The scene I was welcomed with was not what I had been expecting, nevertheless it was one I wholly accepted.
I would have been happy had it not been for the tense atmosphere between the four sorcerers I met.
"Hey, what's up?" I inquired as I made my way to them. We were getting a lot of views from people seeing as I had somehow appeared out of nowhere. "Let's get out of here for the time being." Taking their silence as approval, I opened another portal that took us straight back to Kamar-Taj.
"Okay, someone tell me what's up and why the stare down?"
"Dark magic." Mordo was the first.
"Like Keacilius, she too also draws power from the dark dimension… from Dormammu." Wong clarified.
"It's the source of her immortality, why she had been able to live through the centuries without the erosion of time." Even Strange had something to say
The room went silent as the three sorcerers stared at their master while I conjured a wrap of cloth for Doom's dead body.
"You have something to say to me too, Mr. Cross?" The Ancient One turned to me with an expression on her face that I couldn't quite tell.
"Me? Nah I'm good."
"Cross!"
"What?" I turned to look at Mordo at the shout of my name.
"You don't have anything to say? She taught us that drawing powers from the dark dimension was a vile act, and yet it was exactly what she did, what she had been doing… for centuries even. It was her folly that drove Keacilius to Dormammu and almost destroyed the earth.
Do you really have nothing to say?"
Now everyone turned to look at me except for the Ancient One who had been looking at me for a while.
"Right, because I'm the best advocate for what is morally correct." I quipped sarcastically. "I don't know what you expect me to say because while I don't agree with the use of taboo practices for personal gain, I don't think I'm in any position to judge her for what she did."
"So you side with her then? You seriously think that her actions' debt are considered squared with what just happened."
"Normally I would avoid situations like this since I tend to be a solo party but given as to how she could be called my master in a sense, then yes, I side with her." Mordo looked shocked as I said that but that was something I couldn't understand. What did he expect me to do? Condemn her to death?
She was more knowledgeable about the multiverse than anyone I know and also one of the people I didn't hate, on the contrary I quite liked her. Her eccentrics ways of teaching were the reason why I was able to learn about the arts as much as I could in these past 6 months.
"I think you are the one who don't understand, Mordo. Everything is not always black and white. Sure what she did was morally wrong, but you forget that we are in no position to judge her."
"Why?"
"One: We were all her students at one point in time, even the oldest master in Kamar-Taj was once her student.
Two: She's stronger than us… of that I have no doubt." Even now I could feel the minute tell of her magic fluctuating. She was weak as far as I could tell, but I had no doubt that if it wasn't because of whatever backlash she suffered from Dormammu, she would be far stronger than all of us put together. Even now I had the slight feeling that she could still whoop my ass if she wanted to. Weak or not. Hmm, maybe not, but I wasn't willing to find out.
I was never a stickler for the rules which made me a direct opposite to Mordo. He was all about the righteousness while I took things as I saw them and how they responded to me which made me a lot like Strange in that regard.
"Can we drop this here? We just survived certain death and I don't know about y'all but I need a bath… a long one. The debate on morality and right and wrong can continue another day." And without hearing what anyone wanted to say, I portaled myself back home only for me to look up and find three muzzles pointed at me.
"That thing is freaky!" Yelena and Nat lowered their guns after seeing that it was me.
"Hey Draul, can you teach me magic?" Urghh! I need a bath. I ignored the adolescent girl and made my way towards the bathroom where I proceeded to spend the next few hours submerging myself in a tub full of frozen water… just how I like it.
….
The following days went by with me doing nothing other than micromanaging the company and being lazy.
So bored in fact that I opened the mirror dimension just so I could train.
With my abilities getting more destructive, it was getting harder for me to train to my current limits without wrecking a part of the city. The mirror dimension became my new training ground as nothing I did there affected the material world.
It was because of my abilities that made me turn to my weapon in case I needed to fight in the human world. Sure, I had an astonishing degree of control when it came to it but destruction was destruction. An explosion was an explosion, no two ways about it.
Without any form of augmentation, I was fast enough to react to bullets and other high speeding projectiles then with added augmentation, I could easily go over 7000 km/h by my mental calculations which would put me faster than Quicksilver and yet Doom had manage to keep up with me, barely, though he had somehow managed to turn himself into a magical being.
He could use that form to power his most dangerous spells but I felt something was holding him back. It could either be that it was drawing his life for every second he fought or that he was hindered by a prerequisite. And yet, somehow, I had absorbed every magic he had left after his death.
What I wanted to see was the scale of destruction I could bring when I try to push my abilities to the limit without going into overdrive.
The Ancient One had easily established that my abilities had destructive properties to them – what she termed as chaos energy. An energy form that was as deceptive as it was dangerous. Chaos energy could be used to power the most simplest of spells and make them lethal.
So it came as no surprise to me that everywhere around me ends up being destroyed, one way or the other, when I have literal chaos running through my skin. Whatever brought me here was no benevolent being, that I was sure of.
