Chapter 292: The Ikonn Form (Cloning Technique)
"You know what, just go on without me. I'm not tagging along this time," Wong said, still visibly rattled, as if Strange's private quarters were some kind of haunted house.
Ethan watched him, clearly enjoying the show — Wong had all the hallmarks of a man who'd been thoroughly, repeatedly burned by Strange before.
"You have no idea. The first time I went in, it wasn't even that bad — just fell straight into a portal trap and got dumped in the middle of the ocean, could barely swim back up in time. And that was the good run. After that came the Mirror Dimension tricks, and don't even get me started on how he's found new and creative uses for the Rings of Raggadorr — that thing's meant for defense!
But the worst — the worst — was the time his energy whip came shooting straight up out of the ground!" Wong said, wincing, rubbing his own backside at the memory.
Can't you just portal straight over there? Ethan thought, absently rubbing his hands together, already half-imagining the sting of an incoming energy whip. He winced too, dreading whatever was coming.
Watching Ethan's reaction, Wong's mouth curled into a teasing smile. He raised his voice deliberately, laced with a challenge. "Why don't you try it, then?"
Ethan took a slow breath. He knew exactly what Wong was hoping for — a good laugh at his expense.
But he also recognized an opportunity to show off a little. So he closed his eyes, focused his energy, and traced a perfect circle in the air.
As his fingers moved, an invisible force seemed to gather in the air around him. Slowly, a shimmering portal began to take shape before him.
Once it stabilized, Ethan opened his eyes — and there, on the other side, sat the real Stephen Strange, deep in study.
He was seated in a room packed floor to ceiling with spellbooks and strange arcane instruments, absorbed in a thick, ancient tome.
"That's not possible!" Wong nearly jumped out of his chair.
When it came to portal magic, Wong considered himself second only to the Ancient One herself, bar none. And here was Ethan, casually pinpointing the real Strange on his first try — something that shattered every expectation he'd had.
"How is this even possible?" Wong muttered to himself, thinking back on every attempt he'd made to locate the real Strange with a portal — every single one had failed, either dumping him somewhere nonsensical or nearly cracking open a gateway to some hell dimension by accident.
After that string of disasters, Wong had given up trying to track down the real Strange altogether — from then on, he'd only ever reached him secondhand, through one of the decoys.
Watching Wong's shock, Ethan understood well enough what had just happened.
Right — the Space Stone. That's got to be why I can find the real Strange so easily.
This guy's talent really is something else, Ethan mused privately. A few months, and he's already mastered magic to this level — and invented his own spell on top of it.
Strange, meanwhile, had finally noticed the intrusion into his hidden chamber. He immediately flung out a Crimson Bands of Cyttorak — five scarlet chains lashing straight toward Ethan.
Then, without missing a beat, Strange threw up a Seraphim Shield around himself for good measure, and — for good measure on top of the good measure — opened a portal behind him, clearly ready to bolt the second things looked bad.
Watching this whole sequence unfold in real time, both Ethan and Wong just stood there, stunned. This guy is way too paranoid.
Ethan simply caught all five crimson chains with his bare hands.
Only once he'd finished his whole panic-sequence did Strange finally, warily, look up to see who exactly had intruded.
Spotting Ethan, he blinked in surprise — then, seeing Ethan's own equally stunned expression, seemed to register just how over-the-top his own reaction had been, and quickly canceled every spell at once.
"Oh, hey, Ethan — what brings you by?" Strange said, throwing his arms open in a welcoming gesture, as if nothing had happened at all. Not a shred of embarrassment for having just tried to bind his own visitor moments earlier.
"THIS is how you welcome me? Straight into your finishing move!" Ethan said, thoroughly unimpressed — in the original canon, Strange hadn't broken out the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak until he was up against Thanos himself.
And judging by how smoothly Strange had cast the whole sequence, this clearly wasn't the first time he'd pulled that particular combo either.
"What happened to you? You've turned into a completely different person in just a few months. Where'd the cocky Strange I used to know go?" Ethan teased.
At the jab, Strange let out an awkward laugh, then conjured three cups of tea out of thin air, handing one each to Ethan and Wong.
"Ever since that fight in Hell's Kitchen, and after digging through a good chunk of Kamar-Taj's library, I've come to realize Earth isn't nearly as safe a place as I used to think. Figured it couldn't hurt to be a little cautious. I'm a doctor, after all — if I can't even protect myself on a battlefield, how am I supposed to save anyone else?" Strange explained, dead serious.
For a moment, Ethan actually found himself nodding along — that did sound reasonable enough. A doctor really did need to protect himself first before he could help anyone else.
Ethan also thought he understood, then, why Strange had changed so much: without the car accident that had defined the other Stranges he'd known — since Ethan's own presence had presumably kept that from happening — Strange had never lost his career as a surgeon, and somewhere along the way, that had evidently curdled into this level of paranoid caution instead.
Still. This was excessive, even accounting for that.
"And what about your girlfriend, Christine? Aren't you worried someone'll scoop her up while you're off playing hermit here?" Ethan asked, genuinely curious — by the story's usual timeline, either Strange or Christine was supposed to end up in a car accident eventually.
At the question, Strange just smirked. "Who says I haven't been with her? One of my clones has been keeping her company this whole time. Not just company, either — that clone's been covering my shifts at the hospital too."
Hearing that, Ethan could only mutter under his breath, deeply impressed. This is next-level. He cloned himself to cheat on the timeline itself.
Strange had genuinely found new and inventive uses for this spell.
"Alright, you've been holed up here plenty long enough. I need your help — come back to Hell's Kitchen with me," Ethan said.
Strange shook his head at that. "You have no idea how dangerous it is out there. Christine actually got into a car accident recently — thank god one of my clones was with her, kept her safe. Lost the clone in the process, but she made it out alive! See how dangerous this all is? Tell you what — I'll send a few clones along with you instead."
Well, I'll be damned. Strange broke his own fixed-point-in-time canon event completely by accident. This Ikonn Form spell of his is genuinely something else. He probably has no idea he just solved, entirely by accident, a problem that every other version of Strange across the multiverse spent their whole lives never managing to fix.
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