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"Avada Kedavra, eating a melon!" "Avada Kedavra, eating a melon!" "Avada Kedavra, eating a melon!"
The sound wasn't a chant; it was a deafening, overlapping roar, like the buzzing of a billion angry hornets. Ten thousand voices spoke in perfect unison, creating a sonic resonance that vibrated the very fabric of the Dark Dimension.
Ten thousand Hermiones, filling every cubic inch of Strange's vision, raised their wands.
The tip of every wand ignited.
A tsunami of sickly green light erupted. It wasn't a beam; it was an ocean. The individual curses merged into a singular, catastrophic torrent of death magic that washed over the cosmic entity, drowning out the purple and black of his domain.
"NO—"
Dormammu's voice cracked. For the first time in his eternal existence, the Lord of the Dark Dimension felt his soul tremble. He felt a cold, sharp sensation that he hadn't felt since before he ascended to godhood.
Fear.
He only had time to let out one last, strangled wail. The green light hit his massive, nebula-dust face. There was no explosion, only a terrifying silence as his essence was forcibly unraveled. His features—the eyes of burning stars, the mouth of the void—disintegrated rapidly, bleached white by the Killing Curse before dissolving into nothingness.
The crushing pressure of the Dark Dimension vanished. The colors faded. Silence returned to the void.
Only countless Hermiones remained. They stood silently in the empty space, floating like an army of statues. Then, in a wave of motion starting from the furthest back, they simultaneously bowed their heads, spun the small hourglasses on their necks, and vanished one by one.
POP. POP. POP.
It sounded like bubblewrap being twisted. Within seconds, only one Hermione remained.
Stephen Strange floated in the void, staring blankly at the empty space where a god used to be. His mind was completely blank. The neural pathways responsible for processing "impossible things" had burned out.
He never imagined that Dormammu—a dimensional daemon so powerful that the Ancient One could only bargain with him—would perish like this. Eaten by a green light.
He died at the hands of a human girl.
Hermione felt the Dark Harvest activate in her grimoire. A massive, almost overwhelming surge of soul energy rushed into her, confirming that Dormammu was indeed finished.
"Phew..."
She let out a long, shuddering breath. A wave of relief washed over her, followed immediately by a crushing, bone-deep exhaustion. Her legs gave way, and she sat down on the invisible floor of the dimension.
"Enjoying a melon is fun for a moment," she muttered, rubbing her temples, "but paying off the debt feels like a funeral pyre..."
She shook her head with a wry smile. To completely eliminate a being of infinite mass, she had to borrow her future self. Or rather, her past self.
Now, she had to pay the piper.
She turned to Strange, her face pale and her eyes heavy. "For every time I disappear, you activate the time loop. Reset me to the start of the cast. Do not stop until the last Hermione—me—tells you to."
Strange looked confused, the mechanics of temporal paradoxes making his head spin, but he nodded. He trusted her.
He twisted his hand. The green rune of the Time Stone glowed.
Hermione vanished.
FLASH.
The next second, her consciousness was yanked backward. She was transported back a few seconds in time, appearing in a different spatial coordinate, becoming one of the countless Hermiones she had just seen.
She saw herself—thousands of herselves—raising their wands.
"Avada Kedavra, eating a melon!"
She raised her wand, her arm screaming with fatigue, and joined the chorus. She mercilessly unleashed the Killing Curse on Dormammu.
A flash of green light. Dormammu's scream.
FLASH.
The Time Turner activated.
She was back at the start. A different spot.
"Avada Kedavra, eating a melon!"
FLASH.
Again.
FLASH.
Again.
This cycle repeated itself endlessly. Time lost its meaning. There was only the green light, the scream, and the twist of the hourglass.
That was the horror of Hermione's plan.
To the outside observer, ten thousand Hermiones appeared simultaneously to deliver one strike. But for Hermione, she was living through every single cast. It wasn't a clone spell. It was a temporal relay race run by one person.
One Hermione, eating the melon ten thousand times.
After countless repetitions, Hermione felt her vision go black. Her head felt like it had been hit with a sledgehammer. Her magical core was throbbing with overuse. She felt like she was going to throw up.
