"The controls!" Ashtoreth said. "Go!"

Frost, Kylie, and Hunter grouped up where they stood in the flames beside her, then warped away. She did a quick check through the telepathic bond to see where they emerged: a dark room lit by the illusory red script of various control consoles. The control room for the rift generator.

We need a fakeout, Ashtoreth had told them during the planning phase. We need to make them think we're after one thing when we're really after another. We'll trick them into thinking that the attack is about the rift generator. If we act like it holds some critical piece of intel, the commander of the bastion will be forced to try and stop of us from getting it—and they'll end up sending us exactly what we want by throwing more of their forces at us.

Frost, Kylie, and Hunter dispatched the infernals in the control room in seconds. The combination of Hunter's penetration and Frost's sacred damage aura meant that within a few short moments after warping in, every infernal in the room had taken at least enough damage to be in agonizing pain.

From there, they simply acted in accordance with their training, something that her people were highly familiar with.

While a short fight happened indoors, Ashtoreth took advantage of their enemy's brief retreat to prepare. First, she used [Hellfire Rune] to emblazon several traps along the sides of the buildings around her. Then she used [Hellfire Volley] to fill the air above her with deployable missiles. All the while she channeled more of the flames surrounding her into her [Hellfire Nova].

Surely, she thought, some of the enemies above her had seen her conjure the [Hellfire Nova]. They were a high enough level that some of them would be familiar with tier 3 abilities. Someone would have recognized the nova in the brief moment that it had been conjured.

She was counting on it.

The infernals above and around her decided to attack again just as Kylie began to cast a spell on the controls of the rift tower.

Ashtoreth stood in her pool of hellfire and danced, launching out volleys of hellfire javelins while she used her racial flight ability to avoid the incoming attacks of enemies.

The enemies who had responded to her attack were certainly powerful. They were higher level than she was, even if her race and class were both higher-grade than theirs would be.

But her flames destroyed any of their spells before they could reach her, drinking the energy that made them to grow stronger. Her high [Defense] and [Vitality] meant that she would barely take damage from any of the arrows and bullets that did manage to reach her, regenerating her wounds almost as fast as they appeared.

None of the melee enemies could even approach the sea of hellfire burning around her, and so that left very few avenues of assault. In the meantime, she launched volley after volley of hellfire javelins, taking advantage of the fact that she was highly familiar with the flight patterns they'd been trained in and could strike them out of the air with ease.

All the while, she charged her hellfire novaheart, letting it grow brighter and brighter in the air beside her as the sea of fire slowly shrank.

Fortunately, there was very little chance that the initial assault would compel the bastion commander to order every available infernal to converge on their position. Some of the nearby troops would be mobilized against her, certainly, but pulling them all would leave the rest of the bastion vulnerable when it was clearly under attack. It was too obvious a way to fall into a trap.

Still, the air above Ashtoreth filled with flying infernals as she fought, a veritable army assembling in the air above her, keeping their distance while other soldiers distracted her by engaging.

Soon Ashtoreth incinerated a winged devil with her hellfire javelins, then looked around to find that there were no more nearby targets. Perhaps more than a thousand devils hung in the air hundreds of meters above her, waiting at what they must have felt was a comfortable range.

The disorganized, impromptu assault of the last few moments had done its job in distracting her. Now they would come with protective magic, long-range spells and weaponry, support abilities… the works.

And they drastically outnumbered her.

"I know you're just buying time," said one infernal, breaking away from the gathering horde and dropped through the air.

She landed against the metal surface of the ground several dozen meters away from Ashtoreth, who held off attacking her for the moment.

The sigil emblazoned on her chestplate clearly indicated that she was an Archfiend of Wrath. Her armor was a suit of polished black plate, and her wings were tall and narrow. Her face was a mask of bemused cruelty.

{Bastion Commander Thorices — Level 420 Boss}

"Say," Ashtoreth called out to her, grinning as she glanced at her burning novaheart. "You look like the sort of boss lady who likes to get blazed!"

Thorices glanced at Ashtoreth's glowing novaheart. "Charging your little novaheart to tear apart the very fabric of reality. It's quite clever, Your Highness. It's also not going to work."

"Pfft," Ashtoreth said. "Uh, my plan is way more complicated than that."

"Oh?" said Thorices. "You see, your sister was generous in providing intelligence," said the Thorices. "A shame, what you did to her, but at least she was useful before you had your way."

Ashtoreth fought not to change her facial expression. She had no doubt that Thorices was just trying to throw her off by bringing up the fact that she'd killed her sister.

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Which was, in Ashtoreth's opinion, pretty low. Even if it made perfect sense.

"We know you used extreme-temperature spellfire to destroy the earlier bastions," said Thorices. "We know because Set told us you did."

"Gee, that was nice of her," said Ashtoreth.

"We had some time to prepare ourselves in case you came for us," said Thorices. She nodded toward the blazing orb of light. "You're going to find that your novaheart won't be going off."

