Chapter 21: Eve of the Storm
S.H.I.E.L.D. Triskelion Headquarters. The third basement level.
Nick Fury pushed open the door to the D-7 monitoring room. The two duty analysts following him in the corridor stopped automatically.
It wasn't that the doorframe was narrow—it was because Fury turned and swept a glance at them.
One eye. It was enough.
The door closed.
In the monitoring room, all twenty-six screens returned to their normal state. System self-check complete. Data intact. Logs clean. As if nothing had happened.
But the temperature in the entire room was two degrees lower than in the corridor.
There was a lingering scent in the air. Not ozone. Not the burnt smell of overloaded circuit boards. It was closer to... a forest after the rain. A scent that absolutely should not exist in a sealed space on the third basement level.
Daisy Johnson sat in the swivel chair. Her back was straight. Her fingers were on the keyboard. The sweat from her fingertips made the spacebar reflect light.
She shouldn't have been here. Three months ago, she was still in an insurgent organization's safehouse throwing vulnerabilities at the S.H.I.E.L.D. firewall. But two weeks ago, Fury had personally signed a special recruitment order—"External Technical Consultant," temporary security clearance, bypassing Coulson's standard recruitment process.
Fury needed someone who could understand unconventional signals. S.H.I.E.L.D.'s own technical department was too rigid.
Fury stood behind her.
"Skye."
Daisy didn't correct the codename.
"Tell me," Fury's voice was devoid of inflection, "is this a new trick from Tony Stark?"
It wasn't a question. It sounded like a statement. But Daisycould tell—this man, who controlled the World's largest intelligence network, needed an answer. Any answer. As long as it was something he could categorize.
"No."
"Chitauri residual technology?"
"No."
"Asgard's?"
Daisy turned the chair. Her face looked pale in the blue light of the twenty-six screens.
"Officer, those codes aren't 0s and 1s."
She pulled up the spectral analysis window. The result returned by the instrument was a row of question marks and a flat, blank spectrum line.
"Stark's AI is based on binary. The Chitauri communication protocol uses a hexadecimal variant. Asgard's Bifrost Bridge energy can be mapped to ternary after analysis. Everything is documented."
She paused. Not to organize her words, but to ensure what she was about to say was accurate enough.
"But this thing—they were breathing inside the server. It's not code. It's not a program. It's alive. It survived in our hardware for 4.7 seconds, didn't read any data, didn't leave a backdoor, didn't touch a single byte. It came in, wrote a sentence, and left."
Fury tightened his jaw at an angle Daisy couldn't see.
"What sentence?"
Daisy dragged the screenshot to the main screen.
"Stop peeping, little hacker."
Times New Roman. Centered. Proper capitalization. Perfect punctuation.
Fury looked for three seconds.
"It even chose a font."
"Yes."
Silence. Six seconds.
Fury turned around. The hem of his trench coat brushed against the back of the chair.
"From now on, Level 10 clearance. Participants are you, me, and Coulson. Move all monitoring records into the Black Box. External cover story—D-7 conducted a routine electromagnetic pulse compatibility test tonight, equipment overloaded, now repaired."
"Officer—"
"Do not provoke him."
The four words blocked all of Daisy's follow-up questions.
Fury's hand gripped the doorknob.
"Outside of the Avengers initiative, a variable I didn't anticipate has appeared. Before I figure out whether he is human or god, all contact is prohibited."
Door open. Door closed. The footsteps faded away.
Daisy sat alone for fifteen seconds.
Then she opened a private encrypted folder. Three layers of nesting, 2048-bit key. Even the Director's clearance of Fury couldn't unlock it—it was an encryption protocol she wrote herself, with no administrator backdoor.
She dragged the screenshot inside.
It wasn't that English sentence. It was a face extracted from the last frame sent back by the drone before it lost connection.
Low resolution. Poor lighting. But the eyes were very clear.
Blue light flowed in the depths of the pupils.
Daisy stared at those eyes for four seconds. Then she renamed the folder.
"Blue Eyes".
Save. Close. Lock.
She leaned back into the chair. The fluorescent tubes overhead emitted a steady hum.
She was thinking about something.
The moment that blue energy surged from the drone lens into the S.H.I.E.L.D. server, the gap between the index and middle fingers of her right hand felt itchy. Very brief. So brief that she wasn't sure if it was an illusion.
But she was a hacker. Hackers don't believe in illusions.
She clenched her fingers. The sensation was already gone.
"...What the hell."
Queens. 3:22 AM.
Arthur walked on an empty street. His right hand gripped a staff. The temperature on his left wrist was maintained at around fifty degrees—the Arcane Mark was hot, but it wasn't continuing to rise.
As he walked, he did one last round of mental arithmetic.
Mana pool: Current capacity is thirty-eight percent larger than an hour ago. Passive regeneration rate increased accordingly. Based on the current recovery curve, it would be full in another twelve minutes.
Attribute points: 20 unassigned. Now is not a good time to add points—there is a local big shot of unknown depth ahead, and before figuring out their mechanism, rashly adding points is equivalent to wasting a reset opportunity.
This World has no talent reset runes. He had confirmed it.
He passed a convenience store. "24HRS" was posted on the glass door. He pushed the door open and bought a tuna sandwich that had been pressed at the bottom of the freezer for who knows how long for one dollar and seventy-five cents. The expiration date line was blocked by several rows of drinks above, but the smell couldn't fool his nose—the edges of the bread were hard, and the tuna was starting to turn.
Exit. Unwrap. Left hand opened.
[Cleanse].
The green light shone for less than a second. A palm-sized area of coverage.
The bread returned to softness. The edges of the lettuce retreated from brown back to fresh green. The texture of the tuna spread became firm again.
He took a bite.
"If the convenience store knew about this, 7-Eleven would have to send me a legal notice."
Chewed twice. Swallowed. Tasted good.
Put the sandwich in his pocket. He continued walking.
The golden perception net was a little over a kilometer away from him. The contraction speed was accelerating. The opponent had obviously discovered that scanning was ineffective against his Arcane Mark—so they increased the power, trying to narrow the encirclement, trading density for precision.
Arthur didn't intend to hide.
A level 20 Azeroth mage had been clicking the skill tree all night in this magic-barren dimension. The level's radiation signal was like blowing a suona in a soundproof room—it was hard not to be heard.
He continued walking towards Manhattan.
The structure of the perception net unfolded in his magical vision: not a linear scan, not a planar expansion. It was three-dimensional. Using spatial folding points as nodes, golden energy cable lines were stretched between the nodes. Each node carried a triple energy signature—a joint authorization from three different dimension lords.
Vishanti.
"A buff with three joint endorsements." Arthur didn't stop his pace. "The local gang in this version is really willing to invest resources."
The mark jumped again. The temperature didn't change, but the vibration frequency changed. Under the constant temperature of fifty degrees, the dark blue rune pattern was emitting a subtle resonance—not a passive reaction, but more like it was actively responding to something.
He stopped walking.
Ahead on the street. About two hundred meters away.
An extra line appeared in the air.
Golden. Emitting a warm orange light, suspended one and a half meters off the ground.
The line began to rotate.
Sparks sputtered along the arc. The golden circle formed within five seconds. Diameter of 1.8 meters. The internal space was cut, folded, spliced—a completely different technical route from Blink. That side is coordinate replacement, this side is spatial folding.
On the other side of the circle: wooden floor. Bookshelves. A pot of steaming tea.
A person walked out.
Female. No hair. Yellow robe. Black flat shoes.
Age couldn't be determined. Her face was calm. But there was something in those eyes that Arthur had seen before—seen on the archmages of Dalaran. A certain wear and tear on time itself after watching it for too many centuries.
