A suffocating gloom had descended upon Orario, the once-vibrant city of adventurers now shrouded in shadows and despair. This was the dawn of a dark age—an era born from catastrophe and watered with blood. The mighty Zeus and Hera Familias, those legendary pillars that had stood as humanity's shield against the darkness, lay in ruins, utterly destroyed by the devastating power of the One-Eyed Black Dragon. Those few survivors who had escaped that apocalyptic battle, their bodies broken and spirits shattered, found no sanctuary in their defeat. Instead, they became prey—hunted down mercilessly and slaughtered by the ambitious Freya and Loki Familias, who craved nothing more than to seize the hollow title of "strongest" without understanding the crushing weight of responsibility that came with such a mantle.
The consequences of this bloodthirsty power struggle rippled through every stone and street of Orario like poison seeping into water. Members of the Evilus—those cultists of chaos and merchants of suffering—now walked freely among the common people, their faces hidden behind innocent masks. Each day brought fresh horrors: bodies discovered in alleyways, screams cutting through the night, families torn apart by senseless violence. The massacre had become routine, almost mundane in its frequency.
Fear had become the city's new currency. The streets that once overflowed with merchants hawking their wares, adventurers boasting of their conquests, and children laughing as they played now stood eerily empty. Shops remained shuttered, their windows dark like closed eyes. The bustling marketplace that had been the beating heart of commerce was now a ghost town, abandoned save for the wind that whispered through its vacant stalls. Citizens huddled behind locked doors and barred windows, praying desperately that the violence would pass them by, that they wouldn't be the next victims claimed by this nightmare.
Meanwhile, high above the suffering masses, atop the ivory Tower of Babel that pierced the heavens like an accusing finger, the gods held their council. To any observer, it might have appeared that these divine beings gathered to discuss solutions to the crisis plaguing their city. They spoke with furrowed brows and gestures of concern, their voices rising and falling in heated debate. But beneath the veneer of divine responsibility lay a far uglier truth—they simply wanted this inconvenient problem resolved so they could return to their entertainment, their games, their endless indulgence in mortal affairs like children playing with living dolls.
The evidence of their corruption was impossible to ignore. Ishtar had descended into shameless debauchery, treating her followers as nothing more than tools for pleasure. Apollo pursued his obsessive desires without restraint or conscience. Freya sat like a dragon atop her hoard, collecting "shiny souls" as though mortal lives were mere trinkets to add to her collection. And Loki? She cared only for fame and reputation, for being celebrated and adored, before drowning whatever fleeting concerns she had in barrel after barrel of wine, losing herself in drunken stupor while the city burned.
Not one of them truly desired the betterment of Orario as a whole. Their concerns extended no further than feeding their own self-centered egos, satisfying their own petty desires. It was only their Familia members—those mortal adventurers who still possessed hearts capable of genuine compassion—who truly fought to end this nightmare. Yet even they found themselves fractured, with only a handful forming tentative alliances while the rest regarded one another with suspicion and mistrust, paralyzed by paranoia.
The divine meeting had devolved into nothing more than petty quarreling, with gods voicing their displeasure whenever their pride was pricked, when suddenly—they all felt it. A shift in the very air itself, a change in the atmospheric pressure that made even immortal beings pause. Eyes turned skyward as storm clouds began to coalesce with unnatural speed, swirling into a maelstrom that spoke of divine intervention.
This was the phenomenon that accompanied a god's descent from the heavens to the lower world.
But confusion rippled through the assembly. Every deity who possessed the authority to descend was already present in the lower world. Their faces turned pale with uncertainty as a single, terrifying question echoed through every divine mind: Who was coming?