Ever since they first crawled out of their caves in darkest Africa those many hundreds of millennia ago, the vibrant life of humanity has been constantly followed by the spectre of death: a grim reminder of that which awaited them. No matter how vital one may be, no matter how well fed a king or well trained a doctor, the Reaper would come for them too. Even if he must slowly, inexorably crawl towards them. Even now, in our age of steel skyscrapers and orbital satellites, mankind has failed to undo the shackles that have kept their time on this Earth finite and limited.
It can be thought as ironic that the most vocal advocate for this ultimate fate came not in great beasts or murderous demons, but in nature's smallest, most invisible children. The micro-organism, the deadliest predator in all of Earth's history. The Black Death. The Great Plague. The Spanish Flu. Mass death on scales incomprehensible.
When medicine finally crawled out of the deep pit that had been dug for it by the Popes in Rome, when humanity developed the first vaccines, stared close with their microscopes, and when the nature of disease became known to them, they grew complacent.
Households who were once dead in a week were cured in an hour by antibiotics. Some of the most perilous of foes - measles, smallpox, tuberculosis - were all but wiped out by the cures that their doctors devised.
In all their hubris, the human race forgot what it meant to fear death, even as plagues devastated Africa and Asia. After all, what was there to fear, when you could simply go to the pharmacist for a bottle of pills and a notice? And even as misuse of the gifts their forefathers bestowed upon them lead to even greater threats, the privileged of the world simply discarded the problem, leaving it up to the ones who followed them to deal with.
With all this said, then, it would hardly be a surprise to discover that the greatest threat to humanity passed beneath their radar. As the world busied about with their lives, an pandemic grew in the shadows. If the plagues that killed so many were brushed aside, would it not be too big of a stretch to say that one that killed none would not even be known of?
It was only when the foundations of their carefully maintained society began to quiver that the human race took notice, and by then it was only too late.
And in man's darkest hour, the reaper had come yet again to take his due.
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RENEGADE - a Male!Superpowered!Reader Story.
AdventureThere once was a time when humanity lived in fear of disease, but with the advent of modern medicine they all but vanished. Yet in the shadows there grew something more terrible and disastrous than anyone could have known. Decades later, a boy grows...
