It was imdiately clear to Ashtoreth that they'd spawned in the Abyssal Rift, even if she'd never see it before.
She stood in the middle of a vast, circular cavern filled with a diffuse light which had no apparent source. Gravity seed to follow its own laws in the cavern, so that the landscape that was distantly above her was populated by the sa strange assortnt of terrain features that she could see nearby.
They were familiar things that had been arranged in ways that didn't make sense: stones that were covered in bark, bony trees whose symtrical braches ended in globular streetlamps, pyramids whose outer walls were made of pale, shelled flesh like a crab's.
The ground ahead of her transitioned from a spongy pink substance into a flat expanse of brickwork regularly punctuated by windows. Beyond that, wooden poles grew like spear-hafts, each of them topped with a bulbous, fleshy formation like a two-jointed finger.
The air was warm, moist, and in a constant fluctuating breeze. Oddly-shaped islands floated here and there near the center of the cavern, each hundreds of ters above her.
Dazel raised his head from where he rested in her arms and made a small noise of displeasure. "Poor humans," he said. "Maybe you should all kill yourselves and reroll."
But Ashtoreth was grinning up at the chaotic landscape. "And miss this learning experience? Fat chance!"
"Where the hell are we?" Frost asked.
Ashtoreth turned to see the others scattered in a loose formation behind her.
"Not great," she said, pursing her lips. "This is the—"
She was interrupted by a long, distorted sound reverberating through the cavern.
"Follow ," she said, spotting a nearby structure that might function as cover and setting out toward it.
The others fell in behind her, and she continued with her exposition.
"This is the Abyssal Rift," she said. "It's a sort of demi-plane constructed by the Near Ones."
"It's like a random pick of different tilesets," Hunter said.
"What are the most important things we need to know?" Frost asked.
"Physics don't work the sa way here," she said. "Gravity and space can warp and curve. Almost every enemy will have very high resistances but not a lot of active defenses, and almost every strong enemy will have a psychic component to them."
Dazel leapt out of Ashtoreth's arms and flew beside her as she led them into a small structure that looked to be a massive, hollow tree stump dotted with circular windows and made out of seashell.
"Reality here is pinned to the strong enemies," he said. "When you kill one, especially bosses, things around you might change. The tutorial boss is probably the demiplane's keystone—kill it, and everything might collapse."
"But then how do we get loot?" Hunter asked.
"The system won't let us down!" Ashtoreth assured him.
Kylie opened her mouth to say sothing, but she was interrupted by the sa long, distorted noise from earlier. All of them looked up as it reverberated through the huge cavern.
"Look," said Dazel. "If you guys don't want to Jonestown your way out of this one and try your luck at another scenario—"
"Jonestown?" Frost asked. "Is he suggesting what I think he is?"
"Call it 'retryicide,'" said Dazel. "At least in Hell, Ashtoreth is fighting in her native terrain. The Near Ones are serious stuff. If you want to efficiently farm before the invasion of Earth, you should at least test whether there are consequences for passing on a given scenario—and you won't find a better one to pass on than this."
Hunter scowled. "You just want us to… to give up?"
"I wouldn't classify it as giving up," said Dazel. "I'd classify it as 'retryicide.'"
"They sound the sa to ."
"Think of it like a more upbeat ending to that movie The Mist," said Dazel. "One where there's enough bullets to—"
"I don't think we should try opting out," said Ashtoreth, quickly interrupting him. "This could be a great team-building exercise!"
Kylie jerked her head toward Dazel. "What's he so afraid of, exactly? What are the Near Ones?"
"They're entities of the outer chaos," said Dazel. "They tore their way into the cosmos and overwrote the hole they made with realms like this."
"So people say that the reason it's like this is because the Near Ones are insane!" Ashtoreth said. "And so people say that it's because they hate the way our consciousnesses are coherent, and that the worlds they generate are a senseless mash of things we recognize because they want to tear our minds apart!"
"I prefer the army hypothesis," said Dazel. "This scar is the foothold on reality, but they can't push themselves further inward. They're experinting with everything they can see in the inner realms here because they're creating the minions they need to form the armies that they'll use to invade and destabilize the rest of the cosmos."
"As for ," Ashtoreth said. "I prefer the fan hypothesis."
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"That's not a real hypothesis," said Dazel.
