The pressure collapsed inward.
Galactus's duplication unleashed a crushing wave of nebula matter, each tendril a strand of cosmic hunger.
It surged to consume Soren into its belly and replenish the vast energy it had spent chasing him across the stars.
Soren didn't retreat this time.
His surfboard glided to a stop over the shattered remnants of long-dead space.
He raised a hand.
Without a chant.
A magic circle erupted into being.
It wasn't the elegant geometry of Kamar-Taj's mystics… black magic.
Dormammu's energy flooded through Soren's veins, a searing river of corrupted power.
His body groaned under the weight of it, but his will held steady. His magic was no longer at the mercy of incantations or ritual.
"Void Corrosion."
From the yawning mouth of the circle, a cloud of smoke seeped forward.
It slithered out like a predator smelling blood in the water, there was no light in it. Only decay.
Hunger.
This was a spell from the Dark Elf archives, a long-lost inheritance buried in forgotten ruins.
It devoured.
It corroded.
It existed to undo reality itself.
Even Soren, master of it now, had never dared cast it before.
Now, with Dormammu's power coursing through him?
He could afford to risk it.
The two black forces collided~
Galactus's nebula against Soren's Void.
No explosion.
Instead.
Integration.
The dark smoke and the cosmic sludge began to spiral into each other, twining like rival serpents in a slow-motion war.
But quickly, it became clear, Soren's magic…
Was winning.
Galactus's matter began to decay from the inside, melting into the spell's substance. The surrounding dark fog, thinned as it was drawn into the magic circle and converted into denser, void energy.
A pocket of stillness formed around Soren. No tendrils reached him now.
He stood at the storm, cloaked in rising plumes of smoke that whispered in dead tongues.
He exhaled. "…"
He pushed.
The circle pulsed, and the Void Corrosion lunged outward, a torrent of malignant gas streaming straight toward Galactus's.
It struck like a wave of rot, burning through cosmic armor.
Across the void, Galactus's avatar trembled, not from fear, but from pain.
The feedback of lost energy rippled through its core.
That attack was swallowed…
An emotion Galactus had not felt in eons crept in through the cracks, surprise.
This ant hadn't just resisted.
It had taken a bite out of him.
The black fog that once belonged to it had been, weaponized against it.
"YOU DARE~YOU DARE CONSUME ME?!"
The void trembled again.
But now, Soren's eyes were glowing.
Die!
The psychic roar exploded across the battlefield.
Soren's mental power surged again, brimming with murder.
But this time, the Galactus's had learned caution.
It no longer lashed out mindlessly.
Instead, it began to compress its colossal form, pulling in the vastness of its mass like a dying star folding in on itself.
This didn't reduce its strength, if anything, it made it more lethal.
The corrosion magic that had once eaten away at its being now met resistance.
With its power condensed, the black miasma swirling from Soren's fingertips found itself clawing at a steel wall.
A stalemate began, a tug-of-war through space and universe.
Soren narrowed his eyes, reading the signs.
"You've adapted, big guy."
"But that won't save you."
He could feel it, Galactus's vast endurance.
A being born of a prior universe, surviving through collapse and rebirth, it had faced worse than corrosion.
If Soren continued this attrition, it might take hours, days… years.
"I don't have time for a grind."
Suddenly, the twin magic circles embedded in his palms began to glow brighter, swirling with green and blue energy.
Ancient arcane symbols twisted and fused, the patterns converging into a complex lattice. The air around him vibrating with raw mysticism.
"You should feel honored." Soren said with a smile, raising both hands.
"You'll be the first to witness my true mastery."
From the entangled runes, a strange power emerged, not just time, not just space, but a fusion of both.
This was no longer a simple feat.
It was the first true fruits of Soren's obsession with the Time Gem and Space Gem.
For a long time he had studied them in solitude, meditated on their mysteries, conducted experiments that tore the fabric of the world and rewove it.
Success had always eluded him… until now.
The magical convergence ignited. The green of time and the blue of space fused into a radiant purple-gold aurora, humming with cosmic authority.
Even without physical pressure, its presence made the duplication of Galactus's tremble.
"What… is this?" The clone's voice echoed in the void, for the first time touched by something almost like fear.
"That scent… It smells like...."
"It's called inevitability." Soren replied coldly.
"You survived the last universe's death. But you won't survive this."
The breath of the fused magic pulsed outward. Space warped. Time twisted. The stars blinked and reappeared in strange constellations. The duplication reeled, caught in a web of bending moments and shifting coordinates.
"You think this trick will destroy me?"
"I am eternal!"
"No."
"You're a shadow, and shadows vanish in the presence of real light."
He clapped his hands together.
The twin arrays snapped into one, a celestial clock face whose hands turned across dimensions, dragging the weight of two fundamental forces with them.
꧁𓊈𒆜༺⚜༻𒆜𓊉꧂
PhantomDream