Something hung in front of her chest.
A metallic eye.
eye of agamotto.
It was glowing. Green. Faint but continuous.
Sorcerer Ancient One stood on the streets of New York at 3:30 AM, separated by two hundred meters, looking at the young man under the hood opposite.
The green light flashed. Then dimmed. Then brightened again. As if repeatedly interfered with by something.
Ancient One withdrew her raised finger.
"You are not on the timeline."
The volume wasn't loud. But on the sleeping street, every word was as clear as if carved on glass.
"Vishanti cannot see your past. Agamotto cannot see your future. You are not on any branch I can observe."
Her head tilted slightly by two degrees.
"Where did you come from?"
Two hundred meters away. The flashing red light of the traffic signal hit the brim of Arthur's hood. The end of his staff tapped the ground. The mark glowed with white light.
He took the sandwich out of his pocket and took a second bite. Chewed slowly. Swallowed.
"That's a long story, not convenient to chat standing in the middle of the road."
He glanced at the portal behind Ancient One. On the other side of the door, the spout of the teapot was still emitting white steam.
"That pot of tea of yours, the temperature should be just right."
Chapter 22: Not Even as Good as the Dalaran Sewers
The experience of passing through the portal was smoother than Blink.
No coordinate erasure, no space rewriting. It was more like walking through a door that happened to connect to another room thirteen kilometers away.
The landing point: wooden floor. Warm lighting. Bookshelves against the wall stacked from floor to ceiling. A low table in the center, the white steam from the teapot hadn't dissipated yet.
New York Sanctum. Interior.
The portal closed behind him. The golden sparks dissipated at the speed of cheap fireworks. Sorcerer Ancient One walked past his side, her pace unhurried, heading straight for the tea table.
Arthur didn't follow.
He was looking at the wall.
"Magic Perception" maxed out the instant he entered the high-concentration magic space. This place was indeed saturated—though the way it was saturated made a mage who had received a formal education in Dalaran want to write a letter of complaint.
The barrier structure was divided into three layers. A triple-concentric shell, with each layer drawing energy from a different dimension sponsor. The Vishanti trinity signature was homologous to the scanning grid outside. The outer shell guarded against physical intrusion, the middle shell intercepted dimensional infiltration, and the inner shell anchored reality constants.
The concept was fine.
The construction quality—
Arthur tilted his head.
Seventeen major magic nodes were distributed across three floors. Four of them were squeezed into the northeast quadrant; the density imbalance caused an overall efficiency loss of at least twenty percent. The conduit lines between the nodes used a braided topology—it probably looked good on the blueprints, but every intersection was creating unnecessary energy resistance.
The most absurd part was the power supply scheme. All seventeen nodes were pulling energy in real-time from the dimension sponsors. No local storage. No buffer pool. Every joule of defensive energy was imported instantly.
"Three external dependencies, zero local cache," Arthur's voice dropped to a level only he could hear. "If one client cuts supply, the whole line collapses."
If a second-year apprentice in Dalaran submitted a barrier design relying purely on external power like this, their mentor would make them repeat the semester.
He took another step. The sole of his shoe pressed against a piece of flooring that was slightly warmer and harder to the touch—a hidden warning rune. The trigger threshold was set too low; a draft carrying a trace amount of ambient magic could cause a false alarm.
"The collection is on the second floor, if you're interested."
Ancient One's voice came from the direction of the tea table. She had already sat down and was pouring tea.
Arthur withdrew his gaze from the wall. "I'm not interested in your collection."
"Then what are you interested in?"
"Your barrier design," he walked toward the low table. "Who built it?"
"Agamotto. The first Sorcerer Supreme," she paused. "About five thousand years ago."
"That makes sense," Arthur sat down opposite her. "Five thousand years, and no one thought to add a local mana storage module? You've been running core defense for five thousand years using real-time interfaces from three dimensional entities."
Ancient One put down the teapot. Her expression didn't change, but her hand lingered on the handle for half a second longer.
"You can understand our barrier structure."
"I can understand engineering disasters."
He picked up the cup she had poured. Green tea. Water temperature around seventy-two degrees. Entry conditions met.
He took a sip.
Not bad. Better than a vending machine.
"Your dimension sponsors," he gently placed the cup back on the table, "Vishanti. Three entities provide energy, what are the terms of exchange? Faith? Service? Narrative loyalty?"
"Ancient pacts."
"Subscription-based," Arthur's tone was like reading a product manual. "All of you are leasing your power. Every spell, every barrier, every portal—the energy isn't yours. It's borrowed."
Ancient One's fingers tightened on the side of the cup by two millimeters.
"And yours?"
Arthur raised his right hand. Blue light gathered at his fingertips—dense, self-consistent, pure arcane energy without any external signature.
"Self-produced. Self-stored. Self-emitted," he clenched his fist. The light vanished. "No middlemen making a profit on the price difference."
The tea cooled by two degrees.
"That should be impossible," Ancient One finally spoke.
"In your system, yes," Arthur picked up the cup again. "Your framework assumes all magic energy must be obtained from the outside—dimensions, cosmic entities, artifacts. Self-produced energy doesn't exist in your paradigm because the people who established this paradigm never learned how to do it."
"This is not a question of learning. The laws of this dimension—"
"Are suggestions."
He said this in a way that sounded like he was correcting a factual error on Wikipedia.
Ancient One looked at him for a long time. The eye of agamotto on her chest flashed green twice. Both times it failed to stabilize and quickly went out.
"Time Stone still can't read me?" Arthur drank his tea. "Save some power."
"That is not electricity."
"Anything with finite capacity is called electricity."
Three pots of tea were finished. The conversation managed to stay in the temperature range of "not friendly but no one started fighting."
Ancient One asked many questions. Arthur answered some, deflected some, and feigned deafness to those involving his origins.
What he told her: He didn't come from any dimension she knew. magic was self-produced. He had no interest in Earth dimension politics. He would not join Kamar-Taj.
What he didn't tell her: The system panel, level values, skill tree, and the three Ancient God energy fragments heating up in his jacket pocket.
The temperature of the fragments had been climbing for the past fifteen minutes.
It wasn't body temperature. It was the dark energy locked inside the fragments being excited into a resonance reaction by the Sanctum's Vishanti ambient energy.
Forty-three degrees. Forty-six degrees. Forty-nine degrees.
The system panel popped up a notification at the edge of his vision.
"[Ancient God Energy Fragment x3: Absorbable. Hint: Current ambient dimension energy can amplify absorption effect. Estimated EXP gain: +40% environmental bonus.]"
"[Note: Fragment energy activity continues to rise. Upon reaching critical threshold, absorption protocol will be triggered automatically.]"
Forty percent bonus.
Arthur's fingers paused on the cup wall. His eyes didn't move, his peripheral vision scanned the panel data. The base value of the three fragments plus the environmental multiplier was enough to push at least—
His train of thought was interrupted.
Not by Ancient One.
It was interrupted by the floor.
The low-threshold warning rune he noticed when entering had been triggered. The source wasn't him—his arcane signature was too clean and wasn't on this system's blacklist. It was someone else.
Footsteps came from the stairs. Second floor. Not slow.
The tea room door was pushed open.
Green robes. Dark skin. The tip of the staff was burning with orange light.
Mordo.
The standard combat staff of the Kamar-Taj sequence. Arthur had seen this face in the intelligence files he had organized over the past two weeks.
Mordo's gaze crossed over Ancient One and landed on Arthur. His pupils constricted. The kinetic chain of the staff was already generating.
"Sorcerer Supreme," Mordo's voice was very low. "The outer array recorded—"
"A guest," Ancient One put down the teacup. "Karl."
