A few dozen seconds later, the bomb activated.
Deathstroke's group had already returned to the convergence point of the two Parallel Universes, watching the little white sphere within a cosmos filled with spatial debris.
Earth-1610's Iron Man might not have matched his Earth-616 counterpart in combat ability, but his skill at creating and modifying technology was beyond question. The blast was dazzling when the bomb detonated, yet it did not release all its energy at once. Instead, like a booster, it slowly pushed the moon into motion.
The moon first gave a violent shudder, kicking up a cloud of dust across its surface. Then its orbit changed, and its path of revolution slowly shifted.
It looked rather absurd. Compared with the moon, the tiny flame from that little booster looked like a needle-thin strand of ox hair from afar. Yet that was precisely what changed the celestial body's fate.
It truly was the last straw that broke the camel's back. The moon, perhaps still trying to resist when its orbit first changed, abruptly accelerated once it was caught by Earth's gravitational field.
To the onlookers, it seemed slow. In reality, though, the moon closed thousands of kilometers on Earth every second.
The moon had no atmosphere, so there was little dramatic weather to observe. But when it struck Earth's atmosphere, nearly half its body burned crimson, like a red-hot steel ball.
Two seconds later, the two spheres collided.
How should it be described? Like a slow-motion drop of molten iron falling onto an egg—seemingly slow, yet actually swift. At the instant of impact, tens of trillions of tons of molten surface matter blasted into space, emitting a blinding red glow.
As the moon burrowed deeper into Earth, the cataclysm began. Terrifying pressure swept out scorching material from the planet's core.