Nearly an hour later, Ashtoreth and Frost warped back to Earth and landed exactly where they’d first been taken from, right next to the very same police car that she’d kicked a door off of.

  It was the same moment that the tutorial had begun. Nearby was the very same beam of red light encircled by swirling black clouds, with a whole host of demons flying out of it.

  “All right, Dazel!” Ashtoreth said. “Give me a circle.”

  He rose out of her arms and flew to the nearest driveway, then began to use thin lines of conjured fire to burn a circle into the pavement.

  “All right,” said Frost. “So far so good. Sarah—long time no see. I can’t tell you how glad I am you made it.”

  Officer Carmichael rose from her place on the ground next to them, looking between them. She was much changed from when Ashtoreth had last seen her, a translucent figure in billowing black robes with her hood down. She was level 42.

  “300?” She asked, looking between Ashtoreth and Frost. “300?”

  “I’ll handle this and then start securing the town,” said Frost. He jerked his head toward the portal in the sky. “Get that before you go?”

  “Sure thing, Sir Frost!” Ashtoreth said.

  She launched herself into the air, then sped toward the interplanar rift with a single flap of her wings. She crossed the distance easily: her top flight speed was over 200 meters a seconds, and accelerating to 100 took her under a second.

  The dimensional rift had been torn into the sky above what looked like one of the town’s main areas of congregation, a wide street lined with shops. The pillar of red light stretched down from the clouds to end at street level, and infernals were spilling out at every elevation.

  Devil soldiers, along with a dozen varieties of demons emerged from the rift to immediately attack the humans in the streets around them, and flying demons filled the air above, mostly imps and shearbats.

  Flashes of light along with the ringing clashes of weaponry below her indicated to Ashtoreth that most of the humans, freshly deposited by their tutorials, were putting up a fight.

  They likely wouldn’t do too well. Both the humans and the invaders were mostly between levels 20 and 55, with the humans usually not rising past 40. Worse still, the humans hadn’t come from Hell tutorials. They wouldn’t be used to fighting infernals.

  She conjured her scythe, then dove to land in the middle of the street, right next to the rift, so that her aura would spread 90 meters and grant her massive stat bonuses to all of the nearby humans.

  Then she spun her scythe, conjuring a dozen javelins of hellfire, then sending them each of them outward to a target on the ground around her.

  They instantly incinerated every enemy they touched. Devils and demons alike burst into clouds of hellfire, and Ashtoreth sent out a second volley of javelins a moment later, killing another dozen high-level targets and engulfing the whole square in hellfire.

  True, the screams of terror that the humans made as they were engulfed in an all-consuming wall of violet fire weren’t exactly Ashtoreth’s dream welcome to Earth, but her aura meant that her fire couldn’t hurt allies, and she needed to save as many of them as possible.

  Sure, they’d think they were going to die. But the important thing was that they wouldn’t.

  She swiped her scythe through the air a second later, gathering almost all of the flames into [Bloodfire], extinguishing them instantly.

  She left a few dozen smaller patches of flame burning where she’d burst dying enemies. She wanted enough fires to remain that they would spread her aura aura even when she wasn’t within 90 meters of someone.

  “Don’t worry, everybody!” Ashtoreth said as she launched another volley of hellfire javelins into the sky, creating a series of massive explosions above them. “You’ll be safe within my fire!” She launched another volley, filling the sky with an even larger chain reaction of hellfire bursts.

  “I guess I should have said that to start,” she said. “But—”

  Several nearby telephone polls that had been burned away by her flames began to fall, wires snapping and sending showers of sparks raining down into the street. More humans screamed.

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  Ashtoreth reached out with her magical sense, then swiped her scythe through the air and conjured dense patches of flames everywhere she found any wires or falling poles, incinerating them in an instant before extinguishing the flames an instant later.

  “Okay,” she said, “I didn’t mean to do that. But—”

  She felt a light poke in the back, and turned to see a massive steel harpoon clattering to the pavement beneath it. She raised her gaze to see a large, bearded human man in a suit of blue plate, arm extended from where he’d thrown the harpoon.

  Their eyes met, and she could clearly see him realizing that he’d made a mistake.

  “I love your courage!” she said. Then she launched another volley of hellfire javelins as more demons emerged from the portal, choosing not to ignite their corpses. She looked him up and down, admiring his bulky armor, then added, “And your style! But I’m the good archfiend!”

  Then she emblazoned a [Hellfire Rune] onto the ground beneath the rift, one made to focus its blast inward. She launched another volley of javelins into the sky as more demons emerged, then triggered the rune.

  The rune detonated, and Ashtoreth reached out and held the hellfire as it focused inward, creating a bead of superhot energy that she kept from expanding outward and dispersing, a glowing star of white that was bordered with purple.

  She rose into the air, drawing this fire along the core of the rift as she did so, and her spellfire enhancement tore the magic of the rift apart, consuming it to make the bead of fire burn even stronger and closing the rift as if it were an interplanar zipper.

  She rose hundreds of meters into the air, sealing the rift. Then she released the bead, allowing it to burst into a huge explosion that she vanished with a swipe of her scythe.

  Then, from her place above the town, she spent a few more moment launching hellfire javelins into any enemies she could see in the skies and streets below.

  She didn’t care so much about being perfectly thorough. A few leftover infernals could still try and wreak havoc, and Ashtoreth wouldn’t care. The humans would mop them up.

  Circle’s done, Dazel said via telepathy.

  She dove back down to the street where he’d drawn the circle, scooped him up and stood inside it. Then she began to use the [Runic Warp] built into her boots.

  As the spell charged, she checked in with the others.

  How’s everybody doing? she asked.

  Fine, said Kylie.

  Getting some volunteers together for headquarters, said Frost. It might actually go faster than we’d thought.

  Great! said Ashtoreth.

  Family’s alive, said Hunter. But it’s harder to get away from them than I thought. Dunno where Sadie is, but I didn’t find her body or any blood stains, so that’s promising, I guess.

  “I’m telling you,” Dazel whispered in Ashtoreth’s ear. “His girlfriend was never real. He’s gonna try and play like she’s vanished without explanation in the chaos of the apocalypse.”

  “You wanna bet?” she asked. At the same time, she frowned. If Hunter already hadn’t found her body, did that mean he’d gone to rescue his girlfriend before his family?

  “Bet what?” Dazel asked. “Cores? We’re drowning in them.”

  She shook her head. “Sounds like someone knows he’s wrong,” she said, smirking. “But it doesn’t matter—you ready?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Below them, the runed circle that Dazel had burned into the pavement was glowing as the spell built in intensity.

  “I’m going to have some tasks for you to complete once we get to the other side, is the thing.”

  “Hold on,” said Dazel. “I’m supposed to be running mission control. I’ve got to focus on keeping us organized—and I’ve got to triangulate the runes needed to launch us toward the demiplanar bastions! I’m too busy to help you with anything.”

  “Not gonna fly with me, lazybones!” Ashtoreth said, shaking her head. “Nobody needs orders yet because we’re all in the preliminary phase, and you only need to work on the rifts when we get to them. And that means that there’s a limited window in which you can carry out important tasks for me.”

  “Or,” Dazel said. “Have a nap. Now, have we really weighed the potential benefits of all our—”

  “Shh! The spell’s almost done!”

  Dazel sighed.

  Ashtoreth grinned.

  There were two nearby large populations centers: New York and Chicago. The larger, closer, better choice had been obvious. It was also Ashtoreth’s preference.

  She spread her arms as the light of the rune circle engulfed her and the spell completed. She spread her arms.

  “See you later, town whose name I never learned! I’m going to Neeeeew York!”