The Yeerks should, please, be sent somewhere far away. But they'll share their coordinates to within ten thousand miles so as to facilitate this.

Aroden isn't delighted about Mhalir and Carissa being that far away from the support of the rest of the fleet, but ships are fast, and it's pretty understandable on the Andalites part. He does quickly grab Matirin. "You will need to explain to someone that Mhalir's ship has the modified hyperspace drive that their engineers need to study and copy in order to Plane Shi– to hyperspace-jump," he corrects himself, "themselves to the next circles of Hell." 

And he turns away, without bothering to wait for confirmation, and prepares a Sending to Carissa. "Arrived, as planned. Coordinates -" and he reads them off. It just barely fits into the length limit for a Sending.  

Carissa tries to make herself turn around and say something aloud about this, she really does. It does not work. Mhalir will have to do it.

Mhalir is on it, and turns to provide the coordinates to the ship's hyperspace engineer and other staff. They made it back to the Yeerk ship a few minutes ago and he's been pacing anxiously; it's not that he's eager to go to Hell, at all, but somehow the waiting is even worse.

He's kind of miserable, right now, but fortunately not in a way that seems to be preventing him from taking actions. He's probably not thinking at his best, but this isn't exactly complicated, right. 

Once the coordinates have been confirmed and the trajectory calculated, he orders the hyperspace jump to Hell. 

The first layer of Hell is called Avernus. It is vast and beautiful in the way volcanoes and canyons and black glass ground are beautiful; it is bathed in flame always because it is subject to incursions from Heaven and from Abaddon, and devils are immune to fire where daemons and angels are not. Even the newly sorted petitioners are immune to damage from fire, though not to pain from it; they wait in an enormous queue to be evaluated and sorted to where they'll best serve Hell. Most of them spend the waiting time screaming, but some manage to inure themselves to it, or at least to pull themselves together and function through it; this is one of the pieces of information used to sort them, eventually.

Avernus is said by people of other worlds to be an empty wasteland, but it isn't; plenty of things live in fire, and many of them Hell harvests, or hunts, or trades with. In the hollows of the planes of Avernus fire elementals frolic, and magic wells up in rivers and streams and is collected in black spellmetal.

Andalite and Yeerk ship weapons do not shoot fire, the Andalites determined while in Sothis comparing notes with their alts. For a while they just assumed that Golarion didn't have a word for the thing Andalite ship weapons do; there is not really reason to expect they would, at their tech level. But then someone had the idea of measuring various features of all of the spells Golarion has on offer, and testing them against ship shields. One of the spells demonstrated was Flame Strike, which does half fire damage and half damage of some other kind, understood by the locals to be impossible to protect against because it results from direct divine power, not from one of the five kinds of energy that human casters harness. 

<We call it plasma> Morfirin said at the time. <I think that's a better word for it than 'divine', considering. It is also what your sun is made of.>

All of this is to say that the damned petitioners of Avernus have been burning for a long time, years in some cases, but now they are burning differently, and shortly they are gone.

Hell is exactly as bad as he expected, at least within the bounds of horror that Mhalir's mind can hold, which possibly don't include anything worse than Hell, or wouldn't until he saw something-worse-than-Hell to compare alongside it.

Mhalir is mostly not having emotions about it. Or at all, really. Emotions are not helping him right now and so he's just going to not. Do that. 

It doesn't take very long to determine from sensor data that the Andalites are already firing. Mhalir he orders them to join fire, and transmit a message to the Andalite fleet confirming their arrival and asking if the Andalites want to send any engineers over to study his ship's engines once they've melted everything in this particular sub-plane of Hell. 

Spells are negligible in their effects next to this, so Aroden paces and watches sensor readings that he mostly doesn't understand at all. 

Nefreti, did Nethys give you any more spells for today when you cast Miracle, he asks her. 

Spells per day are a human concept! In a deeper sense there is only magic and the only limit on how much of it you can channel is whether it kills you!

Well, can we move these ships to the next circle of Hell when we are done here. I have my part prepared for one more round. 

