The relationship between Dormammu and the Dark Dimension was not a simple one of ruler and territory.
It was symbiosis. Deep, ancient, total.
The downside of that arrangement had always been clear to Him: His ceiling was the dimension's ceiling. Grow the Dark Dimension and He grew with it—which was why He had spent millions of years either devouring other worlds or traveling to devour other worlds, an eternal expansion project with no retirement date in sight. His power was the dimension's power, and the dimension's power was His. They were the same thing wearing different faces.
The upside, however, was absolute: short of erasing the entire Dark Dimension from existence—every particle of it, every rule that constituted it, every dark energy signature that had ever been associated with it—no force in any universe could genuinely kill Dormammu. Not even a cosmic deity above His level. He could be beaten, contained, frustrated, time-looped into submission by an infuriating sorcerer. But killed? No. As long as the dimension breathed, He breathed.
The catch—and He was only now appreciating the full dimension of this catch—was the corollary.
If the Dark Dimension's size was reduced to a fraction of the clone's half? If the balance of dimensional territory tipped that far beyond recovery? Then seizing back the supreme authority of the Dark Lord became not a matter of fighting hard enough but of pure mathematics. You cannot claim dominion over something you no longer contain.
Run.
The thought arrived with the clarity of a survival instinct that had not been exercised in several millennia.
If not now, when?!
Dormammu's vast dark divine body shuddered.
Damn humans. Ruthless, ruthless methods.
They had used the main body as bait—a blazing, arrogant, attention-consuming distraction—while the shadow clone quietly dissolved into the dark substrate and set about absorbing His home from the inside. The entire elaborate battle, the negotiations, the arm-severing, the splitting of the dimension—all of it had been buying the clone time to establish its claim, one fragment of dark authority at a time.
He found a grim silver lining, at least: the energy Jordan had released when His grip exploded open—that vast, seven-colored discharge of divine power—had been partially absorbed and recycled back into the Dark Dimension's substrate rather than dissipating entirely into the void. Not a total loss. Not a gain, either, but some small measure of compensation for the indignity.
Small.
Very small.
The seven-colored light was still spreading when Jordan began to grow.
It happened quickly—an unfolding, an expansion, the same principle as Pym Particles but running entirely on something far older and stranger than Hank's science. The seven-colored radiance poured off him in waves as his frame scaled upward: from human height to building height, from building height to the scale of a stadium, from there to the scale of a mountain, still growing, still climbing, until he stood in the Dark Dimension as a colossal figure of light that dwarfed even Dormammu's true form by a full head's height.
He looked like a celestial avatar assembled specifically to end darkness—every color of the spectrum blazing off his body simultaneously, making the surrounding void recoil.
Dispel the darkness. Illuminate the world.
Dormammu recoiled.
The light Jordan radiated was anathema to Him in the most fundamental way possible—not merely bright, but antithetical, the way that certain frequencies of existence simply cannot occupy the same space as certain other frequencies. His right hand, caught at the edge of the expanding radiance, charred instantly, the dark essence scorched away. Shadows rushed to fill the gap, healing it within seconds, but He was already moving backward.
"It's just a useless illusion!" He declared, with the conviction of someone trying to convince himself as much as anyone else. "This is the deepest darkness—the darkness that light cannot reach! Even your light will be swallowed by the endless dark and become nourishment for me!"
"Well said," Jordan agreed.
His colossal form raised its hands and applauded. Slowly. Genuinely.
"Keep going," he added, pointing behind Dormammu's retreating form. "Every word you say causes more of your endless darkness to dissipate. I'm learning so much. And as a personal favor—I promise I'll go easy on you when I hit you."
What Dormammu wanted to do was straightforward: get around Jordan, get to the dimensional boundary, and contest the clone directly for the Dark Lord's authority. One-on-one, Dormammu against a shadow clone that had been in existence for less than an hour—the outcome should have been favorable. His mastery of devouring rules was genuine, built across epochs of practice. The clone had raw infinite power and no foundation.
But Jordan was there. Blocking. Cheerfully, infuriatingly there—a living mountain of seven-colored light wedged between Dormammu and His objective, and this particular mountain apparently enjoyed generating additional problems for people who needed to get past it.
Dormammu is now a Muggle, Jordan thought with private satisfaction. And they're about to skin Him alive and fry Him in oil.
He watched the ancient evil god standing there—vast, dark, powerful beyond almost any scale Jordan had encountered—and felt, underneath the combat focus, something quieter. Recognition. This was the helplessness that every world the Dark Dimension had ever swallowed must have felt. The moment the math stopped working in your favor. The moment the walls came in and there was no move left that changed the outcome.
Dormammu stood in that moment, and for once He had no response to it.
Jordan appreciated the peace and quiet.
According to the plan, the shadow clone was the operation's actual main force. The main body was, functionally, a very distracting punching bag—keeping Dormammu occupied, preventing any strategic response, giving the clone time to complete its work. Once enough of the Dark Dimension's authority had been drained from Dormammu's half and absorbed into the clone's, the transfer would complete itself. Dimensional authority didn't require a ceremony. It went where the power was.
At that point, Dormammu's trump card—His unkillable link to the Dark Dimension—would simply cease to exist in any meaningful form. Former ruler. Deposed by arithmetic.
