Yemma sighs. "There is a way I could let you in. A couple of ways, actually. Three." He extends a finger. "Easy way: if the Enemy were somehow not able to do anything, I could let you in. As long as he wasn't able to do anything about it, it'd be fine. That's probably not going to happen, to be honest." Another finger. "Slow way: go away, get stronger. Way stronger. Strong enough that you won't have to worry about the Enemy following you in. Obviously, that's not very helpful for you."
Kakara looks up at him through her bangs. "...and the third way?"
He sighs, nodding. "Third way. Quick way."
A door opens in the wall to your right. There are stairs inside.
Leading down.
"You take the stairs, and find what you're looking for the hard way," he says.
Kakara stares at the doorway. "...those go down."
"As far down as you can go," he says, nodding. "And they lead where you're thinking. I'll be honest: there are things down there that could rip you apart, shade or not, and they'd be happy to. If I were you, I wouldn't risk it. But if you really want to get into Heaven as fast as you can..." He shrugs. "I don't know that you want to head down there now, though."
Dazarel squirms free of her grip and scampers up onto her shoulders, hiding behind her neck. 'Please no.'
Yemma shoots the lizard a foul look. "I'd be glad to chuck him down there, though."
Kakara stares at the entrance to Hell, the hair on the back of her neck standing on end. It looks surprisingly unimposing, for something so important.
After a long moment of thought, she sighs, deflating. "No," she mutters. "You're right. I shouldn't risk it. Not yet, anyway."
"Sorry, kid," he says, grimacing.
Well, that's never happened before. The closest thing to it she's ever experienced is when the Enemy cut off her vision when she tried to look under his hood, and even then there are important differences. This seems less dangerous, for one. And it's definitely not like the wards Dandeer put up on the night before the sealing to keep off prying eyes, either, especially since this doesn't seem like something she could break if she just applied the right force. She's sure her teacher would have an explanation, (and she cuts out an involuntary wince of pain before it surfaces, she will save him) but her training with the Sight was rather condensed to get to the point where she could safely project herself into someone else's mindscape safely as quickly as possible and wasn't complete in any case, so she doesn't know it.
...
Dazarel might know, though. He's not a seer, but he is a powerful psychic and both significantly older and more traveled than she is. She doesn't exactly want his help, per se, but he's there and she might as well get some use out of him.
"My precognition is blocked. It's like there's a wall of static keeping me out, and pressing feels painful. I think I might still be able to get a couple of seconds if I went at it from the right angle, but nothing beyond that, and it doesn't feel like the sorcerous blocks I've encountered before. Do you have any idea what's going on?"
He seems faintly alarmed, though he suppresses it well.
"Kanassan sight is a greedy gift, but a powerful one. There aren't many forces capable of warding it off, and even diminished like this your own power should make it extremely hard for a psychic to block you. If it's not some fantastically powerful magical concert work... it's probably a god."
"Normally, this is where I would advise we leave, but the gods like you enough to bend the rules around letting you into heaven, and even the exceptions will think twice before pissing off your grandfather if you introduce yourself. As long as you don't press it, we should be fine; just stick to present and past sight, if you can."
Past-sight it is, then! If she follows the strange aliens backwards along their path to this point, she sees a lot of infighting, even considering how terrified they seem of their leader. For most of them, this leads back to the entrance to some evil-looking spacial rift full of even more varieties of aliens that are steadily pouring through onto this planet, but for a handful of the stronger looking ones, she sees them attacking other groups of humans and either being defeated and driven off or succeeding and brutally killing as many of them as they possibly can. It's not impossible there's a reason for it, but it doesn't look good at all, and standing by while this happens is the same as condoning it. Fortunately, even at this level of strength she is very fast; it's only been about 20 seconds since she arrived, if that.
Decision made, she stops resisting the guiding force, and arrives in someone's head. Fortunately, she's good enough at telepathy to not need to deal with things like a language barrier.
"Hello, I'm Karen Marsden. You look like you could use a little help here?"
He startles at that, though not enough to put him at any risk.
