Wade Wilson, twenty feet away from the nearest chunk of ongoing combat, stopped mid-monologue.
"Okay," he said. "Okay, so that's new. And also deeply concerning for our special effects department's budget. Do you have any idea how expensive VFX and lighting rigs are?!"
Oblivion stopped advancing and the scythe meant for Luv hung in the air, forgotten. He looked at what was standing across from him and the raw grief-rage in his expression went through several transformations before it settled on an amalgam that incorporated all of them simultaneously.
"What are you?" he said, a genuine question from a being that'd existed since before questions were necessary, asked because it'd encountered a thing it needed to actually know the answer to.
"Still me," Jay said, and his voice carried without volume, resonating across dimensions in a way it hadn't before. "Still human, still an outsider and most importantly still a father."
He raised his left hand, his only remaining hand, and looked at it, at the prismatic light running through his veins, at the way his blood was spiraling even beneath his skin in microscopic helixes.
He looked directly at Oblivion, and his ruined right eye socket blazed with the same six-colored light.
"You want to talk about the outsider? Alright. Let's talk."
He took a step forward and the arena floor cracked under the step from the weight of six Infinity Stones, four cosmic abstract principles and every stolen power he'd ever integrated, all of it held together by a human heart that refused to stop beating.
"You've been telling me all day what I am. Parasite. Aberration. The thing that doesn't belong, that infected this multiverse, that should never have walked through the door. And you know what? Some of that's fair."
He took another step as rainbow blood dripped from his stump, from his eye, and where it hit the ground it burned with prismatic fire.
"I didn't grow up here. I was favored by the One Above All. I only kept stealing from this universe. But I walked in and fell in love with a woman who was already here, and adopted a son I didn't plan for, and I made a mess of the balance of things because I wasn't mindful enough of the consequences of my action."
The light around him intensified.
"But my son is five years old. He loves his dinosaur. He puts his hands over his ears when things get loud. He has this thing where he leans his forehead against Bonk's when he's scared because Bonk presses back and it helps. He didn't ask to exist. He exists because of my actions. Yet he's who he is because I love his mother and she chose me back. The poor thing has done nothing wrong except be born in a way that makes some cosmic entities uncomfortable because of who his genetic material belongs to."
Jay stopped walking ten feet from Oblivion.
"You called Domino, the love of all my lives, a whore," he said, and his voice was very quiet but it carried to every corner of the arena. "In front of our son. In the court of the Living Tribunal, with the full gallery present. You tried to dress it up in regal language, Outsider's corruption of the bloodline, violation of the multiverse's integrity, all of it. But what you said was that the woman I love was reduced by loving me, and what you meant was that she should've stayed in her approved category and not chosen the thing you didn't find appropriate."
The prismatic blood flowing from his wounds began to spin.
"That's not cosmic law. That's just you, a small, mean, personal thing wearing a cosmic hat."
He paused, and his expression softened fractionally.
"I'm sorry about your sister. She made choices today that I don't think you'd have advised her to make, and what happened to her is not the outcome I wanted. She should've just stayed in her confinement and repented for her actions. She should've stayed out of this. That's not on you."
Even Oblivion paused before his scythe came up, trembling in his grip.
"Enough talking, you VERMIN!" he said, and his voice had found its depth again, the void-resonance that predated words. "You want to be here? Then stay here. Be part of this multiverse and accept what it costs."
"Right," Jay said. "Yeah... Alright."
He raised his right arm.
Except it was just the stump.
The end of it, where the arm had been taken, where rainbow blood poured in a steady stream, the prismatic light bleeding from destroyed tissue.
But now the blood didn't just pour anymore.
It erupted.
A geyser of prismatic life-fluid that defied entropy itself, spiraling upward from the stump in a helix pattern that the six Infinity Stones locked into dimensional permanence, and the Carl Creel-derived absorption, working with the Infinity Stone scaffolding adjusted to the power-theft synthesis, all of it converging on the specific problem of a missing limb and the solution it arrived at wasn't mere regeneration.
It was weaponization.
The rainbow blood hardened mid-spiral, crystallizing into a physical construct that shouldn't exist, each color finding its place in the rotation.
Purple at the outer edge, raw kinetic force from the Power Stone.
Orange spiraling inward, the weight of every life he'd touched from the Soul Stone.
Yellow in the third layer, every memory of his son's laughter from the Mind Stone.
Green deeper still, every tomorrow he was fighting for from the Time Stone.
Blue near the core, the distance he'd crossed to find his family from the Space Stone.
Red at the very center, the impossible made real from the Reality Stone.
All of it spinning, drilling, growing, fueled by the stolen cosmic principles woven between the colors, decay, loathing, annihilation and ending, all of it integrated, all of it finally his, held together by Darwin's adaptation screaming at maximum capacity to keep his body from flying apart.
The drill extended from his shoulder, six feet, twelve, twenty, fifty.
Each rotation threw rainbow blood in tight arcs that burned the air where they passed.
Each revolution punched hairline fractures in multiverse seams.
And at the drill's tip, the very point, was Jay's last drop of purely human blood, from before the Stones, the single red cell that remembered being normal, being a man who just wanted to love his family.
That was what would pierce Oblivion.
A father's love made weapon.
"You bigoted piece of primordial shit," Jay said, and his voice was perfectly calm. "You're right that I'm an outsider. I always will be. I'm going to live with that. My son is going to live with that."
