Steve Rogers thanked Jordan, stepped back through the portal, and returned to the compound.
Wong left moments later, already listing tasks under his breath—the surviving sorcerers needed coordinating, search arrays needed constructing, and the question of Tony Stark's location wasn't going to answer itself.
As the Avengers' first official liaison to Kamar-Taj, Jordan followed him through.
The monastery sat at the roof of the world, snow-capped peaks visible through every window, altitude doing its usual work on unprepared lungs. Jordan's biomagnetic field handled the acclimatization before it became an issue.
Wong had barely landed before a cluster of arcane mages converged on him—questions, requests, problems that had accumulated in his absence, the particular energy of people who need someone in charge and have recently found one. He was immediately absorbed.
Jordan stepped back, let him work, and quietly lifted one ability off the skill list F-boy had compiled.
[Fantasy Card: Mirror Magic] Type: Ability • Rarity: SR Source: Kamar-Taj tradition, Vishanti-derived
Mirror Space: Creates a pocket reality that can distort gravity, alter object properties, and reshape spatial geometry. Events within have no effect on the outside world. Enemies trapped inside remain contained unless they can break the barrier from within.Mirror Dimension (Sorcerer Supreme level): An expanded mirror space that intersects with and overlaps the real world—visible to those inside reality, interactive with it, but fundamentally separate.
Power scales with the caster. Proficiency determines scope.
In the Marvel universe, dimensions existed in layers—the material world, the mirror spaces that overlapped it, the ruled domains of beings like Mephisto and Dormammu who were effectively invincible within their own territory, and various pocket realities that skilled practitioners could create and inhabit. Not unlike the imaginary spaces in the Honkai universe, Jordan noted, which made the conceptual framework familiar enough to navigate without a map.
The Ancient One had used the Mirror Dimension as a combat preference—fold the enemy inside, where their strength was irrelevant and her geometry was absolute. Elegant, if you had the power to maintain it.
The logic behind choosing Mirror Magic first was straightforward.
When Jordan had uninstalled the Herrscher of the Void card and transferred it to Tatsumaki, he'd retained the distilled principle—the pseudo-Herrscher Core currently forming in his chest. It preserved his spatial authority in a simplified form. But simplified meant limited. The original Herrscher of the Void worked like a zero-latency high-bandwidth network, direct and instantaneous. What Jordan had now was more like early-generation mobile data: functional, available, but noticeably slower when you needed it to perform.
Small water pipes just don't flow the same way.
Mirror Magic was the technical supplement. It didn't replace the spatial authority he'd given away—it filled the operational gap through a different mechanism. Where the Herrscher Core had worked from the level of fundamental law, Mirror Magic worked through learned technique and borrowed dimensional energy. Less elegant. More available. And crucially: with Jordan's effectively unlimited energy reserves behind it, the power ceiling on the ability was entirely determined by proficiency rather than fuel.
This was also, conveniently, an SR-rank copy. Which meant the Element Pickup cooldown after acquiring it was measured in days rather than months.
Ten days, as it turned out.
Jordan used the interval productively.
The Arcane Library had, due to the snap's unfortunate timing, no assigned librarian. Wong hadn't managed to appoint a successor before the disaster. The practical result was that the collection sat open, uncurated, accessible to anyone standing in the building—including the restricted stacks.
Jordan worked through as much of it as he could read in ten days, which was considerable.
The theory came easily enough. The practice was another matter. Magic, it turned out, rewarded specific kinds of intuitive talent—the ability to feel dimensional energy and shape it through willpower—and Jordan had some of that, but not the extraordinary variety. Not the kind that let genuinely gifted students master in an afternoon what most practitioners spent years learning.
Jordan read the theory. He understood the theory. He could not, through raw comprehension alone, translate theory into reliable execution.
But.
Once the ten days expired and Element Pickup processed the Mirror Magic acquisition into a Fantasy Card—
Mastery was immediate.
He was producing stable mirror spaces within thirty seconds of the card integrating, and by the time Wong came to check on his progress, the complicated protective working of the Rings of Raggadorr was already functioning cleanly in both hands.
Wong looked at this for a long moment.
"...You've learned it."
"I'm a quick study," Jordan said, with the contained satisfaction of someone whose method has just been vindicated at scale.
The correct approach for a Stand user, he thought, is to learn just enough theory to make the copy work, and then let F-boy handle the rest.
The better news, meanwhile, had arrived from the other side of Kamar-Taj's ongoing search.
Pooling the power of every available sorcerer, working through dimensional-scale detection arrays that had taken the better part of a week to construct, the surviving practitioners of the Sorcerer Supreme lineage had located Tony Stark in the observable universe. Steve Rogers opened a portal to the New York Sanctum as soon as the message reached him, bringing Natasha along.
Introductions were brief.
"This is Black Widow—Natasha Romanoff," Steve said. "She's Avengers."
"A pleasure." Natasha shook Wong's hand with the precise social ease of someone who had spent years navigating rooms full of people who might be enemies. "Just Nat is fine."
"Miss Natasha." Wong returned the greeting, skipped the pleasantries, and gestured into the open space of the Sanctum hall.
He raised one hand and released a directed pulse of detection energy—shaped, specific, already calibrated to the readings from the search—and the air ahead of them opened into a projected image: deep space, stars scattered across the void, and at the center a battered craft with its solar collection wings spread wide. Recognizable—just barely—as the Benatar, the Guardians of the Galaxy's ship, though it had been through considerable hardship since Jordan had last seen reference to it.
"Tony Stark is approximately four thousand light-years from Earth." Wong's voice was level. "His condition appears compromised. The ship is unlikely to complete the journey home under its own power."
Steve's expression didn't change, but something around his eyes did.
Natasha's jaw tightened once, then settled.
"But," Wong continued, "it appears capable of maintaining life support for several more days. Whatever is going to happen, there is still time."
"Thank you." Steve meant it fully—the kind of gratitude that doesn't require elaboration. "Would it be possible—using that portal ability—to retrieve him directly?"
"The Dimensional Gate." Wong paused. "At my current level of development: no. The distances involved are beyond what I can presently manage."
Jordan, standing off to the side, filed this away.
Which meant that a true Sorcerer Supreme—at full development—could disregard four thousand light-years as a routing inconvenience. That tracked. It explained how Strange had been able to appear at the final battle within minutes of returning from dust, ferrying half the universe's heroes through cascading portals in what would otherwise have been an impossible logistical operation.
Wong wasn't there yet. That was honest of him to say so.
Jordan looked at the image of the drifting ship and turned the problem over in his mind.
So. The essence of magic, he concluded, as practiced at the highest level—
—is borrowing power from other dimensions.
And not paying it back.