"I'm definitely taking this, right?" Ashtoreth asked, gesturing to where she'd written the ability out with a glamour. "It's too weird and tantalizing. What's Pinnacle?"

"No idea," said Dazel. "But the first place we should check is probably Earth, right? I mean… it seems unlikely, but Earth has a lot of unexplained weirdness going on with it."

"Nah, that can be the second thing," Ashtoreth said.

"Huh?"

But she was already ignoring him. "Excuse me?" she said, speaking largely to the air around her. "Pinnacle please?"

"Obviously it's proper for you to check," said Dazel. "But… yeah, this wasn't going to be it."

"It almost sounds like it should be Heaven, with a name like Pinnacle," said Ashtoreth.

"If it's Heaven, it's probably a waste of an ability," Dazel said. "I'm not sure you can get in."

"Oh, come on, what's it take to get on the VIP list up there?"

"This is something that I actually don't know for once," said Dazel. "But I'm pretty sure you just… can't."

Frost sighed as he read the glamoured words describing the ability. "Another piece of the puzzle, I guess," said Frost. "But I have to say, I'm getting a little sick of the mysteries. The King wants Earth desperately—why? Four angels showed up to match us—why? And now this. What the fuck is Pinnacle? What's it for and what does it mean to curate it?"

"I'm thinking," Dazel said, speaking as if the questions had all been addressed solely to him. "Hm. I'm almost certain this place has to be artificial."

"So… not Earth?" asked Ashtoreth. "Why not?"

"This isn't the same as a normal domain ability, where you make yourself a stronghold at a high tier. This is attached to an already existing place, and it's coming through a racial progression path. The only other place I've seen system-granted abilities that come as part of a race package and get location-dependant abilities is with archfiends in the Circles of Hell."

"Oh hey," she said. "That's right, isn't it?" Then she frowned. "Huh."

"What is it?" Frost asked.

Ashtoreth kept frowning as she looked at Dazel, who was clearly also still deep in thought. "It's like I said," she said. "Very high-tier archfiends can get abilities that interact directly with the Inner Nine Circles."

"That's sort of Hell's capital realm, yeah?" Hunter asked.

"Sort of," said Ashtoreth. "Each of the circles is almost like its own realm, and the last one is really the capital."

"That's where you grew up?" Frost asked.

"In Paradise," said Ashtoreth. "The capital city."

"The Circles are the largest artificial realm or realms in the cosmos," said Dazel. "Doesn't matter if you count them separately or together."

"And they're huge," Ashtoreth said.

"Not important right now, but yes—each of them has more landmass than Earth. And they were built to be fundamentally oriented toward infernals in many ways, though I don't know much more than that. We Warp a lot more efficiently in Hell, and non-infernals have a much harder time of it. That sort of thing."

"Home field advantage," said Ashtoreth.

"Sure," said Dazel. "But the point is that as far as I've ever seen, an ability like this doesn't happen naturally. Both the species, fiend, and the structure of the artificial realms themselves have to be built to resonate with one another."

"Which is sort of why this doesn't make any sense," said Ashtoreth. "I mean—an artificial realm somewhere that was built for humans? That humans were built to interact with? It would have to be old."

"Did you just get it because you're a human, or is it specific to a human archfiend?" Dazel asked. "Did your humanity interact with the part of your race that's anchored to the Circles and… give you this bizarre result?"

He was circling her in the air, now, getting more and more agitated. Ashtoreth had to wonder if this was what he was like when he actually didn't understand something, and wasn't just pretending. "Maybe this isn't even anything; just a malfunction of a normal part of your species. Maybe there is no Pinnacle."

"I sent it along to Matthews and Gao," Frost said, nodding to the glamour. "As for the speculation…" He shrugged. "I hate to say it, but this feels like just another unanswerable question."

"You said this has to be tied to an artificial realm, right?" said Kylie. "Or at least that you suspect it."

"I've never seen anything like this anywhere but with fiends," said Dazel. "Whether that means it has to happen that way every time—even that I can't say."

"Well, normal humans don't get racial advancements," said Kylie. "We do, but that's because Frost and I are undead and Hunter is an inheritor of the shadowflame dragon. Normal human racial progression is just your fourth aspect."

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"Say, that's right," said Ashtoreth. "A normal tier 3 human can't even get this. And if you guys aren't getting human abilities in your racial selection… can anyone? This can't seriously be for just an [Archfiend of Humanity], can it?"

"Unfortunately, it gives a little more credit to my defect theory," said Dazel. "Because now we're trying to justify how someone built an artificial realm just to privilege human archfiends."

"Feels very specific," she conceded. "Even if, you know, I personally think it's a great idea."

