“I was hitting my targets as usual,” Hunter said a moment later. He was seated backwards on a swivelling office chair, arms hung over the backrest. Military officers, including General Matthews, were all around them.

  “Then I was struck by an arrow—one that had been launched with enough force to pierce through a nearby wall and enough accuracy to hit me even though I’m a fast-moving target. I got a glimpse of the person who launched the arrow, and then I left.”

  “Well what did their tag say?” Ashtoreth asked him.

  “I didn’t get their name,” Hunter said. “Just their level. The name was hidden, somehow. And I only got a very brief look at them before I had to leave.”

  “Why’d you leave so soon?” Frost asked.

  “Because that single arrow almost killed me,” said Hunter. “Despite how fast it was travelling when it struck me, and despite the fact that it definitely had high penetration, it stuck in my flesh and then began to… well, it was like it was eating me from the inside out. If I weren’t so fast at teleporting, I wouldn’t have made it.”

  “Definitely level 300, then,” Dazel said. “Not an illusion if they can almost one-shot Hunter. Now tell them what he looked like.”

  “Right,” Hunter said. I got a look at him, and I don’t think he was an infernal. He looked human.”

  “You’re certain of this?” Matthews asked.

  “Yes, sir,” said Hunter. “I’m sure. High [Dexterity] means better perception. I didn’t get the best look at him, but he had no horns, no wings, no tail. He was wearing a crown, though. But the strangest thing was, well…” Hunter looked past the general, at Ashtoreth. “He had human ears.”

  Within a few moments, everyone in the room had turned toward Ashtoreth as if expecting something.

  “What are you all looking at me for?” she asked. “It’s not like everyone with a crown on knows each other.”

  “The real revelation here is that he had human ears,” said Frost.

  “Infernals have normal-shaped ears,” said Ashtoreth.

  “Normal shaped?” asked Matthews.

  “It could have been an infernal in disguise,” said Ashtoreth.

  Hunter shook his head. “I don’t think so. For one, my bloodline gives me strong truesight. I’ve even upgraded it once to ensure that once my quarry is within my sights, it never escapes me. But there’s also the question of how an infernal could get to level 300.”

  Matthews reached up to stroke his beard. “But if they’re human, then it raises another question. How are they 300, and why are they attacking other humans?”

  “Both of those are easy answers,” said Hunter. “Someone in the alliance has betrayed us. Maybe even the whole alliance. We gave the world leaders a huge number of cores that we earned over the course of almost eleven months in the scenarios, right?”

  “And you think they’re using them against us?” asked Frost.

  Hunter nodded. “Obviously. We had to level at a normal pace, with our enemies matching our levels for the whole of that first month. After that, we earned only cores that were around level 300. So how many level 300s can you make with the more the cores we gave away on arrival? More than 44. Probably more than 100. The militaries have to have built at least a few super soldiers, but they haven’t told us what they’re doing with them.”

  “Well that’s just operational security,” Ashtoreth said. She looked over to Matthews. “Right?”

  “I’m not privy to every decision that’s made,” he said. “But yes. It’s not that we don’t trust you, it’s that we aren’t going to trust you with information that you don’t need to know.”

  Hunter shrugged. “Regardless, the obvious answer is right in front of us. Someone in the alliance wants us out of the way now that they’ve got a foothold. With the existence abilities like [Blood Memory] and [Blood Aptitude], they don’t even require you for your knowledge.”

  He stared at Ashtoreth, speaking as if he wasn’t surrounded by the military officers that he was accusing of treachery in that very moment. “The cold calculus of the matter is that you could have come here with any number of intentions that run counter to theirs, right? So they’ll take us out now that we’re not essential.”

  “Hold on,” said General Matthews, raising a hand. “That’s not how you can expect us or any other military to operate. Working with enemy defectors is something that almost all of us do in almost every conflict.”

  “Including when they’re fiends from Hell?” asked Hunter.

  “Uh, archfiend,” Ashtoreth added quietly.

