The entire sequence—escaping the clutches of a dark god, then shearing off both of His arms—took less than a second.
Then the two forces of darkness, born from the same root, met in silence.
No thunderclap. No dramatic flash.
Space simply stopped existing where they collided, folding inward before detonating outward in a wave of annihilating pressure. The dimensional lord's authority ran rampant through the Dark Dimension's own fabric—the dimension itself convulsing like a wounded animal. Across the void, countless black planets caught between the two twisted forces cracked along invisible fault lines before tearing apart, reduced to drifting rubble and extinguished light.
Dormammu stared at where His arms had been.
The expression on His vast, childlike face was one Jordan had never seen there before: gravity. Not rage. Not contempt. Something quieter, and far more unsettling.
The avatar's wounds barely mattered—He could reconstitute dark matter into flesh whenever He wished, and true to form, shadows coiled around the stumps within moments, weaving themselves back into shape. But that wasn't what occupied His mind.
It was the power that had done this.
Jordan's energy had passed through Him—not like a weapon striking armor, but like sunlight passing through smoke, casually, inevitably. It carried a quality that Dormammu had no framework to categorize. This wasn't the power of a mortal, nor of a dimensional entity at His level. It didn't feel like anything He had catalogued in His long dominion over darkness. It was simply... beyond.
Higher.
Dormammu was many things—ancient, vast, arrogant—but He had not ruled the Dark Dimension for countless ages by being a fool. He had recognized the arithmetic of power quickly enough with Strange. He recognized it now.
Whatever Jordan Evans was, He was looking up at it.
"Who..." The reverb in His voice—that bone-deep, dimensional-frequency rumble He had always wielded like a second weapon—came out noticeably thinner. "...who are you?"
Jordan tilted his head.
He'd been prepared to let the dark avatar reconstitute itself and resume the argument. Now he raised an eyebrow instead—genuinely a little surprised.
Dormammu is afraid.
Not performing fear. Not performing diplomatic caution. The Lord of the Dark Dimension, speaking from the deepest core of His own domain, had just asked Jordan who he was in a voice that wavered.
Jordan set his chin in his hand, apparently giving this some thought.
"Just an ordinary person passing through," he said pleasantly.
He let a beat pass.
"So the mighty Dark God Dormammu is capable of fear after all." He straightened, spreading his hands in a magnanimous gesture. "Then doesn't that make my earlier suggestion even more reasonable? You've worked hard for millennia—everyone deserves a retirement package."
The reconstituted arms froze.
"Think about it," Jordan continued, with the earnest energy of someone presenting a very sound business proposal. "You step down. I manage the Dark Dimension. Your pension is set at the highest possible tier—full, unrestricted access to dark energy, same as when you were still employed. You travel, relax, experience the cosmos without a single administrative headache." He paused. "The gates to the Dark Dimension remain open to you at all times. If retirement bores you, rehiring negotiations are always on the table. I'm not some heartless capitalist who abandons his predecessor."
Dormammu's CPU: complete thermal shutdown.
"That is—absolutely—"
The reconstituted face blazed back to full intensity, shadows boiling around its edges.
"—impossible!"
The performance of calm diplomatic consideration lasted approximately three seconds before the Lord of Darkness abandoned it entirely. The sheer audacity—the bottomless, shameless greed of this human standing in His dimension, sitting on a throne built from His own ambient energy, proposing to pension Him off from His own home—
Why would I grant YOU access to dark energy? I AM the Lord of Darkness!
Jordan watched the outrage bloom across that enormous face and sighed.
"The negotiations fell apart again." He tapped his chin, genuinely reflective. "I'm really not as good at this as Strange is."
Doctor Strange, elsewhere in the multiverse, surfacing briefly from an extremely complicated forbidden spell:Don't. Mention. Me.
The great battle resumed.
Dark energy surged from Dormammu's reconstituted form in concentrated waves—purple light pouring from His eyes, His mouth, the palms of His outstretched hands—each beam powerful enough to shatter the dimensional barriers it passed through, leaving clean-edged vacuums in its wake that collapsed inward with hollow cracks.
From the surrounding darkness, the raw material of the Dark Dimension answered His call. Countless dark celestial bodies—planets, asteroids, dead stars—broke apart under Dormammu's authority and were reshaped. Each fragment was compressed, sharpened, and accelerated simultaneously from every direction: a volley dense enough to block out what passed for sky here, roaring toward Jordan from all sides at once like a swarm that blotted out the void.
Jordan didn't particularly move.
He raised the Biotic Field.
The dimensional barrier materialized around him—invisible, immovable, absolute. The physical barrage arrived first: an endless percussion of mass against force, each impact carrying enough kinetic energy to level city blocks, each one absorbed by the Field and dispersed without ceremony.
