Across the arena, five kilometers into the chaos, the Goblin Force was tangled with Jean Grey, now possessed by Phoenix.
The Goblin Force, born at the same Big Bang that created the Phoenix, its polar opposite and ancient enemy, the entity that had devoured whole galaxies before the Fifth Host of Celestials contained it, that had once consumed the Phoenix Force itself and brought Galactus to his knees before being sealed away, was throwing decay-energy in patterns that made the cosmic architecture flicker.
Jean was holding it at a stalemate, but barely. She was a human woman, even ascended, even cosmic, even Phoenix. It was a fundamental force of the universe. It would exhaust her before it exhausted itself.
Jean going down in this arena wasn't a variable Jay's brain would accept.
Jay changed directions again.
He drove himself into the edge of the Goblin Force's manifestation like a wedge driven into rotting wood, both hands now because power-theft had given him back a functional approximation of the one he'd lost, rainbow blood trailing where the stump had been wrapped and the Stones were running enough biology that the arm was moving whether or not it was technically still attached.
The Goblin Force turned from Jean to deal with the intrusion and in the half-second it took for its attention to shift, Jay's power-theft did its work.
He tore the decay-principle straight out of it with the violence of something being unmade at the molecular level. Reached past the Goblin Force's psionic nexus, past the insatiable hunger, down to the entropy-engine running beneath the manifestation, the specific principle that made the Goblin Force the feared entity it was, the thing that had let it consume Phoenix and Galactus both, and peeled it clean away like stripping flesh from bone with his bare hands.
The concept of rot forgetting its own definition while the thing that embodied rot screamed in frequencies that made cosmic beings cover their ears.
The Goblin Force reached for what it ran on and found a hollow where the hollow wasn't supposed to be, and the realization hit it the way prey realizes it's already dead. Its form wobbled, disintegration-waves it had been throwing flickering and dying mid-arc, psionic nexus stuttering like a transmitter that lost its signal while something that had devoured galaxies suddenly couldn't remember how to devour anything at all.
Jean's eyes blazed brighter. She understood what had just happened before the Goblin Force did. The Phoenix Force came forward in full and what it did to the Goblin Force in the next four minutes looked less like a fight and more like an execution, fire burning through something that had forgotten how to resist, cosmic predator reduced to cosmic prey in the time it took Jay to gut its foundation. It ended with silence where there'd been clash, and Jean landing in a crouch with her hair smoking at the edges and her expression carrying the look of having finished something very final.
The eternal enemy of Phoenix Force removed straight off the map of the multiverse because Jay had reached inside it and pulled out everything that made it dangerous, leaving behind only the screaming.
The third Entity Vacancy in the history of the multiverse opened up. The arena felt it as a pressure drop, the equalization field's cracked surface shuddering, and every being whose function intersected with entropy or decay ran an involuntary check on their own foundations and found them strengthened and overflowing, now free to take concepts from Goblin Force.
Jay, like a man possessed and running on nothing but rage and rainbow blood, was already moving. He'd taken the decay-principle and channeled it forward, compressed it into a lance of entropic force that looked like the end of everything given physical form and sent it into Oblivion's chest from fifteen kilometers out. The sound of it connecting was the sound of something that had never once in its long existence encountered the concept of things falling apart meeting that concept for the first time at close range and without warning, like teaching entropy to the concept of void itself.
Oblivion's legs cut trenches in the arena floor, three kilometers backward before his shadow caught him. He recovered and straightened. But the quality of attention he turned back toward Jay had changed again.
--------------------------------------------
The bloodbath had a shape of its own, even if Jay was too far inside it to see the shape clearly.
He went for Sire Hate next like a hunter who'd tasted blood and wanted more. Sire Hate, who'd been dissolving into grey mist not twenty kilometers away, who was in the process of being reassembled and was therefore in the specific vulnerable condition of something between states. Power-theft needed contact but it didn't need the entity to be functional, and Jay got one hand on the reforming mass and pulled the loathing-principle before reassembly was complete, tearing it out the way you'd tear organs from a body cavity.
Hate without a vessel is just an energy signature and an energy signature was something Jay could choke down and weaponize.
