The words still echoed in Jay's mind.

  "Be careful and come back safe. Franklin's going to need his godfather."

  Jay blinked. His mouth opened to respond, but the teleportation had already completed. Blue energy faded around him as he materialized atop the Chrysler Building.

  "I... what?"

  Sue and Reed couldn't hear him. He was alone.

  Godfather.

  They wanted him to be Franklin's godfather.

  A small smile touched his lips. Warmth spread through his chest.

  The warmth lasted three seconds before pain hit his skull.

  Jay staggered. His hand shot out, grabbed the spire. His knees buckled. The metal groaned under his grip.

  "What the hell..."

  His danger sense screamed. But the warning came from inside.

  Jay's healing factor kicked in. Blood vessels repaired. Neurons rerouted. But the damage came faster. His nose bled. Ears followed. Warmth trickled down his neck.

  "No. Not now. Not..."

  Jay closed his eyes. His consciousness dove into his mental plane.

  The mindscape was breaking.

  Cracks spread across the sky. Fractures through the foundation where his powers manifested. Each crack pulsed. Pain translated to his real body.

  "No. No no no no..."

  Jay tried to move toward the cracks, but his mental avatar stumbled and fell. Every movement sent lightning through his consciousness.

  "Come on. Come ON!" He pushed himself up. His mental form flickered at the edges. "I did not survive Sinister just to die from a literal newborn's power!"

  He forced himself to look deeper.

  There it was.

  A silhouette of a young boy, no more than an infant really, suspended in the center. Rainbow light cascaded from the figure in waves. Galaxies formed and collapsed around him. Stars ignited and died in seconds.

  Franklin Richards' power.

  The reality manipulation he'd taken and locked away.

  Except it wasn't locked anymore.

  His original Power Theft manifested nearby. Still resembling Jay himself, all grey with ocean-blue eyes and that tattered red cape. The manifestation strained. Veins of light pulsed across its form as it tried to enforce control.

  But it was failing.

  The power was too vast. Too primal.

  Jay's Adaptive Power perk activated automatically. Golden overlay spread across the manifestation, trying to coerce Franklin's abilities. To reshape them to fit Jay's physiology.

  The golden light wrapped around the rainbow, attempting to compress it.

  Jay watched his perk try every permutation. The reality-warping power didn't even notice.

  "Shit. Shit shit SHIT!"

  Jay's physical body convulsed atop the Chrysler Building. Blood trickled from his body. His healing factor worked overtime, but the damage kept coming faster than he could heal.

  He couldn't give it back.

  The thought crashed through him. He couldn't just return this power to Franklin. Sue and Reed's faces flashed through his mind. Their hope. Their relief. Their trust.

  'You gave him the gift of childhood,' Sue's words echoed.

  If he gave it back now, after everything, after promising them their son would be safe...

  He couldn't do it.

  But he also couldn't pass it to something else. A random animal, an insect, anything. God knew what would happen if something without proper consciousness suddenly had the power to reshape reality.

  "Options," Jay gasped. "What are my goddamn options?"

  Bear it? How? His body was failing. Dying and regenerating again and again.

  Merge it? With what? He scrolled through his available powers mentally. Duality? Too limited. Technomorphing? Laughable. Healing aura? Not even in the same category.

  He could sacrifice some powers. Dump them into his power theft to give it more weight. Material absorption from Carl Creel would help. Pile on enough powers, and maybe he could reinforce the containment enough to survive.

  But it would be a waste. Those powers, gone forever, just to barely maintain the status quo. And for how long? Days? Weeks?

  Jay raised a trembling hand, reaching for the manifestation of Creel's material absorption.

  Then something moved inside him.

  Not in his mindscape. Somewhere deeper. Cellular level. Something that had been dormant suddenly awakened.

  The pain didn't disappear, but it changed. Became bearable instead of apocalyptic.

  "What..."

  Jay searched deeper, past the manifestations of his powers, into the fundamental code of what he'd become.

  And found Darwin's reactive adaptation.

  Or what used to be Darwin's reactive adaptation.

  The power had merged with his Adaptive Power perk weeks ago. Dissolved into his baseline existence. Woven into every cell. He'd checked it then, found nothing different, and promptly forgotten about it.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  But it hadn't been dormant.

  It had been preparing.

  His cells weren't just healing and dying anymore. They were evolving. Neurons restructured. New pathways formed. His DNA unraveled and rewrote itself.

