Strange frowned slightly. He had cast the spell on a whim and hadn't paid attention to the operational details, so he had no idea whether something had gone wrong with his magic.
Vortex, the unlucky fool dragged over to handle crisis PR, brightened at Schiller's words. He raised a hand, cleared his throat, and said,
"I told you already, the timelines and dimensional lines are unstable right now. Annihilation is carrying out emergency repairs. You'd better not expect magic to function normally, especially spells involving energy transmission. Who knows which universe they might get sent to?"
Strange gave him a suspicious look. He had long noticed that Vortex's level of existence was far above that of a human, and among the Five Deities, Annihilation was the most mysterious. For him to suddenly appear and inform the two of them could not be a trivial matter.
More importantly, Strange felt that Schiller's fierce reputation now resounded throughout the universe. Few deities wanted anything to do with him; they were even unwilling to appear before him. It had reached the point of "where Schiller was, gods dared not tread."
For Annihilation to risk being noticed by Schiller one day and woven into his Super Yarn Ball Plan just to show himself before Schiller meant the situation was probably truly serious. Perhaps magic throughout the entire universe had been affected.
Strange's original intention had not actually been to use his severed hand to provoke Schiller. His real goal was similar to Stark's previous thinking: keep Schiller here, then force him to quit.
Stark could only make him quit for a few months at most. Schiller's threshold would indeed drop as a result, but the time was too short for it to fall by much. Strange, however, could stay here and wear Schiller down