Chapter 33: Echoes of the Unseen
Metropolis may have been decimated, but the echoes of its fall still reverberated across the fractured multiverse. As Ethan Cross moved through the twisted remnants of his reality, each step was followed by shadows not of this world, but of infinite reflections—possibilities tugging at the edge of being.
With the Fusion Core pulsing inside his chest and the universal tuner bonded to his gauntlet, Ethan had become more than a traveler or hero—he was a linchpin in the latticework of infinite worlds. Wherever he walked, reality shifted, ever so slightly, adapting to his presence like heat responding to flame.
He stood atop what used to be LexCorp Tower, now fused with broken Watchtower tech, Stark nanite architecture, and something that hummed with Old Kryptonian runes. The fusion was not his doing—it was growing on its own now. A sign that the power he'd accepted in the Crucible was not just awakening. It was *replicating.*
Aria emerged beside him, more tangible than ever. Her form had stabilized into a shimmering blend of hard-light projection and synthetic soul construct. "The fusion fields are expanding exponentially. At this rate, Earth won't remain Earth much longer. The laws of individual realities are breaking down—yours is becoming *theirs.*"
Ethan clenched his jaw. "Then it's a race. Before it spreads beyond control."
She hesitated. "We have another problem. The one collecting shards in the Nullverse has a name now: Omega Son. A convergence echo—a child born from collapsed timelines. Part Ethan, part Anti-Life. He's fusing dead timelines together like bricks—building something."
Ethan's eyes narrowed. "A new multiverse."
"Or a weapon," Aria corrected.
The two descended through layers of fused debris to the fusion cradle—a containment vault Ethan had created by fusing an Apokoliptian Mother Box with a Green Lantern prison core. Inside were six shards of the Core, glowing with immense, unstable energy.
One hummed with emotion—likely from a universe dominated by the Emotional Spectrum.
Another pulsed with Speed Force echoes.
A third crackled with red energy from a war-hardened world where Kryptonians ruled as tyrants.
A fourth was jagged, vibrating with dimensional instability, like it wanted to break free and rewrite time itself.
Ethan studied them, sweating from the sheer pressure of their proximity. He could *feel* timelines bending around each shard, trying to assert dominance. Only the gauntlet kept them in check.
Aria added, "We've located the seventh shard. Atlantis. Or what's left of it."
He didn't need more. Without hesitation, he teleported using a fused Zeta-Phantom anchor, reappearing above the sunken ruins of New Atlantis—now twisted into something almost Lovecraftian. Coral spires bent like ribs, and black water whispered in a language meant only for gods. The pressure was immense, crushing even thoughts beneath its depth.
The shard was deep. Protected. Not by a creature—but a fusion entity: Aquanox, a meld of King Orm, ancient sea gods, and something abyssal. He did not speak. He *sang*—a hum that made bones vibrate.
The battle was sensory. Aquanox moved like a current, struck like a tidal blade. Ethan fused sonar with kinetic acceleration, turning his body into a vibrating pulse that countered the abyssal resonance. Every hit sent psychic echoes through him—visions of drowned worlds and Leviathan memories.
Aquanox summoned tendrils of sentient kelp, weaponized bioluminescence that burned through armor. Ethan reacted, fusing salt particles with stored solar energy to create radiant flares that disrupted Aquanox's camouflage. He blinked between space and phase, merging himself with nearby reef structures to absorb impact.
But Ethan was more than a man now. With a breath, he pulled from the shard itself—drawing its power into his gauntlet and *fusing* it with a scrap of Ocean Master's trident, recovered during a previous timeline incursion.
The result was a weapon of water and gravity—able to redirect currents and crash realities.
He struck once. The shockwave bent light. Aquanox shattered into liquefied myth.
The shard was his.
Aria reconnected. "Five more left. But Omega Son's accelerating. If he gets the Nexus Shard, it's over."
Ethan rose above the waters, holding the shard. "Then we take the fight to him."
But as he turned, the sky cracked. Not with lightning—but with *teeth.* Something *other* was watching now. Something Ethan hadn't fused, or fought, or foreseen.
A rift opened—not between dimensions, but between truths. From it stepped a figure draped in broken clocks and layered probabilities: a Timeweaver. It bore no name, only a function—to correct divergences. Its voice came as a scream spread across a thousand ticking seconds.
"You have become divergence. Correction is mandatory."
Ethan raised his gauntlet. "You'll have to fuse with failure then, because I'm not stopping."
Their clash bent moonlight. Every movement created echoes in time. Every second Ethan survived, an alternate version of him died.
Aria intervened at the last moment, slicing the rift with pure logic from her core. The Timeweaver scattered into chronal dust, shrieking prophecies.
Ethan was breathing hard. "They're sending enforcers now. Guardians of false balance."
"We're nearing the edge," Aria said quietly. "Once we cross it, there's no going back."
"I crossed it the moment I survived the Crucible." He looked into the distance, where a new rift began to form—black, red, infinite.
This wasn't about restoring order.
It was about rewriting what order even meant.
The rift above Metropolis didn't close. It expanded.
