Scenarios

The Crimson Badlands

Perhaps one of the greatest legends across the world is the legend of the Fall of Apophis. The legend states that a hero, who's name is long forgotten, traveled from their home in a small vale called Stardew Valley to the Crimson Badlands. Endless hordes of monsters rise from the corrupted sands, and adventurers from all over the world come here to help quell the tide, preventing the monsters from spilling out of their desert and plunging the world into an endless darkness. But few know the fine details of this tale, and even fewer can say they knew the hero. Here I am today to tell you every detail I remember from when two epic forces collided that one fateful day...

"Shit!" I missed my swing. The slime is all over me. I can feel it already trying to digest me, it's acidic compounds eating away at my skin and clothes. With a burst of magical energy, I repel the creature and it explodes into a spray of now-harmless goop. There are more creatures closing in. Desert spirits descend from the clouds, their serpentine forms twirling through the air like ribbons towards me. A slash from my sword sends a wide arc of burning white energy up towards them. None of them can move before it reaches them, shearing them each in two. Their scaled corpses dissipate into black smoke before they even reach the ground.

The sand around me explodes as several humanoid forms rise from the crimson sands. Wrapped in cloth, the mummies shamble towards me, arms outstretched. Tendrils of dark energy extend from my back. They lash out at the mummies behind me while I swing my sword at those in front of me. One swing sends them collapsing in on themselves, and my tentacles whipping around behind me rip their cloth to shreds. But I know they're not dead.

I pull a large bomb out of the endless sack at my hip and light it. My tentacles lift me off the ground and I use them to run a safe distance away right before the bomb explodes. The lost wails of the mummies mark their true death as the cloth they're made of is obliterated in the explosion. More desert spirits are coming, led by a void spirit. It shares their serpentine shape, but is coated in an impenetrable darkness that makes it stronger, faster, and smarter.

They're followed by more mummies and slimes, colored a deep purple. Undead rise from the sands as well, skeletons and vampries wearing the armor of various adventurers. I see one vampire wearing the bright blue cloak of a First Slash guild member, and several skeletons wearing armor bearing the Castle Village mark. The Badlands don't let anything go to waste, even it's victims.

The Crimson Badlands has had enough of me and means to extinguish me. A grin creeps onto my face. That just means this has finally gotten fun. Only the vampires react when I suddenly throw myself towards the oncoming horde, the remnants of their sapient mind registering genuine surprise at their prey suddenly rushing at them. 'What kind of insane person would ever run at such a horde?'

This kind of insane person.

My tentacles dig into the sand, carrying me towards them faster than my own two feet could. I drop myself down as I reach the front lines, and the tentacles begin lashing out at anything within reach. Sword and tendril alike shear enemies in half. I let out a bellowing laugh, watching the monsters, their simple minds incapable of fear, continue to converge on me.

I'm in the thick of it now. There are monsters on all sides. The slimes have changed colors now. On top of the deep purple acidic ones, the desert has raised some of it's most powerful slimes, with tentacles not unlike my own, to rip me limb from limb. Good thing slime has never been very effective at resisting my own dark powers. My tentacles demolish any slimes that escape the notice of my sword.

I've lost sight of any simple desert spirits. Now all I see are void spirits, their dark auras almost swallowing the eerie crimson light of the badlands. They surge at me from above, but none can get past my tentacles. Their corpses would make this quite the ordeal if they didn't disintegrate upon death.