Dormammu's shriek sent a tingle down my spine, though I had none, and even my lips couldn't help contorting into a bloodthirsty grin.
I was now feeling it.
The immense power that melded everything together.
The Dark Dimension was nothing more than a couple of universes merged together which inadvertently took Dormammu's power to a ridiculous height. But now, he wasn't the only one with the access to that power.
Dormammu had a separate dimension that even allowed him to draw strength that rivaled even that of the stronger Celestials.
Sure I could just wait and let my abilities imprint itself into the fabric of the very multiverse and not bother with Dormammu but I had a reason. It was a clue.
The Dark Dimension was somewhere I felt a sense of familiarity with – not one that suggested I knew it at one point in time but one that straight up told me that origins of my power was somehow linked to it.
The fire that blazed around Dormammu's form was more than enough to thoroughly melt galaxies into nothing more than cosmic slag. It made me wonder why he didn't just go all out when we first fought but had to limit himself to the point that he was sealed.
The dark suns around his form flew towards me in a restrictive formation only for them to be sucked into a continuity and have their essence been sucked out and used to nourish me further but to be honest, it was like a drop in a universal ocean.
Dormammu snarled, which actually surprised me because there was no way he thought that was going to do anything now, or did he? Regardless of what he thought, it didn't matter as space folded in a way that overlapped both past and present, statically holding him in one place for a brief moment, but a brief moment was like eternity to me.
I was more conceptual in nature than Dormammu could ever be.
Simply put, as long as things like strength, space, time, souls, will, determination, even energy, exists, I was simply unkillable. The only way to completely get rid of me would be to erase existence itself and the universes that I was connected to. Not destroy, but complete erasure, both past, present and future. That was where the difference between me and Dormammu started piling up.
He had transcended time, limited time, but he hadn't transcended reality. He could destroy and remold reality within his domain but he had yet to transcend it seeing as he wasn't the Dark Dimension but instead drew his power from it. It was the same reason why something like the Time Stone could work on him. With that reasoning, I could also be said to be acasual, at least within a few given universes.
And right now, reality was being molded to my whims.
The Dark Dimension was slowly being remade in a way that completely erased all of Dormammu's influence, both past and present.
Dormammu had felt what I was doing which was why he started pulling all stops and just tried incinerating me to kingdom come.
Since I dictated how far something was, it was very hard for attacks to reach me and since I dictated the reality of this domain and the once I carried with me, most attacks become meaningless, obsolete in existence.
This feeling of omnipotence was something I'd gradually grown quite accustomed to ever since my apotheosis. It was something that made me realize that there was actually no top of the mountain.
The reason why a few set of beings were considered boundless was due to the fact that nothing in existence was able to comprehend them. I could be considered boundless by every native of my universe because I was everything and everywhere, every time, within the universe. It was not a simple matter of past, present and future anymore. I was above even such terms but the problem was that all these were within a particular number of steadily increasing universes.
It was not to say I wasn't strong outside of the universe I've assimilated but just that I was pretty much undefeatable within them since I could know what is and what couldn't be. Not even Infinity, not the multiversal constant, had nearly the control I had even if she came inside my universe. That didn't make me stronger than her though.
"Why! Why!! Why!!!!!" Dormammu thrashed around in indignation and unwillingness to believe his current situation. Though his flames bellowed in magnificent prowess and lethality, it was naught as it couldn't do any type of significant damage to me.
I appeared on his side during one of his endless shouts and before he could react, the backhand of my fist encouraged his face and sent him breaking through the multidimensional barrier that was all over the Dark Dimension. I was very careful in my strength so as not to mistakenly send him outside and tumbling towards any near universe.
Before he couldn't even begin to wonder what was going on, I caught his dark flaming skull of a head and started laying the blows on it. Each blow resonated with the entire dimension, sending shockwaves that cracked planets and snuffed out dark stars.
He retaliated with an underhand swipe which I could literally see coming from a mile away. I grabbed his outstretched hand and elbowed him in the face before slamming him through a black hole that was progressingly forming and getting destroyed throughout the duration of our fight.
The most darkest shade of red I've ever witnessed covered at the tips of my fingers and slammed into Dormammu as he writhed inside the black hole with no time lag or spatial movement between it forming and hitting its target.
It tore through everything, including space, and wrecked absolute destruction on Dormammu if his wail was anything to be given credence to.
"Will you tell me what I need to know now? Or do you still want to continue this meaningless fight?"
He was wheezing and even his darkness was cracked in so many places that it didn't even make sense. I stepped on the heaving chest of the beaten Dark Lord as red covered both our visions.