"Yes, I could," he thinks back; the reflex is aimed at a different sort of telepathy than her kind and doesn't actually make use of the ki channel to communicate, but inside his head it's not an issue. "Are you an adventuring party? Unless you're at least 7th circle, you're unlikely to be able to turn the tide here, but we could use some covering fire to help evacuate who we can, or as many teleports if you can supply to transport them."
As he says this, he prepares to cast his last fireball at the densest crowd of demons. The Paladin is dead, so there's no need to worry about friendly fire, and while the main demon has some obscene spell resistance and probably wouldn't take damage anyway, he can at least pick off a handful of its entourage and maybe buy a little time by distracting it and blocking its vision.
Normally, this would be where Kakara blurs in far faster than anyone can see and disables the entire army before they could react. It probably wouldn't be that hard. Unfortunately, she kind of lacks a body at the moment, and her beams go right through most things. She could try ripping out their soul, but that's both morally rather fraught and also not something she really knows how to do on command. What she does have is some kind of magic user in who's head she's currently squatting, their soon to be ex-group of allies, a frankly completely inadequate fortress, and whatever tricks she can do with ki as a shade.
That's not a lot in the way of options, and the only one she that has a good chance of actually stopping them is something she doesn't have a lot of control over. And without that kind of control... there's only so much she can do to, to thread the needle between strong enough to save them and weak enough not to turn all the aliens into so many smears on the ground. Kakara hates being powerless like this, almost as much as she hates the exact details of the choice she's about to have to make. But if there's one thing that's true about her, more than anything, it's that Kakara is at her core a protector, and these people need her protection. She pours her ki into the still-unfurling spell matrix. It's complicated, more complicated by far than when she empowered the seal holding Dazarel, but Kakara is good at math, and the spellform is designed to be modified by outside forces.
The sorcerers of Garenhuld, having long had access to obscenely powerful Saiyan fighters and even Super Saiyans to use as batteries, developed a technique they call supercharging. In it, Ki is used as a power source to support the structure of a magical spell, thereby unleashing vastly more energy than a mage can channel on their own. Golarion spells are not so designed. Without this source of obscene power, Golarion's spells are both designed to be efficiently strengthened - such as by a metamagic rod or the caster in question - but pay for this efficiency by having hard caps on just how much power the structure can support. With the additional thousands of years put into spell development, a small part of this difference has been made up, but the difference in scale is still incredible. Typically speaking, the most you can get out of external empowerment on fireball is CL 10 maximized intensified fireball, which does a cool 90 damage to everything inside a 20 foot radius, reflex save for half. Useful, especially when compared to the piddling 7d6 it would otherwise have to offer, but hardly a gamechanger on its own.
Kakara is not so limited. Her Ki Control is exceptional, at the very pinnacle of what her people can manage; she can raise herself to maximum power in a heartbeat and drop it down as quickly if she ever need to avoid notice, and it does precisely what she wishes it to do at all times. Her Ki Sensing is likewise nearly unmatched, allowing her to perform skills considered essentially impossible like sensing machines, culminating in her usage of the legendary spirit bomb - only the fourth person to do so in history. On top of this, the sight allows her to actually see the spellforms in their entirety, and give her a sense of exactly where the limits can be stretched. Oh, and she's a full power super saiyan, which would probably matter more if even in her weakened state her issues were less about being very careful not to put more into the spell structure than it can hold and have it detonate in her host's hand. She's... pretty sure the target can take it, unless they turn out to be extremely weak to fire.
Who here can make a DC 25 reflex save?
Yeah that's super not going to stop it. Take 155 fire damage, bypassing fire resistance, please.
Everyone else in a 40 foot radius will take double that, of course, and be lit on fire as well if they survive.
310 fire damage that bypasses resistance kills pretty much all the demons it hits, actually, and a 40 foot radius is fairly enormous. The fireball bead, when it hits the target, erupts into a burst of golden flames that dispel the arctic chill and outshine the setting sun. Outside of the sphere, many of the demons pause; they were not exactly expecting to deal with that today, or really ever. The only thing that keeps it from being the end of the fight right then and there is that most of them were keeping a very healthy berth around the high level combatants who could easily kill them if they got in the way, and that is not in fact enough for all of them.
