The electricity danced through the water prison.
The last Dark Church cultist trapped inside jerked and convulsed as the current ran through the liquid medium. Abel could see the transformation happening in real time—flesh cooking from the inside out, proteins denaturing. The water sphere itself began to glow with the heat, steam rising from its surface as the internal temperature spiked beyond survivable levels.
The cultist's body locked rigid, every muscle contracting simultaneously. A sound escaped—not quite a scream, something worse. The sound of someone experiencing the end of everything.
When the lightning dispersed, the cultist was dead. Completely, irreversibly dead.
The water sphere dissipated, pouring across the stone ground in a cascade that steamed and hissed as it spread.
Victor stared at the carnage around them—the bodies, the burns, the evidence of absolute combat mastery displayed in real time. For a moment, he simply stood beneath the ancient oak tree, his expression shifting through recognition and something deeper.
For the first time since Abel had met him, Victor's expression showed genuine awe. Not the professional respect from their earlier coordinated battle against the Dark Dimension cultist. Not the intellectual appreciation of spell combinations and tactical brilliance. This was something else,raw acknowledgment of witnessing true mastery maybe.
Victor studied Abel with new eyes. He'd come to this battle thinking Abel was a peer, someone with comparable strength. A fellow young sorcerer navigating power and responsibility.
That assessment had been fundamentally wrong.
The power Abel displayed wasn't just quantitatively more than is. It was qualitatively different. The tactical brilliance visible even during chaos. The spell combinations that shouldn't have worked together but did. The sheer magical output sustaining complex spells simultaneously. Victor recognized mastery when he saw it, and Abel was operating at a level that represented years or even maybe decades of work.
But what really caught Victor's attention was something else entirely: the wand.
Without the wand, Abel was already impressive. His wandless casting showed real skill, real understanding of magical principles. His combat training was solid. His tactical thinking was exceptional.
But the moment Abel drew the wand and gripped it properly, everything multiplied. His magical reserves suddenly became stable, cohesive, amplified beyond what his base power should have allowed. The wand wasn't just a focus. It was a fundamental power amplifier, something that transformed his capabilities entirely.
Victor found himself genuinely curious about that wand. Where did it come from? What made it different from Kamar-Taj's approach to magic? But Victor's pride wouldn't allow him to ask about it directly. Some things were personal. Some tools carried history that wasn't meant to be shared with someone you'd just met.
What mattered more to Victor was something else: he recognized that he wasn't inherently inferior. He was simply younger, less trained, less experienced with his particular approach to magic. The gap between them wasn't insurmountable—it was just a gap that time and dedication could close.
Victor's confidence in himself remained absolute. He was overly talented, genuinely skilled. The fact that Abel was better didn't diminish Victor's own understanding of his potential. It just meant he had something to work toward.
And there was something almost admirable about fighting alongside someone that capable. Someone your own age that powerful.
The space around them began to shift.
The dark energy that had marked the pocket dimension started to fade. The ambient ripple of Dark Dimension power that had filled the air was suddenly being pulled backward—sucked toward a single point.
Above them, suspended in mid-air, the Ancient One floated in serene stillness.
She was constructing the final seal.
Her hands moved with deliberate grace, fingers tracing patterns in the air that left trails of fire—not ordinary flame, but threads of pure magical force woven together with impossible precision. Each line connected to the others in patterns that hurt to look at directly, geometry that defied Euclidean space.
The dimensional crack itself—that vertical pupil-like opening that had no right to exist in normal reality—began to shrink. The fiery threads extended toward it like sutures binding a wound, stitching it closed from multiple angles simultaneously.
Behind the crack, on the other side, Abel could sense something vast and ancient and utterly hostile.
A voice erupted through the closing gap. Not sound in any normal sense. Something that emerged from the absolute depths of power and malevolence, a voice that seemed to originate from the space between stars.
