Chapter 32: Duality Unbound
Time refused to move. The crackling silence around Ethan felt like the pause between a lightning strike and thunder—a breath caught in the throat of reality itself. Buildings frozen mid-collapse, sparks suspended in the air like fireflies turned to glass. Even Aria's projection, glitching and looping through a half-formed warning, hovered in a stutter of holographic fragments.
But the man standing before Ethan was untouched.
He wore no insignia. His armor bore the shimmering hues of fused alloys, yet none were identifiable—no LexCorp signature, no recognizable tech base. It was as if someone had taken dozens of combat suits, power armor, and alien exoskeletons and melded them together until they became something wholly new.
Something dangerous.
"You're me?" Ethan asked, his voice echoing strangely in the static world.
The man smirked. "Yes. And no. I'm a version of you who made different choices. One who didn't fight the pull of the fusion. I embraced it. Let it consume every part of me."
He raised his hand, fingers crackling with unstable fusion energy. The gauntlet was nearly identical to Ethan's—but it pulsed with darker energy, deep violet and black, threads of raw entropy flickering around the edges.
"I don't understand," Ethan said, stepping forward, heart pounding. "How are you even here?"
"I'm here because time broke. Because we broke it," the future-Ethan said. "Every time you fused an object that shouldn't be fused, every time you used that chromosome to force reality to bend—it cracked the multiverse. And one of those cracks led to me."
Ethan narrowed his eyes. "What do you want?"
"To show you the truth. That this power—it's not a tool. It's a living thing. It grows, learns... and hungers. You think you're choosing what to fuse? You're not. It's choosing for you."
"No," Ethan growled. "I control my power. I've made it my own."
Future-Ethan laughed, a sound that chilled. "You think the 24th chromosome was a fluke? A mutation? It was engineered. You were *built* to be this. The fusion is part of you. But it's not loyal to you. It only follows the strongest mind... and right now, that's me."
He stepped closer, and the frozen world around them shivered—time threatening to resume, to fracture further. Ethan could feel it, like a dam about to burst.
"I came here to offer you a choice," the older version said. "Join me. Fuse your existence with mine. We'll become a constant—beyond time, beyond worlds. No more running, no more hiding. Just power. Purpose."
Ethan stared. He thought of Nightwing. Batman. Aria. The people he'd saved. The ones he hadn't. And most of all, the thin line he walked every day between being a weapon... and being a person.
"No," he said simply. "I won't become you."
The world snapped back into motion with a deafening *crack*.
Aria's hologram screamed back to life. "Ethan! Behind you!"
He barely twisted in time to block a strike from his older self—raw fusion energy slamming into his shield-gauntlet and sending him flying through the far wall of the tower.
The air burned. Static pulsed through the debris. Ethan rolled, coughing, and pulled himself to his feet. His counterpart walked through the rubble like a specter, his armor unfazed.
"I'm not your enemy," the future-Ethan said, raising both hands. "Not yet. But I will be if you continue to resist."
"You already are," Ethan snapped, grabbing a twisted support beam and a busted drone core. The fusion lit his body with arcs of gold and red, and in his hands formed a hammer of radiant energy.
He lunged.
The impact cracked the ground, sent fusion waves tearing through the tower. Sparks rained. Alarms blared. Time tried to bend, to loop, but Ethan forced it back with sheer willpower.
The two versions of Ethan clashed again and again—mirror images of each other, each fusion more chaotic than the last. Gauntlet against blade, whip against shield, power lashing through the broken timeline.
In the end, it wasn't strength that decided the moment.
It was *control*.
As future-Ethan raised a new weapon—something that looked like a fused shard of a dying star—Ethan saw the weakness. A moment of instability. The fusion was too wild. Unrefined.
He dove forward, dropping his weapon, and placed both hands on his counterpart's gauntlets.
And *fused them together.*
The blast knocked both of them back. The older Ethan screamed—his arms locking in place, weapons merging and mutating, uncontrolled energy surging up his spine.
"You... idiot...!" the future-Ethan hissed, collapsing to one knee. "You've only... delayed it..."
Ethan stepped forward, wind and energy swirling around him. "Then I'll keep delaying it. For as long as it takes."
The fractured double glared up at him—then smirked. "We'll meet again. When you're ready to finish what you started."
And with that, he vanished—folded into a crack in space-time, like a ripple closing in a pond.
The air stilled.
Aria reappeared, flickering badly, her voice distorted. "Ethan... the Core's destabilizing. You need to leave. Now."
He looked around the broken tower, the fallen Sentinels, the shaking ground.
"I'm not leaving," he said. "Not until I understand what I am."
