[Suzerain of Sheol]

This. This is what he was created for, the demoniac truth at the heart of all their absolute dogma. This... excess, this obscenity, the wretched powers of the world that would see Mankind as ants in a burning hill.

And that cannot be permitted.

Even as the demon charges its mother, tearing into Sin's flesh in the violation of reversed birth, Diogenes acts, stretching his mind out beyond walls of stone, out to the soldiers in the assault vehicle beyond the walls.

The entity has revealed itself. This site is consigned to holy purgation. Destroy it by any means necessary.

He further commands his men in the chamber to hold fire, unnerved by the writhing bulges in Sin's many wombs. Stooping, he collects the hypersonic rifle from the priest's corpse, by far a mightier weapon than his own, and chambers a round, leveling the five-foot barrel at the demon-mother's skull.

He imparts a psychic charge to the bullet within and pulls the trigger. Flashfire sprays from the barrel as the tungsten-carbide round blasts through the intervening air with a defeaning sonic burst.

There is a sound of... shattering, but it is not the devil's bone that scatters across the carpet. Tungsten-carbide dust. There is a visible dent in Sin's brow, but nothing more.

She does not seem to acknowledge the attack.

Instead, she seems preoccupied with the assault inside her, staring at the wriggling shape of Na'lsa at it mutilates her from within. She looks... saddened, remorseful. Worried.

And then her multi-hinged jaw stretches open in an impossible gape of abject horror.

She manages a single word,

"No

before it begins. The birthing.

Sin's coils pulse, gorge, buckle, and constrict horribly in a spasm that draws a keening, sobbing gasp from the demoness. She shudders, is still for a moment, and then heaves, cloacae opening all along her glutted form, twelve at least, ripped savagely open in flooding blood and spattering placentae.

Heads emerge from the savaged orificia, massive, thick skulls coated in squalid amneosis; deep, predatory eyes sparking like furnaces; Cerberian snouts, gushing Hellish smoke, lined with hierarchies of acrid fangs. The stench is like nothing on Earth.

The Hounds of Hell, bastard children of Death, filled with the Profane Spirit. They stand at least seven feet at the shoulder, impossibly muscled, ebon claws the length of shortswords slashing the carpet as they stamp and shake the clinging afterbirth from their hides.

But they do not attack, not immediately. No, their unholy maws part, slavering tongues flitting, and a voice, a single voice, proclaims in thunder from their throats:

IN NOMINE SATANAS, ET BESTIAE ET SPIRITUS PROFANAE, VOS ADVERSUM EGO EVOCANT DIABOLUM, PER EXITIUM CRUCE CHRISTI ET LUMINOS LUCIFER, ANIMA VESTRI DAMNARE AD INFERNOS ETERNUM

And as one, they rear onto their hind legs, towering fifteen feet on titanic legs. Their throats swell and bulge, and as one, the Hounds slam back to the ground, shuddering the chamber, and vomit utter darkness upon the party.