the side.

  She could see why he’d had such confidence. His arrows were fast, and arced slightly so as to make them both more accurate and more difficult to predict. It took her to the edge of her abilities just to interpose her fire between herself and the arrows, a rapid surge of instinct combined with training.

  Conquest apparently noticed her skills, because he paused in the air above her after launching the third arrow, cocking his head.

  Call them when you need them, Dazel said, zipping down through the air to land on the ground beside her. Which might be right now.

  He was talking about her allies, who could warp in via rune circle.

  Not yet! she said, interposing fire between herself and another arrow as she threw herself out of its way and conjured a dozen hellfire javelins to hover in the air around her.

  The fight with Conquest was a trap, but only by a little bit. Both of them had allies, and both of them were a high enough level that they could teleport across the globe.

  When both sides of a conflict had teleporting champions, the normal mode of engagement was that each would commit only the forces they believed they needed to make a battle go in their favor, gradually adding more only when the other side did the same.

  Things could be complicated by the existence of warp-blocking spells and abilities, but at their level, they were unlikely to encounter any such abilities of the size needed to box them in.

  Their fight was a trap in that Conquest wasn’t going to summon his allies unless she summoned hers: he thought he could take her in a one on one fight and likely wanted her to call them for support.

  She wondered at his level. Did Heaven somehow have the power to set the level of their invaders to equal the highest level of the ones they were invading? Did they know, somehow, that Ashtoreth and her crew were 300, that others humans would also be 300 or higher?

  Even if they did, she doubted they’d believe that even a larger pack of humans to be a match for them. Conquest apparently had a good build for killing single targets at range, and a regular level 300 human would be untrained in the use of system-granted power.

  He’d been waiting for her, after all. She’d been right to paint a target on her chest; he and his allies were here to kill her and hers.

  Conquest was old, after all, and was apparently undaunted by the prospect of fighting her one on one. She had to hope that he hadn’t accounted for all the skills that they’d built up in their year of scenarios.

  If he knew what they were capable of and was still unafraid, they were doomed.

  I gotta go work the backup, said Dazel, taking the opportunity to touch down on the ground and zip away beneath a nearby car.

  Ashtoreth grunted her assent, her eyes focused on the angel above her and her magical sense extended into the air around her.

  He launched two arrows in the same instant a moment later, and she sent two javelins after them while whirling her scythe to conjure two swathes of hellfire. Both of them still made it through the spell-eating flames, and one of them buried itself two inches into her chest a moment later.

  She burst the haft of the arrow into hellfire as she converted her scythe into her cannon in the same moment, beating her wings so that her feet left the ground and she rushed down the street as she took aim at him with her cannon.

  Her weapon thundered, a shockwave of air stirring the dust in the street around her and making her clothes and hair flutter as it pressed her wings back. Above her, Conquest shot to the side with startling speed, barely pushing himself out of the way of a shot that moved twice as fast as his own arrows.

  Ashtoreth gritted her teeth. Damned [Nimble] aspects and their bow-kiting.

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  But she’d gotten a little used to the paths of the his arrows, could predict them better, now. Even without her scythe, she could conjure quickly intercepting fire to interfere with his shots.

  His first arrow she dodged by dipping down through the air so that she could spring off the street and toward the wall of a nearby tower, which she ran up as she took aim and launched another shot from her cannon.

  Another near hit, but Conquest had just barely, spun away from her shot in time.

  She hissed in frustration as he launched another double-shot, then kicked herself off the side of the building as his arrows flew past her in quick succession, each burying itself deep into the concrete edifice.

  She lined up another shot as she landed with a crouch against a nearby tower, then fired and watched with growing frustration as Conquest once again seemed to just barely twist in the air to avoid her round.

  Ashtoreth let out a growl of frustration as she kicked off the second tower to avoid his next arrow. Twice could be a coincidence, but three times was an enemy plot: Conquest was faking her out to get her to waste ammunition.

  She ejected the magazine from her cannon as she dropped back down toward the street, launching her javelins at another double-set of arrows and twisting to avoid them as she fell.

  She held her cannon one-handed as she reached into her bag to grab her second magazine, her eyes still on Conquest.

  But she also flicked her gaze down to a place they’d looked a few times since their battle began, this time seeing just what she suspected she would.

  In the tiny reflection that appeared on the scope of her cannon, she saw a white blur approaching her from behind, taking advantage of her apparent moment of weakness as she reloaded.

  His play had always been about the horse.

  Now! she said in the telepathic bond.

  Then in one smooth motion, Ashtoreth brought her tail up against the butt of the weapon, letting go of it with the hand that supported it and quickly pushing down on the barrel to flip the whole cannon in place as she spun to turn 180 degrees and face the oncoming enemy.

  The white horse sped down the street at an alarmingly fast speed, faster than either she or Conquest had moved since their fight began.

  She fired her cannon upside down, partly holding it in place with her tail as she squeezed the trigger with the hand not holding the spare mag.

  Another shockwave shook the street around her as the round shot forward, a bolt of light on a collision course with a horse that was moving far, far too fast to avoid it.

  Her shot struck the white horse in the chest, burying itself in the creature’s flesh with a burst of gore as it was knocked from the air, off its trajectory, to crash into the ground below and tumble past Ashtoreth.

  Ashtoreth was still moving, spinning the cannon again as she slammed the magazine home, spun 180 degrees, slammed the bolt forward and levelled the barrel at the horse as it smashed into cars into cars and skidded along the asphalt.

  She squeezed the trigger once more, sinking another round into the creature and giving it more momentum as it thrashed along its destructive trajectory.

  Then she glanced up and saw a cloud of arrows streaking down toward her, all of them followed by Conquest. He’d grown a pair of glimmering, translucent wings that shone with many colors like a backlit panel of stained glass, and his face was a snarl of rage.

  Joy flared within her as she saw him following his wall of arrows. After all, he hadn’t yet seen her sword.

  She leapt back, giving herself just enough time to conjure Luftschloss and interpose it between herself and the converging arrows, causing each of them to ping uselessly against its massive steel blade, the force of their impacts sending her skidding further away from Conquest.

  The she raised the blade as he swooped in, conjuring two curved blades of what looked like glass to wield against her.

  But while she made it look as if she was raising her blade to meet his own, she had other intentions in mind.

  She launched it straight into his chest at point-blank with a [Mighty Strike], and the point of the blade impaled the horseman and sent him flying through the air to crash into a nearby building amidst a cloud of rubble and dust.

  Ashtoreth dug a claw into the asphalt at her feet as she was sent skidding away from him by the counterforce, conjuring her cannon with the other claw.

  She brought the barrel of the weapon up to Conquest, saw that he’d launched himself out of the rubble and into the air, then brought it back round to focus on the horse that had skidded to a halt and was struggling to its feet more than a hundred meters away.

  She fired.

  Her first round tore through the horse’s neck, causing it to collapse. The second struck it in the head, at which point the horse burst into a massive cloud of violet fire.

  Conquest reached her a moment later, too late. His swords clashed against her raised cannon, sending her backward but leaving her unharmed.

  All his confidence was gone, his face a mask of wounded rage. He screamed, a barely-human sound the reverberated off the buildings around them as his wings rippled with light.

  Ashtoreth grinned.

  “It’s Ashtoreth, by the way.”