"Do your worst…boy."
BOOOM!
Everything collapsed and destruction of an untold magnitude wrecked through Dormammu's body and left the already battered Hell Lord at the doorsteps of Lady Death's domain, though I'm sure he could ever go there.
There was nothing Dormammu could do and he knew it. With the number of universes I held that was steadily increasing every day, also coupled with my influence on what was once his domain, his loss was an inevitability.
During our fight, different types of hell denizens had tried rushing to our direction, only to be vaporized before they even got close.
Dark chains wrapped around my hand but instead of it pulling me and sending me flying towards its caster, I let it wrap firmly around my hands before giving it a great pull that made it feel like I was dragging multiple galaxies around. Both my hands shone in blue and purple glow, representing the Space and Power Stone respectively. Space cracked in one of my hands why my other thrummed with unbridled power.
Both my hands met the two sides of Dormammu's face and it distorted only for it to reform in the palm of my hands. He stilled in my hands as a phantom hand from my stomach phased into his body.
His eyes widened in realization of what I wanted to do and he started squirming while releasing bursts of power in hopes that I would let him go but I just tanked everything.
What I was doing was quite risky in the fact that I was not just grabbing Dormammu but all the Dormammu's that existed in this time-space. Every trace of him from when he first arrived in the Dark Dimension to when he conquered it, and to the present, every single one was caught by me.
With a soul shattering force, I condensed his existence, despite his heavy resistance, to a singular point, which was the present, and started absorbing it. His reality couldn't overshadow mine and nothing he had could topple my existence.
The first thing I did as I held Dormammu in my hands was trace back the Dark Dimension and every memory of it back to the beginning. It was the same thing as what happened during my apotheosis.
From what I could discern, the Dark Dimension was nothing more than a little osmosis experiment as the multiverse was being created. Darkness prevails all, except the light.
The Dark Dimension was the little darkness, or at least an impression of it, that was made to remain in this multiverse. It was part and parcel of a greater whole that was the Overvoid.
That was why it was the bane of everything living - Hell.
Dormammu continued shrinking, his form becoming nothing more than a husk of what he once was as I stripped away everything his evolution gave him and ate it whole.
For all he did, he never once tapped upon the source of the Darkness, or maybe he had a reason not to – fear? His reason for why he didn't mattered not because that was everything I wanted.
The advent of the Elder Gods and some of the Cosmic beings in this multiverse was the reason why some of these demons and Dark Gods came into existence.
Beings like Mephisto and Dormammu, came into existence due to the deaths of Cosmic beings and even witnessed the war of the Elder Gods, but some things still didn't make sense.
Take for instance, beings like Shuma-gorath and even Chthon. The former was a demon of unknown origins, well not so unknown now that I've seen them, and Chthon disappeared for a while before resurfacing and becoming the patron of Chaos and Madness.
What I'm trying to say was that most of the degeneracy the Elder Gods suffered and even Cosmic Beings like Nemesis had to have a cause. One thing that was very clear to anyone who had studied the Marvel Multiverse was that its beginning was never made clear. It was an endless loop of myriad beginnings and constant change.
But even with all this, there was a common denominator when every single godly and cosmic being lost their shits – Darkness. It was an edgy topic but there really was something behind the darkness.
My attention shifted back to Dormammu only for me to see what remained of him was nothing but a soul wisp that I crushed.
The moment I crushed his tiny soul and absorbed it, the Dark Dimension seemed to still for a moment before it all rushed towards me.
….
Before me was a deep swirl of darkness that seemed to suck in everything around it, even me.
This was the space between reality and everything that was not. The first time I had passed through here had been when I was still experimenting with the Space Stone and I didn't, or rather couldn't, stop here because it was too small to move through that it had automatically transported me into that place.
I touched the swirl and it sucked me into an all too familiar nightmarish place.
I could already feel the stares and the phantom eyes and hands moving all over my body. Coming to a decision, my material form dispersed and melded into the darkness soothingly.
The stares and hands all over my body disappeared and receded which made me sigh in relief. I transversed through the darkness that was almost material, more dark than anything I've ever seen.
"I see you finally made it here. Oh how I'm going to enjoy this.~" The voice of the object of my most tangible fear whispered into my ears that involuntarily drove a chill down a spine that I didn't have. "I wonder what brings you here. Knowledge? Power? A vow of favor? Or maybe to sell your existence into His service?"
I took in a deep breath despite the staggering amount of hostility I felt, one so thick and palpable that it threatened everything about me, and answered.
"Knowledge."
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