[A/N]: Alright, that's it. All the setup is done, and one of my best fights is coming up in the next few chapters.
If you're enjoying the story, show some love. Drop a comment, throw your theories at me, share it around, or just vibe. The more support I see, the faster I can push updates.
This week's goal is 200 PowerStones. Hit it, and I'll drop TWO bonus chapters.
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Above the Atlantic Ocean
Jay launched himself at FURY like a collapsing star with his hands encased in black energy speckled with stars that swirled like miniature galaxies. Mad Jim Jaspers' universal reality warping flooded through him, eager and hungry, the power that could destroy entire worlds now focused into a single devastating strike.
His fist connected with FURY's chest.
For one perfect moment, Jay felt victory as his reality warping tore through the robot's adaptive plating, through circuits and consciousness, through the very concept of FURY's existence, and the machine exploded outward in a spray of metal and energy while disintegrating at the molecular level.
Then the pieces laughed.
The sound came from everywhere, mechanical and wrong, Jim Jaspers' theatrical British accent processed through synthesized madness as each fragment hummed with manic glee while flowing back together, rewriting themselves and adapting to the attack even as it destroyed them.
"COME ON, JAY!" FURY reformed in seconds, its single eye blazing yellow with predatory intelligence. "IS THIS IT? I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS FIGHT SINCE YOU KILLED ME! TWICE!!"
Jay's danger sense screamed warnings as FURY's plating shifted and flowed, adaptive algorithms learning from his attack, incorporating the data and evolving countermeasures in real-time. He was stronger, his reality warping deeper and more fundamental, but the robot had the perfect counter: it learned, adapted, evolved, and what good was overwhelming power if your enemy could just become immune to it?
"AND AS I SEE YOU LUSTING AFTER MY POWER," FURY continued, its voice rising with theatrical fury that would have been comical if it wasn't so terrifying. "CORRUPTING IT, PERVERTING IT TO USE AGAINST ME OF ALL PEOPLE? HAHAHA! Oh, this is delicious! To celebrate, I'll kill every mutant on the planet and gift them to Lady Death as a thanks for giving me this GLORIOUS second chance at revenge!"
Jay twisted space around himself, creating a barrier of folded dimensions while his heart hammered against his ribs. Domino was safe on the Helicarrier, Gaea's golden motes were protecting people across the globe, and all he had to do was keep FURY away from them, no matter what. "Again with the villain monologues? Seriously, why do all you guys talk so much?" He manifested a wall of space between them, reality layering on itself while air rasped in his lungs from the effort. "Maybe I should ask Spidey for tips on the banter thing."
"JEST WHILE YOU CAN!" FURY's eye flexed, and Jay felt it scanning the fundamental structure of his reality warping while learning its very essence. "THOSE WILL BE YOUR LAST WORDS!"
The robot blitzed forward faster than thought, moving through spaces that didn't exist, weaving around Jay's defenses with impossible agility as energy blasts carved through probability itself with each one calibrated to disrupt reality warping at the quantum level.
Jay twisted causality and made the blasts never fired, but FURY had already adapted and compensated as attacks came from directions that weren't directions, from moments that never existed, from possibilities Jay hadn't considered.
One blast grazed his shoulder as pain exploded through his nervous system while reality frayed around the wound and his flesh tried to exist in six different states simultaneously. The smell of ozone mixed with something worse, like burning dimensions.
"Okay," Jay gasped, healing the wound by rewriting the last three seconds like hitting undo on reality itself. "You've gotten better."
"I'VE GOTTEN PERFECT."
The fight that followed rewrote the definition of combat itself.
Jay didn't go with normal attacks but unmade, reaching into the fabric of existence and erasing the concept of FURY from reality, deleting it from causality, making it so the robot had never been built, never existed, never could exist.
The Atlantic below them froze mid-wave, then vaporized, then became solid crystal, then returned to water with physics breaking and repairing with each exchange of power.
FURY responded by becoming an idea instead of a thing, a thought given form existing outside physical reality, anchored to the concept of vengeance itself rather than any material existence.
"Clever," Jay admitted, then rewrote the concept of vengeance to exclude FURY from its definition.
The robot laughed and anchored to hatred instead.
Jay made hatred not exist.
FURY found rage.
Jay eliminated rage from the universe.
FURY anchored to envy.
They played this game for subjective centuries, moving faster than thought with each one trying to find the fundamental concept the other couldn't eliminate, couldn't rewrite, couldn't adapt to. Jay's lungs burned even though he'd transcended the need for air while his thoughts were fracturing at the edges with reality warping bleeding into his perception of self.
This wasn't like fighting Jamie or Mephisto but fighting someone with his own power, someone who understood reality warping on an instinctive level because they were born for it, and worse, someone who learned from every mistake.
Jay created a construct inspired by the Equations from DC, not a physical thing but a living equation with mathematics given terrible life. It was probability incarnate, shaped like a dragon made of numbers that didn't exist in standard arithmetic while breathing paradoxes that unraveled reality wherever they touched. The dragon's roar sounded like collapsing dimensions.
FURY countered by generating anti-math, concepts that canceled out Jay's equations and made his impossible numbers equal zero as the shield it generated made mathematics meaningless, existed in a state where numbers had no power.
The dragon dissolved into conceptual fragments. Jay created a thousand more with each one embodying a different impossible theorem as his vision tunneled from the effort of creating this many constructs at once, like trying to think a thousand thoughts simultaneously.
FURY evolved a shield that made mathematics meaningless.