He hit Oblivion with timeless, concentrated J. Jonah Jameson-refined misanthropic fury transmuted through six Infinity Stones into a fundamental force that tasted like blood and felt like murder. The rage amplified the Stones, which in turn amplified his rage again, forming an infinite loop of hatred and power that fed on itself like a wound that wouldn't stop bleeding.
The detonation was visible from edge to edge of the arena and looked like the universe learning what it meant to hate.
Meanwhile, Eternity, the most regal entity and voice of the universe itself, whose authority was surpassed only by the Living Tribunal, who'd stood against the Infinity Gauntlet and against Abraxas and against every force that had ever tried to overwrite the multiverse, moved to intercept the Griever at the End of All Things while Jay had Oblivion's attention occupied.
The Griever was Oblivion's cleanup mechanism, the force that cleared civilizations when their time came, and without her primary host Abraxas to coordinate with, she was operating at reduced capacity.
Eternity was not.
Flanked by his sister Infinity, who was to space what Eternity was to time, and by the Queen of Nevers, who'd once been the Fourth Cosmos itself, the personification of possibility, who fought with the controlled fury of someone who'd been managing the indignity of this trial since its first session and was done managing it.
They moved in brutal three-to-one beatdown with the kind of coordinated violence that comes from cosmic beings who've decided someone needs to stop existing, the Queen particularly devoted to her attacks, remembering what nonsense she'd faced in this sham court. And when the Griever was on the verge of erasure, broken and bleeding concept-energy from wounds that shouldn't exist in abstract entities, they threw her body in Jay's path like feeding meat to a grinder.
He didn't hesitate. Used power theft to steal away whatever was left in Griever's essence, reaching into her dying form and pulling out everything that made her the Griever, leaving behind only the screaming absence of what she used to be.
Just like that, the fourth Entity Vacancy opened and somewhere in the multiverse something that had been waiting to die finally got permission.
In the observation tier above the gallery, the Watchers had stopped watching the fight.
They were watching the multiverse.
Uatu stood at the front of his kin, his vast white form completely motionless. Across the observation tier the other Watchers held the same posture, Aron, Ecce, every one of them, their great eyes open and focused not on the arena below but on the living map of the multiverse that each carried in their awareness at all times.
The map that told them the state of everything.
It was changing.
Where The Powers That Be had governed the domain of magic and the strange, there was now an absence the Watchers could see burning in the multiverse's structure like a hole torn in cloth. Every reality that drew on the mystical axis, and there were more realities than there were stars in any single universe, and nearly all of them drew on the mystical axis in some form, was running a process that had nowhere to report to.
The compact that had kept the wild and the rational in working relationship across the Eighth Cosmos had no counterpart on one side. The Watchers could see this the way you can see a wound on skin, not metaphorically but in the actual architecture of the thing they'd sworn to observe without intervening in.
The Elders of the Universe, the Grandmaster, the Gardener, the Runner, the Champion, more such beings who're the last surviving beings of their species and being cursed by the previous Lady Death to never enter her realm, had all but the recently incapacitated Collector gathered at the far end of the observation tier.
They weren't fighting. They'd made a unanimous and immediate decision not to be involved in whatever this was, because the Elders had survived this long by being very good at identifying which wars they couldn't win and being somewhere else for the duration.
They were watching the Living Tribunal.
The Living Tribunal floated above the center of the arena, equidistant from every combatant, his three faces, Equity, Vengeance, Necessity, all in motion, rotating through their functions the way they always did. He hadn't moved from that position since the fight between Jay and Oblivion began. Hadn't spoken. Hadn't intervened.
He was watching.
The Grandmaster, crossed the observation tier and stopped at the Living Tribunal's elevation.
"This has to stop." His voice had the specific controlled urgency of someone who gambles for a living and has just seen the other player flip the table. "You see what's happening. Every entity he removes from the cosmic hierarchy is a load-bearing wall. The multiverse isn't a suggestion, it requires its pillars. He's already removed four of the eight Ur-divisors, and that Butcher's not finished. You have the authority to end this. Use it."
The Living Tribunal's three faces continued their rotation. Equity faced the Grandmaster for a moment. Then Vengeance. Then Necessity.
He said nothing.
He turned back to watch Jay and Oblivion.
[A/N]: Support my work and get early access to chapters, exclusive content, and bonus material at my P@treon - Max_Striker.
If you wanna hang out, join my Discord server- https://discord.gg/XxGEYk2PM5