Yama looked down at the old building beneath her with her fingers steepled before her, thinking.

  The building itself was unassuming. It was a town hall, a center of some form of power or another. Its main entrance was adorned with a few pillars, and a dome formed the roof near its center, but for the most part, it resembled a large office building.

  She couldn’t figure out what was special about it. Why were the humans using it for what, in her judgement, was the most crucial element of their defense efforts?

  Inside, the humans were creating a teleportation nexus.

  They had acted fast. In fact, they had acted almost instantaneously. The most likely explanation, in Yama’s eyes, was that the meddlers in the children’s tutorials had fed them the idea.

  How they’d gotten to a high enough level that they could assemble a team of people who could cast [Runic Warp] and begin connecting the cities of the world, that was another question. One that Yama would soon be answering herself.

  Once her own forces were assembled, that was. Surrounding the building on all sides were streets filled with the corpses of demons, most of them having seemingly been brought down by firearms. She was eager to see exactly how they’d been so successful in defending their strong point, even if she felt she had some idea of it already.

  Kellock the Sighted, a devil who functioned as her second command, rose to join her midair, his gaze fixed on the same building as hers. He was a white-haired devil in a black, gold-hemmed robe, with one of his eyes replaced by a glittering red gemstone.

  “No sign of your sisters so far, Your Eminence,” he said. “You’re certain Set has seen nothing of this?”

  Yama was supposed to be on another continent. For all that her sisters knew, she was.

  But her real plan required her to be far more proactive than that. She hadn’t prepared any set-in-stone maneuver meant to put herself ahead of her sisters in favor of simply ensuring that when opportunities arose, she’d both see them and have the power to take advantage of them.

  Kellock had been an essential component of her machinations, the heart of the intelligence network that she’d built across the whole of the invasion. She couldn’t trust Set to pass along any information that was actually important, of course, and she probably couldn’t trust Kellock, either: but with both of them to compare to one another, she was at least getting started.

  As the invasion progressed, her spies had informed her that they’d detected the trace of many teleportation spells that were seemingly going to and coming from the structure below her.

  And once Yama destroyed it, taking the cores of all the humans inside and gaining control of all the circles they’d already drawn to lead to who-knew-where across the globe, she’d be foremost among all her sisters.

  It wouldn’t matter how many buildings that Ashtoreth and Apollo were dropping in New York and Tokyo, not if Yama could rip out humanity’s heart along with all its connecting organs.

  “I’m certain of nothing,” she said, answering Kellock. “But no, I don’t think Set knows of this. She was concerned with… other oddities. It’s possible she didn’t mention it because she didn’t see it, but it’s also possible that she’s working in concert with Haddad to attack it herself.”

  It would have to be Haddad, Yama knew. Haddad was the easiest to manipulate, the least threatening of them. Yama was sure that Set had to have some secret plan to come out on top even from her place in the nexus bastion, and that plan had to involve Haddad, somehow.

  “Keep looking,” she told Kellock. “Even if Set hasn’t seen this, someone else could. And if they know I’m here, their coming won’t be obvious. How many of the troops have arrived?”

  “Just over half, Your Eminence,” Kellock intoned. “The rest will be here within minutes.”

  “Good,” she said. “I want as many shifting slitherers as we can muster.”

  Shifting slitherers had a racial ability that made them immune to auras and difficult to detect with magic. All of their initial reports had shown that the burgeoning teleportation nexus below them was protected by powerful, overlapping auras that likely came from a multitude of humans with aura-enhancing abilities.

  It was as good a setup as they could have made, all things considered. But their cleverness and resourcefulness had a limit: they were short-manned. She’d seen very few humans scouting the streets outside the compound.

  Ideally, they’d have had a team of people ready to move out and attack her forces as they gathered. Instead they hid in their shell like a turtle.

  She heard an explosion somewhere on a street to their left, and looked to see smoke and dust rising over several buildings.

  “Perhaps they have flexible defenses after all,” said Yama. To Kellock, she added, “Stay here and ready the troops.”

  He bowed his head. “Your Eminence.”

  Yama beat her wings to soar over several city blocks, then descended to where she’d seen the explosion. She didn’t see its cause, only two massive, hulking thornhide demons prowling down the street, pushing cars away from themselves.

  One of them flipped a car and uncovered a human hiding beneath it. The human screamed and tried to scurry away, but the thornhide caught up with her a moment later, pinning her to the ground.

  Yama watched, but something strange was happening. As the thornhide brought its powerful forelimb down to impale the human on one of its spines, a soft blue glow deflected the attack. The human was left cowering on the ground, completely unharmed.

  As Yama watched, even the human seemed to look up at the demon looming above her, confused.

  “It’s not working!” the demon cried out in a hoarse, throaty voice, hammering their claw down yet again. They looked over at their fellow thornhide. “Zakulzarrar!”

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  “Eh?”

  “Come here—can you kill this human?”

  Zakulzarrar hissed with bloodlust, bounding over a few of the intervening cars to bring his claws down on the cowering human, then draw back in confusion. “What is this witchcraft?” he hissed.

  “It’s not working!” the first thornhide explained.

  Zakulzarrar spotted Yama where she was looking down at them, unamused. But then, thornhides weren’t exactly bred for intelligence, and she’d have to work with what she had, as always.

