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"Avada Kedavra!"
"Avada Kedavra!"
"Avada Kedavra!"
...
A chorus of voices rang out in perfect unison.
Every Hermione raised her wand and unleashed lethal green light.
Thousands upon thousands of Killing Curses converged into a single torrent of destruction, consuming Dormammu whole.
"No—"
Dormammu felt his soul tremble beneath the green light and, for the first time, knew an emotion called fear.
He managed one final wail. Then his colossal face, eaten alive by the green glow, crumbled and scattered into nothing.
The Dark Dimension went quiet.
Only the countless Hermiones remained in the void. Then, as one, they bowed their heads, adjusted their Time-Turners, and vanished.
Strange stared at all of it. His mind was completely empty.
He had never imagined that Dormammu, a dimensional demon so powerful that every Sorcerer Supreme in history had been helpless against him, would fall like this.
Killed by a human girl.
Hermione felt the Dark Harvest trigger. She knew Dormammu was gone. Thoroughly, irreversibly gone.
She let out a long HAAH. Her whole body loosened at once, and then a wave of exhaustion hit her like a wall.
"Blasting the Killing Curse is fun right up until you have to go back and pay for every single one..."
She smiled bitterly and shook her head.
To finish Dormammu off completely, she had borrowed her own future selves. Now it was time to go back and fill in the holes she'd left.
She turned to Strange and said, "Every time one of me disappears, activate the Time Loop. Keep going until the last me tells you to stop."
Strange looked completely lost, but he nodded.
The Time-Turner activated.
Hermione vanished.
An instant later, she was back several seconds in the past, one among the countless Hermiones in the void.
"Avada Kedavra!"
She raised her wand and, alongside all the others, cast the Killing Curse at Dormammu without hesitation.
Green light flashed. Dormammu's agonized scream rang out once more.
Then she activated the Time-Turner again.
And again. And again. For an unknowable stretch of time.
...
This had been her plan from the start.
Time-Turner, combined with Strange's Time Loop: pull endless copies of herself into the same moment, stack one Killing Curse on top of another until the number became incomprehensible, and annihilate Dormammu's soul so completely there wasn't even a trace left.
After however many cycles, Hermione's vision was going dark. Her head felt like someone had driven a hammer into it a thousand times over. The ringing wouldn't stop.
She was pretty sure she was about to be sick.
If it weren't for the goal of finishing that old bastard Dormammu for good, she would never have pushed herself anywhere near this far.
This was worse than pulling consecutive all-nighters to finish a paper.
"I am never doing this again..."
She groaned weakly, feeling like a salted fish that had been squeezed until every last drop of moisture was gone.
Right now, all she wanted was a bed. Any bed. Eight hours of unconsciousness. The rest of the universe could sort itself out.
The method looked simple enough from the outside, if one Avada Kedavra isn't enough, use ten thousand. Eventually Dormammu would go down. But actually doing it was a different story entirely.
The conditions were brutal.
She needed someone fluent in Time Loops, using the Eye of Agamotto to layer the cycles from the outside in. She herself had to reverse time from inside each loop. There was no way to nest from the inside out.
Without Strange, she couldn't have made this work at all.
And those ten thousand Hermiones, for all that they looked like separate people, were all her. Every Killing Curse cast by every one of them was cast by her own hand.
It looked like ten thousand Hermiones each casting it once. It was one Hermione casting it ten thousand times.
A hundred curses blooming in unison. A thousand curses striking home. Ten thousand, all returning to the one who cast them.
She looked at Strange and gave him the nod.
Strange sagged with visible relief and immediately activated the Eye of Agamotto. Green light pulsed and swirled. Time began to reverse.
Everything Dormammu had destroyed snapped back into place. Buildings surged up from the rubble. Fissures sealed themselves shut. The sky cleared to a clean, open blue.
Mordo and Wong stood there with their mouths open, unable to say a word.
Hermione exhaled slowly and felt completely hollowed out.
Soul. That was the key. As long as something had a soul, it didn't matter what kind of god or monster it was, she could Avada it into oblivion.
Dimensional demon? Please.
If anything, Dormammu's choice to merge with the dimension had worked against him. The entire Dark Dimension was his body, which meant she could hit him from every angle simultaneously. No cover. No blind spots. 360 degrees of Killing Curse, all day long.
Liked using a whole dimension as his body, did he?
The moral of this story: a human form is the safer option.
Strange's expression told Wong and Mordo what they needed to know before he said a word. Whatever had happened, it was over.
"Dormammu has been banished?" Wong asked. His voice carried the shaky relief of someone who'd just realized they weren't going to die today.
Strange shook his head.
Wong and Mordo looked at each other. The color drained from their faces.
Not banished?
Did that mean... Earth was still finished?
The small, fragile hope that had just started to form in their chests collapsed instantly.
"Not banished," Strange said. He spoke slowly. "Dormammu has been completely eliminated. Earth will never face another Dark Dimension invasion."
"Oh, so he's been eliminated — don't pause like that in the middle of a sentence, you nearly gave me a heart attack..."
Wong's shoulders dropped with relief before he'd even finished processing what he'd heard. Then it caught up with him.
"Wait. What? Eliminated?!"
His voice cracked on the last word.
"That's right."
Strange nodded. His tone was perfectly calm.
Wong and Mordo both looked at Hermione. Their expressions were difficult to read.
They knew Strange hadn't done it. Strange didn't have the power to eliminate Dormammu. He never had.
Which left only one possibility.
Miss Witch.
But even accounting for her, eliminating Dormammu was too much. That was a dimensional demon. A being that Sorcerers Supreme had spent lifetimes failing to stop.
They went back and forth, questioning Strange again and again, tone cycling through shock, doubt, and flat-out disbelief. Strange's patience ran out well before they reached acceptance. By the time his answers turned curt, they had barely managed to accept that it was real.
"He's... really gone?" Wong asked. His voice was still unsteady.
"Mm."
Wong drew a slow, deep breath and let it out just as slowly, as though he could exhale the shock along with the air.
"That was Dormammu," he murmured, mostly to himself. It still felt like a dream.
"What about Dormammu?" Hermione raised an eyebrow, her tone light. "Was he supposed to be impressive? I honestly couldn't tell."
Wong and Mordo said nothing.
You couldn't tell?
So in your eyes, a dimensional demon barely registers?
Wong pulled himself together — and then burst out laughing.
"Hahaha! Good! Good! Good!" Three times, voice bright with it, his excitement impossible to contain. "Dormammu is dead! Earth never has to worry about the Dark Dimension again!"
"Hermione, that was extraordinary!"
Mordo didn't share the mood.
He was frowning. He looked at Strange, and when he spoke, his voice was grave. "You reversed time to deal with Dormammu. That violates the laws of nature. There will be a price."
➤ Next: The S.H.I.E.L.D. Team
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