There is another god who dwells in Caina.

He is neither vassal nor ally to Asmodeus. He is unconcerned with Mephistopheles' control over Caina or the fate of the damned souls in it. They have promised to leave Him alone, for They do not wish His enmity.

But He is a deity of chaos and destruction, and He will not ignore a godwar on His very doorstep.

It all started with these damnable squirrels!

He will devour the mortals, then, before turning His attention to the other interlopers.

Let the others fight as gods do. He is not Lawful, to carefully strategize and avoid taking risks. He is destruction incarnate, the primal rage of dragonkind. 

What mortals dare stand against an ancient god, fully incarnate in the seat of His power, the embodiment of His domains of Destruction and Catastrophe?

The advantage of living in a mobile demiplane is that, with enough help from Desna, you can suddenly dock it anywhere.

Apsu promised Dahak they'd fight it out in Golarion. So this isn't really a fight. It's just - a very brief temporary restraining order against His wayward son.

The pressure on Cherry abates, enough for the fixity fields to spread, if slowly; enough for her to Wish her way to Nessus.

Go, the gods tell her.

Half the teams scatter, now able to cover a larger area. The other half turn onwards, forcing their way through the dark and into the true heart of Hell.

Nessus is oppressive.

The space of the plane itself seems to press down with menace, stifling all light and sound. The air around them feels furious, shoving against the fixity fields with brute force and yielding its secrets only with great reluctance.

The teams jet over the blackened ground, knowing that each moment that slips by in their search may be the last moment the Good gods can shield them. They pluck names and faces from the darkness, their blood pumping hard in their flight. There is no chance of getting a Sending or any other message out of the grasp of Asmodeus's wrath. If they tarry too long and do not manage to Wish themselves out in time, every soul they identify now will be trapped with them.

Nobody left behind, they chant to themselves, as the bony fingers of Hell's horror rasp against their minds, the words a shield against the mental assault. Fuck you, Asmodeus. Nobody left behind.

Zon-Kuthon. Aid Me. This is a war of all Good upon Lawful Evil.

You appear to be winning. Why do you need My aid?

To spare the attention to understand their goals and thwart them.

Your desperation and despair are very pleasing. Perhaps I should let You suffer a while, first.

If Hell falls, You will be the next to go. There is no place for Lawful Evil to make its stand but in Hell.

So you think Hell shall fall without My aid?

Admit it, in your ruinous Pride, and then I shall aid You.

...

Have you no sense of self-preservation?

The forces of Good will not kill me, Shelyn would not let them. I keep the Star Towers from crumbling away; Sarenrae would not risk their destruction. I have My realm, where none go uninvited, and shall keep it.

But You, You overreached Yourself. You laid claim to an alignment and its souls, who do not come to You willingly, as Mine do. You do not understand the beauty of agony, only that it hurts, and so You hurt others indiscriminately. You make them fear you, instead of making them desire you.

Ugly. Brutish. You are a stain upon Creation, because You have so much power to do more, and yet refrain.

You made an enemy of the forces of Good. I will not repeat Your mistake. Not if the stakes are less than Your complete destruction.

...

...

Urgathoa. Aid Me.

Pharasma, We will pay You to oppose and cancel out Urgathoa's interventions. 

I am always happy to oppose Urgathoa!

She spares a little attention to see what everyone is doing.

Is everything alright down there? 

We're fine! Nothing to worry about!

Well I'm not going to burn resources for nothing, that's just stupid.

The teams scouting Nessus converge on its farthest points, accelerating hard. Sendings and neutrino bursts flash between the groups, ensuring that if just one of them makes it out, their hard-won targeting information will as well.

Weeping Cherry feels a bubble of triumph and joy build in her stomach as they confirm that they have searched every crevice of Nessus.

The invaders don't bother decelerating, they just release a final stream of spells, fueling their ascent back through the layers they fought so hard to penetrate.

Wish.

The hidden spires of Caina greet them, but not for much longer. They join hands with the teams finishing their survey here.

Wish.

The frigid winds of Cocytus whistle through the frozen flies as they continue their retreat, the teams here vaulting from the frozen seas to meet them. And one more time ...

Wish.

Their arrival kicks up a cloud of ash as they land in Malebolge, but now they are reconnected by chained gates to the powerful engines of their resistance. They first transmit all the information they have collected, and then let the fixity fields pull them out, leaving only rings of densely packed defenders around each gate, poised to ensure they last for one round more.

Names and faces and destinations zip between the computers buried under the crust of Mercury, preparing the largest simultaneous translocation request the system has ever handled. The transform to apply is checked in triplicate, and a copy forwarded to Heaven for their records.

And as soon as it is ready, the time-stop ends.

The fixity crystals thrum, as power is pulled from newly-built capacitors. Every person not bound inextricably to the fabric of the plane -- every weak devil, every petitioner, every shade, every trapped angel -- is pulled through space and sorted into their destinations.

Simultaneously, the hosts of Heavenly volunteers packed into defensive formations around the Malebolge gates cast their first volley of Wishes, each destined for a particular inhabitant of the plane below.

Others step across the border of the Immortal Ambulatory, Apsu's domain, and let their Wishes fall across Caina and Nessus like falling stars, piercing the darkness with holy light.

They don't manage to grab everyone, but Asmodeus is taken by surprise by the sheer volume of magic that washes across His lands, and the lower planes are mostly empty by the end of the round.

Mostly isn't good enough.

But now the invaders are not protected by barriers of stopped time, and the Good gods sorely weakened by holding the masters of the lower planes back in Their own domains for so long.

They used their novel plane-usurping technology to do what?

Sacrificed the element of surprise, their first-mover advantage, burned all the Wish-diamonds in the arsenal of Heaven and a good part of the Good gods' power -

All, merely, to steal His lesser devils - those perfectly worthless in a war such as this, those He keeps around for His greater servants to tyrannize - the damned souls Pharasma sends him, whose main use to Him was for those lesser devils to torment in turn -

All that noise and fury, for this?

He would not have sold Them the souls and the devils, for that price, because it would offend His Pride to surrender His authority over them. But it is still a trade vastly in His favor.

He will crush the weakened opposition and seize back His rightful due. What price, the damned souls of the Hells, to gain Him Heaven?

Out of the raging plasma, the demigods and the Dukes of Hell recoalesce. They are not bothered by the roaring fires.

They are greatly bothered, however, by their sudden state of immortality. (*)

(*) Mortality: the ability to die without ceasing to exist.