POV Rio
The rest of December was a fairly peaceful and uneventful month. I mostly attended several meetings with various collectors Lara knew. In just a month, I managed to sell around 80% of the artifacts I took. I ended up giving away around 10% of the total haul to the British Museum. All that and the last bit I sold to Selene got my total wealth to 394 million dollars. Speaking of Selene, she gave me my reward. She offered money, but I asked if she would be willing to instead help me with a financial endeavor.
Instead of trying to desperately gain enough wealth to fleece Stark Industries, I could just have her short the stock for me, and I would take a cut of the profits. Stark Industries was valued at 243 billion dollars, with 51% of that value belonging to Tony Stark. Obadiah Stane had another 9%. With another 15% being split between various other shareholders. Leaving 25% up for grabs. That's 60 billion dollars of value that can be manipulated. After some discussion, we decided on a 50/50 split of the profits. I didn't have that kind of cash, nor do I believe I could obtain it in any reasonable amount of time. If this first trade works, then Selene agreed to take my advice on several other trades.
Was what I was doing technically insider trading? I suppose, but were there any laws against someone telling someone to invest based on something they had seen in a movie? I doubted it. And it would be hard to prove where I could have gotten the knowledge of Tony Stark's kidnapping. Moreover, it's possible Stane might even short his own stock. Though I felt that was unlikely, as it would draw unwanted attention his way. If anything, he may even help Selene short the stock so everyone is focused on Selene and not him. But time would tell us we still had two months before Tony Stark was kidnapped.
On December 30th, I finished assimilating Agent 47 and got my next template. My next template is John Constantine. He was... Decent. He didn't come with much gear. Just his trench coat/outfit, a pack of unlimited cigarettes, and a blessed lighter. The outfit was decent as it was enchanted to be very durable and could shake off small arms fire effortlessly and resist magic, but that was about it.
'At least the outfit doesn't reek of booze and cigarettes.'
But I did find I got at least a decent perk out of him, other than the immense occult knowledge. My soul was unclaimable. Basically, it made my soul impossible to mess with unless you are on the power level of TOAA, and even that would make things tricky. From what I can tell, the version of John Constantine I got was one that owed his soul to so many beings, including Trigon, it was so bad that both Lucifer and God had to step in and make his soul unclaimable to prevent John from constantly selling his soul and causing so much chaos. Thus, the soul technically became owned by God and Lucifer.
Which, in case you weren't aware, are the top of the food chain in the DC Multiverse. Now, obviously, the DC versions of God and Lucifer don't exist here, and the system is not meant to harm me, so automatically selling my soul would be a dick move. So instead, it made it so my soul was unclaimable without being owned by anyone, and nobody could mess with my soul. I was okay with this compromise.
Still, despite the lack of gear, the knowledge that John Constantine had was a reasonable trade. Though I was a bit worried about the usefulness of the info, as this is a different world with different rules. That and John Constantine wasn't a Homo Magi, which meant his magic generally always had a cost. Now, I could offset that cost since I had an internal magic source, but it was still something that I would have to be a bit cautious of.
Regardless of its value, I would get to see how effective they are as the alignment is beginning soon. To make sure we were in the right place on time, we headed to Cambodia. Lara was fairly confident she knew exactly where to find the temple, as her father had told her. When we arrived, we had spotted several groups searching for the temple as we were. But we snuck past them for now. Finding the chamber turned out to be quite easy, as Lara had a magical guide in the form of a shapeshifting little girl.
'Why is it always little girls?'
It seemed like whenever a protagonist was lost or in search of something, if there was a magical guide, it was more often than not a little girl or, on occasion, a little boy. Maybe it wasn't that common, but it felt like it. Sometimes it's a hallucination instead of a magical guide, but plenty of times it's a real phenomenon. It also happens in horror movies and the like.
'Oh, well, as long as it's useful.'
Once we found the main chamber, Lara took the time to look through it while I inspected the place where I knew the triangle was supposed to come out of.
"You find anything?" Lara asks.
"Yeah, this storage container is full of souls, each one seems frozen in time. They used some really messed-up dark magic to do this. And I mean the nastiest kind. My guess was that the people responsible for building this temple all sacrificed themselves to fuel the container and keep this place a secret," I reply.
"But the Illuminati knows the locations of both pieces," Lara comments.
