The roar completed itself.
Oblivion came across the arena with nothing held back, void-energy pouring from him in waves that made the equalization field scream, not tactical anymore, not measured, just grief and fury given form.
Jay raised his remaining arm but Domino was already there, the Death Stone blazing violet, probability manipulation carving safe vectors through the assault.
"Get Luv out!" Jay shouted.
"Not without you!"
And then another figure stepped between them and Oblivion.
Lady Death, skeletal and chained, the confinement restraints still binding her wrists and throat. She'd broken free. She'd come here.
"Brother," she said. "Stop this."
Oblivion's strike, meant for Jay, caught her instead.
The void-energy that should've passed through her metaphysical form instead shattered it and the chains binding her, already weakened, fragmented. Her bones scattered across the arena floor.
Oblivion stopped.
Stared.
Went down on one knee beside what remained.
The tear that came down Oblivion's face was singular and immediate, the first tear the Border Zarr of the multiverse ever shed, and it caught the arena light and threw it back in grey and gold.
"Why did you come here?" His voice was barely above a murmur, which was somehow worse than the booming voice full of pride he'd been using all this time, and his hand was on her skull, carefully touching it, afraid to break what was already broken. "You were safe in confinement. You were contained and protected. I had arrangements. Why did you leave? Why would you come into this arena? Why would you throw yourself at him? Why would you do this for a brother who couldn't even protect his sister?"
The Arena went quiet in a different register than it'd gone quiet before.
Several beings who'd spent the last several hours watching the primordial void argue for the erasure of a five-year-old, who'd listened to his contempt, his cosmic authority and his self-righteous bigotry delivered with the confidence of never being checked, were now watching the same being crouch over his sister's remains and come apart. It didn't make him sympathetic exactly, but it made him comprehensible, and comprehensible was its own kind of uncomfortable.
The murmur that went through the gallery was the sound of recalibration, of beings who'd assumed they fully understood the shape of this and were discovering the shape had more dimensions than they'd accounted for.
And then the single tear became fury.
This new rage that came out of Oblivion wasn't the bigotry-and-authority rage he'd shown Jay all day, that'd been performance over control, the rage of a being who'd decided it was acceptable to feel this way and was expressing it correctly. This was the other kind, uncontrolled and unstructured, coming from somewhere the void didn't usually permit access to, grief converting to fury at a speed that left no room for the formal contempt he'd been deploying. He rose from beside his sister's bones and turned toward Jay and what was in his expression had nothing of the composed cosmic entity in it, just devastation expressing itself as aggression because devastation had nowhere else to go.
The scythe reformed in his hand from shadow and void-substance mixed with his sister's remains, no longer just a weapon from before but rawer, pulled from the deepest part of mania Oblivion was drawing from.
"You," he said. "It's been you all along. Everything. Every single arrangement. Every well-thought-out compact. Every necessary framework I had. You walked in here and you broke all of it with your dirty hands ripping them apart. All of this for one boy? For one abomination who should never have been born?! And she was silenced for it. She came here to defend her failure of a brother and she is gone! Look carefully, that is what you made."
His voice wasn't the void's authority anymore, it was just the sound a man makes when what cannot be taken has been taken anyway.
"I am going to erase you," Oblivion said. "I don't care for this trial or this court anymore! Just me and you, right here, right now. I am going to reach into the fabric of the multiverse and I am going to pull you out of it thread by thread until your patron Eternity himself forgets you were ever here. But before that I'm going to take my time with your woman and son. It'll be a show just for you."
The void-energy that came off him wasn't the equalized version the field had been containing, this was outside the field's ceiling, what Oblivion had been holding back just to keep the trial's integrity intact, and now he'd forgone the thought and the field's architecture above them groaned with structural stress.
Jay stood where he was, swaying, and rainbow blood leaked from his right eye socket where Oblivion's earlier strike had carved through flesh and bone. His right arm was gone at the shoulder, the stump weeping the same impossible chromatic fluid in thick rivulets that hissed and steamed where they hit the arena floor. Each drop left tiny fractures in reality itself, hairline cracks that glowed with six-colored light.
The Infinity Stones embedded in his biology were killing him and he could feel it. Darwin's Reactive Adaptation was screaming at maximum capacity just to keep his heart beating, his lungs inflating, his brain firing, and the integration that'd seemed so triumphant moments ago was now a vice crushing him from the inside out.
He looked at the new Manic Oblivion with his sister's carcass turned to scythe, and instead of the rage that'd fueled him all fight, he felt another thing entirely.
Shame.
Deep, hollowing shame as he understood the face he'd been showing his son.
He'd been running this fight on rage, pillaged powers and the stubborn human refusal to stay down that'd been his one consistent asset since he arrived in this multiverse, and he'd used everything in the tank. And now he was standing on the other side of all of it, more damaged than he'd been in any fight before this, missing pieces he was never going to get back, looking at the oldest thing in creation having the worst moment of its existence and coming at him with everything it'd been holding in reserve.
Across the arena, Luv was pressed against Bonk's side, small hands gripping the dinosaur's scales, watching his Daddy bleed colors that shouldn't exist, and the five-year-old's face was pale, eyes too wide, chest heaving with the kind of fear that comes when the person who's supposed to keep you safe looks like they're breaking apart.
And Jay saw himself reflected in Oblivion's grief-twisted face, saw the rage, the loss of control, the willingness to destroy everything because the precious had been taken, saw what Luv had been watching for the past several minutes of combat.
