The fight between Jay and Oblivion wasn't the most spectacular thing happening in the arena.
It wasn't the largest, or the loudest, or the most visually immediate, and Ben Grimm was currently doing something to Abraxas that qualified as spectacular on most measures. The Phoenix Force and Sire Hate were engaged in a contest that was rewriting the light spectrum in their immediate area, and Wade Wilson was running a monologue about the relative merits of cosmic entities as opponents while deploying his Venom-augmented katanas in ways that the symbiote was clearly enjoying more than he expected.
But the fight between Jay and Oblivion was the one that everything else in the arena was, in some sense, oriented around, the way a room's furniture orients around the center.
They were level in power, the equalization field had done its work, and Jay's absorption of the six Infinity Stones had been calibrated into that same field, brought to the common ceiling rather than exceeding it. What separated them wasn't power. It was everything else.
Oblivion had been fighting since before fighting was a concept that required a word, and he understood momentum at the level of something that'd watched momentum work in every possible permutation across more conflicts than any record-keeping system in the multiverse had attempted to track. When Jay pressed, he redirected, and when Jay pulled back, he was already moving into the space Jay had vacated. The scythe wasn't his only weapon, it was his most visible one, and the void itself was his weapon, the pressure of non-existence that he could direct with precision because he was its origin point. It didn't press against Jay's defenses so much as find the gaps between them and occupy them.
Jay knew he wasn't going to win this by outfighting a being that'd been at this since before the universe had physics.
So he stopped trying to outfight him.
The Tachyon Field he dropped entirely, which wasn't what you did when you were trying to hit something faster than it could react, but it freed the processing capacity he'd been using to maintain it. He redirected that into his Reality Warping, not the blunt application he'd been using to counter Oblivion's void pressure but something more targeted, and he stopped contesting the space Oblivion occupied and started contesting the rules of the space between them.
The scythe came in flat and Jay let it pass through the space where his torso had been, which was now not where his torso was because he'd rewritten the local geometry rather than moving through it. Oblivion's follow-through carried him half a step too far in a direction that no longer corresponded to where Jay's momentum was going, and in that gap, that fraction of a second where the oldest thing in creation was recalculating, Jay hit him.
Not with power. With the elbow, the hard point of the joint, at the angle that produced maximum kinetic transfer into a target that wasn't expecting an elbow.
It was, by any measure, an insufficient weapon to be deploying against the primordial void made sentient.
It connected, and the crack of impact moved through the arena like a bell, and every being present felt it.
Oblivion staggered. Not much. Enough.
Jay took his next step.
Around them, the fight continued, heroes and abstracts and things without category doing what they'd been assembled to do, the arena full of light and noise and the chaos that occurs when a very large number of very powerful beings all have somewhere they need to be and something standing between them and it. Luv and Bonk were still moving through the field, the green healing light marking their path, and the Venom-augmented fighters on Jay's side were holding ground they hadn't been able to hold twenty minutes ago. The Ancient One and Mephisto were having a conversation that appeared to be going poorly for Mephisto.
Ben Grimm, for his part, had just discovered that Abraxas had a weak point, which was that nobody had ever punched it directly in the face with the intention of making it feel bad about its life choices. He was correcting that now.
"Whatta revoltin' development," Ben said, to Abraxas, with genuine warmth, as his fist connected for the sixth time. "You know what your problem is, pal? You got all that cosmic power and none of the footwork. Real shame. Let me show ya somethin'."
He did.
Wade's monologue was ongoing and had apparently shifted into a ranking of cosmic entities by punching quality, and he was on Beyonders.
"Seven out of ten," Wade announced to no one in particular, landing from a backwards somersault and driving a Venom-edged katana through a Beyonder construct that dissolved on contact. "Lots of presence, disappointing follow-through. Reminds me of every boss fight in a game that's building to something better. Next slide. Okay, Griever at the End of All Things, what are we giving her, physically impressive, thematically coherent, personally I respect the commitment to a single bit..."
Jay didn't hear this. He was busy.
The second exchange with Oblivion went longer than the first, four minutes of rebuilt geometry and redirected void-pressure and the creative problem-solving that resulted from a man using six Infinity Stone resonances not as weapons but as a spatial editor, rewriting the playing field rather than the player. Oblivion was learning, he was good at learning, and he had more data than anything else alive about how opposition worked. He was incorporating Jay's approach in real time with the efficiency of something that'd never needed to practice adaptation because it encompassed the concept from which adaptation emerged.
But Jay was learning faster because Jay was losing, and nothing accelerates the learning curve like the motivation of trying not to be erased by something that predates existence.
Across the arena, between exchanges, they trampled things, not deliberately because the fight was too mobile for deliberate anything, but Oblivion walked through a formation of Elders who'd gotten between him and his next position and they scattered. Jay's redirected vector exchanges pushed Griever constructs aside, not because he'd aimed for them but because the geometry he was rewriting was the geometry they were occupying. The battle was happening at all the levels simultaneously, the cosmic fight and the human fight and the everything-in-between fight all occupying the same impossible space, and the fighters in the middle of all of it were just trying to hold on.
"Doing alright over there?" Domino's voice reached him through a lull in the ambient noise, because she tracked him in a fight the way she tracked everything, by feel and by the pattern his power registered against her Death Stone's awareness.
"Ask me in five minutes," Jay said.
"You said that five minutes ago."
"Still applies."
She was already gone, back into whatever she was dealing with, which from the brief glimpse he caught before Oblivion's next approach was something involving Mephisto that the Lord of Lies was clearly regretting.
Jay turned back to the oldest thing in creation and started rewriting the rules of the next thirty feet of space.
The fight wasn't over, and it was, if anything, just finding its real shape, the shape that would determine what the multiverse looked like when the Tribunal's verdict finally, eventually, arrived.
He wasn't done yet.
Neither was Oblivion.
Neither, for that matter, was anyone else in the arena.
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