Kylie arranged for Ashtoreth to et with a representative of humanity's bossn at a duck pond in a park near a place she'd used to live, and Ashtoreth showed up under a glamour that made her look like a red-headed human in a windbreaker with a baseball cap on. She was a little surprised when she arrived and saw soone familiar sitting on the park bench.
"You didn't get fired?" she blurted out at General Matthews. "Uh—from this, I an. Not from being a general."
Matthews's expression held a contained, professional amount of amusent. "It's still ."
"Well congratulations," she said, sitting on the bench beside him. "It's a competitive position, I'm sure."
"Talking to you?"
"Uh-huh!"
Matthews paused, then said, "Last ti we spoke, you were deliberately flippant about cutting us out, then threatened to kill two dozen commandos in the special forces."
"Um, actually," she began, "all I did was ask if we were going to escalate to violence. In a deliberately flippant way."
Matthews considered this a mont, then gave a conciliatory tilt of his head. "Fair enough. Kylie was a little vague on what this was about—I take it you've got sothing to tell us?"
"Sure!" Ashtoreth said. "But before we get started, is there any word on the 'let's fight' proposition?"
"You're asking if we've found soone to replace you yet?"
"Basically that, yeah. Maybe like, a really old elf with intense eyes and cheekbones as sharp as his elegantly curved blade? Soone with strong protagonist vibes, is what I'm saying."
"From what I've seen, that's most of them. And no."
"No? Really?"
Matthews sighed a little. "Don't let this go to your head."
Ashtoreth winced. He was asking a lot and he knew it.
"—Not even the elves think that you'll be reliably beatable without sothing so specific that it defeats the point—which is to say that a silver bullet build might do it, but it's not going to do the job of defending the Earth as well as you do."
"Okay, that? That went to my head."
Matthews looked appropriately nonplussed. "To be clear, there are plenty of elves who would happily duel you. But if we're talking about keeping things fair? There aren't any elves willing to duel you to the death with no information on your aspects or fighting style, not after learning what happened with Famine and War. If it were their howorld and not ours, things might be different. But they're not putting their lives on the line for the sake of Earth's politics."
"And if you ask ," Ashtoreth said, "that last bit just goes to show how much less qualified for the job they are."
"If you say so."
"I do! And I should also probably say that the challenge percentage the system gave started ticking up a couple days ago. Every day that passes is another chance that the system will put in a deathmatch with sobody. It's going to happen eventually."
"What's your percentage?"
"Two."
A shadow briefly passed over Matthews's face.
"Hey—I didn't make the rules!" she said. "You know what they say about hating the player."
"I know, Ashtoreth. But it's still a public relations nightmare if it gets out that you've got to off at least one idiot who's dumb enough to try and beco the king or queen of Earth every now and then. We can't possibly sell that to the general population."
"Well I an… mum's the word on my end of things," she said. "I'm not going to start posting about how I killed so fools this weekend, if that's what you're worried about."
"I'm glad to hear that."
"And I don't even know why you would worry about that," she said. "I an—you guys really should trust by now! Heck, you should have trusted from the start!"
"I agree."
"After everything I did! I gave you millions upon millions of cores," she said. "Literally—wait, what?"
"I agree with you," Matthews said again. "There was no point in asking for you to go as far as you did in proving your trustworthiness if we weren't going to trust you in the end anyway. And putting ourselves at odds with you was always going to backfire more than biting the bullet and accepting that the best possibly scenario ant working with, and trusting, an archfiend from Hell. It's not perfect, but when is it ever? Not in war."
Ashtoreth frowned down at the ducks in the water before them. "Okay, but… I'm confused."
"I am, and remain, one of your most prominent advocates when it cos to the decisions of high command," he said. "But I also follow my orders and respect the chain of command. And if all I ever had to say was 'sorry, I agree with you, but the higher-ups don't agree with ,' you'd get the impression that talking to was pointless."
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"Well, okay, but it sort of was pointless," said Ashtoreth. "I did a lot of work to make sure that things weren't just for show when I subordinated myself to the will of high command."
"I'm aware."
"I an, I gave you millions upon millions of cores," she said. "Literally millions—it was the perfect recipe for stabilizing your power over the Earth! I get that things work differently in Hell, but even before you read my mind, you could still see that I wasn't looking to topple anyone's power structures."
"Minor correction," said Matthews. "We didn't get to read your mind. The elves did, and they just gave us an overview."
"Sa thing."
"Not really. Nobody gave us a detailed account of how to manipulate you. And believe —people were asking for it."
Ashtoreth laughed. "I believe you! But also, you guys are getting adjusted to the cosmos, right? You've clearly got an idea of how valuable millions of cores, literally millions of cores that are way beyond your realm's natural level limit, are."
