Lord Chaos, across the arena, had been doing something curious since the first vacancy appeared and she'd positioned herself between Master Order and the combat, and when Master Order moved to press toward Jay's position she was simply there, expression that wasn't threatening or deferential.
"Move," Master Order said.
"No, darling." Lord Chaos looked at him with the tired patience of someone who'd explained the same thing many times and had arrived at the point where she was done explaining. "I'm not letting this become a funeral for both of us, you stubborn catastrophe."
Master Order looked at her, then at the arena, back at her.
"This is not an appropriate time for your tantrum."
"I'm aware. I'm doing it anyway. Now be a good boy and sit down."
Several beings near them watched in open confusion as the embodiment of chaos kept the embodiment of order from entering the fight, and something in the dynamic between them that had never quite resolved itself came to understanding.
Jay, unaware of this forbidden romance building up, was standing in the center of the arena with his one working arm and the other barely bandaged to his left stump and more stolen power in his body than his body was built to hold, staring at Oblivion, who was staring back, and neither of them was breathing particularly normally.
Oblivion's form had taken actual damage and chunks of void-flesh were missing from his torso, the shadow that composed him showing real discontinuities where Jay had pushed the decay-principle through it. His cape had a burning hole in it the size of a fist from the last exchange, void-fabric fraying at the edges in a way it wasn't supposed to fray.
He looked, for the first time in this fight, like something that'd been in a fight.
Jay wasn't looking much better and his remaining arm was shaking from the effort of integration. Six Stones plus multiple stolen cosmic power-sets plus his own baseline abilities all cycling through the same badly damaged human biology, each new register of energy looking for a home inside a frame that'd been built for one man and was currently housing several abstract principles of reality.
His vision went to grey at the periphery and rainbow blood had stopped coming in arterial pulses and started coming in a constant seep, which was either better or worse and he'd decided not to notice that right now.
"You killed her," Oblivion said, and contempt was still there in his voice but there was something else now, something raw that'd climbed up through the contempt and was sitting on top of it like an open wound. "The Powers That Be. You killed a member of the cosmic axis and you're standing there like it was a decision worth making."
"She took my son." Jay's voice came out flat and dead, the kind of flat that meant everything underneath was screaming and the only way to function was to not let any of it out. "She hurt the Ancient One, the one who comes closest to a mother figure who actually loves me. She came to a place I trusted and tore it apart. So yes. I fucking did."
"You've shattered the balance of this cosmos. The multiverse's magical framework has no governing force. Every sorcerer in every reality is operating in a vacuum, their power source doesn't refill anymore. The compact between mystical and natural order no longer has a counterpart. You've done more damage to the structure of this existence in one mortal day than most threats to the multiverse have managed across entire eras."
"Quit gaslighting me, you bastard. You're the one who started it." Jay took a step toward Oblivion and rainbow light leaked from his eyes, not controlled or measured but spilling out like something inside him had cracked. "You called this trial. You put my son, an innocent child, in front of every being in this arena and asked them to vote on whether he deserved to exist. You did that knowing what it would take from me to fight through it. So don't stand there and talk to me about balance like you're the victim of my bad decisions."
Oblivion was quiet for a moment.
"You're an outsider," he said finally, contempt leaking through. "Don't you understand, you parasite? Everything you're touching is breaking."
"Yeah. I know." Jay's voice was still flat but there was something underneath it now, something that sounded like a laugh that'd forgotten how to be a laugh and turned into something else. "Don't care. Right now, I'm going to finish this and I'm going to enjoy watching you realize you fucked up."
He pushed Oblivion back to the boundary in a series of exchanges that didn't have the shape of strategy, just accumulated force finding its direction and accumulated rage finding something to hit. Each punch Jay landed threw detonations as the stolen power-sets integrated deeper, and by the time they reached the arena's outer edge the compressions were going off at a scale that forced even beings of near-infinite perception to cut their senses back, supernovae-force contained in the equalization field's failing architecture like arguments being settled by volume, each one putting a new note in the structural chorus of the field cracking overhead.
Oblivion hit the boundary and it nearly gave, pressing inward, the golden equalization field bowing around the impact and he pushed back but Jay drove his fist into the center of Oblivion's chest with everything he had left in the tank and something extra he didn't have but was using anyway.
The Big Bang he released in that moment wasn't just metaphorical, it was a compressed detonation of six Infinity Stone resonances, Space, Mind, Reality, Power, Time, Soul, all six cycling through the same badly damaged biology and cosmic-tier stolen power-sets releasing in a single directed point, and the force of it tore a real chunk out of Oblivion's void-substance as pieces of the primordial void simply ceased to be present where they'd been present a moment before.
The cape burned and his waist was barely attached to his legs and Oblivion's shadow pulsed wrong, suggesting something inside the void's being had been disrupted at the conceptual level.
Jay laughed.
It wasn't a nice sound, wasn't the laugh of someone who'd found something funny but the laugh of someone who'd gone past fear and past pain and was running on something that looked like joy from a distance but up close was just more rage with a smile painted on it.
"How's that feel?" Jay's voice came out wrong, distorted by the rainbow light bleeding from his mouth. "The thing that's older than everything, getting its ass beat by a human. Must really fucking sting."
The arena had gone completely silent, everyone just waiting for the final move and beings that'd watched the heat death of previous cosmoses were taking a mutual ceasefire with expressions none of them had worn in memory.
The Living Tribunal's three faces were all pointed at the same position, their expression now something he rarely showed, the last time being when he'd nearly died trying to absorb the outsider Protégée.
Oblivion recovered and the experience of fighting the Unnamed Ones at the multiverse's outer boundary, the things that existed beyond the void itself, had given him a tolerance for this category of damage that Jay hadn't fully accounted for. He came back in with the renewed force and dangerous patience of a border guard that'd survived worse and learned from all of it, and the next several minutes weren't going well for Jay.
He got hit and he got hit again and he kept getting pushed back.
He went down the first time using his forearm to break it, the Stones screaming through his biology as the impact transferred and he got up. He got hit again.
He went down the second time onto one knee, arena floor pressing up through his palm, vision going fully grey at the edges before the Power Stone forced his biology back online and he got up.
The third time he went down on his side and lay there for a full two seconds and his chest wasn't moving right, something in the left ribs had stopped participating in the usual arrangement.
He got up and he was grinning now, blood running down his chin, the kind of grin that didn't mean happy, meant broken.
"You think," Oblivion said, during a pause where Jay was on one knee with the arena floor pressing up through his palm, "that endurance is the same as strength. It isn't. You're a man. You have limits. Every time you stand up from something that should keep you down, you're spending something you can't replace. Eventually, the spending stops."
"Noted." Jay used the arm that wasn't shaking to push himself upright and stood up again and the grin was still there, wider now, manic. "But here's the thing, you walking existential crisis, I've got a whole lot left to spend and you're the one I'm spending it on."
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