If I remembered correctly, in the original timeline one of the Seventy-Two Demon Kings was never summoned this early.
Tom had lost this world to the demon when he arrived alone, overwhelming everything through sheer force and calculated brutality, he did not need to call upon anything greater. This summoning had never occurred.
The difference now lay entirely in the alterations I had made, all of it forced the demon into desperation, and desperation led him to seek assistance from something far more dangerous than himself.
I simply did not expect it to be ######.
Of all possible entities that could have answered that call, it had to be him, a being who was not even a Duke yet and still... Even in this unfinished state, his dominion over physical structure alone made him a catastrophic threat. One direct strike from that dragon would not merely injure this vessel, it would erase it entirely... Bloody hell.
His authority... Biomass Manipulation allows him to control any living matter and bend it to his will but that can only apply to the organisms he had made physical contact with.
And yes, if he could manipulate the integrity of everything within his reach, then the dragon would not be an exception.
"I cannot even think of his name by accident," Moriarty muttered, his jaw tightening as though the very syllables were poison, "I truly believed that fool would never dare call for him, and yet here we are."
Tom, however, had already shifted into motion. His body liquefied, structure dissolving into a tide of crimson that surged across the fractured battlefield, rising in layered waves behind Moriarty like a living ocean.
SWOOSH
The dragon lunged, its newly formed flesh still knitting across bone, but Tom's fluid form slipped through talons and teeth alike. He was not truly alive in that state, not in the conventional sense, and so the dragon's structural dominion struggled to effect something that refused to remain solid.
"We have no method of damaging it," Moriarty said quietly, watching the way the dragon's scales hardened by the second. "Not while he remains connected to it."
SWOOSH
The dragon reared back, wings unfurling with a thunderous snap that displaced the air in violent spirals.
Tom rose from the ground in a towering column of blood, the mass coiling and condensing until his upper torso emerged from the crimson surge.
Behind Moriarty, the tide lifted higher, casting a long red shadow across the battlefield.
"Ten seconds," Tom stated, his voice echoing through the vibrating air as the blood behind him churned like a storm-tossed sea. "Make what you can within that time."
"That will be enough," Moriarty replied without hesitation. "… And the remaining mortals?"
"All of them are dead," he said, his voice turning grim.
The crimson waves surged higher, twisting into jagged spires that pointed toward the sky like blades. "There is nothing left to save... Do not concern yourself with this planet anymore... Just kill it... Even if this world is erased... it doesn't matter... nothing matters."
Unlike conventional particle accelerators, which are engineered to study subatomic interactions or generate controlled bursts of energy, I was attempting something far less academic and far more catastrophic.
By accelerating two condensed masses to near-relativistic velocities, forcing a collision violent enough to destabilize the planet's core equilibrium, and triggering a cascading chain reaction... I would fracture the mantle, rupture tectonic stability, and tear this world apart from the inside out within moments.
The energy output had to exceed the planetary binding threshold but remain delayed just long enough to give us a narrow window for extraction. If the detonation initiated even a fraction of a second too early, the shockwave would distort spacetime locally and interfere with teleportation.
That was assuming they knew when to extract us, but that would not be the issue. The shadow assigned to protect me would calculate the exact moment of detonation and trigger the teleport before the shockwave distorted space beyond recovery.
I had to synchronize two volatile variables at once, the acceleration curve and the collision vector, and I still needed a substance capable of surviving the wind-up phase of the explosion. It had to endure gravitational strain and thermal escalation long enough for the chain reaction to properly ignite.
Moriarty looked up at the colossal dragon as it clashed against the red flood, its movements carving afterimages through the air. Each strike tore away at Tom's mass, scattering waves of blood and thinning him with every passing second.
Above them, the steady gaze of ###### pressed down like invisible weight. Tom could no longer look up at it, and that hesitation was all the dragon needed as it continued to stike from the sky where Tom would have no vision and all he could do was use the trajectory of the Dragon's shadow to predict from where it would attack.
