"We were going to save those—"
"For something unexpected—"

Indecision aside, no one stops her. Instead, everyone retreats to relatively safety and dons blindfolds. One gets tossed to Sadde, for before she sets it off. The maritime distress flare is blindingly bright, meant to be seen from far off in day or night and questionable weather. It lasts for half a minute, and when it's done the floor has been scoured clean. Even the shells and bones dissolved into smoke. The archer has stopped shooting and the floodlights are showing what look to be ordinary walls.

She beams. And they have more where those came from, if they need them.

So, what's left of the demon, then?

It might be in the far corners, or in scraps of shadow away from the flare. But most of the mass it was constructing limbs out of is pretty much gone. The archer isn't shooting very much.

Then the earth shakes. The floor rumbles and cracks beneath them. Shudders and falls. Practitioners slide down a level—why would there be a basement right underneath the factory floor—with debris and equipment falling around them. The floodlights go out as they disconnect from the cords or generators. The lower level is full of eyes and claws and especially mouths.

Well fuck.

She tries to scramble up for stabler ground, they have more flares right?

They do. But this time there are more shadows from the piles of rubble on the irregular ground, and there's no protected area they can hide in. Their diagrams didn't do too well when the floor broke. The flare buys them thirty blind seconds, and they have to expect the demon to resume attacking before they can see anything.

"Shoot at it, focus on limbs reaching for us—" scramble scramble she has a good memory she wonders if she can see anything better without her glasses on—

Mostly just more darkness. There aren't any Others or many spirits aside from the demon, which she's still not looking directly at.

Shapes creep across the background. Indistinct and ominous, and there's a sense that whatever it is it's also right behind her. It's more reminiscent of flashes of illusory movement from keeping one's eyes closed than a jumbled mass of body parts coming closer. There is a good chance it's both. No way out, but there's a way forward. Something like a tunnel. An area that was burrowed out but hasn't collapsed. It gets darker in there and there's more of the images down that way.

The demon heaves a coil at them, moving like a snake instead of like a worm but wetter and slimier than either. With the construct prioritizing reaching limbs, it falls to the practitioners to defend themselves. Blood spatters and smokes as their brightly lit weapons cut it. The diabolist stationed outside with the generator has run in and angled a floodlight downward. At least it's costing the demon something on each approach.

Where does the tunnel lead, and is there a way up, can she climb debris, do they have more floodlights—?

Any floodlights that fell are probably broken, but they've lowered extension cords (laboriously covered in drawings in Sharpie) just in case. No luck so far.

The tunnel is more down than up. Leads to more demon, of course. The shapes lurking in the darkness are different, though. The farthest glimpses are of a mass that's either a writhing pile of worms or a pulsating brain instead of limbs and teeth.

The easiest way up is probably climbing the hole. Sides are sloped. But any crevice might contain part of the demon and probably does.

Well she has her own light source that's... not a flare but still.

She climbs, trying to keep to the illuminated areas.

They have light. The demon can't come close without sacrificing some of its body. But they don't have circles with defined boundaries. There's nothing present that it can't cross. A piece of rebar turns out to be a tendon, with flesh flowing from one end to form a three-foot finger as soon as Sadde tries to use it as a grip. A foothold next to a brick has teeth. Always, there are shapes moving in the corner of her eye.

And then it starts growing a lip, encircling the top of the hole. It angles around the dangling extension cords, making it more like several adjacent lips, but the demon is pretty clearly trying to cut them off.

She points lights up to dissolve it and continues to climb climb climb she's nimbler and more athletic than most people she has a magic body she can do it—

Her flashlight gradually burns a circular hole in its construction project. When she gets up she sees the teammate in the least mortal peril finishing drawing protections around the remaining floodlights. Those go on and the lips vanish completely.

"I think we can get everyone out. If we use the cords as ropes, that's a handhold it won't fake, maybe even use them as barriers too—"

"—and we can plug an extension cord into itself to form a circle, too."

He pauses for half a second. "That could work. We don't have that many, but they'll need it." He detaches one of the cords and drops the other end down.

She helps.

Extension cords form fairly small circles. But they're merely cornered instead of doomed.

The demon doesn't cross that, not directly. Its response is to start launching things: concrete, brick, rebar. Spindly limbs continue reaching for them, to give the fading archer a higher priority, but it must have formed some stronger ones farther out. And the projectiles don't share its weaknesses.

She'll grab a brick thrown approximately in her direction out of the air and smear some Bob on it then use that to fuel a sympathetic connection with the other bricks, twisting them out of paths of collision with her teammates and potentially knocking other projectiles away, too.

It...sort of works. By the time she can declare her brick linked to a target one to knock it aside, the latter has probably already hit or missed. (Usually missed. The demon doesn't have a human's worth of evolutionary history specialized in throwing things.)

The response is to launch fewer bricks and more concrete and metal. Less similarity makes it even harder to deflect in time. The thrower is using quantity rather than skill, but some projectiles bounce off the archer construct and later ones start punching through. Time is taking a side here.

Well she can get one of those missed rebars and make it longer and swat things with it.

That is as effective as swatting things with a piece of regular metal that size. It's no lightsaber.

When the construct is gone—faded or destroyed; hard to tell which and it doesn't matter—the grasping hands are a problem again. A more urgent problem than the occasional chunk of metal or cement.

She was going for reach, not strength, so that's good enough.

How many people do they still need to rescue?

Everyone injured has been dragged back up by then. Technically none. But the defenders are only tenuously protected themselves.

...perhaps they should regroup and rethink.

Nothing stops them on the way up. Letting them off easy? Or that's part of the ever-present implication that it's right behind them all the time.

"How do we win this?" one diabolist asks. "I haven't seen anything much to threaten. Is the whole thing expendable?"