“Ahh. Human magery.” Asmodeus was enjoying himself immensely. “You claim human magic is so powerful that your armies could not stand against it. Abigor claimed that you know. It cost him everything.”
May your talons rot thought Kinathroses. You have no idea what the humans are capable of. You come here, throwing your weight around without understanding anything of what has been happening. Well, you can learn the way we are learning.. “Sire, human magery is much over-rated. Oh, they have some special tricks that it true but they are of little significance compared with other factors.”
“What other factors?” Asmodeus was genuinely intrigued. This was a cut on the situation he hadn’t expected.
“Sire, it is not what the humans have to fight with, it is how they fight. Or rather how they do not fight. They do not seek out our armies to face them in combat. They hide in the rocks, the mud and the caves. They wait until they have a demon alone, or perhaps a small group, then they strike from concealment, killing without warning. Then they fade away again. With all the demons leaving to join the armies for the invasion of Earth, we have too few under arms down here to stop them. By the time the message gets back of the attack, the humans are long gone. Mostly. Sometimes, we send a rescue column out and the column itself is attacked. And again by the time we react, the humans have gone. We cannot get messages around quickly enough, there is too much space to cover.
“And then there are the mage-blasts. Nobody knows where or when the next one will be. Our demons can be on the walls, marching along a road, or resting in their outposts when a mage-blast wipes them out. No warning, no challenge to combat, just a mage blast from out of the mists and darkness. Those that survive are horribly wounded. That is the factor that we cannot fight Sire. How can we fight those who will not stand and fight.”
“Trap them so they have no choice but to fight.” Asmoedeus’s mind turned to the problems he had just heard. He had ten full legions coming down, 66,666 trained veteran demons. That would swing the force level problem decisively his way. The communications problem was one he hadn’t thought of, in his military experience, mostly limited to the formalized, choreographed skirmishes in Hell, commanding units had been no problem. The troops had always been in range of his voice or mind-masking power. It had never occurred to him that wouldn’t be the case here. But he did have enough troops to overcome that problem.
The picture of the rebellion suppression campaign started to form in his mind. He would start with a single main operational base on the edge of the 5th circle segment where the rebellion was concentrated. Then, he would start to spread across the segment, establishing each outpost within sight of another. If one was attacked, support would be immediate because other outposts would see what was happening. And, even better, they could relay mind-masked messages from one to the next, allowing the great rear base to be informed quickly.
Asmodeus mulled the concept over, It seemed to work but he could see one flaw. If he pushed out from one point, he would force the rebels back. That’s where Hell’s strange topography cut in. It was an odd fact about Hell that if one set out in a straight line, in any direction, one ended up in the same place one had started. Left, right, forward, backwards, up, down, it made no difference. Keep going long enough and one ended up where one had started. Heaven was the same. Unless one created a portal, there was no way out because there was nowhere to go out to. Thinking about that made Asmodeus’s head hurt. Still, there was a solution, start from two bases, one at each end of the segment of the 5th circle and close in on the middle. That way the rebels would be trapped between them and eventually, they’d have to fight in the open.
Throne Room, Palace of Satan, Dis, Hell
Count Belial watched Satan rage at Hell’s inability to immediately destroy the impertinent humans, his own mind boiling with thoughts of how he could exploit this unprecedented situation. It had been a scant five millennia since he had clawed his way back to a place at Satan's court, a singular feat among dukes who had fallen so far from their lord's favor. His presence here was still something of a joke; as yet he commanded but a single legion and his domain could muster only a meager tribute of human essence. Most of Hell's nobility thought of him as little more than the court jester, but a few understood the influence that the great mines and furnaces of Tartarus gave him.
Those were the dangerous ones. He had to go from beneath notice to beyond challenge in a single stroke, or he would inevitably lose his domain to one of the dukes. This could be the perfect opportunity, but the timing had to be exquisite. As Belial watched, Satan scooped up another unlucky minor demon and crushed it into paste, squeezing the creature's remains out of his clenched fist before whirling to seek another target. Too early and he would only draw Satan's wrath as the unfortunate ogre had. Too late and his proposal would be seen as a challenge to Satan's preferred course of action – dangerous even for once as favored as Abigor had been, probably fatal for one as lowly as him. Belial waited for the instant that Satan's terrible eyes turned from rage to cold calculation, then spoke.
"Your Eminence…"
Every eye was on him. Satan's gaze bored into him and he dropped groveling to his knees in the expected manner.
"Your Eminence, my demons can strike back at the humans immediately. At your command I will reward their insolence with fiery annihilation. Of course my lord recalls the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah."
There was a murmur of suppressed laughter around the room. Sodom and Gomorrah had been essentially party tricks. They had occurred at a time when Satan and Yahweh were engaged in an informal competition to visit the most creative 'punishments' on the lower planes. The humans had become so pathetic, so despairing at the demons presence that there was little scope for honorable warfare against them; they simply ran screaming or lined up and waited to be hewn down like crops. The demons were always ready to appreciate new forms of suffering and Belial's creative use of magic had been quite spectacular, not to mention entertaining enough to gain his return to the palace. However his suggestion that such tricks be considered a legitimate means of waging war was ridiculous. Surely their lord could not be seriously considering it?
In fact Satan was doing just that. It would take weeks, perhaps months, to prepare another attack on the scale of Abigor's, and much as he wanted to believe that this was simply due to the incompetence and treachery of his former favorite, he knew this was not the case. He had Asmodeus away dealing with the rebellion down in the fifth circle and Yahweh was in the wings. There was another possibility that was on his mind as well, if one attack had failed he had to consider the possibility that a second would also fail. The humans had undoubtedly taken horrible losses, but Abigor was doubtless proclaiming that he would lead them to victory and instructing them how best to resist demonic powers. Combined with their strange and seemingly powerful magic, Satan had to agree with Abigor about one thing; he had to know what forces the humans could muster, what it would really take to crush them. That would take time, as would dealing with the chaos resulting from Abigor's fall.
Already Satan's informants reporting skirmishes between the forces of dukes trying to add chunks of Abigor's domain to their own. That situation was confused, sometimes it was hard to tell whether the demons who had been found brutally murdered or had just disappeared without a trace were the victims of that internecine skirmishing or had been the victims of the human rebellion. Satan was sure that the assassinations had been carried out on the direct orders of his dukes, testing each other's defenses, each preparing to take advantage of any opportunities the way Belial was. An interesting question, was the human rebellion actually the work of a Duke who had seen human magery as a new way of fighting a war? It didn’t really matter, with Asmodeus and his Army moving to crush the rebellion, the status quo would return soon enough, but in the mean time Satan had to be seen to take decisive action. Belial's suggestion was perfect; it was fast, if it worked it would kill enough humans to claim a major victory, and if it didn't Belial was completely expendable.