the city.
“Uh… yeah,” said Ashtoreth. She tried to think of something cheerful to say… but there was really no way to put a spin on it.
Kylie turned and focused her gaze on Ashtoreth. “The cosmos is a horrible place,” she said.
“It, uh, has its ups and downs,” Ashtoreth said.
“We could actually lose Earth,” Kylie said, her voice a toneless rasp. “All of it. Everyone. And it would be like… like nothing. Like hearing that some place you’ve never been got hit by an earthquake on the news. Human history ends and it’s business as usual.”
“Not if we’ve got anything to say about it,” Ashtoreth said.
But Kylie scowled. “Why us? What about God? There is a God, isn’t there? You’ve mentioned Heaven.”
“Well, yes, there’s an Authority in Heaven.”
“But you have to assume that they’re okay with the status quo,” said Dazel.
“And why’s that?” asked Kylie.
“Because they haven’t changed it,” said Dazel. “They’re Heaven. Not even Hell dares transgress against them—Hell has to protect the whole cosmos from the Abyssal Rift because Heaven ordained it so.”
“They have the power to stop Hell,” Kylie said. “But they won’t stop this?”
Ashtoreth shrugged. “We don’t really know much about why Heaven does what they do. You just gotta fill in the blanks, with them.”
“How utterly wretched,” Kylie said. “Everything is awful and it’s on the rest of us to explain why this fits some divine plan.” She seemed to think for a moment, then added, “Though I guess not much has changed in that regard.”
She crossed her arms and returned to the fire. “Sorry,” she muttered. “I don’t mean to try and bring everybody down.”
“Oh, come off it,” Ashtoreth said. “You weren’t bringing us down!”
“I don’t want to be argumentative,” said Frost. “But that sort of brought me down, a bit.”
“Thank you,” Kylie said.
“Thank you?” Ashtoreth said. “Why are you thanking him now?”
“For keeping it real, I guess,” Kylie said. “Look, Ashtoreth, sometimes your reality is… hard to bear. You’re a lot more used to seeing past endless, incalculable horrors to find the fun in life. I don’t know if everything bounces of you, or if you bounce off everything, but….” she turned to look out over the dead city once more. “I don’t know how to process it. I don’t know how to process anything at all.”
She stood. “I’m going to bed. I’ll see you all in eight hours.”
“Goodnight!” Ashtoreth said.
Kylie paused for just a fraction of a moment. “Goodnight,” she muttered as she headed for the house.
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