... 14.

The Pit Fiend bites his head clean off, crushes it in his jaw, and swallows, both to make resurrection more difficult and because there are few things more pleasing to a devil than to devour the flesh of a good-aligned cleric.

You die immediately.

... my head?

Yeah, what of it?

He's not going to trap my soul or pin me while someone gets off a Malediction?
Or mind-control me or torture me or anything?
Just kill me immediately?

... I'll get to see Disboard again?

Not so many spell slots and valuable gems as to waste them on you.
Asmodeus will get you eventually.

Great.

Anyway, thirty seconds after eating my head, the pit fiend will have some stomach problems. I don't think it's enough damage to kill it though, I wasn't really expecting that to happen.

You're going to have to explain that better.

Afraid of being captured or paralyzed or dominated, and tortured or maledicted or soul-trapped, Robaldo would prefer immediate death to many other possible loss conditions.

He's been to Disboard and it seemed pretty fun. He hasn't been to Hell but he's heard terrible things.

Months ago he had custom made a piece of steel, carefully shaped to a mold to fit over his top teeth and against the roof of his mouth after being shrink item'd.

He did this by making a much larger mold, shrinking it, pressing it into the roof of his mouth, unshrinking it, and giving it to a skilled metalworker.

To prevent it rusting in his mouth and making him sick, he had it covered in a thin coating of silver, as one does.

He's been wearing it with a command word trigger on any day he was feeling particularly scared.

This morning, when preparing spells, his fears of fates worse than death were at a peak, so to help relieve them he replaced the Shrink Item and set the command word to "                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           ".

Specifically, to a pause of silence 30 seconds long.

Shrink Item reverts only by "by a word of command from the original caster."
Robaldo has not since casting it gone a full thirty seconds in silence, either by using magic with verbal components or by yelling to his brothers in arms or making a witty remark or just by muttering "not yet" under his breath.

Until now, because of how on account of being dead he can't talk.

His mouth is a bit under two inches wide at the back, so the steel plate is maybe two feet wide. It weighed 40 pounds before shrinking and about a sixth of an ounce after.

Robaldo was mostly planning on killing himself, so it's not a Good aligned mouthguard or anything, and it's not like he sharpened the edges or added spikes that would make it uncomfortable to wear. It's just shaped to fit over the palate of his mouth and around his upper teeth, so that when it expands it would decapitate him.

He tested it out on a watermelon and it seemed to work pretty well.

Is silence of a certain length really a word, though?

Command words don't have to be real words, and multiword phrases have always been allowed!
Many multi-word phrases differ only in meaning because of the presence or absence of pauses, so they can have grammatical value, and almost all languages apply at least some meaning to pauses having different lengths.

At its most fundamental, a command word is just a noise the caster can make with his mouth, and thirty seconds of silence is absolutely a noise you can make with your mouth!

Of course being silent is saying something! People respond with silence all the time! It's a totally valid lexeme!

The Pit Fiend isn't going to just die of a big lump of metal in his stomach, even if it's cutting into his flesh from the inside.
He's Large, and has a pretty big stomach.

It's still hurting a lot though, even past his damage reduction and regeneration.

He'll vomit it back up.

His throat isn't two feet wide, though.

Oh no.

This may present problems.

It was only a Dimdoor.
They couldn't have gone far.
He needs to bring it down before it just regenerates back yet again.
The last few times they tried to rush past enemy lines to bring it down, they couldn't find it, and then it reappeared at the front somewhere else.

Codwin is not actually an idiot.

It takes them two minutes but they get a report of the pit fiend.
It'll have regained a lot of health by now, which is annoying.

The strike team Dimdoors in.

He's sitting on the floor.
There's a wizard trying to reach down his throat to cast Apport Object.
There's a corpse nearby, headless.

Weird, but it's to his advantage, probably.

Let's all just hit them a bunch as hard as we can until they die.

Codwin has Aura of Faith: Any attacks made against an enemy within 10 feet of him are treated as good-aligned for the purposes of overcoming Damage Reduction.

The lump of metal inside him is already silvered.
It negates his damage reduction every turn.

The Pit Fiend does not survive very long.

That was way quicker than he expected.

He'll look around the room and pass the Knowledge (Local) check to recognise a semi-famous Andoran citizen despite the penalty for that person not having a head attached.

Codwin is surprisingly good at recognising people. It gets you more votes.

Robaldo dresses like an insane person. He's not hard to recognise, even headless.

They make a very orderly escape, with units holding ground while everyone else teleports out.

The Andoran forces won't realise Cheliax is even abandoning the fight until there's suddenly no one from Cheliax around anymore.

Then it is a day to celebrate!

The next day their greatest clerics will begin raising the first batch of those worth raising.

He subjectively experiences being in terrible pain.
He infers he isn't in Disboard.
Is he in hell?

They've brought him back.