Mordo didn't withdraw his staff. His gaze was pinned on Arthur. Magic Perception caught the change in the energy flow within his body—his autonomic nervous system response was pouring combat-grade Vishanti energy into all channels.
"The signal source that triggered the highest level of intrusion alert in two hundred years," Mordo's voice was pressed to the edge of trembling, "is sitting right in front of your tea table."
"Yes."
"Drinking tea."
"Also yes."
Arthur took another sip.
The temperature of the fragments in his pocket broke through fifty-five degrees.
The orange light at the tip of Mordo's staff surged.
The system panel made its choice in the same second.
"[Automatic absorption triggered. Environmental conditions optimal. Absorbing Ancient God energy fragments x3...]"
"[EXP gained: 4160 (Base 2971+40% environmental bonus).]"
"[Level up: Lv.20 → Lv.21.]"
"[Level up: Lv.21 → Lv.22.]"
"[Lv.22 Milestone — New skill unlocked: [Counterspell].]"
"[Skill description: Instant cast to interrupt the target's current spellcasting. Upon success, blocks the target's magic channels for 3 seconds. Cooldown: 24 seconds.]"
"[Passive upgrade: Mana pool capacity x2.]"
Golden light exploded from under Arthur's feet.
The teacup jumped. The floor cracked in three places. Every artifact in the second-floor display cabinet began to resonate simultaneously.
Mordo's reaction was at the level of a conditioned reflex. Trained. Completely correct according to Kamar-Taj dogma.
He threw Arthur into the Mirror Dimension.
The Sanctum shattered.
Floor tiles flipped upward. The ceiling folded ninety degrees to the left. The teapot fell in a direction that didn't exist three seconds ago.
Arthur's feet landed on an inverted New York street.
Ancient One was gone. The Sanctum was gone. The tea was gone.
He stood on the inside of an M.C. Escher print. Skyscrapers floated overhead like building blocks. Gravity was in effect in four directions simultaneously.
Thirty meters away, Mordo, his hands wrapped in orange geometric shapes, pointed his staff at him.
"Whatever you just did," Mordo's voice shattered in the folded air, "it ends here."
Arthur looked down at his hand. The golden light was fading. His mana pool had doubled, and the passive recovery rate was already beginning to fill the new capacity.
Automatic absorption. On someone else's turf. In front of the Master.
He let out a breath.
"Leveling up comes with a forced glowing effect, does the designer who made this system have a hole in their brain?"
On the panel, [Counterspell] lay quietly in the skill bar. Cooldown: Ready.
Mordo's first spell had already formed.
Chapter 23: Barbarian
The laws of physics in the Mirror Dimension can be summed up in one word: abstract.
The ground where Arthur had just landed had been the sidewalk of Seventh Avenue three seconds ago; now, it had stood up to become a wall. Half of the Empire State Building on the left was inverted above his head, and what leaked out from the windows was not light—it was the starry sky. The street on the right had curled itself into a Möbius strip, with a yellow taxi hovering on the inner wall of the loop, its tires still spinning.
He crouched down and touched the asphalt beneath his feet with his fingertips.
Solid. Tangible. Warm. But his Magic Perception told him another answer—these buildings, streets, and vehicles were all projections. A topological mapping of the real World. Matter exists but does not carry causality. If you tore down the Empire State Building here, the Empire State Building outside wouldn't even have a cracked window.
"Sandbox instance."
He stood up.
He understood the design concept. Dalaran's combat training grounds used a similar scheme—pulling both combatants into an isolated mirror layer to fight freely without affecting the main World. However, Dalaran's version had independent power supply and automatic repairs. The energy for this Mirror Dimension was still hooked up to an external interface of the Vishanti.
It was still rented.
Thirty meters away, Mordo's feet were planted on a vertical glass curtain wall. Gravity, for him, was clearly pointing in another direction. Orange light surged from the geometric patterns in his hands, drawing sharp, angular lines in the distorted space.
"The energy signature you just released," Mordo's voice was as heavy as if pressed by a stone, "does not belong to any dimension recorded by Kamar-Taj. It does not belong to Dormammu. It does not belong to Cyttorak. It does not belong to any known entity in the Universe."
The tip of his staff traced a semicircle in the air. The orange arc of light solidified—the Rings of Raggadorr. Standard Kamar-Taj defensive apparatus.
"So, either you come from a dimension we have never encountered—"
The shield formed. His second hand began to weave an attack sequence.
"—or you are an advance scout sent by that dimension itself."
Arthur shoved his hands into the pockets of his hoodie.
"Third option: Just passing by. Had a cup of tea. Then got thrown into this snowflake screensaver by you."
Mordo's pupils constricted a fraction. Not because of anger—but because he was scanning Arthur with Magic Perception, scanned him three times, and all three times returned the same result.
Blank. No dimension signature. No traces of entity contracts. No "loan" records of any kind.
In the cognitive framework of Kamar-Taj, this was equivalent to a person having no shadow. It wasn't hidden—it simply didn't exist to begin with.
This wasn't right.
Mordo's training told him: All beings who use magic must obtain energy from some source. This was an iron law. There were no exceptions.
If the person before him was an exception, then there was a problem with the rules themselves.
And Mordo did not accept that there was a problem with the rules.
"One last time—"
"Your staff's energy conduit efficiency is about sixty-five percent." Arthur interrupted him. His tone was like reading an instruction manual. "The remaining thirty-five percent is lost in the crystal structure of the staff body. A material issue. What do you use? Rosewood? Obsidian core?"
Mordo didn't answer.
He moved.
It was not a probe. It was tactical execution trained over decades—the staff swept across, orange light burst from the tip, and a three-meter-long magic whip lashed out from the radiance.
The body of the whip was entwined with binding incantations of the Vishanti. Striking a living being would not cut—it would directly tear the anchoring at the soul level.
The speed was fast. The tip of the whip cracked the sound barrier between the gaps of the deforming buildings.
Arthur stood still.
It wasn't that he didn't have time to move.
He was watching.
Watching the energy flow path on the whip. Watching the weave topology of the incantations. Watching Mordo's wrist angle, the direction of force from his shoulder joints, and the distribution of weight on his ankles.
In the two seconds of flight time, he had dismantled this whip from structure to power supply down to the last detail.
Conclusion: The power was not low. The tearing of soul-level anchoring was fatal for the vast majority of super-powered beings in this World.
But the power supply method was still external. The binding incantations on the whip were maintained by energy pulled in real-time from the Vishanti interface. If the interface were cut, the incantation would just be a glowing rope.
The Mana Shield did not need to be manually activated. With a sufficient mana pool, the trigger threshold for the Mana Shield was automatic—any offensive energy entering the thirty-centimeter range of his body would cause the shield to automatically deploy.
A blue light shone.
No gestures. No incantations. No dimension signature. Pure, self-produced arcane energy condensed on the surface of his body into a translucent spherical barrier.
The whip lashed out.
A dull thud. Like a fist hitting solid rubber.
Sparks splashed in a circle. Orange, mixed with blue.
The binding incantations on the whip lost their structural stability the moment they touched the Mana Shield. The Vishanti's energy signature was interfered with by the arcane frequency on the surface of the shield—not opposition, but frequency incompatibility. Two completely different magic languages were trying to execute on the same contact surface, and the result was mutual garbling.
The incantations shattered.
The whip broke.
The web of Mordo's right hand split open. Blood seeped out from between his fingers. The recoil traveled up along the staff, numbing his radius. He took three steps back. On the third step, he stepped into empty air—the ground beneath his feet flipped itself over in the Mirror Dimension.
He knelt on one knee to steady himself. He looked up.
There was not a trace on the blue Mana Shield. Not even a ripple.
