First Demonic Dragon

Chapter 1177: I Hate Time Travel

“FROM THE TOP ROPEEE!!!”

Abaddon saw the elbow of a fat teenager flying towards his face.

He tried to move, but his body was basically a block of cement that couldn’t get out of the way in time.

Oblivion slammed his elbow into the bridge of Abaddon’s nose.

The dragon fell backward in the ring, and Oblivion appeared behind him like a blur.

He wrapped his arms around Abaddon’s midsection and used the current momentum to subject him to the meanest German suplex the immortal worlds had ever seen.

Abaddon was pretty sure he felt one of his horns chip. He glared at Oblivion who stood over him, charging up a People’s Elbow.

“The fuck are you doing, you hunk of garbage?!”

“I should be asking you that, pussy bacon! What the hell are you messing with time for?!”

Oblivion dropped his elbow, but Abaddon rolled out of the way and left him with nothing but mare to strike.

“It was an accident! You saw that I was trying to interrogate Yog and figure out when WorldJoiner was arriving!”

“Of course I know that! But you almost blew our god damned cover for one! And for two, look at what you’ve done to us!”

Oblivion created a mirror and showed Abaddon his reflective face.

He was horrified.

Abaddon had always been attractive, and divinely so. But now, his masculine facial features were closer to androgynous ones. The eye in the middle of his head had become an empty white void that sometimes shone with an iridescent hue.

He also looked dramatically younger. He was as muscular as he was back in his fledgling true dragon days.

“….Fuck.” Abaddon dropped his head.

“Exactly!” Oblivion shook him. “You thought Karliah was harassing us before!? We’re going to need a restraining order the next time that walking pile of sexual assault sees us!”

“I know…”

“You know she like em’ young and obedient. That’s us!”

“I KNOW!”

“This is it! Bekka’s gonna kill her mom this time!”

“I KNOW DAMN IT!”

At some point, Abaddon noticed that his alter ego had become much more expressive in the time since he had last seen him.

Abaddon had already shed Carter’s existence so that he could step into his full being.

Seeing and talking to a lost part of himself like this felt very nostalgic.

If only a tiny bit infuriating.

“Why do I feel so… not myself?” Abaddon scratched his head.

“Oh. That’s because you used our latent ability of boundless reach when you merged with time and saw the passage of time as well as the lack thereof for everything and everyone that will ever exist. Inadvertently causing you to touch Eternity and evidently take something from him too, given the fact that you are now closer to looking like that bastard than you did yesterday.” Oblivion explained curtly.

Abaddon opened his mouth like a fish, but no sound came out.

Eventually, he simply lowered his head. “Just hit us again…”

Oblivion slapped him.

–

Five minutes later, the two of them were sitting on the floor of a boundless black space.

They mirrored each other almost completely with their arms folded and their legs crossed.

“…Have we been exposed?” Abaddon finally asked.

He was relieved when Oblivion shook his head.

“It doesn’t seem like it… But Eternity is a curious sort. They will continue to pester me for a while, I suspect. At least until their curiosity has been satiated, which could take the better part of a millennium. We have so little else to focus on.”

“But do you believe that he will notify Balance..?”

Oblivion didn’t answer because he didn’t know. That much was obvious to Abaddon.

He hung his head lower and covered his face with his palm.

“…I’m-”

“No, don’t apologize. I know why you did it. And I think… I would have done the same thing.” Oblivion admitted.

He turned to Abaddon with a helpless smile on his face.

“It is enough for our family to live good lives. Come what may. What use is all of this power if we never use it for anything meaningful?”

Abaddon was surprised when Oblivion shifted and grew to look a little more like him.

Evidently, the Egoless was also surprised and didn’t seem to have done it on purpose.

He sighed as he placed his hand atop his fist and stared into the boundless darkness before them.

“From now on… let’s leave interfering with time to the truly insane, yes?”

–

Abaddon woke up cold and covered in sweat.

The ceiling hanging above his head was an unfamiliar one. Sleek and metallic with a slowly rotating fan that certainly wasn’t the cause of this bitter chill. Just as the lights couldn’t be the cause of his throbbing headache.

