The Cure - II [Exemplary]

[Proto Man]

The previous Archdemons had been corrupted Old Gods... powerful entities from a period of lost history twisted and made insane by the Blight. Tarnished by the darkspawn, an Archdemon in turn united their separate consciousnesses into its own hive mind and proceeded to turn them into a full fledged army capable of scouring the entire world of anything that stood in their way.

Scylla was no dragon and no Old God.

Born a woman in a dying world called Thedas, she had grown up on stories about Blights in centuries past. Creatures called darkspawn, men rejected from the Maker’s throne, had corrupted the Old Gods, one by one, in increasingly desperate gambits to remake the world. The efforts had failed, although many nearly succeeded, but in the end, the final Old God was killed at the hands of the Grey Wardens. Thedas prospered for centuries, but eventually, the world started to wither.

She had been born with the ability to touch the Fade, but the institutes that used to hone (or even contain) magical individuals had died away a few generations before her birth. She grew into a young woman with no real control over the power she wielded, and her gifts resulted in her isolation from a society that could no longer understand her. It wasn’t her fault that the elements obeyed her commands or that minds were susceptible to her will.

It was in that isolation of her youth that she came to learn the history of the Blight. The stories and historical records told of a world that, despite being far more violent than hers, was more alive. How wonderful must it have been to go through each day as if it were your last? Her community was a decaying corpse. Everyone there was already dead on the inside, and they were just waiting for the next natural disaster or crop failure to push them into oblivion.

If there had been a Blight tomorrow, the entire society would have just rolled belly up. What new Thedas could have emerged had the darkspawn taken over the world?

That dream was one of the things she clung to when she arrived in the Omniverse. Diablo had been sealed away years ago, but the Pale Moors was still a vicious and vile place of nightmares. Even though they’d conquered their ‘monster,’ the place had never recovered. She had visited Darkshire to find it a sullen, morose place where the citizens waited for their inevitable deaths. What type of society was that? The people there would have been better off dying rather than living in a rotting carcass. It reminded her of her putrefying and decaying world and how wonderful it could be to start the entire thing over from scratch.

So Scylla aspired to cleanse the Pale Moors, and what better way to do that than with the Blight of legend. She created the darkspawn… piecing them together from history books and crafting the contagion that would be her Blight. She watched it spread across the Moors and into the Tangled Green, transforming everything in its path into something purer and simpler. The darkspawn knew nothing beyond survival and her will. Certainly such an existence, sheltered and protected as part of a singular entity, was preferable to limping through life as the living dead.

The Omniverse was a chaotic and terrible place.

She was saving the Omniverse from itself...

So why did they fight against her will?

Here, in the shadow of Diablo’s tombstone, Scylla had her home, and it was here that she would break apart the little tin man and his friends who had harassed and murdered the people she had saved. She had felt every darkspawn they had destroyed, and there was nothing that would please her more than to welcome them into her loving arms, even if that required smashing their skulls apart first.

Even as the first bombs exploded amidst the encampment, the Archdemon Syclla willed her children to attack.

She would cleanse these attackers, as she had done for many before them.

It was up to her to free them from themselves.

***

Bombs rained through the sky, exploding with enough force to shake the earth as their grinning creator whipped them toward the darkspawn. The first salvo had been devastating, with most of the primitive structures being set on fire or simply blown to pieces along with dozens of darkspawn.

Yet after the first array of explosions, the corrupted creatures seemed to regain their bearings. Many had found cover, while others were falling back to defensible positions. Bomb Man grit his teeth as crossbow bolts and arrows started to ricochet off his ceramic titanium body. Behind him, he heard the thud of his siblings’ boots on the ground. A beat later, bolts of lightning, balls of snow, blasts of fire, beams of energy, and a flurry of scissor-shaped projectiles.

Even as the darkspawn were mowed down in that initial flurry, they were replaced by even more of the growling, black-skinned monsters.

“Break apart!” Mireya shouted as they drew closer to the camp, and just like that, the eight individuals splintered off into opposing directions, trying to make themselves all viable targets to the horde of darkspawn now spilling forth from the camp.

For his part, Proto Man fell directly back as his allies splintered apart. As the ‘spearhead,’ it was his job to thrust forward and deal with whoever or whatever ‘Scylla’ was. A few darkspawn continued in his direction, but they were blown apart by a rapid trio of bombs. Glancing over his shoulder, the red robot grinned at the mohawked machine with the passion for explosives. A look forward showed that their tactic seemed to be working for the moment: Most of the darkspawn were giving chase to the other Robot Masters, which left Proto Man with an almost straight shot into the heart of their little base.