"Indeed. I am a bit curious how they know that info. My best guess is that not everyone was willing to die for this secret, or perhaps someone overheard what they said, and that tale was passed down for thousands of years," I reply.
"I suppose so. You really think they will come here even without the key?" Lara asks.
"Almost certain. Powell has lied to the Illuminati, making them believe he has the key, even though he doesn't. He'll have to come here to keep up appearances. Or he risks losing everything. But that also likely means he will come with a lot of armed guards," I explain.
"Let them come, I'll avenge my father," Lara says confidently.
"Well, as I see it, we have a few ways to handle this. We ambush them in one of the corridors and go loud right away. Or we can trap them in here while the guardians of the temple wipe them out. We could also ambush Powell specifically, and I can extract the info we need or some combination of those things," I explain.
"How likely is the second to ensure Powell lives long enough for me to talk with him?" Lara asks.
"Very high. I can heal any wounds he receives and even teleport him away from the fighting if I need to. And knowing Powell, he will gladly sacrifice his own men to ensure he lives. As such, he will likely be the last to die. Depending on their numbers, they might be able to wipe out the initial guardians, but the main guardian will be much harder for them to defeat. And if they somehow do defeat all the guardians, then those remaining will be few and low on ammo. Perfect chance for us to step in and deal with them," I explain.
"Then let's do it that way. How will you keep them from escaping?" Lara asks.
"A barrier spell should do it. It will affect anyone who passes over a predetermined ward. Making escape for them impossible until they meet certain criteria. The restrictions are that I have to make the criteria possible to achieve. That and the barrier will not be that strong; most dispelling artifacts can destroy them, or a sufficiently knowledgeable occultist could do the same. But on the bright side, the terms will be simple: Only one may leave the temple alive. Not including us, of course," I reply.
"Sounds good to me," Lara replies.
I start working on setting up the barrier, all the while I hear the excavations being done just outside the temple. After the barrier trap was set up, I took a peek outside and confirmed that Manfred Powell was here, alongside around 50 armed men. It seemed I was right after all.
'This could be tricky.'
I head back and report to Lara, she chooses to stick to the original plan, but this time, we may have a bit more work to do. As such, we will also be staying out of sight for the entire situation under a notice-me-not spell, as I believe it is likely the guardians could see past the invisibility cloak. Right as the time came, Manfred entered, and they started to complete the puzzle for us. Then, when the time for the next phase of the alignment happened, Lara inserted the key, and a large battering ram lowered from the ceiling. I gave the ram a bit of an extra push with magic, releasing the first piece of the triangle. Before anyone could do a thing, I cast Accio and stole the piece.
"Damn it, stop them!" Manfred shouts, but Lara and I vanish moments later as we apparate to the second location we set as an observation post.
The guardians awoke, and a firefight ensued. The armed soldiers Manfred brought were more than enough to destroy the first wave, but when the second wave hit, they started to take casualties. When the final guardian awoke, all chaos broke loose. They tried, they really tried, but even after shooting the giant guardian with somewhere north of 1000 rounds, the thing was still moving. And when they attempted to retreat, they met my barrier and acted like cornered rats. We both watched as Manfred and Alex West hid from the giant guardian while the soldiers were cut to pieces. None of them had brought any explosives, which was their mistake.
"Bombarda Maxima!" I cast and hit the giant.
BOOM
The giant gets hit, and seconds later, it explodes into hundreds of pieces. The pieces go flying, and everyone takes cover, including me, from the blast. When the dust settled, the giant was no more, and the same could be said for the various guardians of the temple. Manfred chose to try to use this chance to attack me.
"Expelliarmus!" I cast and send Manfred's gun flying away from him.
Alex takes one look at that and drops his gun and raises his hands in surrender.
"Don't shoot! I surrender!" Alex West says.
"Stupefy!" I cast, knocking him unconscious.
I do the same to Manfred. Then I get to work on Oblivating Alex West, he would awake later with no idea of what happened after entering the temple. But knowing him, he will get the heck out of here rather than risk losing more memories to an unknown cause. No treasure is worth his life, let alone his memories. As for Manfred, I took him with us. He would sing like a choir soon enough. Steiner was a sadistic man and knew many ways to break someone's mind and get them to talk.
'I'll have to rush the work, but what's a little brain damage and memory loss when we have an artifact to collect.'