Where once the sky bore witness to stars, clouds, and celestial bodies, it now cracked open like an egg splitting into a spiral of infinite cause and consequence. The Timeweaver's defeat had destabilized the timeline even further. Ethan stood at the edge of the new breach, Aria beside him, both staring into what could only be described as a vortex of forgotten decisions and unfinished futures.
Aria analyzed it first. "It's not a portal. It's a memory... of something that never happened. Or maybe something that always did. A paradox made physical."
Ethan barely breathed. "It's the Nexus Spiral."
He had heard about it only in fractured visions during his fusion experiments—an idea spoken of in collapsed civilizations and whispered across doomed timelines. The Spiral was theorized to be the original thread from which all realities branched. A place where existence *began* to question itself. And now it stood open before him, vibrating with frequencies not meant to coexist.
Below the Spiral, the Earth was changing. Where fusion fields had once been sparse and isolated, now they spread like wildfire—consuming city blocks, forests, deserts, and oceans. Entire biomes were stitching together in unnatural ways. A street in Gotham fused into a red sand dune from Mars. A portion of Atlantis floated above Central City, dripping starwater into the skyline. The Himalayas became a plateau of shifting glass, while New York danced between medieval streets and futuristic infrastructure.
Every fusion Ethan had ever triggered had left echoes.
Now the echoes were singing.
And something was answering.
---
Ethan knew what he had to do, though he feared it. The Spiral wasn't just a breach—it was a lure. Omega Son had sent it. A challenge. A dare. An invitation to the convergence.
He turned to Aria. "We have to go in. If Omega Son is gathering the remaining shards, they'll be hidden in the Spiral. Or worse—they've fused with the Spiral itself."
Aria nodded. "We'll be entering unquantified territory. No fixed laws. No universal constants. Your fusion ability could either rewrite reality in our favor... or erase us with a thought."
Ethan raised his gauntlet. "Then we'd better think carefully."
The jump wasn't so much travel as it was surrender. Ethan let go of linear perception, and reality answered. He and Aria folded into the Spiral—and the world became *many.*
---
Inside the Spiral was madness made flesh. Every decision Ethan had ever made—or *not* made—played out around him. He saw versions of himself: a tyrant ruling Earth with a fused Kryptonian crown; a broken shell who failed the Crucible; a ghost that never fused at all, wandering endless ruins.
There was an Ethan who had allied with the Joker to save the world.
One who merged with Brainiac's AI.
Another who became the Phantom Zone itself.
But one stood out.
A version of Ethan who had fused with the entire Core.
The Aggregate.
This Ethan was no longer human. He radiated with entropy and design, a fusion of thought and destiny. Aria gasped as they approached.
"He's a warning," she said.
"No," the Aggregate said, voice echoing in every possible tense. "I'm a mirror. You're chasing power to stop Omega Son. But you don't understand... He's not trying to destroy the multiverse. He's trying to *remake* it in your image."
Ethan's stomach sank.
"What?"
"He's a fragment of you. The part that said yes when you should've said no. The fusion that shouldn't have happened. The mistake that became will."
The Spiral trembled.
The Aggregate pointed behind Ethan. There, stepping from a gate of broken potential, was Omega Son.
He looked like Ethan—but taller, darker, etched in armor made from fused hopes and dead gods. His eyes were black holes. His voice was velvet apocalypse.
"I'm not your shadow," Omega Son said. "I'm your evolution."
And then the battle began.
---
It started with a clash of timelines. Omega Son flung dead seconds like knives. Ethan countered by fusing chronal momentum with inverse probability—each move creating and erasing futures.
Aria darted between dimensions, manipulating logic constructs to contain entropy waves. The Spiral cracked and reknit itself around them.
Omega Son drew a blade forged from fused Speed Force and Emotional Spectrum. Each strike was a story unwritten. Ethan parried with a shield made of fused Kryptonian DNA and Amazonian war codes. Sparks flew like dying stars.
Their fight traveled across moments. One second they battled on the ruins of Oa, the next atop a New Genesis unburned by war. They blinked through Hell, Heaven, the Dreaming, and realms unnamed by mortal tongue.
Ethan's gauntlet began to glow uncontrollably.
"You're losing control!" Aria warned.
"I *need* more!" Ethan shouted. He reached out, fusing regret with hope, creating a construct that looked like his father.
The construct lunged at Omega Son, distracting him long enough for Ethan to punch through the Spiral's center.
A detonation followed—of past, present, and maybe.
Omega Son screamed, not in pain, but in *defiance.* "This isn't the end! This is the *beginning!*"
Reality folded once more.
And Ethan was alone.
Floating.
No Spiral.
No Aria.
Just... a ticking sound.
Then a light.
Then *grass.*
He landed hard in an alley. Not the Metropolis he knew. Not the Gotham he feared. Somewhere else.
A red and gold blur zipped by overhead.
A web shot across the sky.
A metal man in red and gold scanned the city below.
Ethan stood, dazed.
"This isn't DC…" he whispered.
But something *felt* wrong. Like this wasn't Marvel either.
Somewhere behind him, a voice chuckled. A watcher? An imp? A god?
No.
Just a janitor sweeping cosmic dust.