She wouldn't have gone to such lengths if it weren't to completely eliminate that old bastard.
"I'll never play like that again..." she groaned, finally returning to the "present" moment as the sole survivor of the loop. She felt like a salted fish that had been drained of all moisture and left to dry in the sun.
All she wanted now was a bed. A soft bed. And maybe a coma.
This method seemed simple and brutal: quantity over quality. If one Avada Kedavra isn't enough, use ten thousand. But in practice, the logistical requirements were horrific.
It required an external anchor—Strange with the Eye of Agamotto—to manage the macro-loop, while she managed the micro-loops with the Time-Turner. Without him, she would have been lost in the time stream.
"A hundred melons bloom, a thousand melons are devoured, and all melons return to their origin," she mumbled deliriously.
She looked at Strange, weakly signaling that he could finish the job.
Strange breathed a sigh of relief. He immediately rotated his wrist. The Eye of Agamotto opened fully.
Green light flowed like water.
Time began to reverse.
The broken reality of the Dark Dimension was pushed back. The purple sky turned blue. The crumbling buildings of Hong Kong and London rose from the ground, the dust reforming into bricks, the bricks knitting into walls. The cracks in the street sealed.
The apocalypse rewound itself until the world was whole again.
Mordo and Wong stood in the restored street, staring at the unbelievable scene. Their mouths were agape, unable to speak.
Hermione landed on the pavement and let out a long sigh, leaning against a lamp post for support.
So what if they are dimensional demons? she thought, closing her eyes. Dormammu made a mistake. He turned himself into a dimension. He made himself a massive target. He had nowhere to hide. I could eat him from every angle.
This story tells us that having a physical body is the ultimate truth. Being abstract just means you get hit by AoE attacks.
Although they didn't know the specifics, judging from Strange's weary but triumphant expression, Wong and Mordo realized the battle was over.
"Dormammu has been banished?" Wong asked, his voice filled with the desperate hope of a survivor.
Strange shook his head.
Wong and Mordo exchanged a glance, their faces turning pale.
Not expelled?
The glimmer of hope that had just ignited was instantly extinguished.
"Is... is this really the end of the world?" Mordo whispered.
"It's not an expulsion," Strange said slowly, his voice raspy. "Dormammu has been completely wiped out. He is gone. Earth will never be at risk of invasion from the Dark Dimension again."
"Ah, so he was taken down. He was breathing heavily, which startled me..." Wong subconsciously breathed a sigh of relief.
Then his brain processed the sentence.
"WHAT?!" Wong screamed, his voice cracking an octave higher. "HE WAS KILLED?!"
"That's right," Strange nodded calmly.
Wong and Mordo looked at Hermione with complicated, terrified expressions.
They knew Strange wasn't capable of killing a gnat in the Dark Dimension, let alone the Lord of it. The only possibility was the "Miss Witch" leaning against the lamp post looking like she had a hangover.
But... killing a Dimensional God?
It was too bizarre. It broke every rule of magic they knew.
"Really... really killed him?" Wong asked again, his voice trembling.
"Mm-hmm," Hermione grunted, not opening her eyes.
Wong took a deep breath and slowly exhaled, trying to expel the shock from his system.
"That's Dormammu…" he murmured to himself, looking at his hands. "The Destroyer of Worlds..."
"What's wrong with Dormammu?" Hermione opened one eye, raising an eyebrow. Her tone was relaxed, bordering on dismissive. "Is he that powerful? I didn't sense anything special. Just big."
"..." Wong and Mordo were speechless.
You call that 'not noticing'?
So, in your eyes, is that all a dimensional demon amounts to? A large target?
Wong suddenly burst into laughter. It was a manic, joyous sound.
"Hahahaha! Good! Good! Good!" He shouted 'good' three times, his excitement overflowing. "Dormammu is dead! The threat is gone! Hermione, you did a great job! You saved us all!"
Mordo, however, did not smile.
He frowned, looking at the Time Stone on Strange's chest, then at the weary Hermione. His face darkened with a rigid, fundamentalist anger.
"You reversed time," Mordo said, his voice low and serious. "You manipulated natural law to deal with Dormammu. This violates the natural order. The bill comes due. Always."