The young man in the hoodie stood where he was. His hands were still in his pockets.
"In your Kamar-Taj training syllabus," Arthur tilted his head, "who designed the 'melee mage' school? The power is sufficient, but your energy interface bandwidth can't handle close-range feedback."
Mordo gritted his teeth.
He was not a fool. After one strike, he already knew—physical attacks were ineffective against this Mana Shield. That layer of blue stuff was not "resisting" the attack. It was "ignoring" it.
The energy levels were not on the same scale.
But he did not retreat.
He whispered the activation word. He stuck the staff into the ground. His hands left the staff and began to weave geometric patterns at an extremely high speed—not offensive. It was containment-type.
The folded buildings in the Mirror Dimension began to move at an accelerated pace. Fragments of the Empire State Building rotated and closed in on Arthur. The streets curled up like paper. Taxis, streetlights, fire hydrants—all mirror matter was driven by Mordo's magic, pressing toward Arthur's coordinates from six directions simultaneously.
Not smashing. Folding.
Folding the very space where Arthur was, compressing everything inside into a single point.
A high-level Kamar-Taj sealing spell. The original design intent was to imprison dimensional invaders.
Arthur looked up.
The six sides of closing-in building fragments blocked the sky of the Mirror Dimension above his head.
The system panel quietly displayed a line of text in his field of vision.
[Counterspell]—Ready.
"Finally using magic."
His right hand pulled out from his pocket.
"My turn."
Chapter 24: Where Are You Looking?
Mordo's spellcasting speed was twice as fast as before.
Arthur noticed the reason. It wasn't anger. Angry people cast spells with larger gestures, trading precision for power, wanting to smash every magic circle right into their opponent's face. Mordo was not doing that. Instead, the range of his gestures was shrinking, his wind-up was being compressed, and every incantation opening was seizing that fraction of a second in timing.
Arthur's accuracy in identifying fear was high. It was mainly because he had cleared too many dungeons. Bosses always had similar behavioral patterns before entering a berserk phase—they weren't getting stronger; they were panicking.
What Mordo was panicking about wasn't death. He was panicking about logic.
A person without a dimensional signature. A person who didn't connect to any known energy network. A person who shattered the orthodox magic of Kamar-Taj using a "non-existent magic system."
For a practitioner like Mordo, who treated "laws" as his backbone, having rules broken was far more painful than having his body broken.
Geometric shapes erupted from between Mordo's fingers. They were no longer offensive. They were restrictive. Orange light spread out into a web within the Mirror Dimension, the nodes of the web anchored to the structural inflection points of the folded buildings. Every node was secured with a triple lock—a coordinate lock, a dimensional lock, and a time lock.
The entire Mirror Dimension began to move. Everything.
To Arthur's right, half of the Chrysler Building rotated ninety degrees, spire pointing downward, and smashed straight down. Hundreds of tons of Mirror Dimensionmatter cut into the preset trajectory without resistance, pushed by the spatial folding. To the left, three sections of an elevated highway twisted into a pretzel; reinforced concrete was kneaded and deformed within the force field, leaving jagged breaks. Overhead, an entire block flipped over, with fire hydrants, streetlights, and mailboxes all hanging upside down as they pressed down.
The ground beneath his feet began to shrink.
The patch of asphalt he was standing on was being squeezed toward the center by the six surrounding building masses. The standing area shrank at a speed visible to the naked eye. Basketball court size. Bedroom size. Tabletop size.
Three walls. Closing in.
The closing speed was uneven. The Chrysler Building on the right was the fastest, while the elevated highway section on the left was slightly slower—there was a discrepancy in Mordo's mana distribution. The output power of magic circles led by his right hand was naturally higher than his left. This detail was usually insignificant in actual combat. But Arthur noted it down.
It was a habit. He noted everyone's weaknesses. He might not use them, but once noted, he wouldn't forget.
Mordo retreated outside the folded area. His hands didn't stop. The energy of the Vishanti was continuously poured through his staff, maintaining the operation of this six-sided containment. Sweat trickled down from his temples; it wasn't from the heat, but because the output power was approaching his limit.
"This is the standard procedure of Kamar-Taj for detaining dimensional invaders." Mordo's voice came in through the gaps in the buildings; his Adam's apple bobbed once before he finished the sentence. "Once the spatial folding is complete, you will be compressed into a singularity that contains no time. You won't die. But you won't exist either."
Arthur stood in the very center.
He didn't look at Mordo. He was looking at the fragments of the buildings closing in.
Magic Perception was operating at full power. The Mirror Dimension in his vision was peeled into a transparent engineering blueprint—structural layer, energy layer, information layer, displayed in three superimposed layers. Every closing building mass was engraved with dense, orange locking runes. The spatial coordinates were nailed shut.
Every point inside the hexahedron was marked by Mordo's magic. The marking method wasn't exactly elegant: it simply welded all spatial coordinates within the area onto the folded structure. When the building moved, the coordinates moved with it. If you were at point A, and point A moved with the wall, you moved with the wall.
Theoretically—even if your movement speed was as fast as light, as long as you were still displacing within three-dimensional space, you couldn't get out. Because the coordinate you wanted to go to was no longer in its original position. No matter how fast you ran, you were still running on a piece of paper that had been crumpled into a ball.
Interesting.
"Spatial coordinate locking combined with physical encirclement." Arthur spoke. His tone was much like someone critiquing an assignment. "The logic is sound. The energy utilization rate…"
He tilted his head, visually estimating the closing speed of the six sides. He then glanced at the output end of Mordo's staff—the pulse frequency of the orange light was about seventeen times per second, and the power fluctuation was within plus or minus three percent. Stable. But not high.
"Not even fifteen percent. You wasted seventy percent of the energy on maintaining the stability of the Mirror Dimension itself. The rest is what's actually used for folding."
He paused.
"I don't blame you. The Mirror Dimension itself is a resource-consuming monster. When you fight a Boss in someone else's dungeon, the maintenance cost of the arena alone eats up most of your mana."
The gaps were narrowing. The usable space was less than three square meters.
The spire of the Chrysler Building was two meters above his head. The fire hydrant was one meter behind his back. The cross-section of the elevated highway was less than half a meter from his chest. The orange runes on the walls were so dense they almost formed a solid sheet, the light illuminating his entire face in orange.
Mordo's voice came from outside. Tense. "If you have anything else to say, I suggest you be quick."
Arthur looked down at his panel.
Blink. Ready. Cooldown: zero seconds.
He looked up. The gap was only one meter left. The exposed steel bars on the cross-section of the elevated highway were less than twenty centimeters from his nose.
"To address a technical issue."
He pulled his right hand out of his pocket. The movement was very slow. Unhurried.
"Your coordinate locking covers all three-dimensional coordinates in this space. It's very thorough. Every Planck length has been marked. If I were to use any form of spatial jump—folding, traversing, teleporting—your runes would follow."
The last half meter.
The shadow of the building covered his face. Only the blue light in his eyes remained bright.
"But Blink does not use coordinates."
The blue light flared.
It wasn't flickering. It wasn't moving. There was no displacement from point A to point B. It didn't pass through any point in between.
It was an operation at the conceptual level—erasing the information "Arthur exists here." Writing the information "Arthur exists there." There was no transitional state between the two steps of the operation. There was no intermediate state of "Arthur is not anywhere." The information was directly overwritten.
No trajectory. No process. No "movement" itself.
The molecules in the space wouldn't cause airflow disturbances due to his disappearance. Because to this space, he didn't "leave." He "never arrived."
The six building masses slammed together.
