The rooftop dining area atop the Chemimax corporate headquarters building was open twenty-four hours a day, naturally; one never knew when the most rarified of the leadership echelons might desire a meal, and the staff were always on-call. Gentry took another bite of his steak, savoring it, then washed it down with an exquisitely-paired red wine; dabbing his mouth daintily with a pristine white cloth, he looked over at his fellow diners. "I trust your meals, as well, are adequate?"

The six wiedergänger howled horrifically in response, each of them cupping a bowl containing various portions of what had, until recently, been the flesh and blood which had comprised Maximus Perforce; Gentry had been sad to lose such a long-term acquaintance, but the time for half-measures was quite definitively over. There was only one thing left to do, and he did it; raising his hand ever so delicately, he reached out and plucked the shimmering astral thread which bound him and all the wiedergänger together, and through them, every cosmic reverberation which had resulted from each of his actions throughout the last twelve years of tireless, herculean effort. The thread shivered slightly, as if in anticipation, and it was done. Everything was now in motion.

Beyond this point, Gentry didn't even need to remain in the vicinity of his minions; simply by being bound together, they would pull the skeins of his multifarious actions together -- a carefully placed fire hydrant here, an erroneous delivery of pitchblende there -- and the wheels of his great cosmic engine would turn of their own accord, setting a chain of events in motion which would culminate in the ignition of the great sigil Oghredu, the sign of the devouring fire that would consume the life forces of one million innocent victims (actually about six times that number, but Gentry believed very firmly in being thorough) and complete his great summoning.

Gentry sat, looking out over the city, and simply savored the triumph of all his work coming to fruition. He chewed another bite of his steak, but found that the flavor had quite gone out of it; frowning, he sampled his wine, but it too tasted flat. Standing up, he placed his crumpled napkin upon his plate, arranged his flatware just so, and pondered his circumstances.

He checked his phone, then chuckled at how ridiculous that idea was and tossed it over the parapet into the cool night air; he wouldn't be needing it any longer, after all. He paced, sat, then stood up and paced again; he twiddled his thumbs, feeling vaguely ridiculous. "What am I going to do with myself for the next two hours? Go back to my office and shuffle paperwork?" he asked his minions, but they merely shrieked and gibbered in response; he sighed. "For all the power you lot have, you aren't much good for conversation."

Unexpectedly, a voice rang out behind him: "If you're looking for a spirited debate, I think you might be in luck."

Gentry turned, raising an eyebrow in surprise; Orton and Enna, pleasantly non-winded after a tranquil and leisurely elevator ride up to the top floor of the building, stood heroically silhouetted against the city's twinkling lights. He smiled. "Well well, Orton and Enna. I must say, I quite thought I'd seen the last of both of you."

Orton winced. "Welp. So much for keeping our true names secret from you."

"But of course, my good fellow. Paimon, bourne upon his dromedary, knows all names and secrets." Gentry stepped very gingerly around the chair he'd been sitting in and pushed it back into place, then strode to face his adversaries. "But much more interesting is the question of how you made your way past all my guards and wards -- I have, in fact, been quite industrious in protecting this place."

Orton smiled, his teeth gleaming in the moonlight. "You might say I've got the key to your kingdom, Gentry." He picked up a fork, turned, and hurled it off the building; a number of snipers' shots rang out, targeting the unexpected metallic flicker, and all hit each other with unerring accuracy. Enna, who had no idea at all what was happening, ducked, then glared at Orton.

Gentry's face split into a delighted smile, and he clapped, showing no sign of displeasure. "Marvelous! Simply marvelous. And I was fearing that this evening would prove unbearably dull." He focused his mind, binding and deploying thousands of demonic presences, but they reported strange, conflicting information; that Orton was here, that he was there, that he was fifty feet tall, that he was invisible, that he was God Himself. He frowned. "And here I thought I'd quite gotten around your little fate-tangling trick."

For Orton, this was the spiritual equivalent of mainlining pure quintessence of cocaine; the instant he'd taken hold of the Spear, it had been like a man who'd been blind from birth suddenly being able to see in 4K definition, with helpful little pop-up infographics everywhere he looked just in case anything was in any fashion less than perfectly clear. Even when wielded by a mortal human, the Spear gave complete and total dominion over the vicissitudes of fortune, allowing one to be serendipitous and successful at all endeavours (including, of course, combat of any type and at any scale); when wielded by an Oracle of Orton's caliber (which was very, very high indeed), it was an electron scalpel, a lightning-charged conductor's baton to direct the freewheeling flow of fate to his every desire.