Clang. CLANG. Clang-clang-clang.
The concerto of destruction rang out across the Dark Dimension in an almost rhythmic pattern—a terrifying symphony played entirely against an opponent who wasn't bothering to flinch.
Dormammu went very still.
The last human who came to negotiate was not this durable.
Two direct strikes from Dark Matter Piercing shots was enough to kill most beings in a single hit.
Doctor Strange:I am BUSY. I told you to stop BRINGING ME UP.
The blue node in Jordan's Herrscher of Infinity Core pulsed.
It was a quiet thing—interior, structural—but its effect was immediate. The spatial rules woven into the fabric of the Dark Dimension were the dimensional lord's birthright; they answered to Dormammu as naturally as a heartbeat. But the Herrscher of Infinity Core didn't negotiate with local physics. It reached into the dimensional substrate and simply claimed a portion of those rules, pulling them free from Dormammu's authority with the same casual inevitability as prying a splinter from wood.
Jordan raised his hand.
A spatial gate opened—deep blue, perfectly circular, large enough to accommodate a SHIELD Helicarrier at full beam. The concentrated purple energy wave that Dormammu had been channeling into Jordan's position vanished into it mid-flight.
And then a second gate opened directly above Dormammu's head.
The redirected beam poured through.
Dormammu took His own attack straight down from above, the condensed energy extinguishing the dark flames around His crown in a single column of purple-white light.
The silence that followed lasted exactly long enough for Jordan to feel the golden warmth building behind his eyes.
His black hair lifted without wind. The space around him bent—light itself curving inward as the accumulated energy reached critical density.
"My turn."
He pressed two fingers to his temple.
The Serious Heat Ray was nothing like the ordinary version. Where the ordinary beam simply burned, the serious beam categorized everything in its path as something to be eliminated—and then eliminated it. Twin torrents of crimson-gold erupted from his eyes, the color of a sun seen from inside, and swept through every concentrated barrier Dormammu had assembled using dimensional authority. The purple constructs—massive, ancient, built from rules as much as matter—shattered like glass held against a blowtorch.
The beam didn't stop.
It swept across the Dark Dimension in a single continuous arc—a world-ending slash at dimensional scale—and the crystalline barriers that formed the dimension's outer walls, heated past any threshold they were built to withstand, began to blister. The surface texture of those ancient walls went from deep black crystal to something translucent, almost golden, almost beautiful—
—and then shattered.
The sound was enormous. Like a glacier calving, magnified a billion times—a cascading crackling roar that propagated through the dimension in waves, each wave announcing another section of the wall giving way.
The Dark Dimension split in two.
Dormammu stared.
From somewhere in the absolute deepest darkness—His actual core, far beneath any avatar—the Lord of Darkness stared at what had just happened to His home.
Dark energy poured from the wound in quantities that defied calculation, each second releasing more ambient power than most dimensions generated in centuries. Chaos swallowed it almost instantly—that indifferent, consuming entropy that waited beyond every closed system—and in the moment before the gap began to seal, Jordan saw it:
New universes forming.
Tiny, brilliant, expanding—several parallel worlds blinking into existence simultaneously within the broader multiverse family, nucleated by the escaped dark energy finding new equilibria. The Dark Dimension was enormous. He'd known that intellectually. Seeing it was different.
Dormammu—absent His avatar, operating purely from His core—had no attention to spare for Jordan's cosmological sightseeing.
He threw every fragment of His dimensional lord authority at the breach, frantic in a way He had never been in His long existence. The dark power He commanded in His own domain was god-level; that was not in dispute. But the breach was extensive, and for the first time in memory He watched His own authority—that vast, inexhaustible reservoir of dark dominion that He had always taken as simply a fact of reality—contracting. Visibly. Measurably.
Like a stock market on its worst day. Faster than He could replenish it.
Dormammu had devoured hundreds of dimensions. He had spent ages absorbing weaker worlds into Himself, growing His domain one conquest at a time. His only real setbacks had been at the hands of the Ancient One—annoying, humbling, never genuinely threatening to the fundamental stability of His dimension. And then that persistent, maddening sorcerer who couldn't be killed, only negotiated with.
But this.
Being invaded, and then having His dimension split cleanly in two by a single casual eye-beam.
This was not something that happened to Dormammu.
Dormammu: There aren't that many beings in existence willing to tear a world apart just to make a point.
The last one who had done something remotely comparable was that unkillable nuisance—the one who could only be handled through endless repetition.
Doctor Strange, having abandoned the forbidden spell entirely:
(ノ°益°)ノ彡┻━┻