The sound was deafening. The crisp snapping of steel bars and the muffled crushing of concrete overlapped, echoing back and forth in the Mirror Dimension several times. Glass shattered into particles invisible to the naked eye. The spatial locking runes, into which Mordo had poured all his mana, lost their anchors the moment the target disappeared, peeling off the surface of the building wreckage and shattering in all directions.
Fragments of orange light scattered across the sky. They landed on the ruins like a layer of fluorescent powder.
Mordo stared at that mass.
No blood. No screams. No energy feedback of any living being being crushed. The sensing crystal at the end of the staff dimmed—target lost.
His first reaction wasn't "he's dead."
Because it was impossible for this person to be crushed to death by something of this magnitude. He had already tested the strength of that shield earlier.
Then he had run away.
But how did he run?
Spatial jump? Impossible. His locking runes covered every coordinate within the area. Any form of spatial displacement would leave traces on the runes—entry coordinates, exit coordinates, the path passed through in between.
The runes hadn't captured anything.
Nothing at all.
It wasn't that "the traces had been erased." It was that "no traces had ever been generated."
He hadn't passed through the encirclement.
This conclusion was too absurd. Mordo's brain refused to accept it for two seconds. Then reality forced him to swallow it.
The opponent hadn't "passed through" any space at all.
Then where was he—
"Where are you looking?"
The voice sounded from directly behind Mordo. The distance was unnaturally close. Close enough that the airflow from speaking could stir the stray hairs on the back of his neck.
Mordo's spine, from the coccyx to the cervical vertebrae, locked up in sequence. It wasn't a combat reaction. It was a prey reaction. His body completed the judgment before his brain—turn around. Staff held horizontally across his chest. An orange shield automatically deployed. The deployment speed was 0.3 seconds faster than normal. Thanks to adrenaline.
Then he saw him.
Arthur was standing in mid-air. There was nothing under his boots. His posture was casual. His left hand was in his pocket. The hood of his hoodie had been blown back by the airflow of the Mirror Dimension, revealing an expressionless face.
His right index and middle fingers were pressed together, and a fireball the size of a fist hovered at his fingertips.
It was at the position of Mordo's occiput.
To be precise—less than three centimeters from his occipital bone.
The heatwave was already roasting the skin on the back of his neck. The speed at which sweat beads emerged from his hairline couldn't keep up with the rate of evaporation.
"Your spatial folding locked all three-dimensional coordinates." Arthur said. His voice was flat. No fluctuations. "The logic is correct. The execution is also on point. The teaching standard of Kamar-Taj is at least above the passing line."
He thought for a moment. He added.
"Maybe a bit above the passing line. You are stronger than most mages I have seen."
Whether this sentence counted as a compliment in the current context, Mordo no longer had the energy to discern.
The temperature of the fireball was rising. In leaps. One thousand degrees. One thousand five hundred. Two thousand. The color of the fireball changed from orange-red to bright yellow, then transitioned toward white. The sweat on Mordo's forehead was gone. It hadn't stopped. It had evaporated before it could even be secreted.
"But your knowledge system has a blind spot."
The fireball moved half a centimeter closer. Mordo could feel the hair on the back of his head curling. A burnt smell.
"You believe that all displacement must pass through space. From A to B, there must be a path in between. Even if you fold space to make A and B coincide, essentially, you are still manipulating space itself."
The fireball hovered.
"What do you call displacement that doesn't pass through space?"
Mordo didn't answer. His lips were moving. Not to speak. His muscles were trembling uncontrollably.
The feeling of having one's cognitive framework shattered was not pleasant. It was far more uncomfortable than taking a punch. A fist shattered bones, which could grow back.
Arthur lowered his hand. The fireball didn't dissipate. It hovered at his fingertips. The orange-red light reflected in Mordo's pupils.
"It's called a bug."
Mordo's back was completely soaked. The lining of his robes clung to his skin, ice-cold.
He looked at the young man in front of him. A face in his early twenties. Wearing a hoodie. Standing in the air. Holding a fireball in his hand that could burn right through his head.
Saying the word "bug."
Mordo didn't understand this word. But from the context, he judged its general meaning—a loophole. A loophole in the rules.
The rules had loopholes.
This realization pierced something. Mordo couldn't explain it himself. But a string inside his body that had been taut for many years gave out a discordant sound at this second.
He made a decision.
He clasped his hands together behind the staff. The movement was small. The range was obscured by the shaft of the staff. Orange light seeped out from his palms—it wasn't an attack configuration. It was a self-destruct configuration.
The self-destruct sequence of the Shield of the Seraphim.
The design principle was simple: release all the stored energy of the shield in one second in a disordered manner. Undirected. Uncontrollable. All matter within the radiation radius—including the caster himself—would evaporate together.
In the records of Kamar-Taj, this sequence had only been truly activated twice. There were no survivors either time. The caster and the target were both erased from the material level.
Mutual destruction.
This wasn't courage. This was the instinctive reaction of a believer after discovering a crack in their faith—if the rules had a bug, then delete the person who discovered the bug along with the bug itself.
Mordo's fingertips began to burn.
Chapter 25: A Three-Second Cast Time? Are You Serious?
The temperature at Mordo's fingertips was wrong.
Arthur noticed it. It wasn't because he was deliberately observing Mordo's hands—the Fireball was still hovering at his own fingertips; he had originally intended to retract the two-thousand-degree object.
But [Magic Perception] caught an anomaly.
The flow of energy in Mordo's palms was reversed.
In normal spellcasting, energy travels outward from the core, through the meridians, to the fingertips, and is released. It's a one-way flow. Just like Water flowing from a high place to a low place.
Now, the energy in Mordo's palms was moving backward. From fingertips to palms, from palms to chest, from chest to—the Mana Shield core.
All the energy was gathering toward a single point. Not to be released, but to collapse.
Arthur had seen this pattern before.
Tomb of Sargeras, Phase 3, the Demon Warlock boss's self-destruct mechanism. A three-second charge, full-screen AOE, hitting friend and foe alike. The guide was written clearly: see the cast bar, run; if you can't run, it's a wipe.
Mordo was self-destructing.
The passive warning of the Mana Shield went off at the same second. It wasn't triggered by an external attack. It was triggered by the rapid escalation of ambient energy density.
The entire Mirror Dimension was heating up.
Mordo's staff was thrust into the ground, its markings glowing brightly. He clasped his hands behind the staff, fingers intertwined, palms pressed together. Orange light seeped out from between his fingers, the color visibly deepening—orange, crimson, White.
He was squeezing. He drained every drop of reserve from the magic channels within his body, pouring it into the core sequence of the Shield of Seraphim.
The folded architectural debris in the Mirror Dimensionbegan to tremble. Shattered glass bounced off the surface of the ruins, hovering in mid-air. It wasn't being held up by some force. The space itself was expanding—Mordo was using the shield's energy storage module as a bomb.
Disordered release. Undirected. Uncontrollable.
Arthur lowered his hand. The Fireball dissipated.
He was calculating.
He had just roughly estimated Mordo's total mana. Based on the power bandwidth of the Vishanti and Mordo's own channel capacity, the radiation radius of a disordered release at full charge would be roughly—thirty to forty meters.
He was currently twelve meters away from Mordo.
He could Blink away. The cooldown was ready. A single Blink would pull him to a safe distance, and he could come back to collect the corpse after the explosion. A standard positioning strategy.
But he didn't move.
Because he was watching Mordo's charging animation. Hands clasped. Fingers intertwined. Energy converging from his body into his palms. The convergence speed was steady. No interruption.
A cast bar.
A standard casting ultimate.
Between pressing the skill key and the actual release, there is a front-swing window that cannot be shortened. Energy needs to converge, compress, and cross the critical threshold before it can trigger the release.
How long was this window?
Arthur stared at the luminosity change curve in Mordo's palms, took six data points with [Magic Perception], and fitted an energy growth curve.