  “My master!” the demon hissed. “It isn’t working!”

  The other demon looked up. “Try killing this human, master!” he called out. “There’s something weird going on with them.”

  “Move, you fools,” Yama said as she floated down toward them.

  She raised a hand, wreathing it in dark energy. Seeing this, both demons rushed out of the path from her to the human.

  The human scrambled to her feet, gasping, and began to run toward the nearest building. Yama cocked her head at the woman, then launched a simple bolt of death magic at her.

  As with the demons, a faint blue light flashed as Yama’s spell connected. The woman was left completely unharmed, and soon disappeared through the broken glass doors of a nearby building.

  “Stronger than I thought,” she murmured. But what was producing the aura?

  She reached out with her telepathy. Kellock, she said. We may want to reconsider our strategy.

  There was no answer.

  Kellock.

  Again, no answer.

  But there was no way that the humans could have gotten him. She’d only been gone for moments, and he hadn’t given her any kind of warning of an attack.

  She launched herself back into the air, angling herself toward the two buildings that she was assembling her forces in.

  Kellock!

  Still, no answer. She beat her wings faster, flying hard to get back to her staging area.

  A crack like thunder sounded out from the city ahead of her, and she heard a noise like an avalanche of as a massive cloud of dust rose in front of her.

  “No!” she muttered, rising higher into the air to see that one of the two buildings where she’d been gathering her shifting slitherers had collapsed.

  Kellock still hadn’t answered her… which meant she had to assume he’d betrayed her. Had it been one of her sisters? Apollo would be concerned with Ashtoreth. Haddad was too stupid… but Set wasn’t.

  Set. It had to be Set.

  Then she heard a man’s voice booming out through the city, echoing off the buildings around her.

  “Yama!” he shouted.

  She ignored the voice, instead diving into the cloud of dust that rose from the rubble of the building they’d just collapsed. Whoever was attacking her on Set’s behalf, they obviously expected her to rush to the defense of her other staging area.

  But Yama wouldn’t be walking into anyone’s trap.

  Not without reinforcements, that was.

  She reached through the dust and into the rubble, finding the corpses of her fallen demons and preparing to infuse them with magic en masse. Her enemies might have thought they’d killed half her army, but really they’d just furnished her with the corpses she needed to create a new one.

  “Yama!” the voice called out again. It had to be her sisters: the humans had no way of knowing her name.

  She heard another massive explosion, then watched in dismay as the second building where she’d been mustering her forces began to collapse.

  “Idiots,” she muttered. Had they done nothing to defend themselves? There were supposed to be scouts and watchmen, a command structure for reactive defenses.

  Soon she had invested a substantial amount of mana in the dead that had been pulverized beneath her, and she beat her wings to bring herself out into the dust-laden street as spectral forms began to rise out of the rubble.

  “Yama!”

  Now the voice was just ahead of her, and she was certain that whoever it was could see her. She floated closer, discerning the shadow of a man in the billowing dust as her ghosts filled the space behind her.

  “I see that Kellock must have betrayed me,” she called out to him. “I admit, it’s disappointing. I’d expected his turn to come later than this.” She flared her wings, holding her hands outstretched. “But I need neither servants nor armies to be powerful.”

  “Kellock was this guy?” the shadow said, coming closer. He tossed something to the ground at Yama’s feet, and she watched it glint as it rolled to a stop. Kellock’s eye.

  “He didn’t betray you,” the man said. “I ate him. That’s where I learned your name, Yama.”

  Yama squinted in disbelief. A human? As his shadow grew closer and resolved, she saw that he was holding a long, boxy object at hip height.

  She didn’t care to find out what it was. Sacrificing several of the specters behind her to fuel the spell, she launched a massively powerful bolt of pure death magic at him.

  It was absorbed by a soft flare of blue light.

  “What?” she whispered. Her spell had 50% [Defense] penetration. She’d sacrificed three specters to fuel it. And she was a pure [Magic] build. No defensive ability, no matter how powerful, should have been able to fully deflect or absorb it.

  “You’re undead, right?” A voice rasped from behind her. Yama’s head whipped around to see a human woman wearing dark robes floating in the air next to her.

  {Human Lich — Level 50 Elite}

  “Lich, right?” the human asked. “Gotta get that hefty [Mana] bonus for more minions. I get it.”

  The robes were open. Under the thread of a decorative noose the human was wearing a shirt that read Resting Lich Face in glowing blue handwriting.

  “It was a gift,” the human said upon seeing Yama read her shirt. She reached into a bag hanging by her waist and began to rummage around. “Now hold on, I’ve got a rock for you.”

  “Obey,” Yama hissed at the human, hoping to leash her into minion status with the strength of her [Psyche] and her upgraded [Command Undead].

  Nothing happened.

  The other human, a heavily armored man, stepped out of the dust a moment later. Yama ordered all her specters to attack in the same moment that her attention was drawn to the object he was holding with both hands.

  Bizarrely, it was a firearm designed by the master armorer in Paradise; a gun not only made in Hell, but made for the exclusive use of the Pride Clan.

  But more than that—

  “Is that a minigun?” she asked in disbelief.

  A barrage of blue light spewed forth from the weapons rotating barrels a moment later, and the human lich, pulling a crystal out of her bag, said, “Freeze.”

  Yama froze….