Divining Gentry's location, even through the warp and weft of hundreds of protections and obfuscations, had been easier than the most trivial of cantrips; bypassing all his traps, guards, and wards had been the merest of exertions. Finding a lost spiritual nexus and moving himself and Enna through it to restore their depleted magical energies on their way through New York City? Inconsequential and trifling. And confounding the spiritual perceptions of Gentry's demon servitor horde, despite their colossal astral range? Absolutely, positively, and totally effortless. Orton was doing his very best not to cackle maniacally.

To Enna, of course, this was all quite invisible; she only knew that Orton had guided her back to the boat, ferried her cheerfully across the water, and then gotten her into a cab where he'd stared creepily into space the entire time (she'd eaten a sandwich and had a wine cooler she'd packed earlier). Upon their arrival, they'd slipped in through a side door just as a custodian exited, wound in a chaotic and triple-looped pattern through a number of hallways, then punched in a code to an elevator and had a long, boring ride to the top. And now, here they were, about to engage in the fight of their lives; she felt like the build-up had been a little anticlimactic. Not even a mini-boss, she grumbled to herself. She flexed her fingers, preparing to fight for her life and the lives of every other person on the planet.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Then, surprisingly, Orton did something she would never have predicted; he stepped forward, faced Gentry, and bowed deeply. "Noble Gentry, I claim parlay."

Gentry sniffed. "Well, at least your manners have improved somewhat." He conjured a wrought-iron hourglass, molded in the shape of a twisting dragon and filled with red sand, and set it on the nearby table. "You have three minutes."

Enna blinked. "Orton, what the fuck are you doing?"

"I am," said Orton calmly, "the fuck doing what I'm supposed to be doing. Getting to the bottom of this." He stepped forward, pulled out a chair, and sat; Gentry did the same. After an awkward moment, Enna did too; the wiedergänger fell abruptly silent, wrested into stillness by Gentry's will.

Gentry steepled his fingers, his eyebrows raised. "This is deeply unexpected; I must admit to some degree of curiosity. How did you escape the tarn? I thought you had drowned more than a decade ago."

"We had help." Orton looked into Gentry's eyes coolly. "A good friend who saved all of us from something even worse than you, at the cost of his life."

To Enna's shock, Gentry bowed his head. "I see. My condolences for your loss."

"Wait, what?" she sputtered. "Seriously? Since when do you care about other people?!"

"He didn't say 'sorry', Enna," said Orton, quietly and sadly. "He said 'condolences'." He turned back to Gentry. "Which is very unusual. Most people do, in fact, care at least a little about other humans, but you don't seem to, and I've never been able to understand why."

Gentry shrugged. "Is there some reason that I should? Humans are hardly kin to me, after all. I am above them, beyond them; they are at best fodder. Raw materials."

"But you don't treat them like that," pressed Orton, knowing he was close to something momentous. "I've seen the echoes of the things you've done -- in visions, in shadows you've left behind. You're never cruel. You're always polite. I watched you apologize to a man's severed head. There has to be something human in you."

"Once, perhaps," mused Gentry, picking up a piece of lint from the tablecloth and examining it idly. "Like many of us, I had certain illusions in my youth, which the experiences of age have dispelled." He flicked it away, turning a bored gaze upon Orton. "Is this how you plan to squander your two -- no, one and three-quarters -- minutes of remaining existence? A tired, predictable appeal to morality?"

"Call me crazy," replied Orton, quietly and sadly, "but yeah. I am very, very firmly convinced that it is the best possible use of my time right now." Enna, who had been about to explode with fury, abruptly stilled herself and shut up; even she knew what it meant for Orton to say something like that. "So lay it on me. Tell me why you feel it's okay for you to murder innocent people left and right. I can't imagine you'd be fine with them doing the same to you."

Gentry blinked. "Why on Earth would I not be?"

Enna's mouth fell open. "Excuse me? You're cool if someone tortures and murders you?!"

