Each of the three spoke more shamelessly than the last. Clearly, reputation alone was not enough to intimidate the others.
Dormammu's roar echoed through the Dark Dimension, carrying the last trace of the dark monarch's majesty and fury.
The crack piercing his shell had already spread to the ends of every supporting structure.
The rule nodes once built around his will, spanning every layer of the dimension, were being analyzed and reconstructed by Russell's quantum rules.
He tried to resist again.
At the last instant before the crack pierced his core, Dormammu compressed all the dark energy remaining within him at once, attempting to break free of their combined suppression with a self-destructive explosion.
At that moment, his shell radiated a blinding dark light from within. The rays resembled countless dark tendrils frantically extending in every direction, trying to seize any lifeline they could find.
But Russell reacted faster.
He lightly swept his right hand through the void, as casually as if he were brushing a speck of dust off a table.
Yet with that light sweep, the motion parameters and causal chains of all the dark energy swelling inside Dormammu, struggling to erupt, were simultaneously redefined at the quantum level.
Before those dark tendrils spreading in every direction could reach anything to anchor themselves to, their causal connections to Dormammu's core were severed at the fundamental level.
They lost their source of commands, their motion vectors, and all the force driving them onward.
The tendrils held their final shapes in the void for less than a breath, then disintegrated layer by layer from tip to root, scattering like dust in the wind.
Now that Dormammu's power had been reduced to Skyfather level, he was like a mortal trying to hold apart the walls of a closing valley with his