Something snapped within David—a dam breaking, emotions flooding through barriers of control he'd maintained since childhood. He whirled to face the approaching divinity, rage and determination replacing fear.
"NEVER AGAIN!" he roared, the words tearing from his throat with such force that the nearest corpses disintegrated into ash. "I will never let those I care about fall because I was too weak or too afraid to stand!"
The resolution crystallized within him, hardening into unbreakable resolve. He would not be the man who abandoned others. He would not calculate odds when lives—lives that mattered to him—hung in the balance. He would not run, not ever again, not even from divinity itself.
Behind him, his darker self smiled—not with mockery now, but with grim satisfaction. "There you are," he whispered, already fading back into David's consciousness. "There's the real you."
