"No, no." Jordan shook his head from his throne, one leg crossed, hands relaxed on the armrests. "Times have changed, Dormammu. You're the one negotiating with me today." He gestured invitingly. "State your terms, and I'll consider whether to agree."
The corner of Dormammu's dark lips twitched.
In the entirety of his existence as a dimensional demon god — the accumulated centuries, the consumed worlds, the long practice of receiving the desperate appeals of civilizations that had run out of other options — no one had ever sat in his domain and told him to state his terms. The experience was novel in a way that deeply unpleasant things are novel.
If time could be reversed, Strange thought somewhere across several universes, apparently having a sense for these moments, you'd be begging me to kill you faster.
"As for who I am," Jordan said, in the leisurely tone of someone approaching an anecdote he enjoyed, "I am the sworn brother of the current Sorcerer Supreme of Earth."
Dormammu's eyes snapped wide.
"What did you—"
"Wong and I made it official on a snow-capped mountain outside Kamar-Taj," Jordan continued, without acknowledging the reaction. "He brought two bottles of Vodka. We drank until neither of us could feel our faces. He proposed it himself, actually — I don't think he'd deny that. The two of us have a bond that, in his words, is closer than blood."
Dormammu absorbed this.
The word Sorcerer Supreme had reached something in him that the previous four destroyed avatars had not — an old scar, specifically from the direction of Kamar-Taj. The Ancient One had spent years stealing power from his dimension to fuel her magic. Strange had then arrived and inflicted an experience he had decided was permanently off-limits as a topic of reflection. And now the Sorcerer Supreme's sworn brother was sitting in a throne above his head.
He exhaled slowly. Very slowly.
"Leave the Dark Dimension," he said, with the controlled gravity of someone retreating to their minimum position. "Leave my world. I will consider this matter concluded."
Jordan tilted his head.
On his throne, in the darkness of a dimension he had illuminated and disrupted and broken four avatars in, with the light from the explosion still fading at the edges — he looked, in this moment, less like a hero and more like the specific category of being that owned things by sitting in them.
"But I refuse."
The phrasing landed with the specific weight of a reference that earned its moment.
"Now —" Jordan held up one finger before Dormammu could respond. "I have a dream."
What followed was a speech. Not long, but precisely calibrated.
Jordan's gaze moved across the Dark Dimension's bizarre interior as he spoke — the remnant worlds, the compressed stellar debris, the vast and structurally impossible architecture of a space that had been consuming realities for longer than most civilizations had existed.
"I have a dream," he said, "of living in a dimension. Vast and boundless. With dark matter and dark energy in inexhaustible supply. A place where those who believe in me can arrive after their lives end, kneel, and—"
"You want my Dark Dimension."
Dormammu's voice had gone flat. The way the voice of something very large goes flat when it reaches the end of an available register and has nowhere further to go.
"It's awfully dark in here to live alone," Jordan said reasonably. "Don't you find it lonely? Here's what I'm proposing: you step down as lord, take some time to travel, relax, see other dimensions. I manage the place while you're gone. Full stewardship. I guarantee — not a single unwanted guest gets in."
The silence that followed was considerable.
Dormammu was processing the specific experience of being, on the first day of meeting someone, invited to vacate his own home so they could move in. The audacity of it was so complete, so unironic, that it cycled around from outrageous back to almost impressive.
Almost.
His giant hand came down.
The dark vortex that had been building above the fight detonated simultaneously — pure dark elemental force transformed into lightning under Dormammu's authority, crackling down toward the throne in a relentless vertical barrage.
Jordan held both arms out at his sides.
The Biotic Field spread.
The giant hand hit it and stopped. Not slowed — stopped, as completely as if it had struck the hardest substance in the universe and found it unimpressed. Dormammu's avatar distorted his face with the effort of pressing forward, dark energy churning against the field barrier, the power behind the push sufficient to crush stars on a good day. The gap did not close.
Between the enormous fingers, dark lightning continued to rain down. Jordan stood in it without moving. The bio-field processed each bolt and filed it under insufficient.
"So the negotiations broke down?" Jordan observed.
Dormammu registered a painful truth, the kind that becomes apparent only after extensive empirical evidence: competing with this being in raw power was not a winning strategy even with dimensional lord authority behind him. His first instinct — his ancient instinct, the one that had won him everything he owned — had been wrong.
He changed approach.
The dark vortex above them deepened as Dormammu poured a different kind of power into it: not force but authority. His sovereign claim over this dimension, concentrated and directed, transforming the ambient dark elemental energy into something that operated on a different principle. The lightning became dragons — not metaphorically, but in the sense that what descended had will and tracking and the spatial rifts of something that could tear through dimensional fabric. The space at each dragon's head fractured in a spider-web of broken reality as they surged downward.
"How terrifying," Jordan said, watching them come. His tone was the tone of someone who has decided to say something ironic. "Are you really trying to kill me with this?"
He blurred.
Instant Transmission.
Dormammu's giant hand, suddenly deprived of the resistance that had been holding it up, crashed downward — through the afterimage Jordan had left, through the unfortunate dark star that had been occupying the same region of space, through both simultaneously. Debris.
The thunder dragons corrected course. Lock-on.
Jordan reappeared at Dormammu's forearm.
The golden aura rose around him — not Super Blue's sky color, not the full transformation. Just the base form, the first and most fundamental version: Super Saiyan's clean gold, burning steady against the Dark Dimension's dark. His fingers came together into a blade, the edge of them sharpened by the compressed Saiyan power.
One cut.
The flash was brief. Dormammu looked at his avatar arm.
Everything below the forearm was gone. Not destroyed — severed, with a cleanliness that left the cut surface smooth, sensation absent, the dark magic composing the limb no longer receiving instructions from the central form. He hadn't had time to retract it.
Jordan had already moved again — forward this time, to Dormammu's front. The Biotic Field extended from his hands and wrapped around the severed forearm where it floated in the dark.
He swung it.
The thunder dragons pursuing from above met the dark arm traveling from below at considerable relative velocity.
The resulting collision lit the Dark Dimension like a second sun.
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