The great Lord of the Dark Dimension, ageless consumer of realities, master of his own cosmos, looked at the human standing across the breadth of an entire observable universe from him.
The human was smiling.
And waving.
A human is waving at me from the other side of my dimension as though we are neighbors across a fence.
The distance between them was, by any useful measure, incomprehensible. The span of the Dark Dimension's interior was not something that had a number associated with it in any measurement system that had survived contact with Dormammu. And this insignificant mortal, standing at the far edge of that space, was offering a cheerful friendly greeting across it.
Dormammu hesitated.
"I'm here to negotiate terms."
The voice arrived directly in his consciousness — clear, warm, carrying the quality of a sound that had decided spatial distance didn't apply to it.
The darkness around Dormammu's presence surged. His face — the enormous ringed visage that filled a volume two suns would find spacious — flushed through two colors in rapid succession: the dark red of rising blood pressure, then something deeper and more dangerous, the liver-dark hue of a being experiencing an involuntary and extremely unwelcome memory.
Negotiate terms.
The phrase reached something deep in Dormammu's psychology and found a wound that had never properly healed. Strange's voice, in that endless repetitive loop — Dormammu, I've come to bargain — the same words, the same moment, the dying and returning and dying again, drilling through his ancient consciousness for what he had experienced as geological time. The phrase had been retired to a specific corner of his memory reserved for things that should not be touched.
Jordan had just touched it.
"NEVER." The roar shook the Dark Dimension from its outermost boundaries inward, dark stars trembling, debris fields scattering like startled birds. "I WILL NEVER NEGOTIATE WITH ANYONE EVER AGAIN. THOSE TERMS CAN—"
Jordan raised an eyebrow.
He's panicking.
He hadn't expected the line to land quite this hard. Strange had left a mark on the Dark Dimension's lord that had not faded with time. That had been a significant grudge.
What Dormammu, blinded by rage and painful memory, had not done — what any sufficiently calm dimensional entity would have immediately done — was properly assess who he was dealing with before deciding to fight them. The privilege of dimensional lordship included something the Ancient One had once been forced to steal from demonic allies rather than confront directly: the sovereign authority to simply banish anything from one's own domain. The Dark Dimension was Dormammu's in the most fundamental possible sense. An intruder could, in theory, be removed with a single expenditure of that sovereign will, regardless of how much power the intruder carried.
Dormammu did not do this.
He charged.
Hospitable, Jordan thought, watching the colossal darkness gather itself and surge toward him. Very well.
He reached up and pressed one palm flat against his chest.
The combat suit assembled itself in a cascade of dark gold light and crackling black lightning — not the slow reassembly of armor being put on, but the instant manifestation of something that had always been present, choosing now to be visible. The black suit. The golden J blazing in its diamond frame. The scarlet cape settling at his shoulders, catching the dimensional currents and flaring behind him in the dark.
Jordan hovered in the ruin-light of devoured worlds, hands clasped behind his back, and let the moment breathe.
S-Class Hero, Rank 2. Super Cop. Blue Beast of Z-City. Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan. God of the Mortal Realm. Herrscher of Infinity.
From the darkness, something descended.
Dormammu had manifested an avatar — a dark giant, continent-scaled, its silhouette carved from compressed shadow and ancient entropic force. The decay-laws followed it like a wake: every celestial body within range hissing and smoking under the corrosive pressure of the dark magic, spacetime registering the stress. The Dark Dimension, already strange, became something adjacent to a realm of madness. The visual alone had opinions about sanity, and all of them were negative.
"You have come here to die?" The voice resonated at frequencies that had no human equivalent, carrying the reverb of something that had absorbed the screams of civilizations. "A mortal?"
The aura was maximal. The staging was perfect. All it was missing was dramatic background music.
Jordan floated in the wreckage of several consumed worlds with his hands behind his back and tilted his head slightly.
"I heard you enjoy negotiating," he said pleasantly. "So I came."
The sound that emerged from Dormammu was not a word. It was a compression of several varieties of rage — the specific fury of a being whose worst memory had been weaponized against him twice in one conversation, the wounded pride of a dimensional lord being taunted inside his own stronghold, the affronted dignity of something ancient and vast being poked by something small and cheerful. His presence compressed.
Then exploded outward.
The weapons came first.
Countless forms — swords, spears, blades of condensed dark matter, constructs assembled from the mass of annihilated worlds — erupted from the surrounding darkness and converged on Jordan's position in a black iron storm.
Jordan didn't raise his hands.
The Biotic Field activated.
A blank hemisphere, a hundred meters across, simply appeared around him — not a wall, not a visible barrier, but a defined zone of refusal. The weapons arrived at its edge and the physics of the interaction were extremely consistent: nothing crossed. The clanging of impacts built into a continuous sound, each collision adding to a dataset that kept reaching the same conclusion.
Dormammu registered this.
His vast maw opened. From it came a purple pillar of energy — the kind that had restructured dimensions, the kind that drew on the entire accumulated mass of the Dark Dimension as fuel, the kind that had no size relative to which a single organic being was anything other than a footnote. Jordan's visual field turned uniformly purple.
The Biotic Field held.
Jordan stretched his shoulders. Rolled his neck. Moved his fingers in a loose, preparatory way.
"All that, and nothing to show for it," he said, with the tone of a critic reviewing a disappointing performance.
He inhaled.
Then he opened his mouth and fired.
The golden energy wave was Saiyan in origin — the full density of his current output expressed as a directional discharge, compact and focused where Dormammu's attack was overwhelming and broad. Gold met purple in the space between them.
The collision produced something that had not previously existed in the Dark Dimension: light. Real light, the kind that comes from energy exchanges that exceed their container's capacity, spreading outward from the impact point in rings of brilliant force. The two waves neutralized each other at their shared boundary while detonating the surrounding celestial matter — and in the wreckage of that detonation, something rose that looked like a sun, blazing in a dimension that had defined itself by the absence of suns, casting illumination across the remnants of a thousand devoured worlds.
Dormammu processed several things simultaneously.
The first: this mortal was drawing on infinite energy. An organic being had no reservoir large enough to sustain this exchange by any conventional accounting. Something was feeding him power on the same scale as Dormammu's own dimensional fuel source — an internal well, perhaps, another bottomless supply.
The second: the energy saturation between them was accelerating. The clash had been running long enough that the local space was charged with reactive potential, a stored accumulation waiting for one side to blink. If Dormammu withdrew his avatar now — if the lord of the Dark Dimension disengaged first from a confrontation inside his own domain — the radiant energy would consume the avatar on its way out.
He would have lost. In his own stronghold. To a mortal.
There were other dimensional entities in the multiverse. Entities with long memories and strong opinions about hierarchies. Entities who attended the same gatherings, who traded gossip across dimensional barriers, who would find this story extraordinarily funny and would still be finding it funny at the ten-thousand-year mark.
Dormammu held his position.
Neither side was running out of energy.
The artificial sun burned between them, steady as a new star.