The drill spun faster, growing larger, the rainbow blood-construct now the size of a small building and still expanding.
"But now the multiverse is going to learn to live with the both of us."
His foot dug forward.
"Because we're not going fucking anywhere."
The charge began.
Jay crossed the distance between himself and Oblivion in three strides, each one leaving craters of prismatic fire, the drill extending before him like the prow of a ship cutting through void-energy that tried and failed to slow his momentum.
Oblivion raised the scythe, swung it in a horizontal arc meant to bisect Jay at the waist.
The rainbow drill caught it mid-swing, the rotation grabbing the scythe's blade and pulling, yanking the weapon from Oblivion's grip and flinging it across the arena where it shattered against the far wall.
Oblivion stumbled backward, void-substance flickering, and for the first time since the beginning of all things his expression showed what might've been fear.
"What are you..."
Jay didn't answer.
The drill hit Oblivion's chest.
And the sound was the sound of a fundamental thing breaking, the breaking of a law, like the principle that said "the primordial void cannot be wounded" meeting the principle that said "a family man protects his family" and discovering which one the multiverse considered more fundamental.
The drill bored through void-substance with a sound that removed itself from the noise of the arena and occupied a different register entirely, the register of things that are happening for the first time in the history of what has always been.
The hole it made in Oblivion wasn't damage and wasn't a wound and wasn't any category that the gallery's experience gave them language for.
It was simply there, where primordial void had been.
Rainbow light poured into the wound, six colors spiraling into the darkness, and where they touched the void-substance changed, became neither void nor light but a third thing, a thing that'd never existed before this moment.
Oblivion screamed.
Not with his voice but with his being, the sound of entropy itself experiencing pain for the first time, howling across every dimension simultaneously.
The void stumbled backward and the shadow that composed him flickered and came back and flickered again, and he went down on one knee at the arena's boundary, both hands pressed against the hole in his chest where rainbow light was bleeding into primordial darkness.
Jay stood over him and the drill was still spinning, still extending from his shoulder-stump, still leaking rainbow blood with each revolution, and the light around him was doing a thing that even Eternity, galaxy-chested and ancient, was watching with both wonder and care, the kind of attention reserved for genuinely unprecedented events.
He raised the drill for the second strike.
And then he heard it.
A small voice, cutting through the cosmic resonance and the void's screaming and the gallery's shocked silence.
"Daddy?"
Jay froze.
He turned his head slowly and looked across the arena.
Luv was standing now, having pushed away from Bonk's protective bulk, and the five-year-old was taking hesitant steps forward, small hands outstretched, eyes wide and wet and terrified.
"Daddy, you're... you're bleeding so much..."
The stranger-fear was still there in his son's face but underneath it recognition was trying to find its way back, the child's fundamental certainty that Daddy was supposed to be safe, supposed to be the one who made things better, not the scary glowing figure covered in rainbow blood preparing to execute a cosmic entity.
But the fear was winning and Luv's steps faltered, stopped, and his small hands dropped to his sides.
He was afraid. Of Jay. Of his own father.
Jay looked at his son.
Looked at the drill extending from his shoulder.
Looked at Oblivion, still on one knee and wounded.
And the truth hit him like a physical blow.
He was standing over a grief-stricken being who'd just lost his sister, preparing to kill him while his five-year-old son watched.
He was becoming exactly what Oblivion had accused him of being.
The thing that broke cosmic law, violated the natural order, that took and took and took until nothing remained.
The parasite.
Not because of what he'd stolen.
Because of what he was willing to do with it.
The drill wavered.
Jay watched his wife scoop up their son, watched Luv bury his face against her shoulder, watched both of them look at him with expressions that were equal parts pride and horror.
The drill began to slow its rotation.
"No," Jay said quietly, to himself, to the part of him that wanted to finish it, that wanted the satisfaction of victory, that wanted Oblivion gone so the threat to his family would end permanently. "No, that's not... that's not who I am."
He looked at Oblivion, at the hole in the primordial void's chest, at the rainbow light bleeding into darkness.
"You live," Jay said, and his voice was very quiet. "Not because you deserve it or because I forgive you. You live because my son is too young and pure, he doesn't need to watch his father become a monster like you. You live because I'd rather be a good dad than a victorious man."
The drill began to retract.
The rainbow blood spiraling back toward his shoulder, the construct unwinding, the cosmic principles that'd been unified in that perfect weapon-form separating back into their component powers.
"But if you ever threaten my family again..."
Jay leaned down, close enough that only Oblivion could hear.
"I'll come back. And next time, I will finish it. I will finish you, your co-conspirators, and everything you care about will be taken from you. Remember that."
He straightened, turned his back on the primordial void, and started walking toward his family.
The transformation was already fading, the prismatic light dimming, the cosmic presence collapsing back into human dimensions, and the integration that'd let him achieve fusion was still there, he could feel it, permanent now, the six Stones and four cosmic abstracts no longer running parallel but truly unified. But the expression of it, the manifestation, that was being pulled back by his own choice.
By his decision to be human instead of transcendent.
To be Daddy instead of destroyer.
He'd made it perhaps five steps when his powers gave out.
Darwin's Adaptation had been screaming for the past three minutes, holding his body together through integration that should've liquefied his biology, and now that the immediate threat was past it was demanding payment for services rendered.
Jay was smiling and walking towards his future when suddenly his Danger Sense screamed bloody murder.
"Jay!!"
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