Jordan drifted into a brief, idle thought:
Strange things have happened to the people of this world since I arrived in Marvel.
Doctor Strange, from wherever he currently was: I was gone for twenty days. Twenty days, and that traitor Wong couldn't resist the temptation to stage a coup—I've never been so miserable—
The Ancient One, calmly: I resigned. Voluntarily. Don't attribute to betrayal what is simply succession.
Strange: That's not the POINT—
Jordan surfaced from the tangent.
Something was wrong.
He refocused on Dormammu, who had been standing very still for the last several seconds. Too still. Even accounting for a dimensional demon god in the middle of a strategic crisis, the quality of the stillness was off.
He spread the Infinite Web.
His awareness reached outward through the Dark Dimension, cataloguing—and the picture that came back made Jordan's eye twitch once.
Dormammu's enormous divine body was right in front of him, fully revealed, massive and present in every physical sense.
But His true form was gone. The shell remained—maintaining, with impressive discipline, the infinite-space trap that still theoretically held Jordan—but the actual consciousness of the Lord of Darkness had evacuated. Quietly. While Jordan was thinking about Strange.
No way. He blinked. Are you seriously exploiting a loophole, final boss?
He turned around.
At the far edge of the dimension—at the seam between the two halves, the boundary where the clone's authority met what remained of Dormammu's—a pitch-black figure burned in flames, facing the shadow clone across the world barrier.
The banter had already started.
"You bastard! Thief! Stop your shameless theft!!"
"Ha—only the weak pray." The shadow clone's voice carried its full theatrical weight. "I have only come to reclaim the king's authority."
"Dormammu is the sole ruler of the Dark Dimension! You're talking nonsense!"
"Remnants of a passing age." The clone gazed serenely into the middle distance. "Bury them in the earth—there is no longer a ship to carry you across this vast and lightless sea."
"Give me a GUN—"
"You want to kill me?" Another slow, wicked smile. "Then hate me. Curse me. And... feel the pain."
Jordan observed this exchange for a full three seconds.
I'm on the wrong set.
Dormammu, raging. The shadow clone, absolutely marinating in its own dramatic atmosphere, delivering lines that belonged in an extremely self-serious young adult novel. Neither of them was operating anywhere near normal social parameters.
Full-on unhinged versus terminal chuunibyou. Neither of them is right.
The theatrics aside, the actual battle for dimensional authority was happening simultaneously—both parties pushing raw dark power against each other at the boundary, contesting every fragment of rule and energy and matter in the interfacial zone.
And Dormammu, Jordan had to concede, was good at this.
This was not avatar combat, not the blunt force of a distant projection. This was His native element, His specialty—millennia of practice in the specific art of consuming other dimensions, the techniques refined across countless acts of world-devouring. He understood devouring rules better than almost any entity alive, and that understanding was showing. The rate at which darkness had been flowing from His side to the clone's decreased sharply the moment He engaged directly. Then reversed. A strong, insistent counter-current began pushing back.
The flames on Dormammu's head swayed with sudden, wild joy.
"Do you see?!" He roared across the boundary at the shadow clone. "The darkness itself knows who its true master is!"
The shadow clone, born less than an hour ago, lacking the foundational depth that Dormammu had accumulated across geological spans of time, was being pushed back. The wicked smile didn't waver—but the mathematics weren't favorable.
Who says you're guaranteed to lose if you can't win an argument?
Dormammu, riding the momentum, didn't notice the familiar quality of that smile until it was too late to matter.
Have I forgotten something?
The thought arrived approximately half a second before the answer did.
A black gauntlet punched through His chest from behind.
The impact resonated through the entire dimensional hierarchy of what Dormammu had once been—not through any organ, since He had abandoned the structure of human internals long ago—but through the authority-substrate itself, the deep layer where His dimensional identity was anchored. The world spun. Dark flame guttered.
"How could you—escape—"
"Relax." Jordan's voice, from directly behind. Calm. Practical. "Dizziness is normal at this stage. It'll pass."
A pause.
"And no—I can't believe you actually thought your infinite space trap was going to hold me."
His arms locked around Dormammu's true form with the practiced efficiency of someone who had applied this hold to opponents ranging from Nappa to Thanos. The Strongman Lockman. Complete control, no ceremony.
In Jordan's free hand, a gem appeared.
Blue. Deep and still and somehow present in a way that transcended its physical size—as if space itself recognized the object and adjusted accordingly, the surrounding dimensional fabric subtly orienting toward it the way iron filings orient toward a magnet.
The Space Stone.
Dormammu's dark skeletal eyes went very wide.
He was a local power of the Marvel multiverse, old enough and well-connected enough to know exactly what he was looking at. The Infinity Stones were not abstract legends to Him—they were real, specific, the kind of artifacts that bent the rules of reality at a level that made even dimensional lords feel small.
This human had the Space Stone.
And if he had that—
He must have the others as well. Perhaps... all of them.
The arithmetic of the last several hours rearranged itself in Dormammu's mind with horrible clarity. The power that had felt like fighting a cosmic deity. The reason the Biotic Field had processed everything without effort. The reason the Serious Heat Ray had done what it had done. The reason—
Wait.
Wait a moment—