"Ancient One," the voice thundered, and Abel felt something shift in his chest—a pressure, a weight, as if his own existence was being challenged by the sheer magnitude of what he was hearing. "I will not accept this defeat. I will not abandon my clain over this pathetic planet."
The voice belonged to Dormammu. The dimensional lord. The entity that had powered every cultist in this village. The entity that had threatened to kill everyone while the Ancient One sealed.
Abel heard the voice and felt something shift inside him. It wasn't a normal sound. It was the voice of something so powerful, so utterly vast that hearing it almost dissolved his sense of individual identity. For just a moment, his balance wavered. He had to take a step backward to stabilize himself physically.
Is this what a dimensional lord's power feels like? he thought, his mind struggling to process the sheer magnitude. Just hearing its voice almost breaks my will to exist.
The Ancient One simply laughed.
It was a light sound, almost playful, completely unbothered by cosmic-scale malice. Her laughter contrasted sharply with Dormammu's rage, the sound of someone who had faced such threats countless times before, who understood the difference between threat and actual danger.
"Dormammu," the Ancient One said calmly, her voice carrying absolute certainty, "you've already failed. Whether you eventually claim Earth is a talk for another day. Perhaps you can attempt another invasion sometime. But not today. Not in this moment. And that is what matters."
Dormammu's voice became a roar, a sound of such magnitude that the very air vibrated with the force of it.
"Gu Yi—!"
But the Ancient One didn't acknowledge the rage. She didn't pause. She didn't hesitate.
She completed the final seal.
The dimensional crack snapped shut with sudden, absolute finality.
The sound it made was wrong, not a sound but an absence of sound, the moment where reality reasserted itself and closed the gap completely. The connection between Earth and the Dark Dimension that had existed through that crack severed instantly.
The dark dimension energy that had been bleeding through the crack for weeks, that had been powering the Dark Church cultists, that had been feeding their strength—all of it reversed course instantly. It sucked back through the closing gateway like water flowing upward, pulled back into the dark dimension with the completion of the sealing spell.
The cultists still fighting with Daniel and Mordo across the village suddenly lost their power source.
Their bodies ignited.
Not burning in any normal sense. They combusted violently from the inside out, their flesh turning to pitch-black ash almost instantaneously. Their bodies were consumed by their own Dark Dimension corruption, the energy that had empowered them now destroying them as it was yanked back through the sealed crack.
The screams—silent, internal screams that Abel could almost hear—echoed across the dimensional pocket. The souls, completely infested with Dark Dimension energy, were being dragged back through the closing gateway, pulled into the void, disappearing into absolute darkness.
Within seconds, there was nothing left of the cultists but black residue on the stone—ash of bodies that had been consumed by forces they couldn't have possibly understood.
The Ancient One descended slowly from her floating position.
She moved with the grace of someone who had done this countless times before, her robes flowing around her with deliberate elegance. When she reached the ground, she simply stood before her team, saying nothing.
She just looked at each of them in turn.
Her eyes passed over Agatha, who stood perfectly calm, utterly uninjured, showing no signs of exhaustion. Agatha required no assessment. She was already fully mature, fully powerful.
Her eyes passed over Jericho, who carried slight fatigue but nothing serious. Both had clearly handled their opponents with minimal difficulty, acting from experience and absolute mastery.
Her eyes lingered on Daniel and Mordo—the Kamar-Taj sorcerers who had worked together, who had faced two opponents each. They'd held their ground. They'd defended themselves competently. But it had clearly been a struggle. They'd persisted through determination and technique, not through overwhelming power. They'd survived, which was what mattered, but they hadn't dominated.
And then her eyes settled on Abel and Victor.
The Ancient One could see it clearly through the crystal mirrors she'd created—Abel and Victor had killed multiple opponents simultaneously. Several times over, in fact. Abel had solo-defeated four Dark Church cultists empowered by Dormammu himself. Then he'd rescued Victor and defeated two more.
Their combat performance was... exceptional for their age.
