[A/N]: This week's Second goal is 400 PowerStones. Hit it, and I'll drop TWO bonus chapters.
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The Blankverse
"It's good to see you too, Lady Death."
Lady Death stood in the void with a cold smile playing across her impossibly beautiful features, her form shifting between states that hurt to perceive directly. She was beautiful and terrible simultaneously.
She looked at Jay's battered cosmic form, at FURY's destroyed body floating nearby, and her expression carried something both amusement and genuine irritation.
"Well," she said, her voice like silk wrapped around broken glass, "you certainly haven't made it difficult, have you? Stealing from my realm even after my warning." Her smile sharpened. "You've been naughty, haven't you, little outsider?"
Jay's cosmic form flickered, threatening to collapse entirely. His adaptation was gone, burned into FURY's core and inverted, leaving him vulnerable in ways he hadn't been since before the invasion. Every wound he'd taken during the fight screamed for attention, his reality warping stretched thin just maintaining his transformed state.
He couldn't waste power healing himself. Not here. Especially not in front of her.
So instead, Jay made a grabbing motion with one cosmic hand, reaching not through space but through the conceptual layer where souls resided after death.
Jim Jaspers' soul materialized before him, still grey and monotone from Jay's inverted adaptability, stripped of its mechanical prison and reduced to its most fundamental human form. The soul that should have ascended to Death's realm moments ago but had been trapped in FURY's digital consciousness.
Lady Death's expression shifted instantly from amusement to cold fury as her dark eyes blazed with power that made the Blankverse itself recoil.
"What do you think you're doing, outsider?!" Her voice carried weight that would have crushed normal matter. The void cracked around them as non-reality itself flinched from her rage.
Jay smiled through the pain, his cosmic form bleeding starlight, and his breathing labored. "Oh, I'm just claiming my powers from a lost soul." He grabbed Jaspers' grey spirit, feeling the inverted adaptation still woven through it. "Since you abandoned him and all."
His hands moved with practiced movement despite exhaustion. Polarity activated, yin and yang symbols manifesting around the grey soul, black and white swirling as he filtered out the inverted adaptation, separated it from Jaspers' essence, and began drawing it back into his own cosmic form.
The grey turned to multicolored brilliance as polarity reversed the inversion, and Darwin's perfect adaptation flowed back into Jay's cells, into his biology, merging with his cosmic transformation and stabilizing the wounds that had threatened to kill him.
Lady Death was not about to let a mortal disrespect her. Not after that same mortal had foiled her carefully laid plans.
She moved.
A scythe materialized in her hands, formed from bones that resonated with impossible age. Celestial bones, Jay's Comic Nerd perk screamed at him, taken from beings that predated most of reality itself. The blade was pure concept, Death's own essence given cutting edge, the same weapon Oblivion wielded when he sought to end existence.
Jay's danger sense exploded with warnings that nearly overloaded his nervous system.
He burned through every drop of power dodging, his cosmic form moving faster than thought, but he was exhausted, wounded, and Lady Death was a multiversal abstract concept given form. His reality warping was universal level at best, nothing compared to the being before him.
The scythe's edge caught his chest.
Just a graze. A flesh wound that split cosmic skin and drew blood that looked like starlight.
But this was Death's own weapon.
The wound metastasized immediately, spreading like cancer through his cosmic form, his cells trying to die, his biology fighting itself as Death's essence invaded his fundamental structure. The pain was unlike anything he'd experienced, like every cell screaming its own death simultaneously.
Jay gasped, his cosmic transformation flickering as he poured Tommy's healing aura into the wound, golden light fighting black decay, barely maintaining status quo and preventing it from spreading further, but unable to actually heal the damage.
"You should have stayed silent the first time I gave you mercy," Lady Death said, her scythe spinning with casual grace. "But mortals never learn, do they?"
Jay backpedalled through the void, his mind racing through every contingency he'd prepared, every backup plan, every desperate gambit.
He couldn't call on the Ancient One. That would just put her in danger, and Master had done enough for him already.
He couldn't rely on his powers to escape, much less defeat an abstract entity.
So Jay fell back on the one thing that had kept him alive through every impossible situation: Comic Book Nerd Perk- All knowledge of these multiverses fit into his brain.
While dodging another scythe slash that would have bisected him, Jay began muttering under his breath.
"Companionship plus..." His cosmic form blurred, barely avoiding Death's blade. "... times success..."
Lady Death's scythe carved through where he'd been a microsecond before. "Running calculations won't save you, little thief."
"...times innocence..." Jay's voice grew stronger, more focused, even as blood ran from his nose and wounds peppered his cosmic body. "...where y equals despair..."
Something shifted.
Lady Death's next attack slowed fractionally, her essence pulling back from the wound on Jay's chest, the metastasizing death retreating inch by agonizing inch.
Both of them froze, surprised.
The scythe wounds on Jay's body began to close, not healing but simply ceasing to exist, as if Death herself was being denied permission to claim him.
"What..." Lady Death stared at Jay, her dark eyes wide with rarely experienced shock. "What are you doing?"
Jay saw the hint of success and felt Death's domain receding from his body like water off glass, and he pushed everything he had into the moment.
Tether pulsed on his finger, the Uru band forged in Nidavellir responding to his desperation. He fused it with his reality warping, burning through reserves he didn't have, forcing the Space Stone to function beyond its native universe, to reach across the multiversal barrier itself.
then non-space inverted.
Jay felt the dimensional walls between universes, thinner here in the Blankverse than anywhere else, and he punched through with Tether serving as an anchor, pulling himself through the breach.
He tumbled through the space between realities, through the void that existed outside normal existence, and Jay aimed for a specific vibrational frequency, a universe where he could see glimpses of victory.
Lady Death, still playing with her prey, still not using her full power for reasons Jay couldn't fathom, chased after him with her scythe trailing darkness.
"Let's see how far you can run, little thief!" Her laugh echoed across dimensions.
Jay crashed through multiple universal barriers, each jump burning more power he didn't have, his cosmic form cracking further with each transition. Atlantis flashed past, a universe where it never fell. New York, where the Avengers had disbanded. Delhi, where Mugals had never invaded.
Each universe blurred together as Jay searched for his target, for the one place his desperate plan might actually work.
Then he felt it, a universe where two cosmologies overlapped, existed simultaneously in impossible harmony.
Earth-????
Jay materialized in a dark alley, his cosmic transformation finally collapsing as exhaustion overtook him. He returned to merely human, bleeding from a dozen wounds, his clothes torn and burnt, his body screaming for rest.
But at least he was alive.
He looked up at the skyline, saw the Gothic architecture mixed with modern skyscrapers, and relief flooded through him despite the pain.
Wayne Industries logos gleamed on several buildings. A newspaper stand advertised the Daily Planet.
This was it.
Jay tried to heal himself and gather his footing, but his reserves were gone, adaptation working overtime just to keep him conscious.
Then Death materialized ten feet away.
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