“Hey, thanks,” said Dazel.
“Abhorrent insects, tumorous vines, mutated primates, suppurating trees, congealed slimes, grotesque humanoids, rabid canines, monstrous birds….”
“Such a pleasant bouquet adjectives,” said Dazel. “I can really feel the love you have for your subjects, Your Highness.”
“Huh?” She asked, frowning. “They’re supposed to love me, not the other way around.” She turned back to the humans. “Anyway, demons tend to have the most variety in physical forms because they have loose souls.”
“This is… ugh,” Dazel said.
“You want to step in?”
“No, no,” he said. “You’re way is probably a fast and easy way to understand. I’d end up lecturing on metaphysical mechanics to a bunch of people who barely want to listen.”
“Sure,” she said. “Demons are very easy to socket into new bodies and forms. Dazel here is a good example, he’s basically just a bunch of aether stuffed into a shape and then given some stats. You can almost think of demons as being more… fluid, metaphysically. They’re easier to summon, easier to bind, and it’s easier to transfer their soul into a new body, or have them possess somebody. In Hell, they are typically, typically the lowest-ranked of the three types of infernals.”
“But not always?” Hunter asked.
“Oh no,” Ashtoreth said, dragging out each word for emphasis. “Everything I just said makes demons easy to enslave and very useful as slaves. But there’s also a lot of high-level craziness they can get up to. They can have truly titanic, monstrous forms, and they can use warp magic and soul magic more easily than pretty much any other race.”
“It’s not so much that demons are always on the bottom,” said Dazel. “It’s that our power floor is much lower than that of devils and fiends. If you’re born a devil, the lowest you can be in the hierarchy of Hell is still much higher than the lowest it can get for a demon.”
“Right,” said Ashtoreth. She was smiling: to her it felt like more and more, Dazel was forgetting himself and joining in on the group dynamic.
Sure, he might just be doing it so that he could get at, and manipulate, the humans. Or maybe he’d decided that manipulating her would take a little more friendliness.
But still: he was at least somewhat part of the group, now. Very soon she could goad him into actually being useful. Maybe he would even become pleasant to be around.
“Moving on to devils,” Ashtoreth said. “They tend to be the more… I guess you would call them humanoid. Not always, of course—a better rule is that they tend much more to resemble twisted versions of intelligent creatures like mermaids and elves and dwarves. They’re also much more likely to be practiced spellcasters and have elemental aspects—hellfire, hellfrost, and profane shadows are their typical milieu. It’s much more normal for a devil to be in command of a host of demons than for a demon to be.”
“They’re also the most resentfully ambitious creatures you’ll find in Hell,” said Dazel. “It’s possible to find demons that don’t have a lot of ambition, who just live for the finer pleasures in life, or at least the avoidance of pain. But devils? Every one of them thinks they deserve their boss’s job and would betray every single person close to them to get it.”
“That’s uh, your unbiased opinion?” Hunter asked.
“He’s mostly right, actually,” said Ashtoreth. “The way the fiends look at it, the devils have a taste of power but always have to settle for being second best. I think it’s easier to accept being on the bottom than in the middle.”
“That, or they’re just objectively worse than demons, psychologically speaking,” Dazel said. “In my unbiased opinion.”
“So let me get this straight,” said Frost. “The fiends and demons can both agree that devils are the worst.”
“Yeah, I’d say so,” Ashtoreth said.
“What would a devil say, if they were here?”
“They’d say that fiends are arrogant, incompetent, and co-dependant,” said Dazel.
“—And that demons are ambitionless, cretinous, and servile,” said Ashtoreth.
“Which sort of proves our point, if you ask me,” said Dazel.
“Yeah,” said Ashtoreth. “But devils really are just sort of like that. It’s awful.”
“Someone else should probably feel bad for them,” said Dazel.
Ashtoreth snickered. “Okay, well, on to fiends. See, fiends are a sort of mix of demons and devils, but it’s a little more complicated than that.”
“Because most mixes between demons and devils result in useless freaks,” Dazel said. “Not the optimized superbeings that the lords of Hell desire.”
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
“The bad ones get purged,” said Ashtoreth. “But mostly they don’t happen anymore.”
“Okay, ‘purged’?” said Frost.
“Friendly reminder that I’m talking about the people I’m risking my entire life to stop,” Ashtoreth said. “But yes, purged. The experiments that created my kind resulted in many forms that were… suboptimal. But with great effort, the goal was reached. And now, fiends tend to breed with other fiends, only rarely bringing the other infernals into the mix to change something.”
“You said the goal was reached,” Hunter said. “What was the goal? A strong race?”
“Lots of races are strong,” Ashtoreth said. “Dragons and devils are strong. But do you remember how I said that Hell did everything it could to game the system so that it’s low level creatures win the initial stages of an invasion?”
