The boy start working on the snake-demons. Thomas manages to break one's neck by just holding it and applying his weird super-strength (which is pretty cool, but not all that efficient).

"Yeah, yeah, you're evil. We got the memo."

"Are you seriously taunting the demon overlord?"

Fernando will just be over here, subduing the snake-demons. But he will give Thomas an annoyed looks that agrees with Henry's statement.

"He's already trying to kill us. What do you imagine will happen? He'll try harder?"

Approximately as he says that, Li-Ming slays the last of the demons with a vivid purple energy blast.

Belial roars in fury and begins to grow larger. As he does so, the earth shakes and cracks open, until the party stands on a platform in the middle of an ocean of green flame. "ENOUGH! Behold, the true vision of the Lord of Hell!"

He's very, very large. His head and shoulders are the only part of him that emerge from the green-fire sea, and his head alone is the size of a car.

"It looks like he's trying harder," Li-Ming observes.

"In Lorath's defense he was probably going to do that anyway. Tips on how to fight that thing?"

Lorath waves his staff mystically. Several of the butchered snake-demons stand and advance on Belial, until he smashes them with a negligent wave of his massive claw.

"Shit," Lorath says. "Uh, don't die?" Then he begins firing volleys of razor-sharp bone spears in the general direction of Belial's eyes, zigzagging across the battlefield to avoid the demon lord's swipes.

Fernando makes a few calculations. He flies to Thomas and whispers a plan.

Thomas drinks a stamina potion and then touches the ground and rips a tall column that he whips wraps tight around Belial...

Belial struggles, but doesn't seem to have the raw power to break through the stone. Instead, his eyes flare green and more of those green meteors he seems to like so much start raining from the sky.

Li-Ming, dodging meteors like it's her job (which it kind of is), runs up one of Belial's claw-arms and begins slashing at his face wildly with blades of pure arcane force. Green ichor sprays out of the wounds and spatters across the battlefield. It seems to be going quite well, until Belial turns his head and exhales a cloud of roiling green flames which blast her back onto the floating platform, heavily burned and gasping for air.

Henry and Fernando both go to her. Henry gives a portion of his own lifeforce to heal her... then he remembers healing potions exist.

Breath. Fernando remembers, is the most flick lifeforce aspect, it's hard to accumulate high amounts of Breath because it just disperses. However, breath gifts require little mental attention, so he gladly starts converting health into breath and let his gift absorb heat and douse the fires around Li-Ming.

Gabe, meanwhile, will take a page from Thomas' book and drink the potion, he stands still and let his shield cover the party.

The second Li-Ming is able to walk again, she leaps to her feet and flings a blast of crackling purple energy at Belial's face. It detonates with earth-shaking force, leaving a small crater in the demon lord's head. He retaliates with more meteors battering at Gabe's shield, but he seems to be flagging.

She fires off another. And another. Then she leaps onto him again, buries her staff in his left eye, and blasts a parting shot directly into his brain.

Belial slumps to the ground, the illusory sea of green fire evaporating like mist in the sun. The palace is as it was, apart from the massive demonic corpse lying in the middle of it.

Fernando checks if Li-Ming is okay and does a general scan of the area.

The other picks themselves up.

Li-Ming is not particularly okay (she was very severely burned) but as Fernando investigates she pops the cork out of a healing potion and chugs it with a sigh of relief.

"Well!" she says brightly. "We almost died. That was fun."

"I know, I totally hope we will get invited to the next end of the world."

"Okay, now that's he is dead we are supposed to use the soulstone to prevent him from coming back, right?"

"Yep. That's Adria's thing, I wonder where-"

Adria walks in, followed by an unusually subdued Ari and the Black Soulstone, hovering menacingly at shoulder height. "Excellent, you defeated him. I had every faith in your success, of course."

Adria brings the Soulstone over to Belial's corpse and touches it to his forehead. The soul of the fallen demon lord is sucked into the Stone with a flash of sickly green light. "There."

Henry sighs in relief. "Good. At least that's dealt with."

Gabe puts an arm around Ari's waist. "Are you okay, honey?"

Ari starts. "Oh! Yes. I'm just... thinking. Adria says I'm going to have to work with her to keep the Stone dormant until we can get Azmodan's soul into it and finally destroy it. I'd hoped I'd be able to fight at least one of these things myself."

"Aw, your poor thing. Maybe we can prevent you from passing out next time?"