The mirror dimension gained a red hue as my hands turned black with red accents on it. The next thing I wanted to try in this form was my magic.
I drew a magic circle and confirmed once again that it was red, signifying its corrupt and ominous nature. I wonder what Mordo would say if he saw this.
Strange, I knew, wouldn't care so much as I know for a fact that he had practiced some of the dark arts in secret, but Mordo definitely didn't. Mordo was an orthodox practitioner, never straying for his chosen path.
As for me, as long as it didn't leave a bad thirst in my mouth or introduce me into the ways of a megalomaniac, then I was fine with whatever avenue of power came my way.
I figured out quickly that adding my magic power and chi, fueling them together with my meta abilities increased its potency almost five folds but I couldn't keep it up for long unless I was in either of my augmented or chaotic form, which was what I was calling my two advanced forms respectively.
The reason for the strain was that for some reason, I could not channel dark energy through my base form. If felt like I was missing a crutch which was what the broken symbols on my body gave me.
Speaking of symbols, the more I looked at them, the more they resembled something like a map, joined together by cracked lines. I could tell that the symbols, or letters, or whatever they represented were mostly on my limbs and back while the rest were just jagged lines, making me look like a broken sculpted doll.
I had tried researching what they were, even looking through dark tomes but I came up with nothing. Not even a similar symbol. Even the Ancient One couldn't tell what they were other than a link to something, probably the dark dimension I got my powers from.
I took my mind off the dark thoughts that were swimming through it. What I knew for sure was that it wasn't any of the dark gods of the Marvel-verse that brought me here for the simple reason that there are nowhere powerful enough to bring me here.
The Phoenix knew who it was and didn't want to interfere meaning that whoever it was, they were definitely high up the ladder. The top ten probably.
But then again, the top ten were… Well they were the top ten.
I had a feeling that number 1 to 3 were out as they had no reason to do this, except maybe the Beyonder, and that brought me to a startling thought that for the first time had to occurred to me:
Was this universe pre or post-retcon?
'Shit! Stop thinking about it, Draul!'
I swear I almost had a heart attack at that realization because that meant that…. It's better I stop this train of thought for my own good.
Somethings were not for me to know at this time and I was content with being ignorant for now. I need the peace of mind that comes with it after all.
I stopped my training as it seems that my mind was really active anytime I de-stressed.
Breaking out of the mirror dimension, I arrived on time for dinner to be greeted with takeouts. The peaceful atmosphere that came with dinner in the living room among laughs soothed my burning mind into tranquility.
"So quack, where have you been since morning?"
"Oh, training."
Bucky stood up from his chair and went to check the backyard before coming back to plop back into his seat.
"Stop lying. You are too old for that." Sometimes I felt that Doom didn't do a very good job of taking Bucky's arm. He should have taken the two of them and a limb because I swear Bucky knew how to piss me off with the slightest things.
I had to explain within bites about the mirror dimension and made it clear how I couldn't train anywhere near the house, anywhere near civilization in fact.
"Was that the reason why no one knew about the fight you guys had in Hong Kong? I'm pretty sure it would have made the news if you were there." Steve asked.
"Something like that." I wasn't interested in explaining what had happened since I didn't know what really happened except for the fact that Strange might have pulled the time loop move he did in the movie on Dormammu. Only God knew how they would react to time manipulation and their thoughts if they knew time travel was real. That was not a conversation I was interested in having with anybody. While I cared for them, I was strictly for the notion that time should never be messed with. Half and a quarter of the shit that happened in DC was because the Flash always found a way and excuse to mess up the time stream, if it wasn't him then it was another time travelling fucker. That coupled with all the time travel movies clearly supported the claim of leaving the pouting bitch known as time to itself.
"How is your case going?" I asked in an attempt to change the subject.
"Fury had some breakthrough in tracking some of their bases down. Hopefully with you satellite launch we'll be able to dig up all their tracks." Nat supplied.
My satellite launch was just around the corner, though it was the first one as we needed to set a base first before another launch. It would be the first fully automated satellite in the world. The materials and money I poured into building it would make it the first of a kind.
"You guys have anything doing tomorrow?"
"No. Got something in mind?"
"Figured we could use the day to let off some steam and tension. We definitely need it." I spoke my reason. I needed a distraction and they had been running around for the last few days with leads and fighting metas so a day off sounded nice. And besides, no heroes allowed in the house. We were a selfish bunch, only doing things when we wanted to. I'll admit that I rubbed off way too much on them, though they still had their heroic streak, it was somehow timid compared to the image I had of them.
"Where to?" Case in point.
"We could hit some fancy restaurant and then the beach. In any order you guys want."
"Sounds fun."
"After that we'll go shopping."
Fuck!
The look on mine, Bucky and Steve's face were pale as Yelena said that and Natasha agreed.
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