"Ancient One," Drex said after forcing himself free from Morgan's grip, "what exactly happened to her?"
Morgan stared at him in shock.
He had broken through her psychic control far too easily.
Which meant...
Had she never controlled him at all?
"She was most likely awakened by the dimensional entity tied to her bloodline," the Ancient One replied calmly.
One glance was enough for her to understand nearly everything about Morgan's condition.
Honestly, she wasn't particularly surprised.
Over the centuries, she had encountered many descendants of dimensional entities.
Some extradimensional beings preferred methods like Cyttorak, creating artifacts infused with their power and using mortals as anchors or pawns.
Others simply reproduced directly.
And children born from those unions often awakened frightening powers with very little stimulation, becoming parasitic footholds for outside dimensions within reality itself.
The Ancient One had hoped she had closed every loophole years ago.
Apparently not.
Because Morgan had been born in Earth's dimension, she lacked the foreign extradimensional signature that normally triggered reality's rejection response. That meant the Ancient One couldn't simply banish her the way she would a true outsider.
Morgan was technically native to Earth.
The real danger was that excessive use of her power would gradually create stronger connections for the dimensional entity lurking behind her.
The Ancient One sighed internally.
Ever since Drex Valen appeared, her workload had increased dramatically.
And Stephen Strange still needed several more years before he'd be ready to inherit the title of Sorcerer Supreme.
The thought alone was exhausting.
Suddenly, Morgan hurled a sphere of dark blue flame toward Drex.
"Careful," the Ancient One warned immediately. "Her magic is highly corrosive. It attacks both life force and the soul."
Then she watched Drex casually catch the magical fire with his bare hand.
Three overlapping defensive layers surrounded him simultaneously:
Electromagnetic fields.
Gravitational fields.
And his own biological force field.
The demonic fire failed to damage him in the slightest.
Drex briefly considered testing whether his energy absorption abilities could consume magical energy directly.
Then decided against experimenting recklessly with demonic magic.
The Ancient One gave him a genuinely surprised look.
She understood enough science to recognize what he was doing. After living for centuries, she'd studied countless disciplines simply to pass the time.
What shocked her wasn't the theory.
It was how quickly Drex had approached something dangerously close to a unified field framework.
At this rate, most conventional magic and curses would eventually become almost meaningless against him.
Then Drex attacked.
BWOOOOOM—
Twin beams of heat vision erupted from his eyes.
But after learning to use gravity as a medium for energy transmission, the destructive force of his heat vision had become vastly more terrifying than before.
Normally, the atmosphere was a terrible conductor for concentrated energy transfer.
Gravity, however, was different.
A gravitational medium could transmit energy tens of thousands of times more efficiently than air.
If heat vision energy frequencies were carried through gravitational waves instead...
The resulting output became monstrous.
Photon energy followed the equation: E=hνE=h\\nuE=hν
The higher the frequency, the greater the energy.
Conventional laser frequencies were limited.
But gravitational wave transmission could amplify that frequency by an entire order of magnitude.
On the microscopic level, Drex simultaneously manipulated surrounding electromagnetic fields, forcing particles throughout the environment into extreme high-energy transitional states.
The result was horrifying.
The twin crimson beams distorted space itself as they crossed the Mirror Dimension.
By the time someone saw the red light, it was already too late.
Light speed wasn't something human reflexes could comprehend, react to, or counter.
Where Drex looked, matter ceased to exist.
Air detonated violently.
Structures fragmented into loose particles within fractions of a second.
Ash surged outward like tidal waves.
Mass became irrelevant.
Density became irrelevant.
Hardness became irrelevant.
Anything touched by the beams simply disintegrated.
The Ancient One's expression tightened slightly.
Within less than a ten-thousandth of a second, she twisted the Mirror Dimension itself, bending and refracting the heat vision away from Morgan.
Even then, merely being within several meters of the redirected attack carbonized Morgan's entire body instantly.
Her magical barriers lasted less than a second.
The Ancient One turned toward Drex with visible disbelief.
"…Were you trying to kill her?"
Those two beams alone, if left uninterrupted, possessed enough destructive energy to vaporize all of New York City.
By combining gravitational wave transmission with large-scale electromagnetic particle excitation, Drex had transformed ordinary heat vision from "building-level destructive force" into something approaching apocalyptic weaponry.
Morgan's charred body regenerated rapidly.
Drex looked mildly awkward.
"I thought she was supposed to be powerful."
Mystical combat still confused him.
Compared to someone like the Hulk, Morgan looked infinitely more dangerous.
The Hulk could be crushed through gravity manipulation alone if Drex truly wanted to.
But Morgan radiated the kind of supernatural presence that practically screamed final boss energy.
Of course Drex had gone all out immediately.
"Drex!"
Morgan charged toward him furiously.
"Enough."
The single word exploded outward.
Drex transmitted the sound through gravitational waves.
Ordinary sound instantly transformed into catastrophic destructive force.
Morgan was blasted backward violently.
Blood erupted from every orifice in her body as sonic vibrations tore through her internally. Cracks spread briefly even through the Mirror Dimension itself.
Outside the dimensional barrier, the resulting shockwave would have rivaled the blast pressure of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
Sound, after all, was fundamentally vibration.
And every material possessed a resonant frequency.
Hit that frequency correctly, and even vibranium or Kryptonian metal could theoretically be shattered apart.
Drex suddenly realized he could probably moonlight as Black Bolt if he wanted to.
"That's enough," the Ancient One interrupted firmly. "Leave the rest to me."
Mostly because the Mirror Dimension was starting to suffer structural damage from Drex's experiments.
"Ancient One," Drex asked, glancing toward the unconscious Morgan, "what are you planning to do with her?"
His two casual test attacks had already completely overwhelmed her.
Still, despite her relative weakness against him, Drex found her transformed physiology extremely fascinating.
Structurally elegant.
A beautiful biological design.
He genuinely wanted to study it further.
"I'm going to calm her mind," the Ancient One replied evenly.
Internally, she was already considering dropping Morgan into a time loop for a few hundred cycles until the problem solved itself.
"Will she be harmed?" Drex asked.
Morgan lay unconscious nearby, her body already regenerating from the devastating sonic damage thanks to the passive regenerative properties granted by her demonic magic.
Not fully immortal.
But dangerously close.