Famine was a black-robed figure who rode a black horse and held a small set of metal scales out before him.

  Death, however, rode a ghostly horse, pale blue and so translucent that it was difficult to see in the light of day. He himself had the appearance of a skeletal shade: a smokey blue-grey color that was just a little darker than his horse. He wore torn, tattered robes, and held a plain farmer’s scythe.

  Quickly, Ashtoreth pointed.

  “Oh no!” she cried. “It’s the Three Horsemen and One Guy of the Apocalypse!’”

  At the same time, she reached out to Dazel with her telepathy. As fast as you can, Dazel! she said urgently.

  Above them, Famine raised his scales, touching them with the hand that didn’t hold them. A shadowy sphere emanated out from the scales, expanding fast to engulf the world around them. It rippled through the air, passing over Frost and Ashtoreth in a moment and leaving the world seemingly unchanged.

  That just blocked my teleports! Hunter said a moment later.

  Ashtoreth’s eyes widened. So they had large area-denial teleportation blocking, after all. Dazel!

  A flash of light bathed the city around them as if it had been lit by a lightning-strike, and Ashtoreth turned to see that a dimensional rift had opened just inside the expanding sphere of shadow.

  There!

  Go! Ashtoreth shouted to Hunter and Frost.

  Above them, the four horsemen charged.

  Ideally, they would have created the rift very close to themselves, and very quickly. As it was, Dazel had placed it several blocks down the street, just outside Famine’s ever-expanding warp-blocking spell.

  Compared to the rifts that Ashtoreth had spent the entire previous day closing, this rift was inverted. Entering it would send them back to the bastion.

  The good news was that even as the dark ripple of Famine’s spell passed over the glowing tear of light, the rift stayed open. Famine’s spell could have stopped the opening of a new rift, but wouldn’t automatically close this one.

  The bad news was that they were far enough away from it that the horsemen would have plenty of chances to take shots at them as they fled toward it.

  Frost began sprinting along the street toward the rift, and Hunter burst through the wall of a nearby building, his black dragon’s wings beating furiously. Ashtoreth, faster than both of them even without her scythe out, threw herself into the air and wheeled to face the horsemen.

  They were extremely fast on their flying mounts, after all. And if she were in their position, she’d want one of them to rush ahead so as to close or block the rift while the others took shots at her teammates.

  War dove toward her as Conquest drew his bow to aim an arrow at Hunter. Death raised his scythe, lurching toward Frost as dark energy gathered around it.

  But Famine rushed straight for the rift.

  Ashtoreth raised her cannon and fired her last two shots at the black horse in quick succession, sure that if she couldn’t stop him from reaching the rift, everything was over.

  The first shot grazed the horse along the flank, shaking it in midair, but the second struck it clean through the neck, and it fell through the sky a moment later. Famine rose out of the saddle, still lunging for the rift, startlingly fast….

  She dispersed her cannon and began to conjure her scythe, crouching as she saw War form his assault rifle and level it at her one-handed while his horse charged.

  But before she could leap out of his line of fire, a voice filled her mind, compelling her.

  “Halt,” Death commanded.

  She froze for a fraction of a second, her magical gear and her high [Defense] more than enough to almost completely mitigate the power of his [Command Undead].

  It was still long enough for War to get off an extremely accurate shot, and a blue flare of light deflected a bullet that would have pierced her skull and turned her brain into summer sausage a split-second later.

  She bounded forward as bullets tore into the space where she’d just stood, landing on the top of a nearby car, gripping it with her claws, and launching herself off it to the screeching sound of tearing, crumpling metal.

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  Her scythe finished forming a moment later, and she swiped it through the air to conjure an condensed patch of hellfire to overtake a bolt of fractured, smokey power that Death had thrown at Frost.

  She wanted to spare Hunter from Conquest’s arrows, too, but there was no time: Famine approached the rift ahead of them, and she knew she had to stop him from closing it. She conjured a dozen hellfire javelins, then launched them at the horseman as she sped forward to avoid War’s barrage of bullets.

  She saw another blue flare of light deflect an arrow that would have speared Hunter in the back and felt a surge of uplifting relief. She knew Frost’s barrier aura wouldn’t last forever, but it just needed to hold for another split-second.