"Wally…" Moriarty exhaled, a reckless idea forming despite the risk. "Brace for impact."
"Father, if you do that, you will die," Wally warned him.
"Nah, I'm not going to die anytime soon. I have a destined time to die, and this isn't it," Moriarty replied with a faint smile as he activated his ability.
"I don't even know what that means," Wally said, pulsing with flickering energy particles. "But I trust you."
Honestly, we had no idea how this was going to turn out. We had already spent most of my stamina slaughtering those heretics, and our body was still recovering from the strain.
This would probably be the first time we used Timeless twice in a row while already at our limit.
Ah, hell... Who cares?!
Our eyes flared with a violent green radiance, veins lighting up beneath the skin like cracks in glass, and the earth beneath our feet fractured outward in a widening spiderweb of destruction.
Dust hung suspended midair, shards of rock frozen inches above the ground, droplets of Tom's blood locked in crimson spheres. Only the eye in the sky retained a sliver of motion, its vast pupil contracting ever so slightly as if straining against the invisible force constricting the world.
We turned away from the dragon.
"You just watch us run for now…" Moriarty said, lifting his chin toward the eye. "Because one day… we will come for you. And that day, there won't be anywhere for you to run."
"….."
The eye regarded us for one lingering moment, its surface rippling with something... The distortion in the flow of time, the tightening spiral of causality folding inward around a single point, it recognized the mechanism, but it did not interfere.
Our first step shattered the earth beneath us, the ground buckling and rupturing in a violent chain reaction.
Mountains cracked along their spines, forests flattened in sweeping shockwaves, and the air ignited in a thin burning trail behind him.
Blood seeped from our pores under the strain, veins bursting and sealing in the same instant as our body struggled to endure the speed.
Skin split along our arms, muscle fibers tearing and reweaving before they could fully separate, bone fracturing in microscopic splinters that healed almost immediately.
In less than a heartbeat, we crossed the planet. For a fraction of a second, our organs lagged behind our frame, our hearts spasming violently before stabilizing as time bent around us.
Temporal duplication was not replication of flesh but the division of a single timeline into two simultaneous paths anchored to the same origin. We seized our temporal aura and stretched it outward.
The strain felt like our very existence was being pulled down the middle. Our memories trembled, perception split, and for a brief instant we felt our two heartbeats overlapping out of sync.
Then we ripped.
Our body separated along a glowing seam, blood hanging suspended as two identical forms stepped from the same footprint.
The tear sealed in jagged lines of green light, nerves screaming, muscles snapping and stabilizing. Both halves stood complete, though slightly out of phase with one another.
There were now two of us...
One running East and another to the West.
To us, the frozen world stretched endlessly.
We circled it in opposite directions, twin arcs of devastation marking our passage.
Shockwaves rippled across continents, oceans recoiled, and debris spiraled upward in suspended chaos.
Our vision blurred crimson... One body coughed blood; the other's arm twisted unnaturally before snapping back into alignment. The longer we remained divided, the more violently reality resisted.
And then we saw eachother...
At the exact point we started...
Our trajectories had finally met...
And then we lunged at each other.
We both understood that one of us had to die to prevent a paradox, to absorb the full impact of the collision and allow a single timeline to continue. It was a necessary sacrifice.
Within those moments, brief though our separation had been, the mere knowledge that someone else was carrying our burden had lightened something inside us. For the first time in a long while, we felt a bit less burden on our shoulders...
We no longer knew which of us was the original. The distinction had lost all meaning. All that mattered was that one of us would remain. It did not matter which.
Those seconds may have been the most difficult of our existence, because the choice was necessary... It was about erasing oneself willingly so that the other could continue.
And then our fists met.
The impact did not feel like flesh striking flesh. It felt like timelines collapsing into each other, like existence itself compressing into a single point.
… The last thing I remember was a brilliant green light swallowing everything before consciousness slipped away.