"I have no idea. We still have a bunch of flares unless I severely miscounted or it ate them, right? How many floodlights do we have?"

"If you remember counting them, it didn't eat them. We've got flares. But these are all the floodlights we came with." Three lights illuminate pretty much just the area around them, with a fourth roving around stabbing into the blackness. "That I remember."

"It sounds tremendously stupid for us to have come here with four floodlights, huh."

"Yup. We're probably losing equipment."

"Which means," the diabolist who hasn't been below ground level adds, "we might've come here with a perfectly good plan, lost something it wouldn't make sense without, and not remember what we were thinking."

"...does any part of our plan suddenly not make sense? Let's assume all of the material goods we currently have were acquired in very large quantities to account for a factory that doesn't have a suddenly-collapsing basement."

"This but more isn't nonsense; it just doesn't have much of a way to actually win. I'd like to think better of us than not having an endgame plan."

"Well, sans basement, we would've eventually reduced it to—something smaller, something we could threaten—with what we had there, wouldn't we?"

"Could have, maybe. So that implies that now we do know it has a basement and we can't win by drawing, we back out?"

"...maybe. Kinda wanna hurt it some more with a couple of well-aimed flares just out of spite but yeah sans drawings I'm not sure how to proceed."

"I think that tunnel came from somewhere." The speaker has an injured leg, probably sustained in the barrage since the rest of him is still here. "If it has any parts more vital than arms and mouths, that's the best bet."

"Problem is clearing our way to it."

"Flares, continuously? Two at a time, one on each side to avoid casting shadows. Or just launch one in and hope it gets line of sight to everything."

"Do we have a good reason to want to be conservative about flares? If there's any more demon than we can already see even this many will probably not be enough and we should just leave and try this again in the future."

"We have reasons not to be too conservative. We've been costing it, burning through its reserves or whatever. If we don't try something there's no telling what it comes up with or how fast it recovers."

"Yeah, let's just do the two at a time thing, keep a couple in reserve in case we need to make a hasty retreat, and see what happens."

The demon has been listening. While they're putting their heads together for a more detailed plan than "see what happens," the hole starts getting visibly blocked off. Any debris long or broad enough to be an obstacle has one end jammed into the side of the hole and held in place by demonic fingers. Joints fuse in place when no longer needed.

...the not-joints are still going to melt as soon as they throw a flare down there.

They should go and do that.

The near side turns to smoke as soon as they light it, and the far side as soon as the flare falls down. At least, there are crashing sounds and when they can see again most of the improvised obstacles are down. The demon doesn't do much, maybe because it needs to regroup.

Then they can keep the barrage, two at a time, and clear the way.

The uninjured make their way down. They're circled or in some cases even wrapped by well-illustrated extension cords, which is awkward but absolutely worth it for the safety. Someone comments that there seem to be a lot of cords to go around and they probably had one floodlight per. Not that it's very actionable information.

It's slow going. Far too bright to see. There are occasional rumbling or crashing sounds, but it's always echoing toward them from a distance. The demon can't be doing much of anything in their line of sight, after all.

And they advance towards the bloody tunnel.

There's very little blood! Slime, ichor, fluids best identified as "miscellaneous," but not really blood. Circulatory systems; who needs 'em.

No rocks fly at them. It can't assemble enough of itself to construct an arm, not within throwing distance of the flares. The worst it does is cause the occasional piece of debris to fall from the top of the tunnel.

...she ponders sending a flare into it but decides that'll be a last resort thing.

"So! We're hurting you! Wanna be sealed? We can stop hurting you if you are! We can even let you be in this dimension!"

Its voice is somewhere between a growl and a hiss. Which makes sense, for a hastily constructed voice box. "No... Rather fight..."

One of the flares runs out. The inability to see changes from bright red filtering through closed eyelids to illusory spots swimming in darkness. That was the leftward flare, Sadde's side.

—she very quickly replaces it—