Out at the arena's far edge, between one breath and the next, the equalization field pulsed, the cosmic leveler Oblivion himself had agreed to fight inside, the thing that shaved power down to something survivable for flesh and stone and borrowed time. Fighting Oblivion came with one problem and it was a hell of a problem. He'd been doing this since before time meant anything, not tactics or strategy, just experience stacked so deep that calling him "ancient" was a joke. Out at the void's border, fighting things that couldn't enter creation but never stopped trying, he'd learned exactly one thing that mattered right now.
How much it took to break the unbreakable.
Drawing from reserves older than the equalization field itself, he quit redirecting Jay's attacks and hit Jay with everything.
Jay raised his arm with infinity energy blazing, which did him no goddamn good whatsoever.
The force hit like a freight train made of the universe's fuck you and Jay flew across the arena, slammed into the far barrier hard enough to crack what shouldn't crack, and when he peeled off he left an impression in the wall along with something wet and red on the stone.
His right hand was just gone, torn off at the wrist in a spray of rainbow blood that painted the arena floor in colors that shouldn't exist.
He hit ground and rolled while pain caught up half a second later, the kind of pain that makes your vision white out at the edges, and his body screamed at him while rainbow blood came up when he coughed, spattering across the stone in thick wet droplets. Six Infinity Stones threaded through human tissue, fused into the architecture of a mortal frame that was never built to hold them, meant his blood cycled through colors as it splashed across the floor in shades that shouldn't exist but did anyway, Space-blue bleeding into Reality-red into Mind-gold, each one a war crime against biology. He pushed himself up with his remaining arm, the stump of his right wrist leaving smears of rainbow across the stone, and took stock of the situation.
The arena was packed now with Skrulls appearing in formations under Fury's command, shifting into heroes and throwing powers around while Nova Corps assembled in tight groups while Shi'ar Imperial Guard took the far flank with forty-seven warriors in armor. Both of them had sized up the situation and picked Oblivion's side.
He was an Ur-divisor, one of eight abstract entities along the Universal Axis of Power, paired with the Living Tribunal itself at the summit of the Eighth Cosmos's cosmic hierarchy. Against that, the math was a boot on a skull and you picked the winning side or you got ground to powder under it.
More poured in every minute.
Jay coughed again with rainbow blood hitting stone in thick wet splashes and he tried reality warping, tried soul healing, tried time manipulation, tried everything while the void kept eating at the stump where his hand used to be, chewing through reality warping like it was nothing, and at his internal injuries, unraveling whatever he attempted to fix. The stump kept bleeding, rainbow colors dripping between his fingers as he pressed his remaining hand against it.
Across the arena, through hundreds of fights happening at once, he felt Luv but didn't see him, just felt him through the perception the Stones gave him that went past any super sight. His son was still out there with Bonk, still moving through casualties and healing the injured, doing the job he'd been given.
Then Oblivion moved and the scythe came up, pointing away from Jay and straight at Luv.
Jay's body moved before his brain finished processing and he pushed off the floor with one arm, full intention of crossing the distance before that scythe finished its arc. He got maybe two feet before his legs quit, tendons severed, and rainbow blood fountained from his calves in hot jets that soaked the stone beneath him. The floor caught him and he went down hard.
He lay there with his cheek against the stone and his one remaining hand flat on the arena floor, fingers spread in rainbow blood, watching. The Stones burned inside him like six suns that'd decided dying was optional, and none of it mattered because he couldn't stand the fuck up, couldn't move, couldn't do anything but watch that scythe come down at his son.
Luv watched the scythe coming and something inside him reached outward, not a decision but instinct amplified by his newly unleashed well of powers, broadcasting a call for help from anyone, anywhere and anywhen as he reached the way you reach when it's all you've got left.
Inside Luv, in the space between fear and reflex, he felt the cold geometry of the scythe's arc and understood it the way animals understand falling, not in language, not in thought, just in the body. He was five years old. Bonk pressed hard into his side. He broadcast.
Blue light exploded around him.
Two shapes hit the scythe from behind simultaneously, at the grip, and both hit within a tenth of a second to catch the weapon at the right angle and drive it into the arena floor instead of through a five-year-old and his dinosaur.
