He is welcome to try. 

There are very, very few things on the face of Golarion that can hit Iomedae with a weapon. Karlenius and Arnisant if they get unusually lucky, Malyas under the same circumstances. A pit fiend or a balor or the solar angels she sometimes spars with, also requiring a great deal of luck on their parts.

This thing could easily be more dangerous than any of those. Probably is, actually, because one of the sword-blows actually connects, and that's - a sword that on a clean hit decapitates you, which is in fact a problem even for Iomedae.

That means she needs to end this fast. Is he moving inhumanly fast? Two can play at that game, and she'll know once the first flurry of blows has landed how much of a problem she has on her hands, here.

He's inhumanly fast but not that inhumanly fast. His armor is impossibly strong but not that impossibly strong. When Iomedae goes all out, every blow lands.

Well, in that case, this will be over one way or the other very very fast, because there's nothing on the face of Golarion that can take ten hits from her and remain standing.

While she's doing that, he does something that makes her body try to collapse in on itself.

She'd respectfully prefer it didn't! She's using it! To murder him!

The archangel Michael, general of the hosts of the Lord, is not on the face of Golarion.

He dies to her sword anyway.

And explodes as he dies, in fire and something more than fire and a sound like a mountain shattering.

Like he's actually a Balor in disguise as an angel, she thinks dimly as she dodges the explosion.

He cannot confirm or deny this accusation, being dead. 

Down on the street, someone's car alarm has started going off. Several people in various stages of half asleep stick their heads out of their windows in confusion and alarm.

Iomedae's tempted to swoop down and look if there are any valuables on the body of the archangel Michael but she should really stay out of range of civilians. She'll remain in the air.

Nothing else appears to be happening right now. Also there's no visible corpse.

Bruce has no idea how to feel about any of this for several reasons, one of them being that he was looking straight up when the explosion happened and now he won't be able to see anything for a bit. His best guess is that God hit the demon with lightning (normal) but arranged for Bruce to survive it (why?) and now the demon is fighting an angel and (this is the most confident part of the guess) there are explosions involved.

:Hey: she Telepathies Bruce. :It appears that your god tried to strike me with lightning for some reason. I am sorry you were nearby; I've asked your god to not try to kill me where there are civilians around, in the future, but I don't know if he'll abide by that so I'm going to stay away. Thank you for reading the Bible to me.:

The demon won? He hadn't thought that was possible and he's . . . kind of happy about it. (Because he's evil.) She was weirdly nice, especially considering she doesn't seem to want anything from him now. He hasn't met any demons before and doesn't actually know but it would be strange if they all acted polite and concerned with people's safety for no discernible reason.

Okay. Goodbye. And then, after enough hesitation that she might have stopped listening, I'm glad you're okay.

Thank you. I am glad you're okay. 

Which direction is Eden, again?

Oh, so she does still want something. Mystery solved.

He sends the map again and mentally points a little south of the rising sun.

:Thank you! Take care of yourself!: And Iomedae, who may be underestimating the distances involved, is going to start flying in that direction, routing around densely populated areas.

Bruce goes back inside and lies to his parents about how long he's been awake and marvels at the fact that he survived all of that.

Iomedae doesn't get very far, on the scale of continents, before a planar rift opens in front of her and around her and swallows her up.

Now she's in yet another unexpected location, in the air above a massive lake of fire. It's full of people, being swept around in the currents and rarely coming near each other. Most of them look like horribly burned humans, but some of them are more like the sort of person one would find in the Abyss.

She hasn't, actually, been to Hell.

She asked to go once, when she was twenty eight years old. She'd been arguing with Arazni, about whether she should be aspiring to become the perfect and inhuman Lawful Good god of marshalling Heaven to fix everything. 

"Come with me," Arazni said, and Iomedae permitted the Plane Shift - even then, even for Arazni, it was difficult to make a spell land that Iomedae was inclined to resist - 

- and when she lifted her eyes to the glittering spired sky and knew herself to be in Axis, she closed her eyes again, because she didn't want to spend Aroden's intervention budget wantonly.

"It's My budget," said Arazni, tiredly, "and not even all that much of it, and I am spending it towards my goals; I think there is something here it is dangerous towards your goals, for you to be unwilling to look at."