“Yeah,” said Hunter.
“Take that mentality and apply to crafting a race. You can only stuff so much power onto one soul that has no class, right? So… I don’t know, you two have both played video games. Think of a system where you have a racial point buy. Archfiends don’t just have the most points to spend, thousands of years have been spent figuring out what the most optimal way to build is.”
“So you’re really, really OP?” Hunter asked.
“Exactly!” Ashtoreth said. “Think about it like this: you’re both humans, but because of your bloodline, and Frost’s vampirism, you both have racial abilities. And those abilities should give access to different, hybrid abilities in your class advancement.”
“Uh, yeah,” said Hunter. “My shadowflame dragon bloodline is sort of a crucial part of my whole class.”
“Great,” said Ashtoreth. “So think about my kind like this: fiends were made and perfected over millennia to have a starting set of abilities and a continued racial progression path that gives multiple options for strengthing your build with good synergies—no matter what you actually build for. Toughness, magic, summoning, martial supremacy, striking from stealth… anything. We can build for power in everything—but more importantly, we can shore up any weakness. Flight and truesight both answer a lot of potentially unanswerable problems, without requiring one to take an aspect.”
“As an example,” Dazel said. “It’s no accident that when she became a vampire she got to take the [Drain] aspect and get this absurdly powerful [Consume Heart] ability. She’d have found something like that anywhere as an archfiend.”
“Right!” she said. “Good example, Dazel. Though [Consume Heart] is maybe still—”
“—Yeah, okay, that one is still strong by Hell’s standards even,” Dazel said.
“Earlier,” said Frost. “You said you spent your whole life training for this.”
“Yep!”
“And earlier than that, you said that if you were too weak they’d kill you and eat you.”
“Yup!”
Frost seemed thoughtful for a moment. “I’m very sorry, Ashtoreth.”
Ashtoreth went rigid for a moment. She felt a quick flash of fear and seemed to hear a memory of a distant song….
She shook her head. “There are worse lives to live,” she said at last.
“Amen to that,” Dazel said.
“Language, Dazel. I felt like we were getting along.”
Dazel chuckled. “Just remember, you two. In your world’s terms, Ashtoreth is a genetically engineered supersoldier who has been trained from birth to be one of Hell’s most powerful fighters and commanders. They taught her to be vicious without being savage, cruel without being indulgent, unpredictable without being random.”
“I won’t lie,” said Hunter. “You don’t, uh, seem all that vicious and cruel.”
“Thanks, Hunter!”
“Not surprising,” said Dazel.
“What do you mean?”
“Well I left something out,” said Dazel. “See, Ashtoreth is supposed to be loyal. Loyal to her father, loyal to her family, loyal to the clan of pride, and loyal to all fiends. Loyalty beyond anything. Once upon a time, devils used to rule Hell—devils with plenty of overpowered racial abilities of their own. But beyond any of their many powers, the fiends’ sense of racial superiority helped them stick together while the devils, who never stopped backstabbing each other, were easy to pull apart. That’s why the war went in her kind’s favor. If Her Highness over here has gone traitor, something in her is pretty seriously broken.”
“Sure,” Ashtoreth said. “If you say so. But you know what, Dazel? It’s great that you’re warming up to being on the team.”
“What? I’m not warming up to anything.”
“Sure,” she said. “Except you started off not wanting to help with my loredump, remember? Then boom. Suddenly Dazel is doing more than half of the loredump, all by himself.”
“Uh, well excuse me—”
“Quiet a sec,” Hunter said suddenly, cutting Dazel off.
They stopped and listened. A faint, steady sound could be heard over the trees. At first Ashtoreth thought it sounded like a waterfall, but then she realized it might have been people—it was like they were a few blocks away from a stadium.
“Is that… a battle?” Dazel asked.
“I’ll check,” Ashtoreth said. She stuck her sword into the ground, the planted her heels atop its hilt and pushed it downward, the counterforce throwing her high into the air.
She cleared the tops of the trees easily, then rose further and used her racial flight ability to turn herself and survey the land beneath her.
She saw demons, hundreds of them. Strangely enough, they seemed like they were fighting each other. They were hard to make out at this distance, but some of them were huge, armored quadrupeds that were multiple storeys tall.
Perched on a precipice that was looking over the battlefield, she could barely make out a tower in the haze. The positions of the armies made it seem as if the tower was what the demons were trying to assault.
She landed moments later and looked around at her party. “Great news!” she said.
“O-kay,” said Frost. “That can mean a lot of things with you.”
“There are hundreds of demons over there!”
“Case in point.”
“Oh, come on,” she said, grinning at him. “Don’t you want to hit level 10?”
Community Goal: 666 Followers!
Reward: 2 Bonus Chapters!
Progress: ????? ????? ????? ????? 98%
Read ahead on