But she ignored him to talk to the humans. "I think they're big fans of reality, but they're not sane enough to express it in any way we know. This is them cargo-culting the parts of the cosmos that make sense without knowing that they won't get the sa results that we do. It doesn't function the sa way, but their alien minds can never know why!"
"She made that up," said Dazel. "It's really the army thing. You'll agree with after you spend a few hours here."
From outside ca a new noise—a high-pitched chirping like the sound of a cricket.
"Or a few minutes," Dazel said.
"Damn it," Kylie hissed. Her gaze snapped to Ashtoreth. "I lost my minions on the way here, but the system gave the [Mana] back. I just need so corpses and ti to get the ball rolling."
"Don't worry," said Ashtoreth. "I brought so hearts along to get started and my cannon's full on ammo."
"Actually," Frost said from where he was looking out of one of the shell-stumps circular windows. "It's looking like there'll be enough bodies for both of you."
Ashtoreth leapt up through the opening above them to perch on the edge of the giant tree stump and look in the direction that Frost had been.
True to his word, a legion of enemies was flooding over the bizarre landscape toward them.
Most of them were like six foot tall, four-legged crabs. Their shells were a vividly clashing mixture of blue and orange, and a cluster of lights hovered above their heads, its formation mirroring that of the eyes on their face below it.
{Skitherling — Level 47}
Hundreds of them had already poured out of a distant opening in the curving walls of the vast cavern, and more were still coming.
Almost a dozen much larger enemies walked among them, quickly overtaking their small peers.
The nearest of these would reach them soon.
It was more than twenty feet tall, but most of this height ca from six long, slender legs. Atop these was a shelled, do-shaped head. The head was ringed all round with oddly-spaced eyes and had four mouths, one facing every direction, each of them draped with a curtain of pale, wet fingers.
{Theelertissle Esp — Level 51 Elite}
"Just to be perfectly clear," Kylie shouted. "You think that thing exists because the Near Ones like us?"
"Uh-huh!" Ashtoreth said, nodding as she ford her cannon. "They just don't get us, you know? They wanna make a world that works like ours does, but they don't know how! And so you get Mr. Tallcrab Fingerlips over there."
"Nope!" Kylie said. "No, no, no! I don't like the fingerlips, Ashtoreth! I don't like them at all!"
"I'm definitely right about the army hypothesis," said Dazel.
Ashtoreth brought her cannon up and trained it on the approaching elite. With any luck, it would be just like the insect hive: she could kill a few of the elites and then let the rest of them burn to death in the inferno.
She fired, a flash of light accompanying the loud boom of her weapon.
The air seed to split into fragnts as her shot reached the elite, and she saw bursts of kinetic energy against the ground in a half-dozen places around it.
"Dangit!" she said.
"One more," said Dazel.
She glanced at him. She only had three shots, after all, and each round was expensive. Nonetheless, she took careful aim as the creature rushed toward them on its quickly-moving stick legs, then fired again.
This ti, the elite's defensive barrier failed to materialize, and Ashtoreth's shot connected just above its mouth and ripped a hole through its head as the elite was sent teetering back toward the ground.
She burst it into hellfire, and the motion of its fall ant that the ground behind it was painted with a conical swathe of burning violet flas.
"Knew it," said Dazel. "No way that thing was always on."
"I'm moving up!" Frost said, charging toward the flas. Kylie followed him, but Hunter stayed in the stump, presumably to wait out of view.
Ashtoreth began conjuring another round to load into her cannon, eying the next-nearest elite as it moved over the alien landscape toward them. It was just ahead of them wave of oncors. If she took two shots to kill it, she might be able to cause another chain reaction.
Then she heard the sa eerie, distorted noise that they'd heard twice since arriving… only now it was much, much louder.
The oncoming horde of enemies had stopped in their tracks within a matter of seconds. Then, as one, they began to retreat.
Ashtoreth sighed, consud one of her three hearts, then began to load her cannon as she conjured another round.
Frost stopped at the edge of her pool of hellfire and turned to her with a questioning look.
Ashtoreth made an exaggerated shrug, looking around for what she expected would be a boss.
It didn't take her long to find it.
In the distance, glowing tendrils began to sprout from one of the floating islands as it began to move toward them. A hazy ring of turquoise energy surrounded it in the air, a hundred and fifty ters in diater.
Even though it was more than a kiloter away, it was more than a hundred ters long. Ashtoreth could easily identify it:
{Erzmannanon Indristithic
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