**Chapter 18: The Puppeteer's Gambit**
The world fractured mid-strike.
Marverick's blade hung suspended in the air, inches from Azazel's throat, as a jagged *rip* tore through his mind. Visions bled into reality—not of the battlefield, but of *strings*. Invisible threads coiled around his wrists, his ribs, his pounding heart, all leading back to a figure standing calmly in the eye of the storm.
*Dave.*
The revelation struck like a cleaver. Marverick's sword clattered to the ground, his wings guttering out as the Elysium Stone's light died in his palm. Around him, the battlefield froze—demons mid-snarl, Cain's blade arrested in a killing arc, Ava's violet magic crystallized in the air like stained glass. Only Dave moved, his cane tapping a hollow rhythm as he stepped over the static carnage.
"**Surprise,**" Dave drawled, but the smirk didn't reach his eyes. They were voids now, twin abysses where constellations once flickered. "**Though I'd hoped you'd piece it together sooner. All those *clues* I left…**"
Marverick's throat tightened. The Riggs' ledgers. The Voidborn's whispers. The way Dave always lingered just outside the light. "The ambush at the bunker," he rasped. "The Crimson Choir. *You* led them to us."
"**Guilty.**" Dave twirled his cane, the gem at its tip peeling back layers of illusion. The battlefield *shifted*—ruins dissolving into a labyrinth of obsidian spires, the sky a roiling canvas of black veins. At its center loomed a throne of fused bones, and upon it sat not Azazel, but a withered husk—a puppet with its strings cut.
"**Azazel was a prop,**" Dave said, nudging the corpse with his boot. "**A scarecrow to keep the flies busy while I…*gardened*.**"
Ava's frozen snarl burned in Marverick's periphery. "Why?"
Dave's sigh carried the weight of eons. "**Because entropy's inevitable, kid. The Voidborn? They're not the end—they're the *janitors*. Scrubbing the slate clean for the next act.**" He gestured to the sky, where the veins pulsed like diseased arteries. "**But your little species? So stubborn. Clinging to rot. I tried to prune gently—plagues, wars, the occasional apocalypse. But you kept *rebuilding*.**"
Marverick's fists shook. "So you bred me. Fed me the Stone. All to…what? *Accelerate* the end?"
"**To *control* it.**" Dave's voice sharpened. "**A controlled burn saves the forest. Let the Voidborn in now, and they'll raze the planet in days. But with the Stone? I could've sculpted the collapse. Spared the best of you. Built something…cleaner.**"
The strings around Marverick's heart *twisted*. He saw it then—the Riggs' labs not as factories of death, but arks. The soul-forges not harvesting, but *preserving*. Dave's madness had a perverse logic, a sculptor's ruthlessness.
"You don't get to choose who lives," Marverick growled.
"**Someone has to.**" For the first time, Dave's mask slipped—grief raw as a fresh wound. "**I tried letting you choose. But you kept picking *hope*. And hope…**" He spat the word like poison. "**…is a cancer in times like these.**"
The frozen world began to crack. Ava's magic splintered; Cain's roar shuddered back to life. Dave straightened, his void-eyes hardening. "**So here's the new choice, hinge. Join me. Orchestrate the culling. Or…**" He nodded to Ava, still trapped in crystal. "**Watch me unmake her, thread by thread.**"
The strings tightened. Marverick's hand drifted to the dead Stone.
But in its cold core, a spark flickered—not of light, but defiance.
"**No more choices,**" Marverick whispered.
He shattered the Stone against the throne.
The world exploded in screams—not of the dying, but of the *unmade*.