He picked up a Sentinel's shattered lens and fused it to his gauntlet.
Somewhere far beneath the city, a new frequency pulsed.
A call.
He answered it.
The tower was gone. Reduced to molten steel and scorched rock, its ruin steaming into the gray skyline of Metropolis. Yet Ethan stood in the crater like a stone against the tide, his gauntlet humming with the recent fusion. The shard he'd fused—a broken Sentinel lens—now pulsed on his wrist, revealing energy readings far beneath the Earth's surface. Something old. Something hidden.
The air was thick with ozone, still charged from the recent battle. Rubble surrounded him, chunks of polymerized alloys and scorched concrete humming with residual energy. Ethan didn't move for several seconds. He was listening—not with ears, but with the attuned sense that fusion had granted him. Beneath the surface hum of destruction, there was a frequency, subtle but persistent, whispering like an ancient heartbeat.
Aria flickered beside him, her signal corrupted but stabilizing. "This frequency... it's ancient. Pre-Atlantean. Maybe even older. It's not just tech. It's alive."
Ethan's fingers clenched. A piece of him—the part that had fused instinct with thought since the beginning—responded to the pulse without command. The fusion was learning. Growing bolder. He could feel it now, like a second presence behind his eyes, observing, adapting.
"Can you triangulate the signal?" he asked, his voice low, gritty from the smoke.
She hesitated. "I can guide you, but... it's not on Earth. Not entirely."
A shiver ran down Ethan's spine. "Explain."
"It's like... it's bleeding into our dimension. From a pocket realm. Maybe a failed fusion. A place caught between universes."
Ethan's mind raced. He remembered what Future-Ethan had said—about the power choosing for him. Was this one of those choices? Had something been waiting for him to uncover it?
Without a word, Ethan activated the Rift Drive he'd crafted weeks ago—a fusion of Kryptonian phase lenses and the tachyon conductor he'd salvaged from Reverse-Flash's broken ring. He twisted it, and space around him cracked like glass.
He stepped through.
---
The world on the other side was not a world at all. It was a concept—raw, violent, and infinite. Geometry spiraled without logic. Gravity fluctuated like breath. Colors didn't stay in their lanes, morphing and bleeding into impossible hues. The landscape screamed silently with the voice of a thousand failed experiments.
A fusion realm.
Ethan stumbled onto a jagged plateau of obsidian and glowing filament. Air, if it could be called that, pressed against him in pulses, as though the realm itself were breathing. The sky was a churning field of eyes and storms, observing him without blinking.
Before Ethan could process the strangeness, the gauntlet pulled him. Not forward, but down—into the fused terrain, dragging him through layers of reality like water.
He surfaced in a citadel made of rusted stars and broken tech. The structure loomed impossibly high, its base forged from shattered Monitors' tech and alien steel. Spires jutted out like fractured nerves, constantly shifting in shape. Above its gates: a symbol—a circle with a vertical line, intersected by fragments. Not Kryptonian. Not Apokoliptian. Something else. Something personal.
Inside, the truth waited.
A throne. And on it, a being.
Ethan gasped. It wasn't another version of himself. Not quite. But it was close. A fusion of countless Ethans, each from shattered timelines. Twisted versions of his choices—heroes, villains, cowards, tyrants—all bound into one.
Their armor was a patchwork of every major fusion he had ever attempted—and some he hadn't. A gauntlet crafted from Brainiac tech. A cloak stitched from speed force filaments. A crown humming with psychic feedback from fused Martian DNA.
"I am the Aggregate," it spoke, voice a chorus of familiarity. "And you... are the Prime."
Ethan stared, unease building in his gut. "What is this place?"
"This is where all paths converge," the Aggregate said. "The crucible of consequence. Every choice you made that fractured reality, every failed fusion that birthed a paradox—it was absorbed here. Fed into the Collective Matrix. Into *me*."
"Why am I here?"
"Because you're beginning to awaken. The power you wield isn't just about blending matter. It's about defining reality. Fusion bends the rules not because it's powerful—but because it rewrites the rulebook entirely."
Ethan clenched his fists. "I didn't ask for this."
"No," the Aggregate replied. "But you *are* this. And now, the Matrix is collapsing. The failed realities are leaking. And only one of us can decide what survives."
A tremor shook the citadel. Ethan's eyes flashed gold as he activated a defensive fusion—melding a shard of the Sentinel core with a broken Green Lantern ring. A shimmering barrier of emerald and plasma erupted around him.
"Then show me what I'm fighting," Ethan said.
And the walls dissolved.