"Uh-oh."

"I'm going to make this simple," said Thorices. "Come with me and live. Oppose me and die."

"That's why you're talking to me right now," said Ashtoreth, nodding in understanding. "Well you know what, Thorices? I ought to thank you, so thanks! It sure made things easier that you were willing to chat."

Thorices seemed to suppress a small look of annoyance. "This is your last chance, Ashtoreth," she said.

"Oh no, you didn't get me. See before, I meant that Set was being nice to me," Ashtoreth explained. "Set's whole deal has been like, super helpful pretty much from the start. She even helped me fake you out!"

Thorices cocked her head, her expression growing cautious.

"You see," Ashtoreth said. "This heistacre was never really about my nova."

Hunter and Kylie appeared in the air beside her, causing many of the devils surrounding them to raise their weapons while others drew back.

Immediately, Kylie raised a hand and released a spell she'd been casting since before Hunter teleported them. A bolt of fragmented, draining power shot from her hand to envelop Ashtoreth's novaheart.

The novaheart vanished, fizzling out in a moment.

Ashtoreth saw Thorices's face fill with shock and confusion.

Then the rift tower next to them began to hum as light gathered around its two prongs.

To her credit, the sudden look of horror that came over her face seemed to imply that Thorices had understood immediately what they had done. Ashtoreth's nova wasn't the bomb… it was just the energy source.

After all, [Bloodfire] and [Mana] were both just energy in the end. Dazel had already shown Ashtoreth that it was possible to convert one into the other when he'd used her help to warp them both out of the void. Even if he hadn't, she knew it was possible to convert them because she could burn spells made of [Mana] to create [Bloodfire].

The novaheart could function as a weapon, but for their purposes it was nothing more than a concentration of energy that they could use to fuel their real spell.

The spell that Kylie had been working on in the rift tower's control room was an engine that would burn her novaheart to fuel a very short-term, overcharged use of the rift generator.

Almost as soon as the novaheart had been warped away, the space between the prongs of the tower began to glow with a deep red light.

"You see that?" Ashtoreth asked the commander. "The exit is where the entrance is!" she said. "And the rift is getting ten times the power in any given moment that it's supposed to!"

"What have you done?" The commander asked, looking from the prongs of the tower to Ashtoreth.

"Your security prevents this, sort of," Ashtoreth explained. "We couldn't figure out how to draw [Mana] from the bastion, so we had to give it its own power source. But all the other security we managed to cut through."

The tower's glow built, getting unnaturally bright. The commander shielded her eyes.

"The whole thing creates a feedback loop!" Ashtoreth said as a high-pitched energetic whine began to emanate from the tower. "It builds and builds! And then—pop goes the demiplane!"

In fact, this way of using the bastion was much, much more efficient than if she'd tried to break it using just a hellfire nova. The latter required to her to create flames of a high enough temperature to destroy the very fabric of the demiplane itself. This way just required her to ball up enough fuel to power the already-existing enchantments.

After all, the point of their assault was to steal as many cores as possible. They wanted to get to a higher level.

But what about getting to the highest level possible, for all of them? What about getting over halfway to 500 before the election even started?

We'll be in and out before they know it, she'd told her team. A thousand cores isn't cool—you know what's cool?

A hundred thousand cores.

The commander looked from Ashtoreth to the glowing tower, her eyes widening. Then she launched herself into the air, forgetting Ashtoreth as soon as she realized that her life was on the line.

Ashtoreth reached out to Dazel with telepathy. Get us out of here!

Uh-huh.

Ashtoreth heard a crackle of energy as the world around her was illuminated by a flash of light. She launched herself into the air to see that some distance away, another rift had opened above one of the barracks.

Hunter appeared on the edge of the roof with Frost, both of them heading for the rift. Ashtoreth rushed toward it as well, reaching out with her telepathy to contact Kylie.

I'm good, Kylie said, sending a brief impression of herself ghosting through the below-ground scaffolding of the bastion, circumventing the armies above her as she moved toward the rift.

Still, Ashtoreth stopped next to the rift to ensure that Kylie got out before leaving. She turned to face the tower as the light above it built, creating a flare of energy that was far brighter than her novaheart had been. Infernals seemed to fill the skies around them, but they paid Ashtoreth very little attention. Most of them were fleeing away from malfunctioning tower, while a few dove through the doors at its base, probably desperate to get to the control room and stop the catastrophe.

Five seconds, guys, Dazel said as Kylie rose through the barracks beneath them. Cutting it close.

Ashtoreth turned to throw herself into the rift—

Then the entire world disappeared around her. The bastion beneath her feet, the army of flying infernals, the two glowing rifts, all of it was gone.

She conjured some hellfire to provide light, but saw nothing. She was floating in a black void.

Guys? she asked.

Then she got a System notification:

{Congratulations! You have been selected as a candidate for the election of the Monarch of Earth! You have been placed outside of normal time for the duration of the election.}

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