155 damage, even accounting for the injuries it took fighting the Paladin, is not nearly enough to put it down. It has over 300 HP and fast healing 10, after all; one blast like that isn't even going to stop it from murdering everyone in the fortress.
But it didn't sign up to take on a legendary archmage today, much less do so without an army, and isn't interested in finding out how much the followup shot is going to hurt. It greater teleports itself away, abandoning its remaining troops.
With that, the demons' morale breaks, and what was once a vicious assault turns into a total rout. The defenders move to pick off the stragglers, but they still aren't exactly in a position to defeat the main force without taking significant casualties; if their rescuer want to pick them off with a few more spells like that, they'd be grateful, but they're mostly going to try not to get in the way.
"What was that?"
He's never seen a Meteor Swarm, even from a scroll, but he has seen a Delayed Blast Fireball, and it wasn't even a quarter that impressive. There aren't that many 9th circle casters in Avistan, and he's never even heard of one of them being able to do that to someone else's spell. It's hard to say that anything is really impossible for a 9th circle wizard, but he's definitely considering the hypothesis that it was an illusion to cover their own spell and a modified meteor swarm to do the damage. Nefreti could do that, probably, so it kind of makes sense she's not the only one.
"Not that I'm complaining - I'm very grateful for your help, actually."
Oh. She hadn't been expecting that, somehow; some part of her had expected if it would kill anyone, it would just be the leader. These aliens might be bad news, practically oozing evil under her sight and with a history and plan of torture, but that doesn't make them less dead, by her will and power even if she doesn't have the magic to do that herself. If she had a body she'd be throwing up right now.
"I supercharged your spell; filled it up as full as it could go before you could let it loose, essentially. Normally I would interfere more directly, but I'm a bit bodily impaired at the moment. If we need me to do it again I'm not limited to just doing that once, but you don't seem to have it... hung? Some other kinds of spells will also work fine, as long as you actually want them stronger-" but I'd strongly prefer not to kill anyone else "-but it seems unnecessary now that they're in flight."
Is that what they're going with? Okay, no, don't challenge the Archmage's story, either it's somehow true and you look stupid or it's not but they're telling you for a reason. He's out of 4th and 3rd level combat spells, but he's got 2 Scorching Rays and a Magic Missile, if those work?
Oh, that one's just force. Okay, she can judge kinetic energy, even magical kinetic energy, no problem. Maximized Empowered Intensified Enlarged Toppling Magic Missile it is, then. It's not clear if anyone has ever cast a 9th circle magic missile like this before, but if they did, they would find it very disappointing. From the perspective of someone using a first level spell, though, dealing 27 force damage to 5 different enemies and knocking them prone with no save is significantly more satisfying. It doesn't kill them, since Kakara made sure to aim them at 5 of the strongest power levels in the retreating force, but it does make them put in a valiant effort at running faster, and those of them capable of teleporting at all under the influence of the wardstones immediately find it in their interests to do so.
The Scorching Rays don't take down their targets either, though they do come a little closer even spread across 6 enemies. Would he like to try Ray of Frost?
He didn't actually prep that one, seeing as it's basically useless. Even with this absurd amount of metamagic being thrown into it, really, the range and 1d3 base damage are severely limiting.
"I'm out of spells, sorry. At least one of the other wizards almost certainly has a fireball left, though, if you wanted to do that."
