Dormammu roared, and the purple beam doubled.
The dark energy it was constructed from tore at local spacetime as it expanded — a compression effect, the kind that preceded the destruction of things that had considered themselves permanent. At full extension, what Dormammu was projecting would have qualified as a planet-killing weapon by the standards of anyone who measured such things.
The artificial sun between them kept expanding.
Not retreating. Not destabilizing. The accumulated collision energy had developed opinions of its own, and its opinion was that it was going to grow until something resolved the standoff one way or another.
"You think you're the only one who can push harder?"
The voice came from the wrong direction.
Dormammu's purple pupils tracked it — a tiny figure, moving fast, cutting through the charged space toward the avatar at an angle that suggested someone who had made a decision and was implementing it without further discussion. The figure twisted in the air as it closed the distance, one arm drawing back in a long arc, the movement carrying the geometric perfection of a form that had been refined past the point where individual muscles needed to be thought about.
The Noble Phantasm activated.
The concept of Knight of Owner — Never Dies Barehanded expressed itself not as visible power but as a quality — the designation of the hand itself as a weapon of divine classification. The Dark Dimension's fabric twisted and compressed in front of the descending palm. Dormammu, through the avatar's perception, saw it: a phantom superimposed over an ordinary human hand, the scale of it belonging to a category that didn't have a unit of measurement smaller than stellar.
Ordinary Series —
Ordinary Big Hit.
The slap connected.
The avatar went blank.
This was not a metaphor. The dark energy composing Dormammu's massive form simply stopped processing coherent instructions for the duration of the impact, the way a bell stops being a bell for the moment it's struck and becomes purely a vehicle for vibration. The dimensional lord of the Dark Dimension, master of an entire cosmos, had been slapped senseless by a human hand.
Then the power arrived.
It came up through the contact point in two waves. The first punched a groove across the avatar's face — a physical channel carved through dark energy by the sheer concentrated force of an existence that had exceeded any single universe's growth ceiling. The second went deeper, into the avatar's structure, and the avatar disagreed with it in the most fundamental way available: it exploded.
Dark energy cascaded outward from the detonation point in every direction, returning to the Dark Dimension's ambient field like debris from a collapsed building — a grand meteor shower of compressed darkness scattering across the battlefield, deepening the shadows at the edges of the fight even as the center blazed.
The collision sun, deprived of the energy balance that had been sustaining it, resolved its accumulation in a single instant. The explosion propagated through dark galaxies, through compressed remnant worlds, through everything in its expanding radius, and what it left behind was not darkness but light — the temporary, genuine, unprecedented light of a reaction that had never happened in this dimension before.
At the epicenter of all of it, Jordan stood with his hands clasped behind his back.
He didn't appear to have moved.
The deepest part of the Dark Dimension contracted.
The black mist at its core — the impenetrable density that had no equivalent in any other space, the darkness that darkness itself used as a reference point — pulled inward, and something emerged from it.
A figure in black robes, the design identical to the blood-red robes of Vormir's keeper translated into absolute dark. A body composed not of flesh or energy but of burning magical flames, the specific quality of fire that ancient demonic entities wore as skin. The flames moved with its thoughts, rising and falling with its emotional state, and right now they were rising.
Dormammu's true form regarded the aftermath of what had just happened to his avatar.
A human, he was thinking, with the particular disbelief of a being who had consumed civilizations and knew, from extensive practical experience, what humans were capable of. That was a human.
His magical flames rose several meters as he replayed the specific quality of the power that had torn his avatar apart. The terrifying divine force that had come through that ordinary-looking hand. The sheer quantity of it, operating in the Dark Dimension as easily as it would have operated anywhere else, not diminished by the dimensional pressure that reduced everything else that entered here.
No human does this, Dormammu concluded. This is a dimensional entity in human form, disguising itself for reasons I don't yet understand. Some ancient power playing games.
He began preparing a new avatar. Something larger. Something that didn't have the limitations of his previous projection.
Even dimensional demon gods maintained social awareness — the multiverse had its own hierarchy, its own gatherings, its own complicated politics among beings of sufficient power. Dormammu had attended enough of those gatherings to know that when an unknown entity showed up in your domain and did what this one had just done, the correct response was to establish dominance before the story got out.
The failure to do so had consequences that lasted millennia.
He was reaching for the dark energy to construct the new avatar when the explosion's aftermath asserted itself.
The blast had cleared a zone. In the brief interval before darkness reasserted itself — light travels at three hundred thousand kilometers per second and darkness is considerably slower — a pocket of genuine illumination existed at the center of the battlefield.
Two figures stood in it.
Side by side. Same posture. Same calm expression. The same benevolent smile, rendered in duplicate with perfect symmetry.
The real Jordan had been at the epicenter the entire time, sustaining the energy exchange with Dormammu's beam and expanding the artificial sun.
The shadow clone had arrived from outside the engagement radius, used the explosion's disruption for cover, and delivered the slap.
This was the thing about infinite power expressed as shadow clones: the rules of the technique required halving the base attributes on duplication. Half of infinite was still infinite. Jordan's clones were operating in the same register he was, carrying the same conceptual weight, designated as weapons by the same Noble Phantasm.
A shadow clone in casual combat mode had just destroyed a major avatar of a dimensional demon god.
Jordan considered this as he stood in the light, the Dark Dimension slowly reclaiming its territory around them both.
The plan, he thought, is going to work.
The idea had arrived early, almost as soon as he'd entered the Dark Dimension and seen its scope — the architecture of it, the vast internal space and the specific nature of Dormammu's presence within it. The plan had crystallized fully when the clone's performance confirmed the available power. He'd been running the variables since the fight began, and they had all resolved in the same direction.
He leaned over and spoke quietly to the clone through the Mind Network, the transmission bypassing all external channels, arriving directly and completely. The clone listened. Then Jordan put an arm around its shoulder and gave it one firm pat.
"You've got the rest of this."
The clone's eyes lit up with the specific theatrical brightness of a shadow clone that had decided this moment called for a dramatic register.
"It's fate's arrangement," it said, with great solemnity, looking into the middle distance. "If I can't come back—" it pressed one hand to its chest — "please put three roses on my tombstone."
Jordan stared at it.
"Get out." He kicked it in the foot. "Stop performing. If you disperse, you return to nothing. You don't get a tombstone, you get a puff of smoke and I absorb the memories. That's the whole transaction."
The clone's expression shifted through several stages of theatrical disappointment. "That seems like a very unsatisfying end for a heroic spirit who's being sent into the unknown."
"You're me. The unknown is extremely well-documented."
"Still," the clone said, adjusting its cape with the dignity of someone who had decided to maintain their narrative anyway, "it's the principle of the thing."
Jordan kicked it again, lightly. The clone caught the edge of the clearing in an exaggerated stumble, teetered at the boundary where the light gave way to the returning darkness, looked back one more time with the expression of a soldier walking away from the camera in a farewell scene, and then — with admirable commitment to the bit — disappeared into the ink-deep dark.
Jordan watched the darkness close behind it.
I do have excellent comedic timing, he thought, even with myself.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Writing takes time, coffee, and a lot of love.If you'd like to support my work, join me at [email protected]/GoldenGaruda
You'll get early access to over 50 chapters, selection on new series, and the satisfaction of knowing your support directly fuels more stories.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~