Once, I was content to observe the world, fascinated by your delicate balance of order and chaos.
But the harmony that once intrigued me has grown discordant. Your warring spirits, veiled in deceit and exploitation, have not evolved, not learnt from the world you live in.
Arcadia must fall.
I am to cleanse this world.
All I need is the right ally, the right partner, to do so.
My search was long and arduous.
I found many who claimed to possess the ruthlessness I sought, but none survived the trial.
I began with the rebellious fashionista and the vigilante, but their sight was limited to the constructs of this world. They wanted to restore a world they thought lost.
But when the plague comes, it does not care about what came before. All will wash away. It’s indiscriminate. Pure.
Who else was there?
The one called Kaiju Chiba thought he could stand against my tide, halt the plague, and preserve the old world. His insolence earned him the first taste of my plague, his body left as a warning to those who dare defy me.
But then there’s Blacktooth, a being as relentless and destructive as I.
In his eyes, I saw the desolation I sought, the vision of a world purged and reborn. Nothing sacred, nothing worthy of saving.
Sitting upon his throne of skulls, we will unleash this plague, a storm unlike any you’ve ever witnessed.
It will consume everything, leaving nothing but ashes and the memory of a civilization that once was.
I know there will be those that resist, those who believe their skills can resist the tide.
As Chiba did.
But there will no Big Save for those fighting the Black Plague.
Only death.
The hacker and the assassin hide behind screen and shadow, believing their crafty games will outwit a plague. Their deceitful wires are of no consequence when the very air they breathe is poison.
Those who unravel and cut the strings of life and death will be swallowed by their arrogance. They taunt Zeus and build mighty machines, but even the greatest and strongest minds succumb to fever.
Let their frayed strings and broken technology remain, monument man’s inability to alter the course of destiny itself.
They all fall down.
Hunters become prey as they succumb to my invisible pathogen. Knowledge of the land is futile when the land itself becomes your enemy.
Guardians of justice are powerless in the face of disease, their authority erased by the cold hand of pestilence.
For civilization becomes a distant memory, lost in the chaos of survival.
The last to fall are those who deal in the dead, daring to play mournful dirges as they ferry lost souls to the underworld. My world. They will invoke my name as they strum their last, songs falling on the deaf ears of corpses, their only audience the vacant eyes of the dead they ferried.
Arcadia has fallen and it’s up to me to build a better world.
I am not the end you expected.
I am the one you earned.
I am Nergal.
Not just your end.
But every end.