She thinks about it for a bit. She definitely could, and she's already made the decision to help; in the absence of evidence to distrust these people, it would be hypocritical to decide this intervention was worth killing however many aliens dropped to that fireball but not worth revealing she exists to other people. On the other hand... she really doesn't want to kill them, not even indirectly like when they got caught in the splash zone. If they were pressing the attack... she thinks she would anyway, even as she hated every minute of it, but they aren't. At the very least, it seems likely she probably ought to actually orient on the situation first, and find out to what degree she ought to be helping here, and why her sight guided her to this place. If no one else is in imminent danger -
She checks, with present-sight, to ensure there are no other fortresses or encampments in the path of their flight, or near enough that they could plausibly divert to them - there aren't -
-then she's not going to jump straight into more murder. She regrets the ones she's already done, actually, or at least that she didn't have any better option she could see. Even before, when she had to fight while disguised and suppressing her power level, she was still an incredibly skilled martial artist and always had the option to escalate by powering up, and in her fight against Dazarel, the moment she had obtained sufficient strength to make defeating him even an option, it turned out to be enough strength to safely seal him away without having to choose to resort to lethal force. Killing people... isn't worse than letting more innocents die, but it's still really bad, and the fact that all of the ones she actually killed directly were less targets and more unexpected collateral damage doesn't really help, actually.
"That doesn't seem to be necessary, unless there's some tactical information I'm missing like that winged alien from earlier being about to return with a second army. If it's all the same to you, I'd prefer to orient on the current situation before jumping into anything bigger; I'm from another world, and the main thing I have to go on here is that you or your organization apparently have some knowledge about the inhabitants of Hell I might find useful."
From another world. Well. 9th circle wizards are supposed to get interplanetary teleport, it's how Aroden famously explored the cosmos. Presumably whatever she is if she's not that does too, he thinks it's also a cleric spell. Aniol hasn't heard about that happening in this direction outside of stories but there's no reason it shouldn't be possible, and it's not like some completely unknown 9th circle caster from elsewhere on Golarion is spectacularly more likely either. As for the business with Hell...
Iomedae's church is not just about destroying Hell. She's the goddess of defeating evil, and there's rather a lot of it to go around, exhibit A being the worldwound they're busy fighting against right now. But it remains the case that they do most of the organizing of the various forces of good to oppose Hell and its puppet Cheliax, much as Iomedae herself does among the gods. This is indeed a task they are well equipped to help with.
"I don't handle that personally; I'm on the worldwound deployment, and have been focusing my attention on that. But if you need information on opposing the denizens of Hell, then there are scarcely better options; if we can't help you with it personally, we will likely know who can if anyone. We're a bit busy with the clean-up, but if you're in a hurry I can arrange a sending to Lastwall for them to send some Wizards to Teleport you over."
Presumably if she can cast interplanetary teleport to travel between worlds she can also use a measly greater teleport to go to Lastwall off a description but she's more than earned the right not to be grilled by him over it. Even if it is pointless spending a few unneeded teleports in exchange for driving off a demon army of this scale is cheap at the price, to say nothing of an archmage's potential goodwill. Besides, there are some among the wounded who need more healing than channeling can provide, and between that and the corpses to raise it won't go to waste.
If he had mentioned this fact to her, she would have replied that performing an instant transmission off dead reckoning is quite hard when you need to be precise, actually, and that everyone on this planet is so weak there's nobody running around with large enough unsuppressed power levels for her to have an easy time anchoring on them without knowing them ahead of time. If she needed to get there under her own power, she would fly; it would only barely be slower anyway.
As things stand, she is in fact refraining from mind reading him in any real depth and is blissfully unaware of the thoughts he's not projecting to her, and thus is content to wait the 10-15 minutes it will take to get off a sending and arrange for a teleport.
And in about 11 and a half minutes a wizard can arrive from Lastwall with a spare teleport. In the intervening minutes, they have collected the bodies into bags of holding, including the charred bones of that one Paladin for a resurrection, and arrayed the three most promptly needed regeneration targets to go with. Ordinarily, they are in fact not that fast, but "probable 9th circle claiming to be from another world" is enough to make time of the essence, even before considering they just wiped out a demon army and claim to have some business with fighting Hell.
Aniol, in the mean time, has taken the time to establish that she doesn't need to ride along with him specifically to bow out, both due to the fact that he does not, in fact, need healing more powerful than the fortress can provide and that he does not actually want to have anything more to do with this than he has to. If he had to he'd do it anyway, with the stakes this high, but he's mostly just glad he can leave it to someone good at it.