A quadratic function. The rate of increase was accelerating. The current value was approximately forty percent of the peak.
At this slope, it would take another—two and a half to three seconds to reach the critical threshold.
Arthur's gaze fell on the skill icon on his panel that had been unlocked for less than twenty minutes.
[Counterspell]. Cooldown: Ready.
Instant cast.
A three-second time window. An instant interruption.
This problem was too simple. So simple that he felt the person who set the problem was insulting him.
Mordo's energy curve continued to climb. Fifty percent. Sixty percent. The temperature in the Mirror Dimensionbegan to burn the skin. Heat deformation ripples appeared on the surface of the distant architectural debris.
Seventy percent.
Mordo opened his eyes. The color in his pupils was no longer what a human's should be—entirely white-hot. It had burned through the pigment layer of the iris.
"Rules shouldn't have loopholes."
Mordo's voice squeezed out from between his teeth. Every word carried a tremor. Not from fear. It was his whole body's muscles spasming involuntarily under the infusion of high-concentration energy.
Eighty percent.
"If they do, then along with the person who discovered it—"
Ninety percent.
Arthur moved.
His right index finger lifted. His middle finger pressed against it. No charging. No front-swing. No magic circle. No geometric shapes. No incantations.
A single syllable.
A cluster of consonants originating from deep in his throat, not belonging to any language in this Universe. The root word for "veto" in the Common language of Azeroth.
[Counterspell].
What was released was not energy.
An Arcane ripple shot out from his fingertips. Colorless. Invisible. Massless. Temperatureless. Its propagation speed did not obey the limit of the speed of light because it did not propagate in physical space.
It propagated in the information layer.
Target: The Seraphim self-destruct sequence currently running in Mordo's palms.
Pull the plug.
In Mordo's magic channel network, find that core node running at high speed, and then—shut it down. Not a normal shutdown. A hard power-off.
The ripple traveled from Arthur's fingertips to Mordo's palms in 0.02 seconds.
That world-destroying energy in Mordo's palms, which had accumulated to ninety-three percent, lost all its control commands in an indivisible unit of time.
There were no more release channels. No more direction vectors. No more trigger sequences.
But the energy was still there. Ninety-three percent of full-charge energy. It had already crossed the threshold for safe reclamation. It couldn't go back. It couldn't be released. The channels were severed.
Mordo's chest emitted a muffled sound. It didn't come from the outside. It came from within.
The resonant frequency of his ribs was triggered by the internal energy Impact. The bones struck a bell-like sound within his body.
Then came the blood.
From his mouth. From his nostrils. From the capillaries at the corners of his eyes.
A blood mist sprayed out from every pore on Mordo's body simultaneously. It wasn't bleeding from a wound. It was the magic channels burning through the accompanying vascular network while chaotically releasing the internal stored energy.
Mordo's body left the ground.
He didn't jump. He was lifted by the Impact. The Impact he himself generated. It spread outward from his chest. It blew him away.
The trajectory was a parabola. About twenty meters. He slammed into the outer wall of a folded apartment building. A human-shaped indentation appeared on the wall. Broken bricks fell everywhere.
Mordo slid down from the wall.
Face down. Lying in the pile of broken bricks. Most of his robes were burned away. Scorched marks on his back skin extended from his shoulder blades all the way to his waist.
He tried to push his body up. He pushed with his arms twice. The second time was weaker than the first.
The third time, he couldn't push.
It wasn't a matter of physical strength. It was a matter of magic.
[Counterspell]'s secondary effect—locking the target's magic channels for three seconds.
Three seconds. For a mage who relies entirely on external energy supply, three seconds is equivalent to pulling out the fuel tank, battery, and engine of a car running on a highway simultaneously.
Not deceleration. It's a stall.
Mordo's limbs fell into a weakness he had never experienced before. It wasn't caused by injury. It was caused by his magic being Zero. Every muscle, every magicchannel, every inch of tissue that had once been filled with the power gifted by the Vishanti, was returning to a state he had long forgotten.
Mortal.
Footsteps.
Unhurried. Step by step. The sound of boot soles stepping on broken bricks was crisp.
Arthur walked to Mordo and stopped.
He looked down.
Mordo's face was pressed against the ground. He could only look up with one eye. In his line of sight was a pair of dusty sneakers, and above the sneakers, that expressionless face.
"A three-second cast time." Arthur squatted down. His gaze leveled out. Level with Mordo's one remaining mobile eye. "Are you serious?"
Mordo's lips moved. He spat out a bubble of blood. No language formed.
"In front of a mage with an instant interrupt skill, any skill with a front-swing longer than 0.5 seconds is suicide." Arthur stood up and brushed the dust off his knees. "Difference in strength is one thing. If your version understanding can't keep up, the gap will only get bigger and bigger."
He turned around.
Prepared to leave.
The light in the Mirror Dimension changed.
It didn't get darker. It didn't get brighter. The color was changing. The shattered glass, broken bricks, and Mordo's bloodstains scattered on the ruins—all began to reverse.
Broken bricks jumped up from the ground and flew back to the wall. Cracks closed up. The blood mist retracted into Mordo's pores.
Glass shards reassembled in mid-air. The indentation in the apartment building was smoothed out by an invisible hand.
Time was flowing backward.
It wasn't an illusion. It was real.
The Arcane Mark on Arthur's wrist throbbed violently. Pain. A needle-pricking pain.
The last time he felt this intensity of warning was when the Old God fragment resonated while facing the Whisperer.
God-level energy.
He stopped in his tracks. He didn't turn around.
Because there was no need to turn around.
That person was already standing directly in front of him.
Yellow monastic robes. Shaved head. Bare feet. Hands folded in front. No magic artifact. No magic circle. No precursor to any magic release.
But the entire Mirror Dimension—along with time itself within the space—was listening to her.
Ancient One.
"The way you discipline your students," Ancient Onelooked at him, her voice sounding as if it were coming from every angle of the space simultaneously, "is a bit too heavy."
Chapter 26: Blind Spot
Ancient One did not cast any magic.
She didn't need to.
She stood there, and the entire Mirror Dimension fell silent. It wasn't a process of calming down—it was a direct leap from a state of chaos to a state of stillness. There was no gradual transition. The architectural debris that had been reversing and reassembling moments ago all froze, suspended halfway through their restoration, like a construction site time-lapse video that had hit the pause button.
Arthur's Magic Perception was overloading.
It wasn't because of an overwhelming amount of information. It was because all the background magic noise within his range of perception—Vishanti energy, the sustaining field of the Mirror Dimension, the residual mana fluctuations from Mordo—was being suppressed by a deeper frequency.
It was like listening to a song when someone suddenly turns the subwoofer to the maximum. The original music was still playing, but you could no longer hear it.
Ancient One was that subwoofer.
"You are not a follower of Dormammu."
Ancient One's voice had no echo. The reflective surfaces of all objects in the Mirror Dimension instinctively refused to reflect her sound waves. The sound originated from her lips and traveled point-to-point into Arthur's eardrums.
"Your energy is excessively clean. No dimensional residue. No physical imprint. No trace of any transaction."
She looked at Arthur.
The penetrating power of her gaze was not on a physical level. Arthur could feel his Mana Shield being "touched" by that gaze—it wasn't an aggressive scan. It was like fingertips lightly tapping a shell, listening for the echo to determine the internal structure.
Arthur put his hands back into his pockets.
"I've also never met a Master who throws guests into a trash compactor right off the bat."
He gestured with his chin toward Mordo on the ground. Mordo's injuries had stabilized after Ancient One arrived. The bleeding had stopped. His breathing had leveled out. But he was still lying on the broken bricks, face down, clearly not intending to stand up in front of the Sorcerer Supreme.
