They walked toward each other slowly at first.
Oblivion across the cracked arena floor, scythe loose in one hand, his shadow pulling inward like a held breath. Jay from where he'd left the space that used to contain The Powers That Be, one functional arm while the other hung by threads of tethered cloak and sheer bloody-minded refusal to fall off, rainbow blood tracking every step in color-cycling arcs that looked like someone had spilled a paint store across cosmic stone.
The equalization field above them was making sounds it wasn't supposed to make. Hairline fractures had spread through the golden boundary since the moment Jay swallowed the sixth Stone, and the running detonations of the last few hours had turned those hairlines into proper cracks you could see from anywhere in the arena.
Nobody acknowledged the cracks out loud and that was the tell. When a structure is failing, beings inside it either panic or go very still. They'd gone very still. The Beyonders, the Celestials, the entities who'd survived the heat death of previous cosmoses, all holding the quiet that meant they'd noticed and were choosing not to name it, because naming structural failure in a contained space is the same as accelerating it.
They started walking, calm and controlled.
Then their steps grew faster, heavier, like something inside them had finally stopped holding back.
And in that quiet understanding that there was no other way this could end, no words left to say, no peace left to offer, they broke into a run.
They hit each other in the middle of the arena.
The crack of their fists meeting wasn't a sound so much as an event. The arena floor split outward from the point of impact in concentric fractures, sections dropping several inches before the equalization field caught them. The gallery above lurched. The Beyonders, who'd survived the end of multiple cosmoses, grabbed for purchase. Gaea's presence shuddered through the soles of every fighter who still had feet on stone.
The equalization field barely held, screaming like cosmically overtaxed architecture while the two of them threw the second punch.
After a few exchanges, it was apparent Jay wasn't winning. That was fine. He'd stopped trying to win this the proper way sometime around the second minute of trading blows in the arena's center, because winning against the primordial void on its own terms wasn't a realistic scenario for a man who'd existed for a fraction of a fraction of what Oblivion had experienced.
What Jay was doing instead was pushing, staying present, occupying every second of Oblivion's attention so his friends and family would be safe from this monster.
The rage was doing a lot of the work. He knew that. The part of his brain still running analysis knew he was operating from a compromised emotional state, that grief and fury and six Stones cycling through damaged tissue and soul were producing output that no baseline version of himself would've been able to safely hold.
He knew it and he didn't particularly give a damn, because The Powers That Be had abducted his son and he'd finally done something about it and god if that didn't feel fucking good. But there was still the thing that had sat behind this entire trial, targeting his family and plotting to erase his son from existence itself, an innocent boy, still standing in front of him with a scythe, and his soul had formed a clear opinion about the situation that no amount of damage was going to revise.
Oblivion drove a knee into his ribs that lifted Jay off the ground and deposited him sixteen meters to the left. Jay rolled, redistributed the momentum, came up already swinging.
His reality warping edited the geometry around his fist on the way in. The punch connected at an angle that shouldn't have existed from Jay's starting position and the crack of it landing drew a sound from fellow combatants that wasn't quite a cheer and wasn't quite horror but lived somewhere between the two.
Oblivion staggered half a step. His void-born darkness flickered at the edges where the impact had disrupted it.
Jay pressed forward. He had no intention of giving that half-step back.
----------------------------------------------------
The problem with the rage was that it was also the solution, and Jay's body had worked that out before his mind caught up.
Pure reactive instinct is a different thing from tactics. It doesn't plan. It just reads the room at a level below language and responds. And what his instinct had been reading for the last several minutes was simple: the gallery was full of them. The most powerful beings in the multiverse. A significant number on Oblivion's side of the arena. Jay's power theft ran hot when he was like this.
And the gallery was right there.
Oblivion threw him for the third time in four minutes, grabbed Jay by the ankle and put him into the arena wall on the far side with the casual efficiency of something that had been doing this since before the wall existed. Jay peeled off the crater he'd made and stayed on the wall for a moment, gravity suggesting things he wasn't obligated to follow, his one remaining hand flat against stone.
His eyes tracked sideways.
Abraxas the Bomb Entity, the antithesis of creation itself, born within Eternity's core at the moment of the Big Bang and kept sealed for the length of the Eighth Cosmos by Galactus's continued existence. The being that had murdered every variant of Galactus across alternate realities just to navigate the multiverse. The entity that had required Reed Richards to destroy and reconstitute the entire multiverse just to put him down, and who'd since been rehabilitated into Eternity's personal warhead, was five kilometers to his left, still occupying his position at the flank, still fighting his assigned opponents while watching Luv from across the arena with the kind of predatory attention that made Jay's power-theft ability start pulling toward him like a compass needle.
Jay pushed off the wall. He changed direction mid-flight and the vector shift came so abruptly that Oblivion's follow-up strike landed on empty air.
He hit Abraxas with his shoulder and the contact lasted approximately one second before Abraxas threw him off, and in that one second Jay's power theft did something it had never done at quite this scale.
It reached into the architecture of a Cosmic Abstract's power base and tore.
He ripped the detonation-principle straight out of Abraxas like yanking a spine through meat. The bomb-entity's self-detonation capacity, his reality-eating energy, the power-amplification function that Eternity used him as a battery for, all of it came free in one screaming motion with the wet sound of fundamental forces separating from their host, leaving Abraxas's hands unable to produce even sparks where moments before they could've leveled star systems with a flick.
Abraxas looked at his hands and the sound that came out of him wasn't cosmic or dignified but raw and animal, the kind of noise something makes when you've reached inside it and pulled out what makes it alive. Then his expression turned to horror as the weight of realization hit him deep in his soul and he collapsed to his knees like a puppet with cut strings, trying to ignite powers that no longer existed inside a suddenly hollow shell.
Oblivion had gone very still. His scythe was down at his side, watching Jay in a way he hadn't watched him before, threat assessment revised upward without warning.
"What," Oblivion said, with careful precision, "did you just do?"
Jay turned back toward him and raised his remaining working hand. The stolen detonation energy came out compressed into a sphere that looked like a dying star eating itself from the inside out, hit Oblivion's void-form at the sternum and pushed him back thirty-three kilometers, which was three kilometers more than anything had moved the primordial void in this arena.
"What you've always accused me of, you bastard!" Jay's voice came out distorted, rainbow light leaking from his mouth. "I STOLE!"
They went back to trading blows and Jay was building now, the stolen power of the Bomb-Entity running through the same channels the Infinity Stones used, power-theft integrating it into his biology the way it integrated everything but not without cost. His vision went to static at the edges every time a new power-set tried to seat itself inside damaged tissue, jaw clenching against the integration-burn that came with each stolen register of energy finding a home inside a body that wasn't architected to hold this much.
His fists when they landed started throwing off shockwaves of concussive force that put new cracks in the arena sections every time he connected. After the fourth exchange the blasts were the size of small supernovae, compressed and contained by the equalization field but hitting Oblivion's void-form with enough force that the shadow around him was developing gaps.
Oblivion drove the scythe into the arena floor and the recoil threw Jay across the space and into the far boundary with force enough to leave another impression. Jay got up and came back. His expression hadn't changed in the last three moves.
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