Greed God chapter 161

April 3rd 2016 Gotham City 1:00 PM EDT

It usually only took a second or two for merges to complete, but I'd never  merged anything on this scale before. I'd done a small town, but it had  been like a few buildings. This was Gotham and Metropolis, two of the  biggest cities on the east coast, and there were a lot of people in  both. I'd concentrated on NOT merging all the people, since I didn't  want to accidentally turn my women into random strangers, but there were  going to be a LOT of changes.

I'd used Gotham itself as  the primary, since I didn't want my house to move, and Metropolis was  pouring into the city, rapidly changing so many things. Metropolis's  powerful grounding effect on magic as the 'City of Tomorrow' was the key  to this whole plan. Doctor Gotham was plugged into a magical generator  and had nigh unlimited power within his territory, and there was no  possible way to beat him as long as those two things remained true.

Contacting  Doctor Fate had yielded surprising results when it came to allies,  mostly because this whole city might as well have been cancer as far as  he was concerned. Wild magic running amok in a place the size of Gotham  was a huge win for Chaos, and Doctor Fate literally did not care what he  had to do to fix that shit. I thought I was a sociopath, but that guy  made me look like the world's huggiest puppy. As the light faded, I used  appraisal on the slowly revealed city, and felt my breath catch in my  throat.

[Appraisal function activated. Treasure  detected. Brightedge City -C rank. A sprawling magitech metropolis,  Brightedge city contains both powerful mystical energies and advanced  futuristic technology, sometimes in the places you would least expect  them. Altars to lost machine gods, futuristic rituals of blood  sacrifice, and treasures of a million kinds all lie within this city.  Warning: this disruption in the lines of fate affects the plans of  beings beyond your comprehension. Tread carefully.]

The  light finally faded and I was...in awe. This new city was breathtaking.  Massive skyscrapers of glass and stone stood beside towers of bone and  magic. Some of the buildings were heavily enchanted in sections and  hummed with futuristic energy shields in others. I'd felt the movements  of the energies as they had happened, and I knew that many things had  changed. Crypts and hidden places had been altered, had become more, and  even powerful places beyond the reach of the upgrade were being  affected by the environment.

I heard a small gasp from  beside me, and looked over to see Leslie staring wide eyed at the new  skyline. Metropolis was just...gone. Not destroyed, but part of  Brightedge, and the place it had been was just empty fields of grass  now. I knew everything that had been in Metropolis would be here now, in  some way or another, but I could understand why she was so shaken. I  put a hand on her shoulder. "Hey, cool it, no need to freak. No one got  hurt, I just combined the cities. Trust me, it was necessary."

She  was shaking under my hand, too awestruck to speak. Not that I would  have heard it over the booming howl of unbridled rage that shook the  whole fucking city. "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!?" The tide of  palpable fury that washed from the city probably would have had me  pissing myself if this wasn't part of the plan. Doctor Gotham was  fucking PISSED, and he was coming this way. I barely recognized the  urbane, amused voice of the condescending old warlock with the  earthshattering power and simmering hate warping his bellow, but barely  meant I still recognized it, even if I wish I hadn't.

I  turned to Leslie. "Ok, this? This you can freak out about a little. I'd  hide behind me if I were you. This next part is going to get a bit  dicey." The tiny blue girl gave an eep, of fear and dove behind my  larger form, and I turned back to watch the coming fireworks. Blue booty  would still be there later, but this was a once in a lifetime shot at  observing magic on a scale most people would never get to witness, as  long as I survived.

Something that became much less  certain when a literal COLUMN of black flame smashed down from above me,  aiming right at my and the nearly naked cutie behind me. I considered  defending myself, but I wasn't stupid enough to think that I could block  that. Doctor Gotham was an A ranker even without access to an unlimited  energy source. I might as well try to piss on the sun. I'd either  survive this with outside intervention as expected, or I would die.

Luckily,  it turned out to be the former. Before the flames impacted us, a golden  flash of light bloomed in front of me. The spell coalesced into a  golden Ankh that swallowed the entire burst in a single bottomless  slurp, barely rippling at the prodigious might of the hellfire it had  consumed. Doctor Gotham emerged from the clouds above me, glaring down  at both me and the Ankh. His white ponytail whipped in the wind, as did  his brown coat, and his blue eyes were alight with hate and rage.

He  snarled at me soundlessly. "You! I remember you boy. I invited you to  become part of this new world, to join with me, and this is how you  repay me? You've ruined everything! Do you know how long it took to plan  this? To execute the rituals, to arrange the necessary convergences of  magical energies? Then you just do...THIS, and suddenly it's all gone.  My careful webs of spellwork fractured into nothingness." His eyes  snapped up to the clouds in the distance. "Nabu! You simpering little  goody-goody. I know you're there. You did this didn't you? Gave him the  spell to create this...abomination."

