MARVEL: BUYING GODHOOD

Diablo PoV

The transition from a crude smuggling den to a functional intelligence hub has required forty-eight hours of meticulous restructuring.

I do not sleep; my mind requires no rest, and every hour spent away from my Master’s side feels like a minor personal failure.

These humans believe themselves to be predators, but they are merely cattle playing in the mud, entirely blind to the corporate and cosmic war brewing above their heads.

The upper level of the warehouse had been transformed into a functional intelligence hub.

Rows of server racks replaced the clutter of contraband, their steady hum filling the cool air..

Borzoff stands by my desk, clutching a stack of decrypted drives, his collar soaked in nervous sweat as he looks at the screens.

“We dug into the Sterling Global executive committee like you wanted,” Borzoff says, his voice tight, refusing to meet my eyes.

“It’s… a mess. These guys are vultures, but they hide their tracks behind shell corporations in Panama and Switzerland. They hire top-tier cybersecurity firms to keep their personal lives completely off the grid.”

“Human greed always leaves a footprint,” I say quietly, my white-gloved fingers turning a page of a financial ledger with absolute precision.

I am not looking for a quick kill.

A simple beatdown solves nothing in a war of capital.

I need absolute, undeniable leverage to hand to my Master before his scheduled seventeenth birthday arrives.

The framework requires trillions of dollars to unlock the true paths of power, and that means the corporate hierarchy of Sterling Global must be bent to Master’s will without triggering a federal investigation that would freeze the assets.

My eyes lock onto a recurring transaction under the name of Richard Hall, a majority board member currently allied with Arthur Graves.

The numbers do not balance.

Millions of dollars earmarked for deep-extraction geology projects in Africa are being quietly routed through secondary clearing accounts.

“Fascinating,” I murmur.

“Mr. Hall has an expensive habit. High-stakes gambling debts run by the Maggia crime family. He has leveraged forty million dollars of company-allocated exploration funds over the last fiscal year to cover his personal losses.”

I spend a moment analyzing Hall’s psychological profile.

He did not steal out of a desire for power; he stole out of raw, desperate fear.

The Maggia had him cornered, and his intelligence is remarkably limited.

He is not a dangerous opponent; he is a short-term tool.

By buying his debt, we do not merely control his vote; we control his entire economic lifeline.

Master can use him to sign off on highly irregular material transfers without Hall ever daring to raise a question to the regulators.

Humans frequently mistook greed for ambition.

They were not the same thing.

Ambition built empires.

Greed merely consumed them.

Richard Hall was not a visionary.

He was not even particularly intelligent.

He was a frightened man who had spent decades accumulating wealth only to discover that wealth could not purchase courage.

The Maggia had cornered him years ago.

Every stolen dollar since then had simply been another desperate attempt to delay the inevitable collapse.

Predictable.

Pathetic.

Useful.

“Should we leak it?” Borzoff asks, a trace of his old criminal instincts flaring up.

“It’d ruin him instantly. The feds would pick him up by morning.”

“Ruining him is an uninspired goal,” I reply, keeping my tone conversational and polite.

“If we expose his theft to the public, the SEC freezes his voting shares. That restricts Master’s immediate operational authority over the company. No. We do not destroy the crack. We simply let him know we are standing in it.”

I move to the next file.

Thaddeus Vance, the head of the executive committee leading the proxy hostile takeover play.

I scan the personal data, the tax filings, and the corporate records with my analytical capabilities.

I pause, my gaze tracking a hidden logistics annex from a luxury cosmetic subsidiary that has been buried under a mountain of routine shipping manifests.

Vance has an immaculate public profile, but beneath the surface sits a quiet, highly illegal acquisition of a rare-earth mining permit obtained through systemic blackmail of a foreign magistrate.

“A man with no natural weaknesses is a structural anomaly,” I say, a small smile appearing on my face.

“It is terribly inconvenient for business.”

Unlike Hall, Vance possessed discipline.

That alone made him dangerous.

Most corporate predators destroyed themselves through excess.

Vance had survived because he understood restraint.

No gambling.

No public affairs.

No extravagant purchases.

Every action served a purpose.

Unfortunately for him, perfection was impossible.

Given sufficient time, every structure developed fractures.

The challenge was not finding weakness.

The challenge was finding the correct weakness.

I tap the document.

“But he is not an anomaly. He is merely quiet. This illegal acquisition… ensure our proxies secure the original authenticated encryption keys from the foreign magistrate’s files. Once the documentation is in our possession, Mr. Vance will discover that his pristine legacy depends entirely on his willingness to cooperate with the hereditary transition.”

Then, I open the third folder.

Evelyn Vance-Ross, the third majority board member, and Thaddeus Vance’s older sister.

Unlike her brother, her corporate record is flawlessly legal.

She does not steal, she does not take bribes, and she does not gamble.

For several seconds, I simply studied the file.

Most leverage points were simple.

Debt.

Fear.

Greed.

Evelyn Vance-Ross was different.

Everything she had done over the last three years had been motivated by a single objective.

Keeping her son alive.

Humans repeatedly surprised me in this regard.

They would abandon principles for money.

Abandon allies for power.

Abandon nations for ambition.

Yet many would willingly burn the world itself to protect a single person.

I had never fully understood the instinct.

Fortunately, understanding it was unnecessary.

One only needed to predict it.

I pull up her private medical registries and personal correspondence, which I extracted from her private cloud storage.

Evelyn has been quietly funding an unregistered, highly experimental medical facility in Switzerland for the past three years.

Her twenty-two-year-old son, Julian, is currently suffering from an unrecorded, degenerative cellular disease.

The facility is using highly illegal, black-market chemical treatments harvested from unregulated maritime research sectors to keep him breathing.

If the public discovered her involvement, she would not merely lose her seat on the board; she would face an international criminal tribunal for human experimentation, and the clinic would be shut down, effectively executing her son.

I close the folder carefully.

This is not an asset we need to exploit through raw terror.

It is a leverage point that requires a surgical touch.

If Master offers her access to the superior biological engineering capabilities available within the evolution tree down the line, her loyalty will not merely be secured through leverage; it will be absolute.

“What about the rest of the board?” Borzoff asks, staring at the growing mountain of records.

“They are minor pieces,” I reply, my mind already looking far beyond this boardroom dispute.

Our roadmap must be executed without a single flaw.

First, we secure the board to lock down Master’s inheritance.

Second, we stabilize the company and consolidate the vertical infrastructure his mother left behind.

Third, we systematically expand this information network into the wider world.

Money is simply the currency of this localized reality, but absolute influence is the true prize.

This syndicate is a microscopic start.

One day, the banking cartels of Manhattan, the media conglomerates that shape public perception, and the compromised intelligence agents hidden within federal agencies would all be mapped.

Every politician had a debt.

Every bank had a hidden ledger.

In time, I would uncover them all.

By the time Master is ready to step onto the cosmic stage, the global infrastructure will already belong to him in the dark.

“See that you secure those encryption keys immediately,” I murmur to Borzoff, closing the final terminal link.

“Do not let your remaining men forget their place. We have a great deal of work to do.”

**Author’s Note** Thanks for reading!

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