  “I’m telling you, high command didn’t unanimously decide to kill you all,” said Matthews. “It doesn’t even make sense to do so—the more time goes by, the more we’ll gain our footing and the less and less significant all of you will become in the grand scheme of things. Your level lead is temporary, and you already gave us the cores to match it.”

  “We’re supposed to feel more secure because you assure us we’re becoming less relevant by the moment?” Hunter asked.

  Matthews shook his head. “Look,” he said. “If you want to talk about cold calculus, you don’t threaten us enough compared to the advantage of having two natives of Hell to gain information from. You warrant a back-up plan, that’s for damn sure—a contingency in case you really do betray us. But that’s all.”

  “Like how Batman has a plan for all the members of the Justice League,” said Hunter.

  Matthews blinked. “Uh. Sure. Yeah, sure.”

  “Then we’ve got a rogue nation,” said Hunter. “Someone built a hunter-killer, maybe another assassin class, to take us out.”

  Matthews sighed. “Much as I hate to say it, that could be possible. As far as we know, the invasion is not going well for Hell. I’m not supposed to tell you four this, but human forces have already mounted successful assaults against some of Hell’s bastions.”

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  “Using the cores we gave you,” said Frost.

  “And the items,” said Matthews. “Like I said, I’m not privy to everything, but a squad of our finest with a level advantage of over 100 and the proper gear to boot are effectively invincible against the invaders.”

  “Great!” Ashtoreth said. “That was the whole idea.”

  “It’s become obvious to most of the organized defense that we’re pushing them back,” said Matthews. “In these circumstances, it’s not unthinkable that someone sees the way the wind is blowing and is moving to secure their own dominance in the world order to come.”

  “Exactly!” said Ashtoreth. “If you want to win the monarchy, you have to build the strongest single-combat fighter you can,” said Ashtoreth. “And if you want to do that, and you don’t have any morals, you start killing all the other strong fighters and taking their cores.”

  “Winnow down the pool of potential candidates while also giving your own fighter a unique advantage,” said Matthews. He shook his head, a note of frustration entering his voice. “Damnit, I should have seen this coming. It’s cold, but it makes perfect sense.”

  “Our injection of cores into humanity’s defenses was limited,” Ashtoreth explained. “Until time has passed and Earth gets closer to the inner realms, there is no other supply. That means that anyone who concentrates that power into themselves by killing the high-level humans, then subsequently wins the monarchy will dominate the Earth and humanity’s destiny.”

  “If the Monarch controls travel between Earth and the rest of the realms,” said Matthews. “Then the monarchy is what the Strait of Gibraltar once was, except for the entire world, not just one part of the Mediterranean.”

  “What’s the Strait of Gibraltar?” Hunter asked.

  “Not in Batman, apparently,” said Matthews.

  Hunter glared at him.

  To Ashtoreth, Mattews said, “If you’re guess is true, it’s a huge deterrent to our overall efforts. All our operations will need to come with additional security. High command hasn’t been keeping many secrets because we’ve needed to act fast, but that’s clearly over.”

  “I guess it’s naive of me,” Ashtoreth said. “But I really didn’t think this would happen so fast. It’s only been two days.”

  “But you did think it would happen?” Matthews asked.

  “Of course,” she said. “You guys are humans, not teddy bears. Anyway, I gotta get going.”

  Matthews frowned. “Going? You’re not seriously—”

  “Uh-huh!” she said. “Will you give Dazel the circle runes, Hunter?”

  “Sure.”

  “Ashtoreth,” Matthews said. “Hold on, here. This hunter they’ve built were almost certainly built specifically to kill you.”

  She laughed. “Even if they know how to do that, they’ve still got to actually take me in a fight. They’ll have abilities to suss out the stronger fighters, so I’ll go alone to bait them out and then Hunter, Frost, and Kylie can back me up if I need it.”

  “And if you die, we’ll have lost one of our most powerful assets.”