"Yes. They're very valuable, Ashtoreth."
"Enough cosmic dollars for Scrooge McDuck to break his neck on. And the elves definitely told you so things about the contents of my mind."
"So things, yes."
She gave him a significant look. "Big things."
"All right, fine. Big things. But nothing we ever found in your mind was ever going to help us get around the main problem that people in high command have with you, Ashtoreth, which is that your father absolutely must have contingencies for when one of his daughters goes rogue."
She crossed her arms. Sighed. "Yeah, probably…"
"Probably?"
"Okay, for sure. For sure, for sure."
"What do you think those are?"
"I have no idea." She shrugged. "If he had a big red button that made us drop dead, I'm sure he'd have pushed it before I beca monarch. At this point, running interference on will just result in an election that puts one of your soldiers or my friends in the position after ."
"And we know he hasn't bound you to him using any infernal contract."
"Nope! He specifically teaches us how they can be circumvented—as you've seen."
"And you don't know if anything like this has ever happened before."
"I don't think so," she said. "I had to steal an antithesis shard in order to do this. Disloyal daughters make enough sense—most of us are just resigned to the fact that we can't change anything, not fanatically devoted to him."
"Probably makes for more functional soldiers in the long run," said Matthews. "But we're still facing down a problem, here. If the King's failsafes were known to us, we might know how to counter them. But right now, we're stuck doing the sa thing with your father that we're doing with Dazel. We're waiting for him to make his move with no idea what that move might be."
She rested her head against the bench. "But they both involve ."
"Both of them," Matthews agreed. "I'm not going to try to justify the decision to keep you out of the loop when it ca to the warp conduit we unearthed in Siberia, because it's not a decision that I ever agreed with. But a large faction in high command believes that the only way we can get ahead of your father is to get you out of the picture, sohow. That everything you touch is compromised."
Ashtoreth sighed and thought of Icon's distrust. There was a lot of that going around. "If I were a sleeper agent that my father could activate, what's he waiting for?"
"I know."
"More importantly, why wouldn't Dazel have done sothing about it? He's apparently got the intel he needed on my soul while I was sleeping, so if there was a kill switch, he would have found it. Sothing like that might be possible, but that just makes a huge vulnerability for his enemies, given that most of Hell's realms are ruled by his children."
"I see your point," he said. "But that still leaves us with no idea what kind of plans he might set in motion to stop you."
She shrugged. "Maybe it was the angels," she said. "Maybe the fact that they were angels was just a misdirect, and Heaven has nothing to do with any of this. Heck, maybe it's just the mistrust."
"Those answers feel a little too easy."
"Yeah…" she said, looking down.
"Listen, Ashtoreth—I want to ask you sothing, but you don't have to answer it if you don't want to."
Ashtoreth tensed. She didn't like the sound of that. "Okay…"
"Doesn't a conversation like this bother you?"
She frowned. "How do you an? I'm at work right now. Who cares if I'm a little bored?"
"No, not—bored? I an that we're talking about how you, as a designer soldier, can't be trusted as soon as you make any move toward self-determination."
Ashtoreth tried to consider his angle. Perhaps soone had instructed him to try and get her to open up to him on a more personal level to avoid another problem with her loyalties? She almost expected him to be wielding a clipboard when she looked over.
"I suppose I'd rather be the undisputed, unimpeachable hero of the realm," she said. "One who subordinates herself to high command and gets praised for it, you know? Sets aside the power and looks all virtuous and stuff instead of getting treated with suspicion." She gave an exaggerated shrug. "But hey, you get what you get—and so people get miserable slavery, then death. I can crush stones into sand with my bare hands and fly faster than sound, though. So that's pretty cool, I guess."
"You guess?"
She rolled her eyes. "What do you want to say, here? It's been a stressful ti for lately, but I've had a blast making new friends and occasionally, rarely getting to enjoy a little piece of the humanity that I've been desperate to be a part of for the last six or so years of my life. But here's the real deal: I'm going to fight my battles, whatever they are. I'm going to win them. Then, at long last, I will sail into the sunset and live a life of immortality and godlike power. And hopefully, hopefully, the people of Earth will let call it my ho and hopefully the greater share of the cosmos will be open to . There are worse lives to live than mine."
Matthews was quiet a mont. "I guess that's probably as good an outlook as you can have on the situation, isn't it?"
"Uh-huh! I'm a spectacularly talented optimist. Now if we're done filling in the boxes on my psych eval, I've got so things to show you."
"And do those things by chance involve getting taken off-world?"
She grinned. "Only if you want them to! But if you want my advice, you should definitely want them to."
He stood and brushed himself off. "Let's go, then."
"Great!" she said, standing. "Let's start with a little sothing that high command is definitely going to love. I call it, 'The Cosmic Army Starter Pack.'"
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