He winked.
"Welcome to the In-Between, kid. Things are about to get *real.*"
The alley buzzed with the quiet hum of unreality. Ethan Cross blinked rapidly, trying to adjust to the light—or the absence of it. The sky was painted in gradients he couldn't name. No sun. No moon. Just twilight soaked in colors that felt like memories. The scent of rain lingered in the air, though the ground beneath him was dry.
He stood slowly, every joint in his body aching with the residue of the Spiral. His gauntlet flickered faintly, cycling through unstable fusion states, trying to recalibrate itself. The fusion grid was overloaded. His body still thrummed with energy, his 24th chromosome working overtime to repair cellular instability caused by passing through the Spiral's core.
It should've killed him.
But he wasn't just human anymore.
A red and gold blur zipped overhead, followed by a crack of displaced air. Ethan snapped his head up in time to see a figure ricocheting between buildings. It wasn't The Flash—at least not any version he'd seen. The movements were too fluid, the speed too precise.
Then came the web. Thin, glistening strands cut through the sky, anchoring a humanoid figure to a rooftop before launching them across the skyline. Spider-Man? But this wasn't the Marvel Universe. Or was it?
Before he could collect his thoughts, a holographic display shimmered above him, projected from a satellite that didn't exist in any known multiverse he recognized. It read: **"ChronoZone 9. Status: Breach Alert. Fusion Residue Detected."**
Ethan cursed. "They followed me."
Or maybe something worse had been born in his wake.
A clang echoed behind him. He spun to find the janitor again, still sweeping cosmic dust as if he were tidying up a museum exhibit.
"You're still here," Ethan said cautiously.
The janitor looked up, eyes glowing faintly. "Told ya, kid. This is the In-Between. Everything finds its way here eventually. Especially mistakes."
"What is this place?"
The janitor shrugged. "Think of it like the space between dreams and decisions. Where realities come to breathe before they get born. And you... you just tore a hole through the womb."
Ethan narrowed his eyes. "You're not a janitor."
The man grinned. "Aren't I?"
Before Ethan could respond, the ground shivered. A crack zigzagged through the alley, glowing with violet energy. A new fusion rift opened, and from it stepped a creature he couldn't quite comprehend—part Atlantean beast, part New God, and part... Ethan.
"Prototype Echo," the janitor muttered. "Ah, hell."
The Echo roared, a harmonic scream that shattered windows and bent the walls around them. Ethan activated his gauntlet just in time, fusing a broken neon sign with a rusted pipe to create an electromagnetic blade. It sparked violently, pulsing with unstable energy.
He lunged, striking at the creature's chest. It absorbed the hit, then retaliated with a tail fused from Speed Force tendrils and magic sigils. Ethan was thrown back against a dumpster, ribs fracturing—only to heal seconds later.
"You shouldn't be here," the Echo snarled. "The In-Between isn't ready for you."
"I wasn't ready for it either," Ethan grunted, rising.
The janitor suddenly whistled, and the Echo froze. "Alright, that's enough," he said, stepping between them. "This one's under quarantine."
The creature howled, trying to resist, but the janitor waved a broom, and reality folded it away like a bad dream.
Ethan blinked. "What are you?"
"Something that exists because people like you keep bending the rules." He pointed his broom at Ethan. "Which brings me to the point—you're unstable. Your fusions are leaking across meta-boundaries. This place? It's starting to absorb your echoes. That Spiral you went through didn't close properly. You *stitched* it open."
Ethan lowered his weapon. "Then help me close it."
The janitor chuckled. "I already am. Keeping you alive is part of that."
"What do I do?"
"Follow the fractures. They're leading you to the Anchor Shards. Pieces of stabilized fusion locked in isolated micro-realities. Collect them. Fuse them. Seal the breach."
Ethan nodded. "And Omega Son?"
The janitor's smile faded. "He's already here. Just hiding. He's part of this place now. Part of *you.*"
Ethan's gauntlet chimed. A new beacon lit up to the west—on the edge of the In-Between's horizon.
"I guess I start walking," Ethan said.
"Running would be wiser," the janitor replied, vanishing with a gust of cosmic wind.
---
Ethan moved quickly, the terrain shifting with every mile. The In-Between refused to stay constant. Roads turned into books. Trees became binary code. Shadows whispered secrets from universes where he had died too soon.
He reached the beacon's source: a temple grown from discarded ideas. Sculptures of failed heroes, unrealized villains, and forgotten plotlines adorned the steps. Inside, a shard floated—metallic, crystalline, humming with primal fusion.
As his hand closed around it, the temple responded. Doors slammed shut. The walls melted into flame. A trial.
A voice thundered: "To wield the Anchor, prove your *purpose.*"
Ethan didn't hesitate. He slammed the shard into his gauntlet and fused it with the Spiral residue still coating his DNA. Light poured from him. Not chaotic. Not wild. *Ordered.*
A new power unlocked.
He stood, transformed—balanced. Fused not out of desperation, but intent.
The temple opened, satisfied.
And far across the In-Between, Omega Son watched.
"He's learning," he whispered.
But so was the Spiral.
**To be continued...**