"Maybe humans are supposed to be infernals," Hunter said.

All of them turned to him. "But they're… not infernals?" Dazel said hesitantly.

"I meant… maybe we were supposed to be grunts in Hell. Whether we count as demons or no, you know? Maybe we originated as a slave race, and the infernals built an overseer archfiend that Ashtoreth is using." He shrugged. "I'm just spitballing."

"Wow," said Kylie. "I guess Ashtoreth is less special than she thought."

"Hey!"

"What? If anything but Dazel's defect theory turns out to be true, then there's no way you're the first [Archfiend of Humanity]." She shrugged. "Maybe your kind all get sent to a farm somewhere. A happy place covered in humanity-obsessed archfiends who spend all their time doing human things."

"I wouldn't be unique, sure… but I'd make more friends!" she said, the two potentials warring in her mind before the latter won and she burst into a grin.

"Look, I don't want the defect theory to be true," said Dazel. "But anything else has to explain a pretty serious hiccough, which is that Ashtoreth's species has a known history that begins a few centuries before her father takes control of Hell."

"Oh," Ashtoreth said, her heart falling.

"What is it?" asked Frost.

"History doesn't say anything about humans being around when my dad was conquering Hell," said Ashtoreth. "How would they interact with fiends at all?"

"That doesn't kill all our theories," said Hunter. "That just means that you probably didn't get offered the ability for being a fiend."

"He's right," Dazel said thoughtfully. "Or at least, he's making sense. The fiend connection is probably just a red herring."

"And this Pinnacle place… it could be older than my father. It could have been built by ancient humans who knew how to use the system…"

Suddenly, her head snapped over to look at Hunter. "Wait a second!"

"Uh. What?" Hunter asked.

"That could be it," said Ashtoreth. "Think. What do we know about humanity's ancient history—their history from before they were all stuck in one of the outer realms?"

"Nothing?" Frost said.

"Not quite," said Ashtoreth, still looking straight at Hunter. "We happen to know one very salacious detail about what the ancient humans got up to."

"Oh," Hunter said.

"We know that Hunter's great great grandmother fucked a dragon!" Ashtoreth said.

"I… oh," said Dazel. "I see. This line of thought is both intriguing and amusing."

"You think Hunter's grandsire is still alive?" Kylie asked.

"Almost certainly not," said Ashtoreth. "Otherwise some elves would be running around with his exact brand of overpowered bullshit. I mean, Mr. Shadowflame has had a lot of time to get randy on the elves since he met Hunter's great grandmother. You really telling me that a dragon willing to get with a human just… didn't bone a single elf for thousands of years?""

"You never know," said Dazel. "Maybe the Wolfhard Patriarch's whole thing was ear shape."

"This is the strangest fucking conversation I've ever been in," said Hunter. "Including when I first met you."

"The point is, someone knows when and how the humans were around, and we may be able to track someone's bloodline back to them," Ashtoreth said. "Even if we can't do that… there's beings in the cosmos a lot older than my father. Someone has to know something."

"And with any luck, the ancient humans will have left us something actually helpful," said Frost. "But somehow, it feels like that's hoping for a lot."

"Still—we got ourselves another lead!" Ashtoreth said. "Whatever's actually behind this invasion, whatever's actually going on… we're going to find it eventually. It's only a matter of time, especially with all the other humans wondering the same questions."

"It's too bad you're valuable," said Dazel.

Ashtoreth frowned. "Uhhh…"

"I mean, it's too bad this ability is on the Monarch of Earth," he said. "If it were one of Kylie's mana dogs or something, we could just punt them across the cosmos hoping they stumble upon this Pinnacle place."

Kylie blinked and looked over at Dazel. "I never told you I think of them as dogs."

"It's like I know you," said Dazel.

"Say, Dazel," Ashtoreth said, eying the ability as something occurred to her.

"Yeah?"

"Could we track the plane back from the ability itself?"

"I don't know of a way to," he said.

Through telepathy, however, he added, Maybe when we buy me a soul map from an outer market, but I still don't give it good odds.

"I see," she said. "Well, I'm going to take this and then grab my fourth spell for 450. I guess we'll see if the bossmen thought of anything we didn't, too."

"Right—Ashtoreth," said Frost, his eyes distant.

"Uh-huh?"

"If that conversation's done, Matthews wants you back on the welcome mat," he said. "Someone here to see you."

"Okay. Another officer?" She broke into a grin. "Maybe a head of state?"

She was only joking. They didn't let her around those, unfortunately.

"An elf," said Frost. "One of their psychics." He grimaced and gave her an apologetic look. "Here to read your mind."

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