Right now, if there was one thing Eliot had come to realize, it was that the path he'd been following might not have been his own decision at all.
It started with being used by the Goddess for her own purposes, then moved to fulfilling 'Eren's' destiny. After that came his capture and torture at Anna's hands. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, he'd gained knowledge about enslavement—knowledge he shouldn't have possessed. And somehow, it had felt like a perfectly reasonable idea to start by enslaving Anna herself, then continue on a spree attempting to enslave every heroine.
The more Eliot thought about the sequence of events, the more convenient and orchestrated it all seemed. It felt eerily similar to when he'd been following the Goddess's directives—everything had flowed so smoothly, so naturally, as if guided by an invisible hand.
"The merge," he recalled suddenly, his eyes widening with realization.