Huh, I hadn't  expected him to just completely write me off and assume Doctor Fate did  all this, but I honestly wasn't complaining. This asshole could smash me  like a bug, the less of his attention  I had the better. I reached out  to the city, to see if I could gain control of it, but I felt no  response. Shit. I'd been afraid of that. Possession was nine tenths of  the law for the greed system. My Brands existed because owning a person  is difficult to quantify, but for actual objects as far as it was  concerned I had to be strong enough to take them and hold them. No  convenient mental link to Brightedge.

I'd have to conquer  the damn place the old fashioned way, and that was going to be a fucking  mess. For now though, I was focused on the battle of magical titans  going on above me. Doctor Fate coalesced from the dark, floating above  the river in his shining golden helmet and ridiculous cape. "Sun King."  The helmeted sorcerer intoned. "Your monstrosity has been quelled. You  have unleashed chaos on this world, and must be brought to order.  Surrender yourself now, and I will allow you to keep your li-"

Apparently  Doctor Gotham was not a fan of surrender, because he unleashed a huge  wave of power at the other magic user. A twisting flicker of his hands  and he hurled forth a sort of jagged, shifting fractal made of black and  green energies. The fractal expanded to fill the sky as it bore down on  Doctor Fate. The helmeted sorcerer raised another Ankh, but Doctor  Gotham flicked his hands again and the fractal shattered, reforming into  a dozen smaller patterns that spate a strange black green lightning  from every angle.

Fate raised his hands and PULLED them  apart. The Ankh he had conjured warped around him. Despite still being  completely flat, it somehow expanded and thickened, drawing in the space  around Fate without actually damaging anything and somehow creating a  two dimensional bubble that it fucking hurt to look at. The lightning  crashed harmlessly against the barrier, and Fate snapped his fingers.

The  sparks of gold from the impact points turned to chains as the Ankh  dissolved into links, climbing each individual stream of energy back to  the original fractal and binding each one in halcyon restrictions until  the whole area was a web of golden binding. Fate made a fist and YANKED  it back, and I heard a sound of ripping and a scream from Doctor Gotham  as the bound energy, still somehow connected to him, was torn right out  of him.

The warlock shuddered and dropped a few feet,  catching himself in midair. He hunched over, panting, for a minute, and  when he looked up, the strong and masculine face under that silver hair  had been replaced with a lined and wrinkled scowl. He looked like he had  aged fifty years from that one attack. He'd been old before, but it had  been a distinguished fifty or sixty. Now he looked a hundred and ten.  Doctor Gotham coughed and a few times, hacking up a few traces of black  energy before wiping his mouth.

He glared up at Fate.  "That was MINE. The word of Daganoth took me centuries to properly  refine, and I would like it back." He lashed out with a hand, and a  sickly blue web flew out at Fate. The web was...wrong. Like I was  looking at something a spider had made as it's magnum opus before it  died of madness. It hurt to watch the shifting shapes, like trying to  wrap my thoughts around them punctured and raked at parts of my mind.

Fate,  however, wasn't even phased. A few flickering gestures conjured a swarm  of golden hawks that swooped down on the net. Each hawk was a  conglomeration of dozens of powerful spells, and the fell up on the weak  points in the net ripping chunks from them as they did. The net had  been seen through completely and the hawks tore into exactly the right  spots to dissolve it.

As it collapsed the energy in it  exploded outward, running amok and burning away at the air and the world  itself like vitriol or poison, but Fate had taken it apart from a  distance and remained untouched. It wasn't that there was a huge  difference in their ability. Fate was A rank I was pretty sure, though I  wasn't going to appraise him right now and risk distracting him  somehow. No, the difference was that first attack.

That  word thing had been incredibly powerful, and I got the impression it  wasn't exactly a part of Doctor Gotham. Some kind of  spell construct  that he funneled his power through, and a borrowed one at that. Fate had  taken advantage of the old warlock's hubris and the fifty thousand year  gap in practice time to steal a huge chunk of his juice, and it had  damaged the other wizard.

Doctor Gotham had also been cut  off from his city, which probably hadn't been fun to start with. It  explained why fate had arranged for me to do this the way I had, so he  could intervene while his foe was weakened. Between those two factors,  Doctor Gotham was officially too damaged to win this. Unless fate got  cocky, which I didn't see happening. This was a foregone conclusion.

They  still battled for an hour before it ended. The magic made what I'd seen  from Zee look like a child finger painting, I memorized every second of  the fight, but eventually, after a long battle, Fate managed to close  and restrain The Sun King. The Ankh he used wrapped around the old man's  neck, his hands locked in the two protrusions on the side like  stockades. I expected fate to address me, but he just waved a hand and a  second Ankh opened, a portal that he dragged the other wizard into,  disappearing. I let out a long sigh of relief. Looked like the plan had  worked. Time to deal with the fallout.