Apex City Square.
Alex and Wanda were currently walking through the bustling square. Small one- or two-story buildings lined either side of the street, each a different storefront that had ample foot traffic moving in and out. Discounting the ominous starless sky with a faint red tint, the street could be classified as a lively shopping district.
"To think you pushed this place to become so lively in barely a month…" Wanda said, curiously looking around. "I really should pay more attention to what you do."
"Is that so?" Alex asked, amused.
"Probably not," she said. "You're doing such a good job. I don't want to steal your thunder."
"Aren't you getting bored of staying in all day? All you do is sleep, fuck, and watch movies all day."
"What else should I do?" Wanda shrugged. "If I wanted to, I could clump all these planets together with some effort and speed up most of your plans significantly. But you won't let me."
"And what do you plan to do once your actions alert someone you can't handle? Or worse, trigger the awakening of the Dimensional Lords? Your actions would be the equivalent of a universal beacon that would attract every single cosmic entity toward this cluster."
"To be fair, the destruction of the Chaos Dimension was more of a universal beacon than this could ever be," she said.
"Yes, but that didn't attract anyone toward Earth because I could mask you through my soul. I can't exactly do that for forty planets. Just leave these things to me; I'll ask you for help when I get stuck somewhere."
"Then don't tease me about not doing anything. You are the reason that I laze around all day."
"My thoughts were more along the lines of going out, talking to people, making a friend or two."
"Sounds exhausting," she said. "How about you bring Nat here? I haven't seen her in a while."
"Actually, that doesn't seem like that bad of an idea," Alex said. "It's almost time for Xialing to take over the Ten Rings anyway."
"Who and what, now?" Wanda asked.
"Mine and Nat's daughter," Alex said before stiffening up as he sensed a possessive emotion rising within Wanda. "Adoptive!" He quickly corrected himself, but the damage was done.
"Daughter?" Wanda looked at him with wide eyes. "You agreed to have a kid with her and not me?"
"Adoptive," Alex flicked Wanda's forehead. "She was almost ten when we picked her up. I have no intention of having any children until I am absolutely sure of our safety. The current situation in Gaia has only solidified my belief."
She looked at him with an aggrieved expression, rubbing her forehead. "What situation?" She asked poutily.
"Tsk," Alex's expression darkened. "The thing about the Infinity Stones being stolen. I told you before, didn't I?"
"Pity," Wanda said flatly. "If you dare to have a kid with anyone else before me, I will make sure you regret it."
The threatening aura Wanda was exuding made Alex sweat as he glanced at her menacing expression.
Moments later, however, that expression dissolved into one of surprise. "Eep…" A cute yelp escaped her lips as her eyes widened, prompting her to grab Alex's sleeve and press her legs together as she stopped walking. "A-Alex… stop…" She weakly moaned out, biting her lower lip as her expression turned into a pleading one.
"This look is much cuter on you than that possessive one," he smiled and approached her before pinching her chin to raise her head. He leaned forward and gave a brief kiss to her lips.
"Nh~" She moaned weakly, her arms moving higher to approach her breasts.
"Honey…" Alex's playful tone held a hint of warning. "You don't want me to start denying you, do you? Keep your hands down."
"It's too… intense…" She said weakly, looking up at him with pitiful eyes, obediently lowering her hands. "You know my breasts are sensitive."
"To think just moments ago you were talking about casually shifting around entire planets," he said as his hand trailed along her hips and cupped one of her breasts.
"Alex…" She gasped.
"As punishment for disrupting our date, these will stay on for the rest of the day," he said, tracing his thumb along the outline of her stiff nipple, visible through her outfit. A thick black band was wrapped tightly around the erect nub with an identical one on her other nipple. Both bands were vibrating intensely, sending jolts of pleasure through Wanda's entire body and were the source of her current state.
"No…" She gasped as Alex suddenly increased the intensity of the vibrations. "Ahn~" Unable to suppress her moan, she put her arms around Alex's neck, leaning against him as her upper body almost instinctively started swaying, rubbing her breasts against him. Moments later, the vibrations completely died down as the two bands went inert, acting as nothing but simple bands that forced Wanda's nipples to stay erect.
