Chapter 8: Contempt

Meimu looked as though he had just seen a ghost.

What on earth could have turned a P226 Blackwater pistol into a pile of scattered parts in an instant, while simultaneously blasting all the skin, muscle, and blood off a man’s arm, leaving nothing but a stick of raw, bloody bone, before searing it into something that resembled a glowing chunk of molten steel?

The answer: a magic whip.

These magical whips constantly crackled with sparks, much like those that fly from a chainsaw at full throttle—impossible to mistake. Nearly every sorcerer trained at Kamar-Taj could wield one, but their most notorious users were the fanatical followers of Kaecilius, the principal antagonist in the Doctor Strange films.

By channeling different levels of magical energy, the whip could be used for various effects—binding, or even serving as a defensive weapon.

Beside him, Douglas was shrieking like a slaughtered pig. His screams stopped abruptly a second later, as his head was split diagonally, hacked in two like a watermelon under a swift blade.

Meimu was not unfamiliar with such scenes. He recognized an "air blade" in the killer's hand.

Unless you looked closely, you’d never spot the weapon’s true form. A swirl of wind circled its edge, rendering it a translucent blur, distorting even the air around it.

With a sickening sound, the headless corpse collapsed forward, falling less than a meter from Meimu.

He was in utter shock. Brain matter and blood splattered across his face, and a ringing filled his ears.

The dirty back alley, thick with yellow dust, tangled wires hanging everywhere, the decrepit brick-and-timber buildings straight out of the 1950s or ‘60s—everything seemed to flash away into nothingness.

He could neither hear nor see, save for the ghastly corpses—those of the thugs, Nick, Douglas...

And the enemy, closing in with every step.

He didn’t recognize most of their faces, but he knew those uniforms: deep brown martial robes, some with bare torsos.

There was no mistaking it. They were the fallen ones who followed Kaecilius.

The next instant, Meimu saw their leader.

A white man with hair gone silver, tied up in a knot atop his head, his features sharp and deeply set. In his dark, almost black eyes, there was an unrestrained cruelty and arrogance.

Kaecilius—once the main villain in Doctor Strange, now the greatest hound of the ultimate boss Dormammu on Earth.

He had once been the disciple of the Sorcerer Supreme, the Ancient One, whom Meimu was supposed to seek out as his next master. But Kaecilius betrayed her for the sake of dark power.

If he was right, Kaecilius and his followers had already infiltrated the Kamar-Taj library, slain its guardian, and stolen the most crucial pages of the forbidden tome, making themselves enemies not just of the Ancient One, but the entire world.

At this point in the timeline, he still looked human. A little later, after infusing himself with Dormammu’s power, his eye sockets would turn as black as ink, making him look like some immortal who hadn’t slept in seven nights—truly terrifying.

Dormammu himself had once been a sorcerer who discovered and entered the Dark Dimension, sacrificing his own body to become its master. The transformation granted him dreadful, evil power, and his flesh was replaced by seething magical flames. He began his conquest of other dimensions, becoming the most fearsome lord of darkness.

At the sight of Kaecilius, Meimu felt as if he’d swallowed a hundred live flies. His chest was tight with frustrated anger.

Damn it all, he hadn’t even made it out of the tutorial zone and here he was, facing the final boss. How was he supposed to fight this?

In a flash, four golden, spark-crackling magical whips lashed toward him like serpents.

There was no chance to resist or dodge—the speed of the attack was far beyond what any ordinary man could handle. Meimu managed only a half-step back before he was seized.

A searing pain shot through all four limbs, as if red-hot irons were clamped to his wrists and ankles. Forget struggling; just enduring the waves of agony crashing into his brain was enough to make him nearly pass out.

He felt as though he’d plunged into the deepest circle of hell.

Uncontrollable, Meimu screamed again and again.

A deep, resonant voice reached his ears, even as his hair was yanked back and his head was forced upward.

Whether he wanted to or not, his entire vision was filled with Kaecilius’s seemingly gentle, yet truly savage face.

Meimu’s features twisted with pain as he managed to gasp, “My surname is Mei, given name Mu!”

Kaecilius smiled. “Of course I know who you are. If you were truly Stephen Strange, you’d already be a corpse.”

Beside him, one of his lackeys produced a portrait and a photograph—the unmistakable likeness and photo of Doctor Stephen Strange himself.

Kaecilius sneered and shrugged nonchalantly. “Well, you’re clearly not him. An Easterner and a Westerner—hard to confuse. I don’t know how, as a mere bystander, you ended up replacing Stephen Strange as his ‘successor,’ but it doesn’t matter. My master wants me to kill Stephen Strange.”

Meimu’s heart was a tangled mess. He didn’t know how to describe what he felt.

Was it fear?

Terror?

A desperate will to survive?

Or was it a new despair, ready to embrace death?

Head wrenched back, gasping for air, he managed to croak, “So what, you’re going to kill me too? My passport says I’m Stephen Strange now!”

“Do it!” barked one of the dark followers in Spanish. For some reason, Meimu understood him perfectly.

But Kaecilius, with a sudden, explosive punch, smashed the blond youth in the face, bloodying his nose.

“How I do things is not for you to decide!” Kaecilius released Meimu and seized his lackey by the collar, raining down punch after punch—more than a dozen—until the man was left a broken heap.

“Do you know why I punished him?” he asked his followers.

The fallen ones shook their heads.

Kaecilius’s voice rose to a shout. “We are sorcerers! We are the chosen ones of the great dark power! As magnificent as we are, why should we care about some talentless nobody?”

He roared, “We have more important things to do than waste our time on a mere mortal with no magical aptitude! Kill? If we wished it, we could wipe out every ant-like mortal on this planet.”