He prepared Wish in his remaining ninth-level spell slot, and has a diamond for it on hand and grabbable in an instant, because sometimes you really, really urgently need some sort of absurdly powerful arbitrary magic done RIGHT NOW. 

We can do that!

Aroden informs Matirin of this fact, asks to be alerted when everything is thoroughly melted. 

Are the Andalite ships facing any kind of resistance yet? Aroden wasn't sure, beforehand, whether Asmodeus, here closer to the main domain of his power, would have access to magic that could challenge their shields. 

They are very far from Asmodeus's own divine domain, still, but nothing here has challenged them. One space on the plane's surface seems to be successfully shielding; they are unsure whether to concentrate fire there in the expectation that whatever is shielding will run out of the capacity to do that or whether to ignore it in the expectation that if it can handle a ship weapon it can persistently do this.

Aroden's guess is that it's divine magic, possibly the divine domain of Avernus. From his intuitions on god-magic, which differs from human magic in some respects, he expects the shields will go down after enough hammering and it's worth focusing on them. 

They swing the ship's weapons around to focus on that spot.

At that point several things happen. Firstly, something Teleports to above the ship and dispels Nefreti's Forbiddance preventing teleportation onto the ship. Secondly, another one of the ships careens wildly in the sky and then starts firing at its allies. Thirdly, Achaekek, the Mantis God, tears opens the air behind Nefreti and Aroden with sharp claws and reaches through to grab them. 

This is unsurprising and also so inconvenient. 

Aroden is sufficiently absurdly-shielded by various magic items that he has a breath or two of reprieve before he really needs to worry. He races through his options - he could cast his special Gate as an ordinary Gate, but that doesn't get very many people out, and he would prefer to be here and win, rather than elsewhere hiding...

The Mantis God eats people who are trying to become gods, or have annoyed a god, and are not themselves gods (yet). 

It's not a secret, at this point, that he's Aroden. 

...

He casts Wish, and - he doesn't have a safe wording for this but it's not complicated, it holds together very cleanly in his head, though partly at seams that only make sense to him because of his remembered god-nature. 

He wants Achaekek to know that he is Aroden, he is the same entity, and he ought be recognized for that, and therefore he is out of Achaekek's jurisdiction and of no concern to him. This won't get Nefreti out of their mess, of course, but he suspects she can manage for a few seconds, and if he's less distracted he can - figure something out. Maybe. 

Achaekek rears up, taking it in, then shrugs and bites down on Nefreti. 

How rude! She's delighted! She turns into a tiny fairy about an inch tall, and clings to the Mantis God's mantis-pincers, and heals herself.

I think we need to get out of here, Aroden sends telepathically to her, tightly. Can you cast Miracle under these conditions - I have another Gate - 

The pincers snap closed again, faster than sight, and it takes a second for it to be clear that Nefreti is still clinging to the outside of them and still in one piece. I can do that, she says agreeably.

All right. On your go. 

Aroden can telepathically communicate with Matirin and some of the Andalites on other ships, which they set up as a contingency, clearly a good idea. Gate to next plane, he barks to them, and prepares to cast his half as soon as he detects the burst of power from Nefreti with his permanent magic senses. 

Nefreti does not have anywhere near the number of ninth level spell slots she is using today but both 'today' and 'spell slots' are conceptual confusions only humans need to have. She asks for another Miracle. She maintains her concentration on the Miracle even while Achekek's stinger manages to crush her tiny fairy body against Achekek's claws. 

And then there is a Gate! 

- he should do a Sending to Carissa, Aroden thinks in the very back of his mind, or ask the Andalites to transmit a message - but no, he's too far away to make the Gate - they'll do a Sending from the next plane once they have the coordinate and a plan...

The ship goes through the Gate and the Mantis God will presumably make his own Gate but it's known to take him one minute, from the time he first rends space to when he can do it again, it's one of the known limits of the Mantis God. Nefreti heals herself again and flutters up onto Aroden's shoulder and starts casting Forbiddance again. 

While she works on that more than a dozen devils teleport onto the ship only for the nearest Andalite to decapitate them.