Chapter 29: The Last Echo

The air itself held its breath as Jax stood between the shimmering paths, his outstretched hands trembling inches from both the blue and red strands of fate. The child's golden light pulsed around them in frantic waves, barely holding back the Spiral's encroaching darkness.

"You can't take both," the child whispered, her voice strained. Cracks now spiderwebbed across her glowing skin, thin lines of blackness seeping through like ink in water. "The strain will tear you apart before—"

Jax clenched his teeth. "Watch me."

His hands closed around both paths simultaneously.

The universe screamed.

For an endless moment, nothing existed except the agony—white-hot filaments of pure causality burning through every nerve ending. Jax's vision shattered into a kaleidoscope of possible futures, each fragment more terrible than the last:

**In one shard:**

He saw himself standing in the city's core chamber, fingers flying across the ancient control panel with surgical precision. The blue preservation energy wrapped around him like a cocoon as he severed Veridia Prime's connection to the Spiral layer by layer. Thousands would survive—the infrastructure intact, the skyline preserved. But in the shadows between buildings, something darker stirred. The Spiral hadn't been defeated; it had been forced dormant, coiled tight around the city's beating heart like a serpent waiting to strike again.

**In another:**

Flames licked at his boots as he stood amidst Sub-Level 7's ruins, the detonation codes still flashing across his wrist-console. The red destruction energy pulsed in time with the distant explosions rocking the city above. Towers collapsed like dominos, the very earth shaking as Veridia Prime consumed itself in purifying fire. But as the smoke cleared, the Spiral emerged unscathed—its tendrils now freed from containment, slithering across the scorched earth to seek new prey.

The visions multiplied—a hundred variations, a thousand—each ending with the Spiral victorious.

Until—

A single, impossible possibility flickered at the edge of perception.

Jax lunged for it with what remained of his unraveling consciousness.

The child's scream pulled him back to the present. Her small body had become a battleground—golden light warring with the black tendrils now burrowing deep into her flesh. "It's too much!" she cried, her voice breaking apart into static. "You have to choose!"

Jax's response came not in words, but in action.

With a roar that tore his throat raw, he wrenched both paths together—the blue preservation and red destruction twisting around each other in a violent helix. The resulting shockwave blew outward in a sphere of violet energy, flattening the advancing Spiralborn like wheat before the scythe.

The child gasped as the fused energy struck her chest. The cracks in her skin flared blinding white before—

—she *unfolded*.

Her small body expanded in a fractal cascade of light and memory, revealing glimpses of the truth beneath:

A thousand Echoes woven together.

Eiden's final act of rebellion.

A living archive of every Path ever taken.

The Spiral's perfect opposite.

As the lightshow reached its crescendo, the crumbling tunnel walls dissolved completely, revealing the terrible truth beneath Veridia Prime's foundations—

The city wasn't built atop rock and soil.

It was constructed around something.

Something vast.

Something sleeping.

And in the blinding light of the child's transformation, the great coiled shape *twitched*.