For we once so loved the world by HowlingDarkness95

Chapter 24

The avengers plus one arrived in New York to complete and utter mayhem. Doombots were surging back and forth, alternating between throwing pulses of energy into anything that moved and going for the old-fashioned bladed attack. Skurge himself was in the middle of the chaos, his big hulking mass visible as he towered above the various doombots around him. Even from the distance, they could see his sadistic smile when he turned and saw their quinjet. As they flew over the chaos, Iron Man and Thor dropped out of the jet, engaging the enemy almost immediately. It was a tough decision, but Steve had eventually ordered the team to move out as one. Despite this being a code red, they were wary of yet another trap and from what happened the last time, the avengers weren't going to let their members be picked off one by one.

Loki didn't care about all the trivialities that came with the group of mortals, he knew that no permanent damage would befall New York if only for the simple reason that it was the Greeks' stronghold. Of all the places in Midgard, this city would be the most protected one, avengers or no. He wondered vaguely as they flew around the city searching for a suitable place to land if Amora knew about the Greeks' existence or if she was as ignorant as the other immortals. If she didn't, it would explain the attack, but if she did, then it was pure stupidity on her part. Loki was under no false impression that Doom was working with Amora. If this attack showed anything, it was that Amora was in charge, the Asgardian sorceress' sidekick in the streets more than enough proof of that.

While the avengers worried about their fellow mortals and laid down plans on how to stop the metallic creations down below, Loki's mind raced ahead, trying to figure out what game Amora was playing. The first possibility that came to his mind was that she was trying to draw his brother in. It certainly wouldn't be a surprise, she did have some sort of obsession with the golden prince after all. But Loki knew her, taught her her magic even, and while she wasn't as capable of intricate planning as he was, he knew that she, like him, would never reveal her true hand with such an obvious attack. Which made the idea that this was to trap Thor practically null and void.

As soon as the jet landed, Loki was out and about on the streets searching for his first targets. As he approached the mass of chaos, he saw how the bots facing him seemed to turn around after a few steps in his direction as though they had spotted another target behind them. Loki hid a smirk, the gods were smart indeed, a direct shield around the blocks to keep the damage limited to a small radius would have been too conspicuous. This on the other hand, was ingenious, and if Loki wasn't expecting some sort of spell to be erected to prevent massive damage, he would overlook such an insignificant action too.

The god strode forward confidently, looking as though he was right at home in the midst of the chaos. He tore down the spells viciously, taking pleasure in manipulating the energy in his hands and flinging them at another bot. that was the beauty of spells and seidr, the beauty that those brute Asgardian warriors failed to comprehend. The basic form of a spell is energy, and seidr is the art of manipulating said energy and allowing it to take on a physical form or being able to exert a force on the physical world. If there was one thing that the mortals got right, Loki thought, casually flinging his hands out and crumpling the metal beneath his fingers without breaking a sweat, it was that energy could not be created or destroyed, it could only be converted.

That was essentially what Loki was doing. In ripping apart the spells covering the bots, he had in his hands a specific spell which he could degrade its specificity to its base form: energy and manipulate said energy into something else, an attack or a defensive shield, whichever suited him. He was barely even using his own energy reserve, relying on the abundance of energy which the Doombots had provided him with and which the Avengers had given him free reign of.