Anyone who has played any Monster Hunter game will have probably noticed at some point that the ways these so called "monsters" act are strangely familiar, with their behavior being more animalistic than monstrous. This is without a doubt the thing...
It's the dead of night in the mountainous regions surrounding the citadel and the frigid peaks cast expansive shadows across the land, the darkness swallowing the ruins of a once mighty castle and the villages that prospered around it. Where once beautifully crafted architectures stood, now only derelict buildings exist, their ornate designs enveloped or destroyed by the unstoppable forces of nature. The previously bustling roads connecting each to the neighboring villages now find themselves overgrown and clogged.
Demolished outposts litter the region, with those who once diligently guarded them now long gone. The lone castle stands solo, its walls barely standing while its moat, canals, and tunnels have become very appealing to the local fauna. The citadel's ramparts are riddled with scratches, dents, and scorch marks, signs of the beating it was put through. Even its mightiest weapons, a pair of devastating dragonators, are heavily damaged, their metal rusted and tips rendered blunt by time. The one on the left is in especially bad shape, having been bent and broken in twain by unrelenting forces.
Although there are many ruins found throughout the old world, those of the citadel are unique. They were not rendered to their current state through centuries of neglect, but rather, the damages were caused by one unpredictable event that, compared to the other derelict monuments across the continent, happened relatively recently. The emergence of a Gaismagorm with its Qurio sent the local fauna into a panic when they chose the citadel as their new home. Every creature was focused on fleeing the highly specialized pseudo-wyverns who were trying to drain their blood in order to process it into edible biomass with the aid of a virus, thus allowing the swarms to feed the elder dragon that provides them with a home, nursery, reliable food source, and protection.
In their desperate bid to escape the crimson swarms, the animals found themselves forced to cross through the castle and villages, destroying all in their path as they fled. Aggravating the problem were those who got infected by the virus the pseudo-wyverns carry, turning them into afflicted monsters whose blood vessels were forced to widen, making it easier for the Qurio to feed and causing the infected to become increasingly hostile in their delirious state, ultimately dying from cardiac arrest or blood loss.
Just when it seemed as if things couldn't possibly get worse, the massive abundance of Qurio attracted another species, one that came to feed on and take over the swarms. With so much chaos happening all at once, the entire population disappeared in under a week, either evacuated or slayed by the frenzied monsters.
It's been a little over a half-century since that tragic night. As nature balanced itself out, life forms soon returned and thanks to the return of the land's silver guardians, the massive and uncontrolled swarms of Qurio have finally subsided; however, this doesn't mean the Qurio are completely gone. As a blood moon hovers over the landscape, a silhouette flies across it and dives down to the forests found at lower altitudes, the gargantuan mammoth trees standing proudly as Bloodbath, an adult male Malzeno, latches onto one of the plants, his curved claws sinking into the thick bark as some of the parasitic pseudo-wyverns fly around him.
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