So she opened her eyes. It was beautiful, but she'd known it would be. Alive and inventive and alien and relentlessly richer than it'd been the day before. Much richer than Heaven, which was presumably part of the point Arazni had brought her here to make.

"I think," Arazni said, "that it is bad for people to aspire only to glorious death on the battlefields of Golarion and then glorious death on the battles of Abaddon, or wherever else Heaven sends them, and never to imagine any future so compelling to them that it'd tempt them from sacrifice."

"I have never aspired to death," Iomedae said. 

"You want to be a god who -"

"I'm going to die," Iomedae said. "That's not - I am not denying that the plan I have described to you constitutes death. I meant that the aspiration is to create the right kind of god, and dying is a thing that will happen along the way, and it's a different motion, and a less destructive one, than aspiring to die. No one else makes the distinction but it's - a really important one -"

"I continue to think that you are reluctant to imagine a world good enough you would be tempted to continue living so that you could have it."

Iomedae shook her head and opened her mouth to object. And then reminded herself that Arazni was in fact much older and wiser than her, and spending something important to try to make this point, presumably because it was an important one. And tried to - imagine that it was true, that she was reluctant to imagine how good the future could be in part because she was afraid that really believing in it would make it harder for her to do what she has decided she is going to do.

Okay, maybe it was a little bit true.

She tried, then, for the first time, to imagine an actually good future. She stared out at the streets of Axis, and was silent, and -

"It doesn't matter," she said eventually. "However - however good it is, if it is more likely to come about if I ascend properly, then I should do that. It's a multiplier on everything else, not a - reason for selfishness. You were right that I was reluctant to think about it, and that was silly of me, and I am grateful for the prompt to be less of an idiot, but - but it isn't the kind of thing that could change anything."

"I think," Arazni said, "it is a reluctance you might not have had, a mistake you might not have made, if you weren't so set on - dying. I think that since you are asking of yourself a thing people generally cannot ask of themselves, you are instinctively wary of putting too much pressure on the convictions that seem to be permitting you to ask it of yourself, and I think it's a knot inside your head that'd be gone if you permitted yourself a bit more - selfishness, if you want to call it that -"

"What do you want to call it?"

"Humanity."

Iomedae looked out at Axis. "This is the wrong place," she said, after a minute. "If we're going to talk about whether I should permit myself more selfishness. If we're going to talk about that you should arrange me safe passage to Avernus, and we can go there and talk to our hearts' content, about how comprehensible it is of us to be selfish."

("I do not want you to come to Hell's attention," Arazni said, of course. "And we could hardly speak freely there. And if I am inclined to enable you in being self-destructive I can do so more cheaply."

And so she hasn't, actually, been to Hell.)

She keeps calm. This is a combat situation, not a feelings situation. Are there any visible threats to her.

Not around here, not as long as she stays in the air. And the lake has edges, visible in the distance before the sulfurous air becomes too opaque to see past.

Rescuing people from Hell would be emotionally soothing and not work, not substantively. There is a significant chance she is in over her head, and an additional significant chance she can handle this if she uses her resources well and not if she uses them badly. The way to plan this far out of context is to conserve your resources. 

The thing she should do, here, is pray. 

She looks out at the lake.

It is not a thing humans would build. There are many many humans, some good ones, some bad ones, some petty and tyrannical ones, but the worst dungeons into which the worst tyrants fling their enemies are not Hell, and the worst tyrants fall, because other humans oppose them. There is a scale of cruelty and tyranny and Evil that is, actually, the domain of gods alone, the domain of those so unrestrained that they will not pay the price of wronging people, that people even united cannot necessarily bring them down, and some such beings want to cause people more harm than is even to their own advantage.

Iomedae does not hate humans. It would not be a good use of her time. But she hates the entities that describes, and she means to grow strong enough to destroy them, however long it takes, nearly whatever it costs, and she doesn't know if this is Asmodeus's Hell or the private Hell of some private monster but she will see them both DIE. 

And if Aroden is around to help, then she'll be able to do it faster.

This is not a conventional sort of prayer, but she is nonetheless entirely sure that if she is in her universe at all He'll answer it.

She is, in fact, farther away than that.

But not so far away that it is impossible for Aroden to recognize that particular shape, calling out across a vast distance, and say -

GOOD LUCK