"Will you be good for the rest of our date? No more talk of other women or kids," Alex asked, holding her close as her short, warm breaths tickled his cheek.
"Fine," she said, looking sulky. "You're so mean…"
"I can be meaner," he said playfully.
"Let's continue our date," Wanda said, seeming to have recovered completely as she wrapped her arms around one of Alex's and squeezed it between her breasts. "Let's go." She led him forward.
Alex couldn't help but glance down at her, his eyes briefly pausing at the visible outline of her nipples through her top before he turned his head forward.
"Can't you hide them?" Wanda asked, a faint blush on her face. It had nothing to do with the punishment that she had just experienced and was mostly because of embarrassment.
"I can, but I won't," Alex said. "Isn't it more thrilling this way? It's not like anyone will recognize either of us."
"Ugh…" Wanda grumbled.
Smiling, Alex snapped his fingers. Immediately, the people around them seemed to gain the understanding that there were two more people on the street. Aside from a few looks of suspicion, no one seemed to bat an eye at their presence. As if they had always been there, but were merely being ignored by the populace.
That had been the exact case. The two had been strolling along the street under a Chaos-enhanced version of ‹Camouflage› that made people instinctively ignore their presence. Alex had now modified it so that while they were visible to people, their identities would be scrambled. Whoever saw them would see someone unique. And due to the special nature of Chaos magic, even if two people communicated about them, the unique identities would converge, paradoxically making sense despite both people seeing different visions.
After all, they were in the dead center of the main square of Apex City that had an insane amount of foot traffic despite the small number of people in this city. Not even considering their identities as the city's overlords, Alex was too possessive to actually make such an intimate display with any of his hosts in broad daylight where they would be visible to other people. The camouflaged state was also why Wanda was utterly indifferent to their placement.
Having turned visible, the two of them finally continued their date as Wanda soon grew conscious of her nipples that were poking through her top and jabbed her finger in Alex's side. Still, she quickly forgot about it as Alex brought her a bagel to share with her.
Within the month, Alex had actively promoted opportunistic people who had resources into establishing small-scale industries in Apex City to get the commerce rolling. That was his first step in making this a city as opposed to magical living quarters with a barren common area for everyone. With plenty of subsidies and near-instant construction of buildings, Alex had turned the originally empty city square into a commercial district with everything: entertainment venues, food joints, clothing stores, everything. Though the trade-off was that everything that had been built functioned in a non-magical fashion. In his fast-track development cycle, Alex could only start out with one-to-one copies of normal storefronts from the real world, with plans to slowly introduce magic into basic things and eventually expand its scale to make this a pure magical city.
The non-magical situation went so far that Apex City had started functioning on two currencies: Dollars and Apex credits. Dollars were self-explanatory and were used by most people to handle mundane transactions. There were even a few currency exchange outlets that would take currencies of other countries and convert them into dollars for a small fee.
Apex credits, on the other hand, were a currency that Alex introduced very soon after the establishment of the city. Their function and purchasing power were equivalent to Gaia credits. Alex considered both currencies to be the same but simply possessing different names, considering the different theme of Gaia Federation and Apex City. Similar to Gaia credits, Apex credits offered two exclusive items, namely the Anti-Age Serum that could halt aging for one year, costing a million Apex credits; and the Gaia Balm that could heal most surface-level physical effects, including but not limited to soreness, stiffness, and body pain, costing one credit for a single hundred-milliliter tube.
Alex was planning to introduce a third item that would be exclusive to Apex City—Chaos Authority. Unlike the others, this one would have a linearly increasing cost based on the amount of authority one wanted to purchase. After all, the more authority one had, the more their mana storage and regeneration capacity. Now that Alex had quantified the amount of authority that Wanda's Source of Chaos could distribute, selling Chaos Authority was going to become much more straightforward.
It's essentially going to be a special pay-to-win path for rich people… Capitalism, aren't thou just amazing…
Alex couldn't help but laugh at the thought. Though he decided that he would set up restrictions to keep the sale of Chaos Authority under a strict system of checks and balances.
…
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/addyctive