  Even his conceptual structure was shifting. The mental plane itself grew new architecture. Foundations that could bear impossible weight.

  The process took thirty seconds in the real world. But in his mental plane, Jay experienced every microsecond. Every cell division. Every synapse rewiring.

  It should have been agony.

  Instead, it felt right. Like his body had been waiting for exactly this challenge.

  The light radiating from Franklin's power began to dim. Contained. Jay's power theft, reinforced by the adaptive changes, established multiple locks.

  It was still strenuous. Under constant pressure. But it wasn't killing him anymore.

  Jay's consciousness rose from his mental plane slowly, carefully.

  First came awareness of his body. The weight. The ache in his muscles. The taste of copper in his mouth.

  Then his senses returned one by one. The wind against his face. The sound of distant explosions. The smell of smoke and ozone.

  His eyes opened.

  He was on his hands and knees atop the Chrysler Building. Gasping. Covered in sweat and blood. Dark patches stained his shirt. His healing factor worked overtime, cleaning up the damage that remained.

  But he was alive.

  And more than that, he could feel it. The power thrumming beneath the locks. Not his to use, not really. But present. Waiting.

  Light flickered across his skin before fading. His eyes glowed briefly, then returned to normal.

  "Okay," Jay breathed. "Okay. I can work with this."

  Then he remembered why he'd teleported here.

  He willed to know what was going on. Information flooded his mind. Another byproduct of Franklin's power, leaking through the locks. He simply knew things now.

  He knew Clint Barton was dead. The moment of his death played out in his mind's eye. The arrow's impossible flight through chaos. The illusion dropping like a curtain. The scepter puncturing through flesh and bone. The light dying in the archer's eyes. Blood pooled beneath him.

  "No. Clint, you... fuck. FUCK!"

  He knew Loki had brought the mothership through. The vessel emerging from the portal. Massive. Terrible. Disgorging thousands of Chitauri soldiers. Far more than there should have been.

  He knew about Black Dwarf. The Black Order member crashing into the rooftop. Engaging Thor. Another deviation. Another escalation.

  "Of course," Jay muttered, standing on shaking legs. "Of course it's worse."

  His display of power at Doomstadt. The very public demonstration broadcast across the world. Of course, Thanos would have seen it. Recognized that Earth's power level had risen dramatically. Sent more firepower to compensate.

  And Loki, already more competent than his MCU counterpart because he'd grown up in a world that had always had superhumans, would have adapted his plans accordingly.

  The butterfly effect of his own interference was coming home to roost. And people were dying because of it.

  "Fuck!"

  Jay's fist slammed into the Art Deco spire. Metal shrieked and crumpled. He reigned in his strength before he damaged the building further.

  He'd known sacrifices would have to be made. Had steeled himself for that reality. But knowing abstractly and seeing the consequences play out were very different things.

  Clint Barton was dead because Jay had changed the timeline. Because he'd made himself a factor that Thanos accounted for. Because his very existence had made Earth more of a threat.

  A life snuffed out. A good man. A father. Someone who'd fought to break free of mind control only to die hours after regaining his freedom.

  Jay closed his eyes. Took a breath. Then took another.

  And the Avengers...

  Information cascaded through his mind, showing him the current state of the battle without needing to look.

  Tony's armor was failing. Arc reactor at seven percent. Repulsors barely functional. One arm completely dead. He was flying on willpower and spite, taking hits that should have killed him.

  Steve's left arm hung useless. Shattered by a Leviathan's tail strike. His shield was cracked. Actual fractures visible in the vibranium alloy from Loki's sceptre. He fought with pure determination, but his enhanced body was failing him.

  Natasha could barely stand. Multiple broken ribs. Internal bleeding. Severe concussion. She'd pushed herself far beyond human limits.

  Banner was still Hulk, but the green giant was slowing. Wounds weren't healing as fast. The rage that sustained him was flickering under sheer exhaustion.

  They were losing.

  The realization took exactly zero time. Jay's consciousness processed the information instantaneously. Another aspect of Franklin's power bleeding through.

  It was useful. It was also deeply unsettling.

  "Right," Jay said, rolling his shoulders. His body still ached. The strain of containing a cosmic power pulled at his cells like gravity. But the adaptive changes held. He was functional at least. "Time to stop this clusterfuck before it gets worse."

