Jordan had always appreciated the Turtle School's fashion philosophy.
Master Roshi had understood something essential: if you were going to be the strongest person in any given location, you might as well be comfortable. The Hawaiian shirt. The sunglasses. The general aesthetic of a man who had stopped trying to look threatening approximately when he'd stopped needing to. Jordan had borrowed the template and spent a day in Hawaii testing it, far from New York and everything New York currently contained.
The beach was excellent. The food was excellent. He worked his way through the local cuisine with the systematic dedication of a researcher and found that his appetite had survived the breakthrough entirely intact. Something he'd vaguely worried about — whether becoming the kind of being who contained infinite power would gradually remove him from the category of things that enjoyed shaved ice and kalua pork — turned out to be a non-issue.
He'd thought about it more than necessary.
The infinite power had taken his shape. Not the other way around. The body he had now was constructed around who he was, not what he could do, and who he was included a person who had opinions about food and found beaches pleasant and tipped generously. He would always be human as long as he wanted to be. That was the OPM worldview at work — the specific trace that Saitama's universe had left on him, deeper than any card ability.
He was considering what to eat next when the portal opened.
It appeared without warning in the space between him and the hotel door — dark, circular, dense in the way that things are dense when they are composed of compressed nothing. It didn't look like a dimensional gate. It looked like a hole that had decided to be a mouth.
It swallowed him.
Jordan disappeared from the MCU dimension without making a sound.
Three thousand miles away, across all three of Earth's Sanctums simultaneously, every sensor that the Kamar-Taj network maintained for monitoring dimensional integrity started screaming.
The boundary between the Dark Dimension and Earth had opened.
Not the way it opened when Dormammu was pushing from the outside — Kaecilius's rebellion had taught every living sorcerer what that looked like, and the memory was recent enough to still produce nightmares. This was different. The door had opened from Earth's side.
Someone on this planet had walked into Dormammu's domain voluntarily.
Wong, who had been Sorcerer Supreme for approximately one week and had been quietly hoping for a gentle first month, felt three pounds of weight leave his body in the space of thirty seconds. He summoned his robes, opened a sling ring portal, and went to find Strange.
Doctor Strange had, in theory, semi-retired from active Sorcerer Supreme duties following the timeline corrections. In practice, he was using the free time to work through Kamar-Taj's restricted archives at speed, which he privately understood as preparation and publicly described as personal enrichment. He was in his sanctum reading when Wong arrived with the expression of a man carrying an emergency he'd hoped someone else would handle.
"Don't look at me," Strange said, before Wong could speak. "Whatever happened to the Dark Dimension, I didn't do it."
"I know you didn't—"
"And I want that stated clearly for the record before this conversation continues."
Wong explained the dimensional readings. Strange listened, set down his tea, and gave Wong the look of a man running a short list of suspects.
"You came to me because of Dormammu," Strange said.
"You're the only one who's spent real time with him."
"I'd like to stop being defined by that experience."
"Strange." Wong adopted the tone he'd developed across years of navigating difficult personalities at Kamar-Taj — patient, slightly weary, fundamentally unmovable. "Who took care of you when you first arrived here? Before you knew anything?"
"I genuinely don't remember."
"Strange."
Two more exchanges of this general character followed before Strange picked up his teacup again with the composure of a man who had decided to stop pretending he wasn't going to answer.
"I have a reasonable idea who went in," he said. "And I'll tell you this much — it's not us who are going to have a problem." A faint smile crossed his face. "Someone is about to have a very interesting conversation."
A specific silhouette seemed to pass through Wong's memory: tall, blond, scarlet cape, the particular quality of someone who approached difficult situations with the relaxed curiosity of a person who had already done the math.
Oh, Wong thought. That someone.
He exhaled.
Dormammu was in trouble.
Here is what had happened.
Jordan had wanted to test his post-breakthrough capabilities on something that could meaningfully respond to them. The Dark Dimension was the deepest, most hostile location in the Marvel Universe's accessible catalogue — the stronghold of an extra-dimensional evil god who had spent geological time consuming realities and currently occupied a body that was itself a small cosmos. It seemed like a reasonable benchmark.