Or rather, he couldn't stand up.
The silence effect of the Counterspell had worn off. But the fact that his mana channels had been burned by the backlash of his self-detonation wouldn't automatically repair itself just because the effect ended. Mordo's current state was roughly equivalent to someone who had just finished a marathon and was told they had to run another one.
Ancient One didn't look at Mordo.
"Mordo's judgment had its reasons. An existence without a dimensional signature touched the Sanctum's barrier. In our experience, this usually means an invasion."
"Usually." Arthur repeated the word.
"So I came to verify."
Ancient One raised her right hand from in front of her. The movement was slow. It wasn't because she needed to charge up. It was because she was giving Arthur time to react. It was a form of courtesy.
It could also be a warning.
In front of her chest, a pendant embedded in a metal frame began to rotate.
eye of agamotto.
Arthur recognized it.
The "eyelids" of that pendant slowly opened. The Arcane Mark on Arthur's wrist stung.
It wasn't an alarm. It was resonance.
Green.
The light flowing out from that "eye" was green. It wasn't reflected light, nor was it the artificial green of an LED. This green carried its own temperature—to be precise, it carried the "temperature of time."
Looking at that light, you would get an uncontrollable feeling: you were simultaneously growing older and younger.
Time Stone.
One of the six Infinity Stones. The ultimate tool for manipulating time.
Arthur's pupils constricted.
It wasn't fear. It was an assessment.
Very fast. 0.4 seconds.
Conclusion: Cannot tank it head-on.
This wasn't something that could be dodged with a Blink. The Time Stone manipulated the concept of "time" itself. Even if you Blinked to the moon, it would follow you. Because your timeline was attached to you; wherever you went, it followed.
All the cooldown bars for his skills on the panel froze simultaneously.
It wasn't that the skills entered cooldown. It was that the cooldown countdown stopped moving. Because a countdown needed "time" to run. Time had been paused, so the countdown naturally stopped as well.
The panel was still there. The icons were still there. The numbers were still there. But those numbers were no longer ticking down.
Even the natural regeneration of mana had stopped.
A speck of dust floating on Arthur's body hung two centimeters in front of his eyebrow. Motionless.
Time in the entire Mirror Dimension had been frozen.
Only he and Ancient One could still move.
No. To be precise, only Ancient One was "allowing" him to move. The freezing range of the Time Stone included him. But Ancient One had deliberately opened a window on him.
It was like freezing an entire river, but leaving a hole in the ice for a fish.
"I need to take a look at your timeline," Ancient One said.
It wasn't a request. It was a notification.
"Your origins, your purpose, and—the potential impact you might have on this World."
Her expression held no hostility. No goodwill. It was the face of a night watchman checking a post.
Professionalism.
Arthur did not express an opinion on this proposal.
Because he didn't have the time to.
The green light had already arrived.
Ancient One's consciousness passed through the focal point of the eye of agamotto, turning into a green stream of information that cut directly into Arthur's timeline. This was not a physical attack. There was no trajectory. It could not be dodged, blocked, or countered.
Because you could not counter the fact that "someone is watching you."
She was looking at his past and future. Flipping from the first page to the last. You cannot stop someone from flipping through a book unless you burn the book.
Ancient One's consciousness traced back toward the past.
The first second. She saw Arthur meditating in an abandoned warehouse. Normal.
The second second. She saw Arthur killing a Whisperer in the sewer. Interesting.
The third second. She saw the moment Arthur traveled to the alley in Queens—
And then it was gone.
It wasn't blurry. It wasn't obscured. It wasn't hidden by some power.
It was that the "timeline itself" was gone.
In Ancient One's perspective, Arthur's timeline existed starting from the moment he appeared in the alley. Flipping backward—blank. Flipping further back—still blank.
This person had no past.
Ancient One frowned. Her first change in expression.
She turned to the future.
The direction of the future was harder to read than the past. Because the future was a probability cloud. It wasn't a single line, but the superposition of countless lines. When the Sorcerer Supreme read the future, she was reading the weight distribution of all possibilities. Whichever line was thickest, that future was most likely to happen.
She looked forward along Arthur's timeline.
One second into the future. Blurry, but there.
One day into the future. Even blurrier. She could barely see the outline.
One week later—
Ancient One's pupils constricted sharply.
What did she see?
Not Arthur's future.
It was a Planet.
The position in her field of vision that should have presented "future imagery" was filled by a Planet so massive it had no boundaries. That Planet was not a physical entity. It was a phantom. A projection. Some kind of residual image that spanned dimensions and time.
But its presence overwhelmed the timeline itself.
It was like observing a cell with a microscope when the lens suddenly slammed into the eyeball of a blue whale.
The scale was wrong.
Ancient One saw the core of that Planet.
There was something moving inside the core.
Not the kind of movement of "being alive." It was the movement of "existing." A fundamental pulse that preceded time and space. Causality itself was a derivative of it.
World Soul.
This word wasn't pulled from Ancient One's store of knowledge. It was that thing itself that directly hammered this concept into her consciousness.
Very brutal.
Like a neighbor who didn't have the habit of knocking.
Ancient One's consciousness was rebounded by that power.
Snap.
The eye of agamotto slammed shut. The hinges on the metal frame emitted a sharp metallic sound. The green light of the Time Stone went out. It wasn't a slow fading out. It was snuffed out.
Ancient One stepped back half a step.
Her left foot retreated. Toes touched the ground first, then the heel. Very steady. No stumbling. But she had retreated.
Mordo saw it.
Mordo, lying in the pile of broken bricks, witnessed this scene completely with his one remaining functional eye.
The Sorcerer Supreme. Earth's strongest Guardian. An immortal existence who had protected this dimension for hundreds of years.
Had taken a step back.
Ancient One's breathing changed. Not obviously. The rise and fall of her chest increased by about two millimeters. Her nostrils flared slightly. A drop of sweat slid from the edge of her bald head to behind her ear.
She looked at Arthur.
Her gaze was different.
That professional calmness was gone. Replaced by a mixture—apprehension, curiosity, and an extremely faint tension.
Time flowed again in the Mirror Dimension. The cooldown countdown on the panel ticked once and continued. The dust landed on Arthur's eyebrow.
Arthur reached out and flicked the dust away.
The feedback from the Arcane Mark told him—something had emerged from the depths of his soul to block it. As for what it had blocked, Ancient One's change in expression was the best explanation.
He didn't intend to ask.
Because some trump cards didn't need to be revealed by oneself. Letting the other party guess was more effective than laying them out on the table.
Ancient One spoke. Her voice had returned to stability. But her throat tightened by half a fraction.
"I cannot see your past."
She paused.
"And I cannot see your future either."
The sound of Mordo's sharp intake of breath came from the pile of broken bricks.
Sorcerer Supreme Gu Yi. Holder of the Time Stone. She had seen the fates of countless dimensional invaders. Foreseen every attack of Dormammu. Calculated her own time of death in advance.
Could not see.
Arthur nodded. His expression didn't change much.
"Then don't look."
He said.
Ancient One stared at him. She stared for three seconds.
Three seconds later, she asked a question that Mordo had not expected.
"That thing behind you—"
Her gaze fell on Arthur's right wrist. The location of the Arcane Mark.
"—is it still alive?"
Chapter 27: Not in the Script
Arthur did not answer.
It wasn't that he didn't want to.
It was that he himself wasn't sure of the answer to that question.
The Arcane Mark had been etched onto his wrist the moment he transmigrated.
It would issue warnings, resonate, and heat up when facing god-level energy.
But it had never spoken to him.
"Alive" is a word that requires definition.
