If she wasn't sandbagging she could use Ghost Flame Shintai to become a big fire in that turn, or Yin/Yang Prana to become incorporeal and avoid both the attack and the maggots.
There are a lot of options for Elder Vamps.
Including some I'm not thinking of right now propably.
I doubt that would work; they're demon maggots that eat the souls of the damned and a stupidly huge monster that may or may not be properly dead, not mundane insects.
The charm says you need take a turn to clear them, and doesn't specify anything about the maggots acting like a swarm you can damage. I'd bet that getting rid of them isn't as simple as being on fire or not entirely corporeal.
Even if it did work Eiko or a similar enemy would need to take some combination of rolls, resource expenditure, and additional actions to actually do something like that.
Forcing her to choose between taking a debuff or doubling the costs of attacking Molly wouldn't end the fight, but it would seriously tilt it in our favor.
It also helps with mooks since they're less likely to effectively resist or work through it.
All of which we get without mote cost and it's associated expenditure bottleneck.
incredibly stupid aspirant akuma will have a DC of 8. Every single one that has a functioning brain will pay someone with feng shui to set up their sanctum to help with the practice of law, for -1DC, and will have paid an astrologer with Tzu Wei to tell them what time/date they'll be lucky in the next week and will perform the ritual then, for another -1DC. They'll also have set up their sanctum to be extra lucky with low dot Tapestry, which means they ignore rolls of 1 and double 10s.
These guys are selling their souls to demon lords, I'm not going to assume they're all idiots but competence and forethought shouldn't be default assumptions. This isn't an employment contract, they're selling their souls. By default the majority should be the desperate and the foolish.
There's also a certain amount of risk in setting up a specialized soul trading station. A lot of it is innocent enough alone, but so is buying fertilizer. A lot at once or the right mix of innocent things will still get you unpleasant attention.
The supernatural world isn't a surveillance state, but people do pay attention because sometimes your neighbor acting sketchy means they're going to kill you and use your ghost as crafting material or something.
There's also the matter of resources. If you can access multiple specialists and can afford their services you have less of a need to engage in this risky sort of operation.
There's also likely a meaningful learning curve even for the good ones, because information on how soul commerce works is something nobody wants to be clear. The Yama Kings want people to know just enough to get in trouble, and everyone else wants the details of how to do it at all forgotten entirely.
There isn't going to be a needle exchange equivalent for making sure you sell your soul safely.
You can't just be so smart you know all the relevant details on stuff you've never seen before. Having a huge occult score should help you make educated guesses, but the fact that you're filling in blanks should be reflected in difficulty.
Only a small number of people should have anything like the setup you're describing from the start.
People make bad deals all the time without properly preparing first, it shouldn't be surprising. See pay day loans, flexible rate mortgages, and student loans.