He hadn't planned to be swallowed by a portal. That part had simply occurred.
When he arrived, everything was dark.
Not darkness the way a room without lights is dark, where shapes still exist in shadow and eyes adjust over time. This was a different category entirely — the Dark Dimension's foundational darkness, the kind that had existed before light was a concept this territory had agreed to accommodate. The silence was the same species of absolute. Civilizations had been absorbed into this place and contributed their remnants to its substance, and every one of them had gone the same way: gradual assimilation, soul-capture, eternal servitude.
Jordan considered his situation for approximately one second.
What does someone do when they walk into a completely dark room?
He punched.
Not hard. Not a formal technique. Just a loose, forward punch that let a fraction of his current power bleed out through his knuckles into the darkness ahead.
The light that emerged was iridescent — the seven-colored spectrum of infinite power expressed as something almost casual. It left his fist and expanded. Not quickly by the standards of someone standing inside the Dark Dimension and watching it happen, but quickly by every other available standard: the light scaled from the size of a fist to the size of a room to the size of a city in the space of a breath, and then didn't stop. Stars. Nebulae. Galaxy-scale illumination filling the Dark Dimension's volume the way water fills a vessel, finding every corner, every density of compressed shadow, the thick viscous darkness dissolving under it like fog under noon sun.
The process took roughly three seconds.
What remained when it finished was not empty. The Dark Dimension had always been full — every world Dormammu had ever consumed was still in here somewhere, the remnants of those realities compressed and rearranged and overlaid into each other over epochs of accumulation. The bizarre geometry of digested universes, stacked and interpenetrating, celestial structures that followed no natural physics because they were built from the combined debris of several hundred former natural physics. Strange colors. Impossible architecture. The fossil record of everything that had ever been eaten by a hungry void.
Jordan turned slowly and looked at it.
Huh, he thought. That's actually remarkable.
Something moved, deep in the newly illuminated interior.
The darkness that had remained — the residual concentration at the very center of Dormammu's presence — surged and churned. Then two points of purple light ignited within it, perfectly symmetrical, vast in the way that things are vast when the scale of comparison is measured in solar radii. The darkness around them deepened, not less dark for being illuminated from the outside, but more dark, the concentrated darkness of something that had chosen to be dark as an assertion of authority rather than a fact of physics.
The eyes of the master of this dimension opened.
A face emerged — slowly, from inside the darkness, vertical ripples spreading outward from the center the way impact rings spread from a stone dropped in still water. It was large. The word large was doing significant work here. The face of Dormammu, lord of the Dark Dimension, mad extra-dimensional entity, consumer of realities, occupied roughly the space that two suns would occupy if arranged at conversational distance from each other.
He had just been woken up by something that had illuminated his entire domain.
He was processing this.
Then Jordan's seven-colored wake — the trailing turbulence from the original punch-light, still propagating outward through the Dark Dimension's restructured space — reached Dormammu's extended form. The comic impact of several galaxy-masses of colorful force meeting the outermost extent of an evil god's cosmic body at high velocity sent the surrounding dark matter scattering in every direction: dark stars colliding, structures built over millennia breaking apart into smaller structures, an expanding field of chaotic debris spreading from the impact point across a volume of space that had previously been decorously stable.
Dormammu regarded this.
His authority over this dimension was absolute. Every shadow answered to him. Every remnant soul worked his will. Nothing had entered this space without his permission in longer than most civilizations had existed.
"Insects," he said, in the deep abyssal voice that mortals heard in nightmares, the kind of voice that contained multitudes in the literal sense that several absorbed civilizations contributed to its resonance. "Mere mortals. Like ants before—"
When the abyss gazes into you, it is generally because the abyss has determined that you are worth gazing into.
Dormammu gazed.
Something gazed back.
His voice stopped. Not trailed off, not interrupted — stopped, the way a current stops when the power cuts.
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