The moment the citadel walls collapsed, Ethan found himself no longer standing on obsidian ground—but falling, endlessly, through layers of broken space. Each shard that passed him was a reality refracted, a memory twisted, a version of himself replaying decisions he hadn't made.
In one, he was a villain clad in fused Doomsday-Kryptonite armor, laughing as Metropolis burned. In another, he was a martyr, entombed in a crystal prison, arms outstretched as if crucified by his own conscience. In yet another, he was a recluse, hiding away from a world he once tried to save but ultimately abandoned. Each flash sent a jolt through Ethan's mind—fragments of choices that never happened, yet felt painfully real, like ghosts of possibilities begging for acknowledgment.
The gauntlet on his arm, fused now with the Green Lantern shard and Sentinel core, reacted instinctively. It formed an energy cocoon, protecting him as he spiraled downward. The green energy flared in rhythmic pulses, guiding him through the chaos like a lighthouse in the storm.
But downward wasn't quite the right direction. Space here didn't follow logic. Time ran sideways. Up was a question. Down was a dare. Left became right, and sometimes his heartbeat echoed before it even began.
Finally, Ethan landed—if such a term could apply—on a construct of memory-turned-matter: a battlefield assembled from his past conflicts. Sentinel remains lay half-submerged in fused terrain. Phantom Zone cracks bled into collapsed Watchtower wreckage. There were whispers in the wind—names, voices, memories caught mid-sentence.
The sky was an aurora of time distortions and looping cries of combat. The sun here flickered like an old bulb—sometimes bright as a thousand stars, sometimes cold and dark like a collapsed dimension.
"Welcome to the Crucible," a voice boomed.
Ethan turned, pulse steady, heart hardened. The Aggregate now stood in multiple forms—each one a manifestation of an alternate Ethan. They circled him like judgmental specters, each wearing their own war-borne armor, scars of different choices etched into their skin.
"Is this a trial?" Ethan asked.
"No," said the one with red-glowing eyes and Deathstroke's fused gear. "It's a convergence."
"You've reached the threshold," another intoned, clad in golden robes and fused Atlantean-aetheric armor. "You can either unify us... or be undone by us."
Ethan raised the gauntlet, its power building. Tendrils of cosmic fusion leaked from its core, flickering between matter and potential. "Then let's see which version of me deserves to walk out of here."
The battle wasn't physical. It began in the mind. Ethan was pulled into a realm of thoughts, where every regret, every moment of hesitation, became a weapon wielded against him.
He stood trial before his own guilt—faces of the innocent he couldn't save, shadows of friends he failed. Each attack shattered his mental armor, and each crack was filled with the voice of the Aggregate:
"Do you even know why you fuse, Ethan Cross?"
And then came the answer. Not spoken. *Felt.*
Because he *had* to. Because he was incomplete. Because the world, fractured and chaotic, only made sense when it *became one*—through him.
That was the moment he stopped fighting—and *started fusing*.
He fused his guilt with his determination.
His fear with his courage.
His fractured timeline with the prime one.
His anger with his discipline.
His past with his future.
Each fusion was a step upward, a metaphorical climb through the Crucible's layered mindspace. The alternate Ethans began to fade, not destroyed—but *reintegrated.* Not defeated, but *accepted.*
He found fragments of his first fusion accident, locked away in a dark corner of his mind—painful and unresolved. He reached in and embraced the failure, turning it into understanding. He pulled memories of his mother's smile from before the accident, anchoring his resolve in something real.
The Aggregate, now smaller, singular, stepped toward him.
"You've chosen synthesis over rejection. You've accepted the chaos, rather than fighting to cage it."
Ethan nodded. "I'm not afraid of the other versions of me. Because I know what I'm becoming."
The Aggregate smiled—and then *merged* with him. A pulse of white-gold light erupted from Ethan's chest as a new core stabilized within his gauntlet. Not just a fusion device now—*a universal tuner.*
He saw everything—the web of multiverses, the strings of broken choices, the looping moments of failure and triumph. It all connected. It all converged through him.
And then the Crucible collapsed.
He stood once more in the ruins of Metropolis. Aria reconnected, her voice stronger than before.
"Signal stabilized. What happened in there?"
Ethan looked to the sky, his eyes now reflecting layers of fused dimensions. They shimmered like mirrors into a thousand possibilities.
"I accepted what I am."
A ripple echoed across the sky. Something was coming.
Something... *other.*
Metropolis was no longer just a city—it was a scar etched across time and possibility. As Ethan stepped through the molten remains of what had once been a convergence point of Earth's defenses, the ground pulsed beneath his feet like the beat of a slumbering titan. Each step reverberated with resonance not entirely bound to this plane. His gauntlet shimmered with iridescent bands of color, reflecting more than light—they reflected timelines, intent, consequence.