The scythe hit stone and Oblivion staggered. Both figures landed clean. Dust cleared in stages and the arena went dead quiet in that way it does when nobody knows how to process what just happened.
The first to resolve out of the settling dust was tall and early twenties with blond hair loose around a face that had a sharp jaw and baby blue eyes, plus a grin that said he was pretty damn satisfied with that entrance. Blue uniform made of unstable molecules, with a big Four emblem right at its chest, glowing in blue light.
The second landed a half-step behind him, shorter and darker with brown hair in a bun and strands falling loose, a white streak running crown to chin through hair and beard both. White coat open over bare chest with a dhoti below, and his eyes had that wariness that said he'd looked at this situation before arriving and understood the variables. The white streak was the same one in the photographs Jean had shown Luv the first time they met the babies, the one that marked Nate Grey like a brand from the Age of Apocalypse, the boy Mr. Sinister built out of Cyclops and Phoenix's bones to be the most dangerous psionic weapon ever manufactured, and who'd since outgrown every cage anyone ever tried to put him in.
Both turned and looked at Luv while Luv looked back.
The noise of the arena kept going all around them, bodies hitting bodies, powers detonating, the creak of stone under too much cosmic weight, and the three of them stood in the eye of it.
Something passed between them that skipped words, just recognition and the frequency of people who belong to each other, and all three felt it at once.
The blond one grinned first. "Oh, we are absolutely taking a photo of this the second we get back. Big baby brother in overalls, mate, we're framing it, putting it on the bloody wall."
"Franklin." The dark-haired one sounded exhausted the way you sound exhausted by something you've said a thousand times and will say a thousand more. He crouched in front of Bonk, who'd gone completely still the moment they arrived, and put both arms around the dinosaur's neck without hesitating. "I've missed you so much, Bonky."
Bonk made that sound he made when reunited with someone he loved, the low rumbling chirp starting deep in his chest and coming out warm as he pressed his dome into Nate's shoulder with the certainty of a creature who knew family when he felt it.
Across the arena the Fantastic Four stopped fighting mid-formation. The X-Men froze mid-movement. The Living Tribunal, the multiversal arbiter whose three faces represented Equity, Vengeance, and Necessity, the being whose authority extended over Eternity and Oblivion themselves, who'd existed as long as the multiverse and served the One Above All, turned all three faces toward the arrivals simultaneously. That wasn't something it did for routine events. That was what it did when something happened that it needed all three perspectives to measure.
Franklin looked across the arena to where his family had been tangled up with Galactus and his heralds, and his expression found the problem with the solution already there.
"Right," he said. "Me and Galactus need to have a chat."
He raised one hand and the reality around his fingers didn't ripple the way lesser power rippled, it simply agreed with him, the way reality had always agreed with Franklin Richards, the boy who'd once handed a future Galactus an orb containing his own younger self's powers and made the Devourer of Worlds his herald. The most terrifying human in any timeline. The one the Living Tribunal had noted actually mattered to the multiverse's continued function.
"TO ME... MY GALACTUS!!"
Space folded and through it came something gold and white and vast, moving with slow deliberation like a being that'd reconsidered its entire function somewhere between now and Franklin's present.
A second Galactus entered the arena.
He was the same size, the same basic architecture, but gold where the original ran purple, white running through the plating in patterns that looked like philosophy rather than decoration. The original Galactus, Galan of the Sixth Cosmos, the sole survivor of a dead universe, the entity that'd consumed planets since before the Shi'ar built their first warship, carried the weight of something that devoured because devouring was its nature, its sentence, its function. This one carried something different, not warmth exactly but cycle rather than ending. Life-Bringer rather than Devourer. The same being, rewritten from the inside out by time and Franklin Richards.
The original turned toward him like someone seeing their own face wearing the wrong expression.
"This should not be possible."
The Life-Bringer regarded its past self with the patience of a version of itself that'd already worked through every argument the original was about to make. "I know," it said. "I remember thinking that too. But a future me thought different, so here I am, returning the favour."
They went into the arena wall together and the impact registered across every tier. The battle between two versions of the same Ur-scale entity threw off forces that made the Beyonders, the beings who'd killed the Living Tribunal itself during the Incursion Crisis, actually step back.
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