Oblivion drove him into the floor again.
Jay lay there for a moment and he heard the arena go completely silent, heard the fight stop around him.
Most importantly he heard Domino somewhere in his Infinite perception, the Death Stone's gentle energy registers distinct from everything else, still moving and working.
He heard Luv.
Not through the Stones specifically, just through the particular frequency that'd existed since the moment his son was born, the connection that had nothing to do with cosmic power and everything to do with the fact that Luv was his kid and Jay had learned the specific weight of his footsteps and the particular pitch of his voice and could find him in any noise.
Luv was okay, moving with Franklin and Nate between casualties, trying to help, Bonk pressed to his side, still working, still doing the job, still being exactly who he was even in the middle of all this.
That image was enough.
Jay's seventh stand-up was the same as the others in every way that mattered and completely different in one.
He got up for the eighth time and he was laughing again, that wrong sound that made people watching flinch because it was the sound of something inside a person snapping and deciding it liked being broken.
The scythe came from outside his danger sense and that was the tell.
Everything about the arena registered in Jay's extended awareness, every power output, every movement, every incoming threat vector and the danger sense had been running continuously since the trial started, a background process that kept him fractionally ahead of things that should've killed him.
A weapon coming from outside his danger sense was a weapon coming from outside the arena's logic.
The arc took his left arm. Again.
Jay turned and he'd been wrong about the direction it came from twice already because the arc had curved, and he tracked it back to the source and his brain went still with recognition landing wrong, the way recognition lands when you place something familiar in a context that has no right to contain it.
The scythe was made of bone and a golden chain worked into the blade, the chains from the court, the chains that'd held Lady Death herself.
He was placing it now and the placing of it was a cold thing that moved through him separate from the rest of the fight's heat.
She was standing there, thirty meters to his right, on the edge of the arena's south boundary where the equalization field had cracked worst, where golden light came through in damaged columns. Positioned, Jay understood, so that if he turned to face Oblivion he'd be facing away from her, which was exactly how the scythe had found a vector outside his danger sense.
Lady Death, not the new principle but the old one, just a frail skeleton now, her form stripped back to the fundamental structure, golden chains still wound around her wrists, ankles and throat from however long she'd been in confinement. She'd taken what was left of herself and made a weapon out of it instead of seeking redemption and her spine had been worked into the scythe's shaft and her ribs were the blade.
Her empty sockets were looking at Jay with the same gaze as a gambler down to their last penny staking everything and going all in.
She was already swinging again.
A shot came from his left before any of them could sense it, one round with the Death Stone's violet pulsing along the barrel, and it went through the left eye socket of Lady Death's skull with a crack that sent chunks of bone scattering across the arena floor.
The scythe dropped and the skeletal form crumpled and the ancient principle of death that'd governed this multiverse before Domino had lost her final bet.
Domino was at Jay's side before he finished turning and her hand went to his shoulder first, taking his weight, and then she saw his face, the missing arm, what the last forty minutes had done to the rest of him.
She didn't say anything, couldn't, and she was checking his injuries with the experience of someone who'd learned battlefield triage from firsthand accounts and everything she found made her jaw tighter.
His right eye was seeping rainbow blood and the chest had lacerations running in lattice patterns where void-touches had found purchase. There were chunks of tissue that were simply not present where they should've been, places where Oblivion had hit him with something that took what it touched rather than damaging it. The remaining arm was functional in the loosest sense, the Stones running enough biological scaffolding to maintain movement.
"Jay," she said, one word with everything in it.
"I know."
He was looking at Lady Death's crumpled form, at the scythe lying on arena stone, and his mind was already running the calculation about what power-theft could do with what remained in that form, the ancient death-principle in its exhausted and hollowed state, what he could extract from it, what he could invert and weaponize, what he could do to Oblivion with the original death concept as a blunt instrument.
His body was already moving to close the distance to the fallen form and the grin was back, that manic broken thing that'd replaced his smile somewhere in the last hour.
Domino put her arms around him from behind, pulling him back.
She wasn't restraining him, she was just there, her weight against his back, her arms around his ribs where the lacerations ran, and the sob she'd been carrying for the last ten minutes came out against his shoulder, quiet and completely devastating.
"Please stop. Look at Luv," she said, and her voice was steady but it cost her something to keep it that way. "Jay. Look at your son."
He didn't want to look.
He wanted to go get that scythe, wanted to tear whatever was left out of Lady Death's corpse, wanted to use it to carve Oblivion apart piece by piece until there was nothing left but void-dust and regret, wanted to make the bastard understand what it felt like to have someone you love put in danger by forces you couldn't control.
He wanted to finish this.
But Domino's arms were around him and her voice was breaking and she was asking him to look at his son.
He turned.
Luv was thirty feet away, held between Franklin and Nate who'd both put themselves between him and the combat, and Bonk was pressed against his side.
Luv was looking at Jay.
That expression, what was on Luv's face was the one expression no parent ever wants to see aimed at them and the poor boy's chest was heaving, his blue eyes wide and wet and fixed on Jay, showing him a face they didn't know the person they loved possessed.
The expression of absolute terror, the terror of a five-year-old looking at a stranger wearing his father's skin.
Luv had been through a lot in the span of a few hours, he'd been abducted, he'd stood in the center of the cosmic court while beings older than time voted on his right to existence, he'd watched his father wrapped in chains like a caged animal, he'd seen Bonk, his best friend, nearly die.
But none of it had produced this expression. This expression was new.
And it was aimed at Jay.
The manic fire inside Jay went out in an instant, snuffed like someone had dumped cold water on it, and the grin fell off his face and left something hollow behind.
He looked down at his hands, at the dried multicolored blood, at the lacerations on his chest and the stumps where his arms ended, at the violet stone light coming off the arena floor where Lady Death had fallen. He looked at all of it with the eyes of someone who hadn't been fully inside his own body for the last stretch of this fight and was now back, standing in the wreckage, taking inventory of what his hands had done.
He'd killed cosmic entities today and he'd cracked the structural axis of the multiverse's power balance, he'd carved a path through Oblivion's side of the arena that left Vacancies in the cosmic hierarchy where there'd been none in recorded history, and he'd done it with his own hands, six Infinity Stones and powers stolen from beings that'd existed before the word ancient applied to anything.
He'd done it while laughing, while grinning, while something inside him that was supposed to keep him human had shut off and let him become something else.
He didn't regret the what, he regretted the how, regretted that his son who'd always looked at him with trust and safety was now looking at him with that expression, regretted that the face Luv was afraid of was his face, regretted that he'd put it there.
The worst part was knowing that somewhere in the last forty minutes he'd enjoyed it, had felt that manic joy at making gods bleed and watching cosmic principles beg, had laughed while doing things that should've horrified him.
And his son had seen it all.
He opened his mouth to console his son, to say something that would fix this, that would make Luv understand that it was still him, that he was still Dad, that the monster Luv had just watched tear through the cosmic hierarchy was just a thing he'd had to become for a little while.
"Luv... son, this is not..."
A roar came from across the arena before he could produce the next word and it cut through everything, through the silence and the moment and the fragile attempt at connection Jay was trying to make with his terrified son.
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