  She conjured another dozen hellfire javelins, her eyes still locked on Famine ahead of them. The horseman raised his scales, a white light building around them, but Ashtoreth’s first hellfire volley hit him before he could complete the casting of his spell, the javelins converging on his upraised spellcasting focus.

  Hunter rushed through the rift a moment later, vanishing with a flash and a pop.

  Ashtoreth wheeled in the air to avoid the trail of seemingly endless bullets that came from War’s gun, angling her wings to make her move in an erratic pattern. She had to wait for Frost to get through the rift, then try to close it once he was done.

  Two of war’s bullets tore through her wings, and she swiped her scythe through the air to ignite one of Conquest’s arrows before sending three of her javelins to intercept another one of Death’s spells.

  Then Frost leapt, reaching the rift and vanishing with a pop.

  Ashtoreth lunged for the rift herself, conjuring as many new javelins as she could in her last moments on Earth and launching all of them toward the rift, slowing their speed so that they would impact after she did.

  Then she felt a bullet strike her clean through the back as she slammed into the rift, and the world around her fizzled and popped before she was tossed out in the red atmosphere and empty metal cityscape of their stolen nexus bastion.

  You okay? Frost asked as she fell to slam into the roof of a nearby tower, then regenerated her wounds in a flash.

  Good, she said, reaching into her bag to consume as many hearts as she could and start filling the massive [Bloodfire] pool that was granted by her scythe.

  Famine stopped your closing shots, Dazel said.

  Ashtoreth looked up and saw that the rift was still open. “Heh,” she said.

  Then she conjured a [Hellfire Nova], creating the blazing novaheart and quickly storing it in her gauntlet as she continued to eat hearts to replenish her [Bloodfire].

  She felt a ripple of magical energy emanate from the rift.

  Give them credit, said Dazel. At least Famine looked through to the other side before they jumped.

  A moment later the four horsemen emerged from the rift in unison, fizzling into existence as Ashtoreth rose off the rooftop to join her companions in midair. For a brief moment, the two teams faced each other down.

  “These the guys giving you trouble?” Kylie rasped.

  She was floating in the air high above the rift, and just as the horsemen each looked up to spot her, she upended her black satchel to dump a continual cascade of grey dust into the air. “Sometimes my back gets tired from carrying this team so hard,” she said.

  Then she snapped her fingers.

  The dust began to shift and glow.

  When they’d been stuck looping through scenario after scenario, Kylie hadn’t been able to bring her minions with her between each scenario, instead needing to raise more every time.

  But while minions couldn’t be brought along, corpses suffered no such restrictions. And while her bag didn’t have enough storage to hold an army of corpses at the ready, they’d come up with an easy workaround.

  Ashes.

  All forms of ghostly minions, from shades to specters to phantoms, could be reanimated through ashes. In fact, Ashtoreth could still remember that one of the very first things Kylie had done when they’d met was throw out a handful of ashes and summon a spectral demon.

  She usually only needed the ashes of a few enemies when they began a new scenario, as her other three aspects gave her more than enough power to get an undead army started.

  Hence, over the course of many scenarios, she’d both upgraded the storage space in her satchel to absurd proportions and tested which enemies made the best spectral minions.

  Today she’d chosen gryphons, drakes, and winged serpents. Their forms coalesced and emerged out of her cascading waterfall of ashes, speeding toward the horsemen below her.

  Fast flyers, all of them. They’d be more than capable of catching the horsemen in the air.

  Ashtoreth, having finished consuming enough hearts to fill her [Bloodfire] pool, cupped her bloody free hand to her mouth.

  “Something I learned down in Hell!” she called out.

  War turned to her as the others faced the cloud of ghostly minions, his face a mask of shock.

  Then Dazel triggered the engine that Set had built, distributing massive life-harvest buffs to all of them in a moment. Their bodies began to glow with inner, orange light as their stats were all raised by thousands, in many cases more than doubling.

  A half-dozen or so of the flying specters began to glow, too. He’d prepared quite a few buffs in the time they’d given him.

  “If at first you don’t succeed…” Ashtoreth shouted.

  She spun her scythe, igniting every one of their buffs. Her hellfire would slowly eat the spell so that they’d all have a replenishing source of resources to drink that would keep them within her auras.

  Ashtoreth spread her arms as they were all wreathed in violet fire. “Cheat egregiously!” she cried.