Seers on Durus didn’t tell everyone, or even anyone, everything that they
knew. They had to be smart about what information they let get out. If, for
instance, one told their neighbor that they were going to run into a door
today, the neighbor would go outside, and try to avoid doors for twenty-four
hours. Then seven hours later, a construction worker walks by with a door,
and accidentally hits him with it when he turns around. The seer
actually exacerbated the problem by saying something. The victim would have
been much better off hearing that they should be careful, or to wear a
helmet. That did not explain, however, why it was that no one seemed to know
that the Mage Protectorate was destined to fall. The final battles of the
war with the monsters began in 2090, and ended in less than a month, and it
all started when an unexpected visitor appeared shortly after the Mage
Selection Games. He was definitely not human, but nothing like what they had
seen before. He was white, and tall, and fierce-looking. Speedstrikers
looked just like you would think an unstoppable killer alien would. Mirror
monsters looked like, well, mirrors. All the other types had been cataloged
and classified, and nothing new had ever appeared since those very early
days after Springfield fell into the Deathfall portal. So what was this
thing here? It seemed intelligent, just like the verters, and it didn’t take
long before his true nature was fully understood. Based on some things that
the verters had said over the years, people always suspected that time
monsters were only temporal glitches, and that real, intelligent, and
independent monsters were the ones who were actually trying to step through
the portal. This pretty much proved it. He was the real deal, and all the
things that had come through before were quite accurately mistakes. There
was something wrong with the portal, which this new monster explained led
him here from his home universe of Ansutah. No one else ever survived the
trip intact, so even if it turned out to be possible to travel back through
the ring, it had never happened before. So the other monsters never knew the
portal wasn’t working, which meant nothing could warn them to stop trying.
This monster, who called himself a Maramon, was a one in a million success
story. He didn’t make it through the ring whole because of anything he did,
but because the chances that it would happen at least once were not zero.
They were low, but not impossible. He told them that time wasn’t passing the
same way for his people on the other side. While the monsters had been
arriving for decades, he had only waited a couple hours for his turn to step
through. Time probably wasn’t moving at a different rate on his homeworld,
though. They were probably just being spit out at random intervals. Hell, it
could even be that every glitch that had shown up before him had actually
come from a Maramon who tried to cross over sometime after him. There
was no way to know, but that wasn’t the point here. All this time, the
humans on this planet had been fighting an enemy that mostly didn’t know
they were enemies. They weren’t actively trying to hurt the humans. They
were most likely just moving along the surface on instinct, attracted to the
presence of other moving creatures, and destroying them incidentally, rather
than deliberately. If it was possible for a Maramon to cross over without
being turned into an abomination, then a real war might start. This new
enemy was free-thinking, and capable of forming motivations. They were a
huge threat. Though he was the only monster who had ever kept his faculties
during the trip, there was no proof it wouldn’t happen again, and he was
making no attempt to quell their fears that he really was an enemy. He made
his motives remarkably clear; that he wanted to kill all the humans too, and
that he would be doing it on purpose. At first, they figured they could
contain him before he could cause any trouble, but he easily escaped, and he
used his intelligence to control the glitches all by himself. Things were
only going to get worse from here as the War for Durus began.
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