Victor had handled his battles well, but Abel had clearly surpassed him. The gap was visible, measurable, undeniable.
The Ancient One processed this information with the strategic mind of someone who had lived for centuries. In all of Kamar-Taj, besides the future arrival of Stephen Strange—who would eventually become the next Sorcerer Supreme—only Casillas possessed a level of power comparable to Abel and Victor. And the Ancient One strongly suspected that Casillas, while extremely talented, might still fall short of Abel's true capability.
Abel's strength was rare. His magical knowledge was comprehensive. His combat instinct was exceptional. His ability to adapt tactics mid-fight was something most wizards took decades to develop.
The Ancient One had watched the entire Iron Man battle through her scrying weeks ago. She'd seen his strategic thinking in action. And now she'd watched his capability when tested against genuine cosmic-powered opposition.
Abel Shaw was someone special. Someone whose potential extended far beyond normal parameters.
The village square was chaos.
The remains of Dark Church cultists lay scattered throughout—some dead from magical combat, some from the disintegration caused by the crack sealing, some simply collapsed and unconscious from the sheer trauma of magical assault. The normal villagers who'd been caught up in the cult stood confused and terrified, their minds fractured by the sudden cessation of the Dark Dimension power that had been sustaining them.
Agatha stepped forward with grim purpose.
She moved between the confused villagers with methodical efficiency, raising her hands, drawing power from traditions from the most part forgotten. Magic that was older and more primal.
It wasn't flashy. It wasn't decorated with light and color. It was just raw magical force, reaching into the minds of the cultists one by one, touching consciousness directly, and extracting memory.
When she finished, they were empty. Not dead. Not catatonic. Just... blank. Their eyes had no focus. Their movements were mechanical, disconnected from intention or purpose. Their memories of the Dark Church, of Dormammu, of their faith—all of it had been excised. The trauma of having your mind violated was written in their postures, but they didn't understand why. They couldn't remember what had been taken.
Agatha's method was crude and brutal, and Abel could see it left spiritual scars on those affected. The damage to their psyches would take time to heal, if they ever fully healed. But it was necessary. If even one of them retained faith in Dormammu, if even one of them found a way to communicate with the dark dimension, the problem would never truly be solved.
Victor stood beneath a large oak tree at the edge of the village square, and for the first time since Abel had met him, his expression showed genuine sadness. Not the pride-tempered respect from earlier battles when they'd fought the Dark Dimension cultist together. Not the intellectual appreciation of Abel's power that Victor had shown after watching the combo attacks. This was something raw and unguarded—pity, almost. Compassion for people caught in systems beyond their control.
Victor took a deep breath, visibly gathering himself, and turned to Abel. "Master Abel, those people we fought... the Dark Church cultists... do you know most of them weren't true believers? They were just villagers."
Abel studied the confused, empty-eyed survivors standing scattered throughout the village square. The way they moved was disturbing, disconnected from intention, like puppets with their strings cut. Agatha's memory erasure had been effective and complete.
The village itself told a story of abandonment and neglect. Stone and wood buildings, simple and crude, held together more by habit than structural integrity. Soil and sand for streets, no pavement, no organization, no sign that anyone important cared enough to maintain infrastructure. Dust kicked up with every step, coating shoes and trouser legs in gray. The electricity that powered some of the houses was sparse and unreliable. Only a handful of structures had access. The water system relied on an ordinary well that looked like it hadn't been properly maintained in decades. The smell of the place was wrong—not filthy, but stagnant. The smell of a place time had forgotten.
It was backward. It was poor. It was the kind of place that modernity had forgotten, that the world had decided wasn't worth investing in.
Abel understood immediately what Victor was saying. He understood completely.
"Why would they embrace Dormammu?" Abel asked quietly, though the answer was already forming in his mind. Sometimes understanding the reasoning behind choices was more important than judging the choices themselves.
END CHAPTER 32
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Hey guys what do you think about the new cover, is it good? or is the previous on better? Let me know!