For the first time in his life, Soren was truly going to throw hands with an EX-Class Entity.
Dormammu, Lord of the Dark Dimension, Devourer of Worlds.
Standing alone in this forsaken realm, the Time Circle spinning in a green shimmer around him, holding him in a fragile bubble between the rivers of death.
"Ant… surrender to me."
Dormammu's vast voice echoed, not through sound, but through Soren's mind and bones, an ancient, primordial authority that made reality itself tremble.
"Serve me. Bring me more worlds to devour, and I will grant you dominion over time itself… and more."
The promise was intoxicating…
This… was the first time he had stood against a being of this caliber.
And yet, he stared down Dormammu's offer like it was trash.
"How many worlds have you devoured, Dormammu? How many lives have you consumed?"
"And your so-called immortality? It's nothing more than a curse, a fragment of yourself stretched thin across a rotting dimension. Do you think I don't see through it?"
"Your 'gift'? Filth. I'd rather die a man than live as one of your shadows."
The Dark Lord's eyes narrowed, their sapphire blaze flickering dangerously.
No one had dared speak to him so in eons.
"Then DIE!"
The sky above cracked open.
A rain of colossal, blue-flamed meteors, entire worlds he had devoured, reduced to burning projectiles, came screaming down, turning the sky into a hellish storm of death.
Soren's mind tightened around the Time Circle.
The meteors crashed, detonating with cosmic force, shaking the realm as their demonic flames engulfed his position.
BOOM.
BOOM.
BOOM.
A deafening series of explosions obliterated the landscape.
When the smoke cleared…
Soren still stood there. Unharmed.
Dormammu's giant expression faltered into disbelief.
"You call yourself 'beyond time'?" Soren brushed nonexistent dust from his shoulder, as if the god's attack was nothing but an inconvenience.
"And yet you cannot touch me."
A massive dark tentacle lashed out, piercing through Soren's body, or what should have been his body.
The tendril retracted… nothing happened.
"Now…" Soren raised his hand, and a blazing green Time Circle formed in his palm. From it, a strange gem emerged, radiating infinite power.
The Time Gem.
One of the Six Infinity Stones.
In the endless dark, it looked no more than a speck yet Dormammu's eyes immediately fixated on it.
His vast blue pupils dilated in primal hunger.
For the first time, Dormammu showed something other than arrogance.
"Human… give me the gem. Hand it over, and I will spare your world!"
Soren scoffed.
"Pathetic. I can feel your greed. The Infinite Stones were forged at the dawn of creation itself, six fundamental truths made manifest."
He raised the gem higher.
"TIME STASIS!"
At Soren's command, the Time Gem blazed with impossible power.
The Dark Dimension froze.
The void, the stars, the blue fires, even Dormammu's colossal face locked in place like a statue.
Everything stilled.
Even Dormammu, whose very nature was supposed to transcend time, was caught in it.
Soren exhaled, feeling the weight of using the Gem's full power. Without it, not even his strongest temporal magic could have frozen this monstrous dimension.
"Look at you now."
He let his gaze roam across Dormammu's endless body, the waves of suspended meteor fragments. A dangerous thought flickered through his mind.
"System." He whispered mentally. "Can I extract anything from him?"
[It can be extracted… but Dormammu is far beyond ordinary lifeforms. He's no longer a creature in any biological sense... there are no genes to speak of. What we can extract is something else entirely… a fragment of his infernal essence. A piece of the so-called 'devil soul.']
"Devil Soul, huh? I don't care what form it takes, I'll take it."
He withdrew his Genetic Modification Scalpel, an artifact capable of harvesting the essence of any being.
Without hesitation, he approached Dormammu's colossal form, now a frozen planet-sized wall of demonic flesh and shadowed essence.
"You devour worlds…"
Soren whispered as the scalpel's blade glinted in the green twilight.
"Now it's my turn to devour you."
He casually swiped the scalpel downward, the blade cutting through the very substance of the Dark Dimension like paper.
A faint, dark wisp of energy peeled away from the cut, a single tendril of black airflow, so thin it was like a strand of smoke, hundreds of times finer than a human hair.
If not for his perception, even Soren would've missed it.
The concentrated, primordial essence of Dormammu himself.
"So this is the Devil Soul…"
The power radiating from just that sliver was terrifying for its size, heavier than any dark magic he had ever encountered. He could feel the corruption in it, like an invasive hunger trying to sink into his soul.
There was no room for hesitation now.
He raised the scalpel again and again, slicing across the space across Dormammu's omnipresent body, each strike stripping away more of the dark mist, gathering it in a growing thread.
Little by little, the thread thickened, eventually reaching the width of a single hair. It took dozens of precision cuts, everyone draining his stamina, sapping his will.
By the time the thread was fully formed, Soren's breathing was ragged, sweat beading on his forehead despite the stillness of frozen time.
ROAR!
"YOU INSIGNIFICANT ANT, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME?!"
Soren staggered, eyes wide in alarm.
"What?!" He could hear Dormammu.
But time was frozen. He shouldn't be able to speak in this state.
꧁𓊈𒆜༺⚜༻𒆜𓊉꧂
Fellow Phantoms and aspiring Phantoms to be, if you seek to access advanced parts of this story procced to my shadowy realm of p@treon.
PhantomDream