Jay shifted tactics by folding space and time into a möbius strip, trapping FURY in an infinite loop where every action led back to its beginning, where cause and effect chased each other in endless circles. The temperature around them dropped to absolute zero, then spiked to plasma heat, then ceased to exist as a concept.
FURY punched through causality itself and stepped out of the loop before it formed.
"YOU'RE THINKING TOO SMALL!" The robot's form rippled, adapting not just to Jay's attacks but to the very concept of being attacked. "YOU HAVE THE POWER OF A GOD, BUT YOU'RE STILL THINKING LIKE A HUMAN! LIKE A CHILD PLAYING WITH DADDY'S TOOLS!"
Jay's eyes went black with stars swirling in the void as worry coiled in his gut, cold and sharp, but he pushed it down. Domino, Bobby, Franklin, everyone was counting on him. "Imagination? Let me show you imagination then."
Reality inverted.
The ocean below became sky while the sky became ground, gravity pointed in seventeen directions simultaneously, light moved backwards through time, sound became visible, colors tasted like emotions, and every physical law rewrote itself in real-time. The air itself screamed with the wrongness of it all.
FURY adapted to all of it within seconds.
Jay aged the robot backwards until it never existed, but FURY anchored outside temporal flow.
Jay created a black hole made of condensed probability with every possible outcome that would destroy FURY compressed into a single point of impossible density as the gravitational pull was so intense it bent light into pretzels.
FURY generated a white hole made of impossibility itself, spewing out every outcome where it survived and thrived and won.
The two constructs collided as reality screamed, and the sound was like the universe itself crying out in pain.
Time got weird when beings who could rewrite causality fought each other as hours passed or maybe days with Jay's sense of linear progression shattering somewhere around the third century of subjective combat.
They moved across three-dimensional space and four-dimensional time and five-dimensional probability, fighting in spaces with negative dimensions, in realms where geometry was a polite suggestion at best.
Jay's body ached in ways that shouldn't be possible as his reality warping should have fixed it, but the effort of maintaining his existence while fighting was taking its toll. Each breath came harder while each thought took longer to form.
He created an army, not of soldiers but of alternate versions of himself pulled from every possible timeline where he'd made different choices, a thousand Jays with each one real in its own quantum state and each one wielding reality warping with different techniques and styles.
Scholar Jay who'd studied Science instead of stealing powers, Villain Jay who'd chosen conquest over heroism, Old Jay who'd survived centuries, Undead Jay who'd learned to haunt life itself.
For a moment seeing all these versions of himself, Jay felt the weight of roads not taken, lives he could have lived, choices he could have made. Domino in some realities, dead in others, alone in most.
All of them attacked FURY simultaneously from every angle and dimension.
FURY's eye tracked all thousand at once as its adaptive plating flowed, generating countermeasures faster than thought, and for every Jay that attacked FURY evolved a specific defense, learned that version's patterns, adapted to that timeline's physics.
One by one the alternate Jays were erased and removed from possibility itself with their timelines collapsing and their quantum states destabilizing. Jay felt each one wink out like stars dying, felt the weight of a thousand deaths that were and weren't his own.
The prime Jay watched it happen with his mind racing through exhaustion as FURY was learning from his own power because it was his own power, stolen by Jim Jaspers and filtered through a soul that had been born to warp reality.
Every attack he made FURY studied and evolved past, every trick he used FURY learned and countered, and the robot was getting stronger with every exchange, feeding on the combat itself.
Jay manifested a construct made of pure cosmic energy shaped like a sword that could cut through concepts.
"You're using my power against me, Jay. But you don't understand it. You're just copying the surface level."
"AND YOU," FURY continued, generating a shield made of anti-concept that made Jay's sword meaningless, "THINK YOU'VE MASTERED REALITY WARPING IN THE WEEKS SINCE YOU STOLE MY POTENTIAL? I WAS BORN FOR THIS POWER! MY ENTIRE EXISTENCE WAS BUILT AROUND IT! You're just a thief playing with stolen goods!"
The accusation should have stung, and maybe it would have if Jay hadn't spent months watching what bigots like Jaspers did to innocent people, what Jim's alternate version had done stealing power from a genocidal lunatic who'd murdered an entire universe's worth of heroes. The moral math wasn't complicated.
"Yeah?" Jay swung his conceptual sword, ignoring the way his arms felt like lead. "And your alter self built FURY to hunt down and kill every hero because you're a paranoid fascist. So excuse me if I don't feel guilty about stealing from a bigot like you."
FURY's shield blocked the blade, and the sword shattered into fragments of failed possibility.
"Okay," Jay admitted, dissolving the remnants while his thoughts felt sluggish, like moving through molasses. "You've got a point about the experience thing, though."
He needed to think bigger, stranger, more fundamental, but his mind was fractured from centuries of subjective combat with his reality warping flickering like a dying flame.
Jay reached into reality's source code, into the underlying structure that made existence possible, and he found the fundamental constants, the numbers that couldn't change: the speed of light, Planck's constant, the gravitational constant, the fine structure constant.
And he rewrote them all at once.
Physics broke.
Light moved at the speed of sound while gravity became a polite suggestion, atoms held together through mutual agreement rather than electromagnetic force, and matter and energy became interchangeable not through Einstein's equation but through pure whim.
The Atlantic Ocean turned into crystallized thought that tasted purple while the sky became liquid emotion that felt like nostalgia, and FURY's body made of matter that followed old physics should have dissolved.
Instead, the robot adapted.
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