The stranger-fear in his son's eyes suddenly made perfect sense.
Oblivion was already moving and the scythe came around in an arc meant to remove Jay's head from his shoulders.
Domino stepped between them, the Death Stone blazing so bright it cast violet shadows across the arena floor, and the scythe struck her barrier and stopped, void-energy meeting death-authority in a collision that sent hairline fractures spreading through the equalization field overhead.
"You want him?" Domino said, and her voice was very calm. "You go through me first."
"Gladly," Oblivion said, and swung again.
Jay watched his wife hold the line, watched her probability manipulation twist the scythe's trajectory just enough, watched the Death Stone's authority push back against void-energy that should've overwhelmed any mortal wielder, and she was buying him time, time to recover, time to think, time to find another way.
But Oblivion wasn't stopping and each strike came faster, harder, more desperate, and the grief-mad void was throwing everything at her and Domino's defenses were starting to crack.
"Mom!" Luv's voice cut across the arena.
Jay's head snapped toward his son and Luv had pushed away from Bonk, was taking steps toward the fight, small hands outstretched.
And Oblivion saw him.
The void's eyes tracked to the five-year-old and the scythe in his hand shifted direction mid-swing, no longer aimed at Domino but past her, toward the small figure thirty feet beyond.
"No more delays," Oblivion said. "The abomination ends now."
Jay was still standing thirty feet away, swaying, and the Stones were the only reason he was upright. Darwin's Adaptation was screaming. Every cell in his body was voting to shut down.
But Luv was in Oblivion's sightline now and Domino was out of position and the scythe was already moving.
Jay reached inward, toward the Stones, toward the stolen powers, toward anything left in the tank.
One more push. That's all he needed. One more.
But instead of going back to rage and mania as fuel, he shifted.
Not in the arena outwardly but in Jay's head, inside his mindscape, where all his looted powers manifested and integrated, and the enhancement that'd come with the Infinity Stones in his biology had changed what that space looked like, had turned the starry sky into a galaxy. In that galaxy all the powers he'd been running today were present as separate things, the Stones each an entity of their own governing their aspects in wondrous yet deadly harmony, the stolen authorities of abstract beings, the decay addiction of Goblin Force, the loathing-principle of Sire Hate, the Bomb-craze from Abraxas and the Voidesque-aspect of The Griever at the end of all things, all of it sitting in its own space inside him because the moment he'd tried to fuse them like he did with his old powers his own body would explode in a grotesque blast of flesh and energies as warned constantly by his Danger Sense.
He looked at his Power-Theft ability in his mind, the version of himself with ocean-deep eyes and a tattered red cape, and it looked back at him.
And then it smiled.
Not the cautious, analytical expression it usually wore but a full, wild grin that said: finally.
It wasn't that he had six Stones and four stolen powers running in parallel, it was that all of them were running through the same host, barely holding together only because Darwin's Reactive Adaptation was keeping him alive from all this abuse of his body, and the power-theft itself had been watching all of it and cataloguing and learning from these new and highly superior powers but it wasn't one to be left behind.
"You've been holding back," Jay said to his own reflection in his mindscape. "Keeping everything separate because fusion would kill me. Because I was afraid of losing control."
The Power Theft avatar stepped forward, that red cape billowing in non-existent wind.
"But you know what?" Jay's voice echoed through his own mind, and he glanced toward the edge of his mindscape where he could feel his son's presence in the real world, small and scared and watching. "My son is out there terrified. Not of Oblivion but me, can you believe that? Because I've been fighting like a monster to protect him from a monster."
He looked at the six Infinity Stones, each one a burning star of cosmic principle in his mental sky.
"If I'm going to do this, if I'm going to finish this, I need to do it right. Not as the thing Oblivion says I am but as the thing I choose to be. A father. Protecting his family. One last time."
He reached out toward his Power Theft avatar.
"Show me what we can be when we stop being afraid."
In the final moment, his Power Theft avatar grasped his hand, and suddenly the separation collapsed, the avatar merged with Jay, flowing into him like liquid starlight, and the mindscape ignited.
The six Infinity Stones began to spiral inward, not away from each other but toward each other, pulling the stolen cosmic principles with them in a rotation that looked like...
"A drill," Jay whispered, and despite everything, the pain, the blood loss, the dying, he smiled. "Of course it's a drill."
The fusion began.
Light came up from the arena floor around Jay.
Prismatic light, not the clean rainbow of the Infinity Stones at rest but raw and organic, the exact chromatic signature of the blood pouring from his wounds, now amplified and weaponized. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, spiraling together in a helix pattern that punched straight through what remained of the equalization field's structural integrity.
The field didn't groan this time, it shattered, pieces of cosmic architecture raining down in geometric fragments that disintegrated before hitting the arena floor.
The form that came out of that light wasn't Jay exactly, it was Jay as the sum of everything he'd taken in and held and integrated, the power-theft at its full extension expressed outward, and what it looked like from the gallery was in the rough shape of a man but enormous at the edges without being physically large.
His Tachyon Particles had gone beyond silver, they were incandescent, burning with prismatic light that matched his blood, and his hair streamed behind him in a corona of the same six-colored radiance.
But he was still bleeding, still missing his arm and still mortal at his core despite the cosmic integration running through him.
Jay's Power Theft amplified, unified and whole at last.
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