"ENOUGH WITH YOUR MEDDLING, YOU ALIEN!!!"
The scream bypassed my eardrums entirely and rattled directly against the inside of my skull. It was a psychic shockwave so heavy that I actually saw a few of the surviving Coalition soldiers in the distance drop to their knees and dry heave into the dirt.
I floated there in the bright afternoon sky, slowly lowering my hand from where I was pointing at my own chest. I looked at Nakime, who was staring up at the shattered remains of the moon with her newly restored eyes wide open.
"Okay," I muttered, rubbing my temples to stave off the incoming migraine. "First of all, hypocrite much? Have you looked yourself in the mirror? You don't get to call other people aliens."
'Second of all, just what the hell happened up there?'
Instead of saying the last part out loud, I pushed the thought directly through my mental link, aiming it straight at my most chaotic summon.
'Meruem,' I yelled in my head. 'What did you do?!'
Hundreds of thousands of miles away, on the crumbling, fractured surface of the moon, Meruem did not look stressed. Through the link, I got a front-row seat to his current situation.
He was sitting on a massive plate of lunar crust. He had his legs crossed tightly, his feet resting on his thighs in a perfect lotus position. And Meruem wasn't fat anymore.
The comical beach-ball physique he had been sporting a few minutes ago was completely gone. He was back to his sleek form fit for an apex-predator.
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But it was what was in his lap that caught my attention.
Sitting gently in the cradle of Meruem's crossed legs, with the Ant King's hands resting casually on top of its hair, was a head.
It was Thragg's head. The pristine Viltrumite mustache was still perfectly groomed, but the Grand Regent's eyes were rolled so far back you could only see the whites. The rest of his body was just... gone. Eaten? Digested, most probably. Thick, dark Viltrumite blood was smeared all over Meruem's green mouth and chin.
'My apologies, Master,' Meruem's calm voice echoed back through the link and he didn't even sound out of breath. 'The fight got a bit out of hand. I needed to burn the excessive fat quickly to keep up with his speed. He was exceptionally durable. A fascinating species, truly. But ultimately, just meat.'
I let out a sigh of relief and exasperation.
'I'm glad you dealt with Thragg, but was there really a need to make so much noise and destruction,' I grumbled internally. 'Look! You woke up the giant, glowing time squid.'
'He was very chewy,' Meruem noted to himself, completely ignoring my concerns. He looked up at the massive, glowing blue tentacles erupting from the craters around him, while patting Thragg's severed head like it was a household pet. 'The release of my Nen, fueled by Trillions of Dead Viltrumite Lifeforce seems to have agitated the local wildlife. Do you want me to kill this one as well?'
'No!' I snapped. 'Just get back here. Now. We need to regroup before this thing resets the fucking universe.'
'Understood.'
Meruem simply raised his hand and swiped at the empty vacuum of space and a swirling, neon-green portal ripped open in the dead silence of the moon.
Meruem's Aura Synthesis was frankly broken.
He stood up, casually clutching Thragg's severed head by the hair and stepped through the green portal, and vanished just as a massive blue tentacle smashed the lunar plate he had been sitting on.
Down on Earth, I watched the portal open a few feet away. Meruem stepped out, looking completely refreshed, hovering as he settled quietly beside me and Nakime.
"Glad you could make it," I said dryly.
"The local wildlife is very loud," Meruem observed, looking up at the sky.
He was right. The mysterious entity was throwing a cosmic temper tantrum.
The massive tentacles were thrashing wildly in orbit, whipping through the vacuum of space with speed that didn't make sense given its size. It might not have been an issue if it was just physical blows, but I could see the temporal energy those wild swings released.
"YOU HAVE DISTURBED THE RE-SET!" the Entity's voice boomed in everyone's skulls again. "THE SET ORDER OF THIS UNIVERSE IS COMPROMISED BY YOUR CHAOS!"
"Oh great," I muttered. "It's one of those Lore gatekeeper types. They always hate it when you speedrun their fav media or disrupt canon timelines."
"YOU HOARD SOULS THAT DO NOT BELONG TO YOU!" the Entity continued to rant, the psychic pressure making my ears ring. "YOUR ACTIONS HAVE ALTERED THE TAPESTRY! THE HALF-BREED WAS MEANT TO SUFFER! THE VILTRUMITE WAR WAS MEANT TO FORGE THE TIMELINE! THIS IS WRONG! SO WRONG! NOW YOU WILL WATCH THE WORLD YOU HAVE RUINED BECOME DUST!"
While it was yelling at me, it was also actively destroying things.
A Coalition dreadnought floating in low Earth orbit, tried to bank away from the shattered moon. The pilot was probably panicking, trying to punch the hyper-drive.
A single, glowing tentacle casually brushed against the hull of the ship and instead of breaking the ship, It aged it.
In a fraction of a second, the high-tech metal of the cruiser turned into flaking rust, its structural integrity failed instantly and the engines sputtered and died. The ship just crumbled into a massive cloud of brown dust in the middle of space, scattering its screaming crew into the void.
Inside the remaining ships of the Viltrumite armada, the horror was even worse.
I managed to see what was happening up there, and honestly, I really wish I couldn't.
A tentacle whipped through a Viltrumite warship and instead of damaging the hull; it just phased right through the metal, washing a wave of blinding blue light over the crew inside.
The Viltrumite soldiers, beings who lived for thousands of years and possessed bodies that could survive flying through a plantes, experienced a biological glitch.
Half of the crew instantly aged as their hair turned white, their incredibly dense muscles atrophied in a millisecond and finally their skin sagged, rotted, and their ultra-hard bones turned to brittle powder as they collapsed into piles of dust inside their pristine white uniforms.
The other half of the crew went the opposite direction.
Their biological clocks reversed and fully grown, battle-hardened warriors rapidly shrank inside their suits. A massive, seven-foot-tall Viltrumite turned into a gangly teenager, then a crying toddler, and finally reduced into a small, fetal clump of cells.
And then the cells popped out of existence entirely.
It was a nightmare. It was like watching someone spam the 'undo' button on reality. There was no fighting it. You can't punch time. You can't flex your muscles to stop yourself from being un-born.
And the temporal ripples didn't just stop there, they were hitting the Earth.
Random time shifts started popping up across the globe like lag spikes in a corrupted save file.
In Egypt, a temporal wave washed over the Giza plateau. In the blink of an eye, the weathered, ancient stones of the Pyramids transformed. The missing smooth, white limestone casing instantly reappeared, blindingly bright under the sun, completely restoring the structures to the exact day they were built thousands of years ago.
Halfway across the world in India, the opposite happened. A blue ripple hit Agra and the pristine white marble of the Taj Mahal instantly aged millions of years, crumbling into a sad, grey pile of eroded dust in a matter of seconds.
The timeline was literally falling apart just from the entity wildly swinging its tentacles, trying to scrub the dirt off the universe. And apparently, I was the dirt.
Nakime didn't hesitate. She looked at the random patches of blue energy starting to spark across the landscape around us.
"I've got this," she said, her voice completely steady.