Gentry shrugged. "Why not? If they have the ability, who am I to gainsay them?" He spread his hands. "Power is authority, and absolute power is absolute authority. The highest arbiter of virtue is one who can enforce their vision of it." He leaned back in his chair, sighing. "Compared to virtually every other God, I've been outrageously charitable."

"But you're not," continued Orton, still pleasant and calm. "You're not a god. You're just a magus, exactly like those magi you killed to obtain their power. You put your pants on one leg at a time, just like everyone else."

"For now," agreed Gentry genially. "But only for the next two hours."

Enna laughed. "So that's why you're killing millions of people? For a teleporting-your-pants-on spell?"

Gentry sniffed. "If that's what you want to call godhood."

Orton shook his head. "It's not, though. You're going to die when that moon hits this planet, Gentry, no matter how you try to hide from it. There's no hole deep enough, no warding spell strong enough, and no inner domain resilient enough to protect you."

"You are, of course, quite mistaken," returned Gentry. "The lunar fall will take several days to take effect -- plenty of time for me to make my way to the bathysphere I have painstakingly prepared and journey to the most stygian depths of the sea. With the proper entropic protections, I can ensure that my habitat outlasts all other quantum observers."

Orton's trance shattered. His mind reeled, stunned; he couldn't believe what he was hearing. "You... you want to reduce the weight of entropy in the local universe to zero. You literally want to become..."

"God." Gentry did not even blink. "With no opposing perspectives sharing my worldline, I will have absolute power to forge new vectors of existence, with no care or constraint for previous states of matter or energy."

"Hey now, I'm no expert at this stuff," broke in Enna, "but wouldn't your own memories prevent you from doing anything too extreme?"

"Not if he uses a mindscape to constantly destroy and reshape his own memories," Orton breathed. His chest felt tight; this was beyond insane, a full extra tier of madness beyond what even he had been prepared to contemplate. "And with an infinite number of demons to help him, his creativity will never fail. He'll be able to create any state of reality he wants."

"Just so." Gentry reached out and gently flicked the hourglass, stirring the few grains of sand remaining in the top. "And very soon, at that."

"But you won't," protested Enna, somewhat less than confidently as she noticed Orton's lack of rebuttal. "Because we'll stop you. We'll totally, totally stop you."

"Possible," mused Gentry, "but very, very unlikely. At least as unlikely as your friend's previous four attempts."

Enna fell back from the table, nearly toppling over backwards in her chair; only Orton's quick hand on her back saved her. "You... you knew?!"

Gentry nodded, his eyes now half-closed. "Pursan knows of hidden things; the past, the present, the future, and all the secrets of all universes." He looked at Orton. "I suspect you will make other attempts, but eventually, you will fail, lose your nerve, or go mad. My triumph is always inevitable, as I'm sure I have told you in other lives."

Orton's head drooped; he let out a long, slow sigh. "Yeah. You do keep saying that."

Gentry got up from the table; he dusted off his immaculate vest, straightened his tie, and watched the last few grains of sand drop to the bottom of the hourglass. "And that is that, I'm afraid. I hope you won't find it disingenuous if I don't wish you success in your next life."

"It's fine," replied Orton in a flat, dead voice. "I don't think you need to." Enna, aghast, turned to stare at Orton.

"Oh?" Gentry raised an eyebrow. "And why is that?"

Orton's right hand rose up, moving back over his left shoulder and curling around apparently nothing in particular. "Because you aren't going to become the god of jack fucking shit."

In the blink of an eye, Orton cleft the night in two; the Infinite Edge, unstoppable and incontrovertible, lashed outwards in a crescent-moon shape of instantaneous death. Gentry, his eyes still half-closed, conjured the crystalline shield of the Immovable Object; the blow knocked him back a full step and shattered his defense like candied glass, but he was otherwise unharmed.

His wiedergänger were not so lucky.

Like a synchronized release of butterflies, the heads of the six necroneiric monstrosities rose as one from the necks of their bodies, sailing majestically off into the darkness as their rattling screeches were all simultaneously cut off by Orton's annihilating slash. Orton tapped the table with his other hand and sundered it into splinters, diving through the ensuing cloud of debris as he pulled Enna with him into accelerated time. The battle for the future of the Earth had begun.