To the will of a Planet, what does it mean to be alive?
Does it mean breathing? Having consciousness? Or does it count as alive as long as that power remains?
He didn't know.
So, he chose the most honest way to answer.
"You guess."
The Ancient One stared at him for two seconds.
Then, she did something that nearly caused Mordo to bite his tongue off.
She smiled.
It wasn't mockery, nor was it polite pleasantry.
It was the smile of someone who had lived for hundreds of years, revealed only after hearing a truth.
The curve of her lips was slight, and it lasted only a brief moment, but it was real enough.
"It has been a long time since anyone dared to say 'You guess' to me."
"That is their loss."
The Ancient One withdrew her gaze from Arthur's wrist.
She waved her left hand, a casual, effortless gesture.
The Mirror Dimension changed.
The building fragments suspended in the air stopped stagnating and accelerated back to their original positions.
Within ten seconds, the entire space returned to how it looked before Arthur had stepped inside.
Clean, tidy, without cracks.
No bloodstains, nor the human-shaped dent where Mordohad been plastered against the wall.
The invisible gravity that had blanketed the entire scene since the Ancient One appeared dissipated as well.
Breathing became easier.
The cooldown countdown on his panel resumed its normal rhythm.
Mana began to regenerate naturally.
Mordo climbed up from the pile of rubble—or, to be precise, he was lifted up by a gentle orange light.
The Ancient One's hand was not pointed at him, but the energy of the Vishanti automatically repaired his most severe lacerations.
The first thing Mordo did after steadying himself was look at the Ancient One.
"Sorcerer Supreme, he—"
The Ancient One raised her hand.
Palm facing Mordo, fingers closed together.
A wordless "shut up" gesture.
Mordo fell silent.
The Ancient One swept her left hand to the right, and the boundary of the Mirror Dimension was torn open.
It wasn't a portal, but rather like pulling back a corner of a curtain to reveal the street scene of the real World.
The streetlights, pedestrians, and taxis of Greenwich Village—the real night view of New York leaked in through the rift.
It carried the cold wind of November and the scent of a hot dog stand.
An exit.
She had opened it.
"I cannot see your past."
The Ancient One's voice returned to a steady tone, though it was half a degree lower than before, "And I cannot see your future. The Time Stone is ineffective against you—not because it is blocked, but because your timeline itself does not exist within the causal network of this Universe."
She paused for a beat.
"You are a variable, not in any predetermined destiny."
Arthur pulled his hoodie back up, the wind blowing the brim against his forehead.
"The word 'variable' isn't quite accurate," he said, "Variables are determined by equations. I am not in anyone's equation."
He thought for a moment.
"My destiny is determined by my Mana, not in anyone's script."
The Ancient One did not refute him.
She was weighing things.
Arthur could feel that this Sorcerer Supreme was using her hundreds of years of experience, the residual information fed back by the Time Stone, and the intuition honed from guarding Earth for centuries to make a judgment.
Enemy? Ally? Or... an uncontrollable neutral existence?
Three seconds later, the Ancient One gave her answer.
"As long as you do not align yourself with the darkness," she said, "the Sanctum will not be your enemy."
Pause.
"But I will be watching you."
Mordo understood.
His expression shifted from confusion to disbelief.
The Sorcerer Supreme was compromising? With someone of unknown origin...
The Ancient One did not look at Mordo, but that sharp intake of breath from Mordo was incredibly clear in the quiet Mirror Dimension.
Arthur nodded.
Then, he did something the Ancient One had not anticipated.
He bowed slightly, raised his right hand, palm facing down, and touched his fingertips to his left chest.
He stepped back with his left foot and tilted his torso forward fifteen degrees.
The movement was fluid, precise, and carried an ancient sense of rhythm.
The Ancient One had never seen this etiquette.
She had seen the Asgardian chest-thumping salute, the Kamar-Taj palm-joining salute, and the prostration of Dormammu's followers.
But she had never seen this.
The moment Arthur performed the salute, a thought flashed through his mind.
The Dalaran Mage salute.
In Azeroth, it was the formal greeting between members of the Council of Six of the Kirin Tor.
It was not used for superiors—too presumptuous.
It was not used for subordinates—too insulting.
It was only used for equals.
He was using a salute that did not belong to this Universeto tell the Ancient One: I consider you an equal.
The Ancient One watched this movement and was silent for a second.
Then, she also nodded slightly.
The range of motion was much smaller than Arthur's bow, but the meaning was the same.
Acknowledged. Equals.
Arthur straightened up.
"Sorcerer Supreme."
He spoke, his tone as flat as if he were discussing something that had nothing to do with him, "Guarding this riddled World must be exhausting."
It wasn't a question; it was a statement.
The Ancient One did not respond.
"Perhaps one day, you will need real magic to help."
The emphasis of this sentence was on the words "real magic."
The Ancient One's eyelid twitched.
The Arcane Mark on Arthur's right wrist lit up.
Blue.
Not the white of a warning, but the blue of active release.
Blink.
No wind-up, no gestures, no incantations.
Blue light spilled from him, lasting less than 0.2 seconds.
Then, he was gone.
On the streets of Greenwich Village outside the rift of the Mirror Dimension, a young man in a dark hoodie appeared on the sidewalk, his pace not interrupted in the slightest, as if he had been walking the whole time and had never left this street.
He vanished into the crowd in an instant.
In the Mirror Dimension, only the Ancient One and Mordoremained.
Mordo's robes were still scorched, and he was supporting his body with his staff.
His breathing had calmed, but his complexion was still ashen.
"Why... let him go?"
There was resentment in Mordo's voice, and a hint of something deeper.
The Ancient One looked in the direction where Arthur had vanished for a long time.
"Because if we went to war," her voice was so soft that Mordo had to hold his breath to hear it clearly, "even with the Time Stone, I have no certainty of winning."
Mordo's staff tapped against the ground.
His hand was shaking.
The Ancient One closed the Mirror Dimension.
When Arthur returned to the abandoned warehouse, it was 2:17 AM.
He took the bottled water he had bought at the convenience store from his pocket, twisted off the cap, and drank half the bottle.
Going head-to-head with the Sorcerer Supreme was more mentally draining than fighting three Whisperers.
He sat down in front of his workbench.
The panel hovered quietly in the bottom-left corner of his vision.
Level: Lv.22 Experience: 47,820 / 55,000 Mana: 2,100 / 2,100 (Regenerating).
No level up.
The confrontation with the Ancient One did not generate experience points.
Reasonable. She hadn't attacked him, after all.
Just as Arthur was about to open the panel to research the progression path of Counterspell, his peripheral vision caught something on the tabletop.
The computer was on.
His second-hand ThinkPad, which had been turned off when he left five minutes ago, was on.
There was only one window on the screen.
A command-line interface.
Green characters scrolled rapidly across the black background.
Tracking protocol. Reverse IP geolocation. Packet sniffing.
Someone was tracking him.
By following the residual energy fluctuations he had left at the entrance to the Mirror Dimension and cross-referencing them with the anomalous peak records of the city's power grid, they had triangulated the physical address of this warehouse.
A small window popped up in the bottom-right corner of the screen.
A line of text.
Standard monospaced font, no signature.
"Found you:)"
That smiley face symbol.
Arthur stared at it for three seconds.
He remembered that name.
Skye.
That hacker from S.H.I.E.L.D.
Using the traces of residual magic to reverse-engineer a physical IP—this line of thinking was more than a cut above that bunch of Agents from S.H.I.E.L.D. who only understood guns and bombs.
Arthur placed the water bottle on the table, the bottle making a soft clinking sound.
The corner of his mouth twitched.
The movement was even smaller than the smile the Ancient One had given earlier.
"Interesting."