Aria's voice crackled to life. "We've detected an energy pulse rippling across multiversal ley-lines. Whatever you triggered... it didn't just stabilize you. It marked you."
Ethan looked skyward. There was no sun—just layers of shifting atmospheric filters peeling back to reveal something more than stars. Strings of collapsed probability danced like electric veins across the upper atmosphere. The fusion had resonated through the fabric of creation, calling out to entities that watched from beyond time.
And something had answered.
---
It began as a flicker above New Themyscira—a golden shard falling from the sky like a meteor wrapped in memory. The Amazons watched it fall with reverence and terror, for it hummed in tones not heard since the days of the Old Pantheon. The shard pierced the sea, boiled it, and birthed a spire of crystalline growth that sang with Ethan's fusion signature.
Then it happened again—over Central City, over the ruins of Coast City, in the void where Apokolips once loomed.
Fragments of something ancient. Shards of what Ethan had seen in the Crucible.
Pieces of the Fusion Core.
---
Deep beneath Gotham, in the black chamber once sealed by Bruce Wayne himself, a voice stirred. Mechanical lungs wheezed to life. The AI once known as Brother Eye pulsed with reactivation.
"Fusion protocol initialized. Tracking subject: Ethan Cross."
Dozens of red eyes blinked open in the dark. Servers purred to life. Dormant weapons took breath once more. The Eye had seen a potential future—a singularity birthed from Ethan's very DNA, powered by the 24th chromosome, guided by fusion's lawless symmetry.
---
Ethan's mind pulsed. Not from pain. From connection. As the universal tuner stabilized within his body, he began to sense the threads of existence itself. Like a spider to its web, he could feel the tremors in distant realities. Fusions gone wrong. Wars that hadn't yet happened. Beings looking for him—not to challenge him, but to use him.
Aria blinked into existence beside him, her form no longer glitching. "We have to make a decision, Ethan. You're not just a stabilizing force anymore. You're becoming a source. A node. If too many fragments of the Fusion Core land across Earth—or worse, beyond Earth—there's no telling who or what might use them."
Ethan nodded. "Then we find the pieces. And we contain the ones who would misuse them."
---
The first hunter came within hours.
She called herself Prysm—a fused remnant of Zatanna and a corrupted Mother Box AI. She moved like thought, phased through dimension, and spoke in reverse incantations translated through binary code. Her body shimmered in glyphs of broken magic and warped code.
"You carry the spark," she whispered as she appeared, levitating above Ethan's campfire in the woods outside Metropolis. "The Core sings in you. Give it. Or be undone."
Ethan didn't hesitate. The gauntlet pulsed, and the earth rose to meet her.
They clashed—magic fused with digital entropy against Ethan's raw, reality-bending fusion. Her spells twisted trees into molten serpents. Ethan countered by merging bark with sound waves, creating sonic barriers that cracked dimensions.
Their battle lasted ten minutes in real-time. Ten days in fractured space. Ethan finally fused a Silence Stone with a collapsed Boom Tube coil, wrapping her spellcasting in a field of inertial stasis.
She collapsed, twitching.
He didn't kill her. He couldn't. She was like him—a byproduct of broken choices, a result of unrefined power. But he locked her in a stasis cell crafted from the remnants of the Fusion Citadel.
---
He kept moving.
Tracking the shards took him to dead zones: places where reality was frayed, often ignored by traditional heroes. In the Phantom Verge, he faced living paradoxes—beings that were events, not people. In the broken timeline of Red Sun Earth, he allied briefly with a benevolent version of Lex Luthor, one who had preserved Kal-El as a living battery to power his peacekeeping machines.
Each fragment reclaimed brought more clarity—and more weight. Ethan's dreams grew heavier, crowded with voices of other Ethans. Some congratulated him. Some begged. Others cursed his name.
Aria finally confronted him.
"You can't keep them all in you, Ethan. The fusions—these shards—they're changing your core. You're becoming the Aggregate you feared."
He looked at her, tired, yet resolute. "Maybe that's what I need to become to stop the next one."
Aria's projection flickered. "The next what?"
Ethan turned his gaze toward the sky. Beyond the clouds, the ripples of dimensional rifts had begun to solidify into something far more dangerous.
"Someone else is gathering shards. And they're not from *this* multiverse."
---
In the far reaches of reality, within a dying timeline known only as Null Earth, a figure stood atop a throne made from the corpses of dead timelines. His body glowed with entropy and light—a fusion of cosmic energies, psychic voids, and fractured logic.
He smiled.
"Found you."
To be continued...