She'll go along with it, hanging out in the mind of one of the injured who consented to that. Kakara misses the exact moment of arrival, even with her reflexes, but she does catch the second the spell transports them and the spellform is fascinating. She can see the similarities to the instant transmission calculations, but also where it lets you skip over most of the hard work from doing it manually in exchange for a few limitations. There's nothing she can use from it as is, seeing as she's not a sorcerer, but something to keep in mind for if she ever takes a crack at designing her own improvement to the Ki technique.
This about Lastwall - it is, surprisingly for a knight order bereft its chief sponsor and situated in a relatively unprosperous part of the continent, extremely wealthy. It is Lastwall, of all the forces on the continent, that receives the donation of every country unwilling or unable to commit to directly fight at the worldwound but that still desires not to be eaten by demons. It is Lastwall that receives the questionably gained gold of a thousand adventurers, magnates, and warlords concerned about their alignment and desperate to evade the pit. It is Lastwall that, during the glory days of the Chelish empire in the lead up to Aroden's folly, received a fortune in magical items, and it is Lastwall that inherited most of the assets of the Shining Crusade.
This also about Lastwall - they spend a lot of money, too. They are a small country that has taken on five different tasks, each of which individually by all rights ought to be too much for it to handle, and cannot set them down without great cost. They are perpetually short in manpower, martial might, diplomatic weight, and a dozen other necessities to which they must pour the vast majority of this river of gold they receive to stem. This habit is indeed why donating to the church of Iomedae is the most reliable way to turn gold into good at any scale. Their mission does not permit them to waste it on frivolities or monuments to ego.
This is not to say Lastwall is ugly, or in ill repair. They are well aware of the positive effect that beauty has upon people, and the ability to hire Shelynite followers at bargain prices is no small aid here. Likewise they are constantly aware of how their image does, indeed, reflect on how seriously other nations take their mission and correspondingly how likely they are to go along with it. In search of this as much as efficiency, the capital of Lastwall has styled itself in the style of military practicality, with defenses that serve double weight to both dissuade attack by the forces of evil and to show that that is what it does, allowing them to at least lose less without having to sink a sizable chunk of their fortune into monuments, cathedrals, and other standard architectural great works. They're very aware of the incentives this can create, but they're careful about it and sometimes the appearance of the thing really is as important as the function.
For someone who lives in an information-era civilization and who spends much of their time in the space-age civilization hidden within it, it's not exactly impressive. Even the Senzu Clan base of Heramere keep, itself a military relic of a time where technology was even less advanced that Golarion's present, is more imposing. (Of course, that base was constructed with both technology and strength well beyond those publicly admitted to, but let's not sweat the details).
It's got a quaint charm to it, though, and she knows enough about that era's military situation to at least understand the purpose of most of it.
She can stick around while they do some regenerations and a letter from the garrison is handed off to give context to whatever the sending said, and shortly afterword she'll be introduced to Eulalia Serven, the 6th circle cleric of Iomedae who happened to have the most diplomatic experience of those in the city. They'd have picked someone with a high ranking as well if they could, since some high level casters tend to get offended if you try to have them meet with someone sufficiently "beneath them," but those are mostly uncorrelated from spells outside of the obvious exception of Queen Galfrey and the spell part tends to be more important than any noble ranks with wizards. Queen Galfrey also represents Mendev regardless, not Lastwall, but that wouldn't stop them from getting her aid if it was in fact needed; neither branch of Iomedaens is in the business of losing for no good reason, or indeed any reason at all if they can possibly help it.
"Hello! I'm told you're a powerful caster from another world, here to ask us some questions about Hell, and that you currently need to possess someone to communicate?"
(She's got Tongues active, of course; Karen seemed to understand them just fine earlier but it would be, in fact, incredibly silly to rely on that for no reason and have it fail on them in some regard. The marginal cost of a tongues cast in Lastwall is essentially a rounding error for this meeting.)