“Oh, thank fuck, he’s up…”

Abaddon felt movement on his chest, and Sif poked her head into his field of vision.

“Hey there, jailbait. How you feeling?”

Abaddon immediately knew his changes were not just ethereal based on his unlikable new nickname.

“…I’m fine.” He lied.

“Headache, huh?”

“Maybe a little.”

“How did I guess it?”

Sif helped Abaddon sit up, and he saw the room was filled with the concerned faces of his wives.

“I’m fi-”

“You are decidedly not fine, and if you say that again, I am going to strangle you.” Lailah slapped her hand on the bed.

Abaddon figured that wasn’t the right time to follow up his sentence with ’you promise?’

A metallic door slid open, and Shin, Michael, and Fiona all came rushing inside in a single file line.

Much to his surprise, Michael seemed quite relieved to see him awake and fine (he wasn’t fine) even more than Shin did.

“You’re up. Mind telling us where the hell our big bad went and why we suddenly have a holding brigade full of decidedly docile watchers?” Fiona asked.

Abaddon rubbed the back of his head. “…Can I get a drink first?”

Shin pointed to the nightstand where a pitcher of water sat untouched.

“Something stronger.”

Valerie smiled widely. “I just knew I loved you for some reason.”

His butterfly-winged goddess created an entire bottle of tequila out of thin air and poured him a glass.

When she tried to hand it to him, Abaddon reached for the bottle instead.

Seconds after bringing the bottle to his lips, he had downed nearly half of it.

Valerie watched him with unusually big hearts in her eyes.

“Keep it in your pants for a second.” Lisa pulled her away. “If he’s drinking, then it means things are that bad.”

“Right, right… God damn, that man..”

“VAL!”

“I’m focused, I’m focused!”

Abaddon finally put down the bottle and wiped his chin with his forearm.

He exhaled, and a gout of flame blew past his lips.

“…Yog-Sothoth knew where Worldjoiner and her forces were coming from. It’s what had him so spooked and made him erratic. When I learned this, I attempted to get him to tell me everything, but he deteriorated further and became nearly incoherent. So I…”

“You went into his mind?” Lisa was baffled.

“I didn’t see another option.” Abaddon admitted. “But I did not exactly anticipate what I would see either…”

“And what did you see?” Shin raised his brow.

Abaddon shuddered slightly as he reached for the drink Valerie had initially poured him. “…Everything.”

Fiona folded her arms. “Care to be a little less cryptic, jailbait?”

“Hey, I called him that too!” Sif laughed.

For a moment, the jotunn and Fiona seemed to take great pleasure in Abaddon’s diminished age. Something that made him consider chucking them both out the window into space.

“As I said. I saw everything. From the very first living organism to the… well, there will never be a last, but you get the point. It was nauseating.”

Abaddon looked towards Fiona and Shin. “You should both know… your birth parents loved you both immensely. They would have been prouder than anyone to see what you’ve turned yourselves into.”

Needless to say, the pair looked like they had been hit by trucks. Out of everything that they were expecting Abaddon to say, that certainly wasn’t on the list.

“That still doesn’t answer why Yog disappeared…” Michael tilted his head.

“Getting to that…” Abaddon replied, his headache intensifying. “When I became one with time, I became completely unanchored. I could go anywhere. Do almost anything. Even in places where time didn’t flow.

So, I went back in this timeline. Before the horrors got out while I was away, and I shut the door tightly when they were about to break free.”

Everyone in the room had their jaws drop open at once.

Except Fiona, who chuckled. “Real good joke, but I still have some pretty vivid memories of those beasts if you had shut them, then time would have rewritten itself, and I wouldn’t remember anything. I may not even be here right now.”

Abaddon nodded as he pulled Valerie and Lisa into his lap.

“Mhm. Ordinarily.”

“…Ordinarily?”

“When a new timeline started to branch off, I decided to stop it before it could fully form. I don’t want to be disoriented from any more mixups.”

“…Are you saying…?”

Gently, Abaddon rubbed Lisa and Valerie’s faces. They immediately noticed that the way he was looking at them now was leagues different compared to how it was before.

He refused to take his eyes off them as he dropped the biggest bombshell yet.

“I didn’t feel like dealing with it… so I ate it.”