  He looked down at the battle below. At Stark Tower, where Loki stood beneath the portal, scepter raised in victory. At the Avengers, scattered and broken across the rooftop. At the mothership still disgorging soldiers.

  He determined his next actions. His voice when he spoke carried power. Authority that reality itself had to acknowledge.

  "THAT'S ENOUGH!"

  The words didn't just echo. They existed in all places simultaneously. The Avengers heard it from every direction at once. Loki heard it coming from inside his own skull.

  Reality recognized Jay's words and bent to accommodate them.

  Then he snapped his fingers.

  'SNAP'

  Reality rippled outward from him like water disturbed by a stone.

  The ripple hit Manhattan and the world melted.

  Buildings stretched at impossible angles. But they didn't break. Just changed. A skyscraper bent ninety degrees, its windows still intact, people inside feeling nothing. Another twisted into a spiral, its structure somehow still sound.

  Colors appeared that had no names. The sky turned a shade between purple and green that made the brain hurt to perceive.

  Manhattan's geometry warped. Straight lines became curves. Distances stopped making sense. Someone fifty feet away was also five feet away. Both states became true.

  For civilians, it felt like vertigo combined with déjà vu.

  For the Chitauri, it was worse. Some went blind, their alien optics unable to process the new reality. Others fired at enemies that were both there and not there. Their communication network filled with panic.

  And through it all, reality continued to function. People didn't fall. Buildings didn't collapse. Because Jay, instinctively, was holding it together.

  Jay materialized on the rooftop.

  He didn't teleport. Didn't fly. Just simply decided he was there instead of on the Chrysler Building, and reality rewrote itself to make that true.

  Light cascaded from his body.

  Tony's eyes snapped shut reflexively, his HUD's brightness sensors maxing out. "What the..."

  When the light dimmed, when his optical sensors adjusted, his entire body went rigid.

  "You have got to be kidding me."

  Jay stood between the Avengers and Loki. Purple shirt scorched and torn. Jeans ripped at the knees. Face covered in dried blood. But he was alive. And more than that, radiating enough power to make Tony's arc reactor look like a AAA battery.

  "JAY?!" Steve's voice cracked. "Where the hell have you been?!"

  But Jay wasn't looking at them.

  His eyes, glowing with that impossible rainbow light, focused entirely on Loki.

  The God of Mischief stared back.

  For the first time since the invasion began, uncertainty flickered across Loki's face.

  The scepter trembled slightly in his grip.

  His Asgardian heritage gave him perception beyond mortals. He could see the energies Jay contained. Could feel the fundamental wrongness of a human hosting this kind of power.

  Thor stood frozen, Mjolnir half-raised. His eyes tracked the light emanating from Jay. Recognition dawned slowly.

  "Brother..." Thor's voice was barely a whisper. "What manner of being has arrived?"

  Loki opened his mouth. He forcefully closed it. His theatrical confidence, the mask he'd worn throughout the invasion, cracked at the edges.

  "I don't..." His voice came out smaller than intended. "You? You are that Jay, I thought when the healer would appear?"

  But even as he asked, realization was settling in. The power radiating from this human.

  This wasn't just another enhanced human. This was something else entirely.

  Jay took a step forward.

  Reality rippled with the motion. The rooftop's surface became briefly transparent, showing the building's internal structure. The arc reactor in the basement. The Tesseract above. Then it solidified again.

  "Someone," Jay said quietly, his voice carrying a weight that made the air itself feel heavy, "who's very, very tired of gods playing with human lives."

  Thor's grip on Mjolnir tightened.

  "Father's mercy..."

  Because Thor recognized that level of power.

  Loki felt it too. His theatrical posture crumbled. Not all at once, but in stages.

  "No," Loki whispered. His eyes darted, looking for an escape that didn't exist. "That's not... you can't..."

  Jay turned to face him fully.

  The rainbow light intensified for a moment. Loki saw something in that illumination that broke whatever confidence he had left.

  This human could unmake him with a thought. Could erase the invasion with a snap. Could rewrite the entire timeline if he wanted to.

  The only question was whether he would.

  Tony's voice cut through the tension. "Jay, you son of a bitch. You've been gone for months! We thought... we didn't know if you were dead or..."

  Jay ignored Tony and turned back to Loki, who still stood frozen.

  "Let's start with you."