  Ashtoreth frowned. “If there’s humans hunting high levels out there, they need to be stopped,” she said. “Even if we destroy the rest of the bastions, most of them will have unloaded hundreds of thousands of infernals at this point. Getting every one of your strongest fighters to operate on their tippy-toes because you can’t feed them to whoever betrayed you will cost millions of human lives or more.”

  “Teleportation still takes time,” said Frost. “We’re not going to be able to zip in and save you in an instant unless we go in with you.”

  “But think of the benefits!” Ashtoreth said. “If I can eat even a single of their hearts—oh come on,” she said as the expressions on many of the humans around them soured. “That’s my style, you guys. If I can eat their heart, I’ll know what they know and we can get to the bottom of this. But who else can we send apart from me? We need bait, good bait. And we’ve got to nip this in the bud.”

  “As much as I don’t want to see her risk herself, I agree with the boss,” said Dazel. “I don’t think a human assassin, or a group of human assassins, stand much chance against her. As far as I can see, Ashtoreth’s weaknesses aren’t something that theorycrafting humans are going to figure out how to exploit.”

  “Those being?” Matthews asked.

  Dazel looked up at Ashtoreth. Both of them stifled laughter.

  “Come on, Sir Matthews,” she said. “I’m not telling.” To Dazel, she added, “Circle me up.”

  “I’m still not sure this is a good idea,” said Matthews. “They might not even be in that city, anymore.”

  Ashtoreth shrugged. “Maybe I’m thinking too much like an archfiend,” she said. “But treachery like this should be crushed immediately, and with the fullest show of strength. You want to discourage anyone from thinking they can pull out ahead of the pack, right? We’re not going to play around them, we’re going to destroy them immediately and make it look easy.”

  Matthews sighed. “Good luck, Ashtoreth.”

  “See you soon, Sir Matthews!”

  She left to find Dazel’s rune circle. “Say,” she said. “You think it’s a bit too much if I put a giant target on myself?”

  She wove a claw through the air, creating a glamour that did just that by putting her in a pair of white robes with a bulls-eye across the chest.

  “Or maybe I could make myself look like a giant haunch of meat with a bone in it?” she asked. “Because I’m bait, you know?”

  “You know what?” Dazel asked. “If it keeps you from turning yourself into a chicken leg, I prefer the target.”

  “The one who attacked Hunter used arrows anyway,” said Ashtoreth. “We’ll table the bait costume idea for a dragon, or something.”

  Dazel sighed.

  Very soon Ashtoreth had warped into the air above whatever city in Africa Hunter had been attacked in. It was sunny, there, and she blinked as she extended her senses into the air around her, trying her hardest to sense an attack from any angle.

  “Hello!” she called out, cupping her hands to her mouth. “I’m Earth’s strongest defender and I’m not afraid of anything! Anyone?”

  “Not even going to feign caution?” Dazel asked.

  The point is to make the traitors look trivial, Ashtoreth said with telepathy.

  They just well might have been. She hadn’t want to say much about it in front of the human commanders, but Hunter had less than a third of her [Defense] and [Vitality] and wasn’t a vampire to boot. Vampirism meant that she regenerated 20 times faster per point of [Vitality] than he did, and so there was a high chance, between both those facts, that the arrow which had almost killed him would be nothing more than a nuisance to her.

  Suddenly she sensed an arrow coming her way, fast enough that she wasn’t sure she’d have time to avoid it even with her scythe out for the faster flight it granted.

  But she didn’t need to avoid it. It sped past her, clearly meant only to get her attention.

  She spun to stare down at the figure who had launched the arrow.

  They stood atop a nearby tower. They were a blond human wearing ceremonial robes of bright white cloth and wielding a horn bow. Upon their brow was a crown of dark, lustreless metal.

  One of their hands rested on the neck of a beautiful white horse.

  She tagged them:

  {??? — Level 300 ???}

  “Ashtoreth,” Dazel whispered. “That’s… not a human.”

  Whoever it was, they regarded her with an unreadable expression as she floated down toward them.

  “Dazel,” she whispered. “If you know what’s up, you better tell—”

  “That’s an angel,” he said, his voice filled with horror.