He does! And about all the same equipment as the other one, really, Hosilla seems to have been keeping them balanced.

The earth elementals are very excited about this outcome.

"He's dead! No more new orders!"

"That's--good. I'll look for a way to get you home when I'm done with my other emergency, if you haven't already solved it yourselves by then."

Onward to where the kids were supposed to be! She really hopes they're still alive. At a minimum she's made it harder for the cultists to do this again.

They seem to find this offer a little doubtful but don't let it interrupt their happiness at the disappearance of their tormentor.

The door will open just fine for her when presented with both keys. There's a long spiral staircase leading upwards on the other side.

Extremely reasonable of them to doubt her; she is flying by the seat of her pants.

Sneak sneak sneak up the stairs. Carrying the Hand's glaive, this time, in case the upcoming boss fight is against someone it's inadvisable to punch.

The stairway lets out into a balcony overlooking a large, circular room, with staircases curving back down the walls to reach ground level. What looks to be a group of young teenagers are tied up, overseen by a someone in a fancier version of the Baphomet cultist uniform with a glowing magical glaive. As they arrive, a tall, four-armed batlike demon teleports in carrying a weakly struggling man dressed as an Iomedaean priest.

"Everything is prepared for you now, Hosilla. I want to see the ritual ready by tomorrow."

They're alive! And there's an additional guy who also needs rescuing.

Does the big demon look like he's about to teleport right back out? The faster and easier this fight is, the less likely anyone she doesn't want to hurt will get hurt.

He doesn't, no. While the now-confirmed Hosilla spouts some platitudes about his loyalty and service, the demon seems to be examining the captured kids more closely, though it's not obvious what he's looking for.

Well in that case she's going to sneak as close as her battle instincts say she can get unnoticed and then CHARGE. How about that demon inspects the business end of her glaive.

It resists the attack nearly as thoroughly as Deskari did, though the injuries do look deeper. In response, it manifests four incredibly nasty looking black flaming knives in its hands, and as soon as it gets a look at her there’s a feeling like something is trying to take away her life force.

“Oh, another sacrifice delivers herself right to me? I suppose it would be rude to turn down a gift.”

She doesn't hear his words. There is nothing but the dance of attack and counterattack, the winding road through possibility to the reality of winning. She throws the glaive in his face and draws the angel's sword, ducks inside his reach and tries to put it through his chest. 

The Vrolikai dodges enough not to take it straight on, but the sword still slices right through his side without any noticable resistance and leaves a bleeding gash. Lariel’s blade pulses reassuringly on her hands, bolstering her even as one of the knives lands a glancing blow and tries to rip out a chunk of her life force again. Hissing with anger and shock at this sudden shift, the demon fires off a lightning fast bolt of crackling darkness at her.

Brenda ducks down and the sword comes up and if he's not fast he'll have three hands.

The vrolikai is incredibly fast, but Deskari was faster, and it turns out to be a bit difficult to keep your hand out of range from a sword if you're also trying to stab them with a knife. How about she never does that again and instead just stays still while he kills her?

Hm? What was that, did he want her to do something? Anyway stab stab stab.

Where the abyss did this girl come from? The list of people in Mendev who can do that should have exactly one entry and this is definitely not Queen Galfrey. Also, for someone he's landed multiple stabs on this person does not look very drained of energy - which is a serious problem because if they have a death ward up it means they almost certainly knew this fight was coming. Add in the fact that they are, for some damned reason, down here in his maze when the entire city should be just overflowing with targets for a high level adventurer, all adds up to one conclusion: one of his rivals has sold him out. Even if he wins here, there's probably going to be another attack dropping by to take advantage of the damage their patsy did.More mongrels to transform would be nice, but he can just go back for them directly later, and even a relatively useful pawn like Hosilla isn't worth dying for. Time to cut his losses, and hope his regenerates are enough to fix all these injuries.

Greater Teleport.

Being repeatedly stabbed and energy drained does in fact suck, but not enough to stop her from turning to see what Hosilla is getting up to right now. Hopefully he's up to getting rekt by Anevia and Camellia and Wenduag and Lann.

It's not going amazingly. Hosilla didn't notice her companions at first, but they fired on her when she started trying to interfere with Brenda's fight with the Vrolikai, which resulted in her switching tactics and charging up the stairs. Thanks to the distance she had to travel under fire, said fire support, and the positioning advantage, Seelah and Camellia haven't lost just yet. It's not looking good though, and she's ranting about getting back at someone for their betrayal.

How about instead he gets a back full of cold iron, courtesy of Brenda charging up the stairs behind him.

Since she has no idea Brenda's coming, Hosilla has no particular ability to avert this, and a good sword will go straight through her defiled armor. What it doesn't do is kill her, and instead redirects her from trying to gut Seelah to slicing open Brenda. For someone with a hole in her chest, she's an astonishingly capable fighter - Hosilla isn't quite as hard to dodge as the Glabrezus that jumped her earlier, much less the Vrolikai or Deskari, but it's still enough that Brenda has to exert some effort into not getting hit by her attacks.

She will put in that effort! And be distantly glad she put on some armor. And stab him again, can't forget that part.

Then she'll go down relatively quickly, not helped by the fact that her trying to heal hermself involves stopping attacking Brenda and leaves her free to focus on hitting her harder. She's just surprisingly durable for a human, not proof against sword wounds. Once the fight is over, Seelah starts downing a potion; she got hurt pretty badly trying to keep Hosilla from getting past to their archers.

"That was incredible! That demon was so terrifying it was hard to think clearly, and Anevia said the rest of us probably wouldn't be able to do more than scratch it, but you chased him off like it was nothing!"

"It, I, thank you," says Brenda as her brain reevaluates its relationship with the passage of time and changes said relationship's Facebook status to It's Complicated. She leans against a wall and blinks several times and draws the connection between her ongoing dissatisfaction and her knife holes. "I'll be back in a second, I gotta, thingy--" she pulls one of the other healing potions out of her backpack and quaffs it. "That thing. Everyone in one piece? Kids all accounted for?"

"That's as many people as Lann said was missing - I guess one of them could be someone else in disguise, we should check that because we're dealing with demons but I don't expect it - and the priest the demon kidnapped is still here and alive."

"The only other thing I'm concerned about is what Hosilla said in the fight. Wendu, she knew you by name and expected you to help her.  What was that about?"