[Part 2 - But One Man]
ARC Broadcast Log I
There are reports coming out of the quarantined Hellified zone near the San Andreas chasm. Satellite imagery show what ARC personnel believe to be the legendary Doom Slayer himself fighting the mortally challenged. The Doom Slayer, or 'Doomguy' as he is sometimes referred to, was thought to be a myth of the resistance - a sort of avenging angel. He was last reported to be seen on Mars and is allegedly responsible for the destruction of the Argent Tower there. He disappeared soon afterwards. The UAC continues to deny all reports of his existence. We will continue to broadcast new information as we receive it.
Exultia
Translation from the 'Ligra Sultagenta' (Book of Kings)
What treachery comes from our darkest selves, driven by greed and want; for I have been deceived by the Deag. They came North with I, the priests, as allies to our cause against the Khan Maykr and her unscrupulous methods. Their silvery tongues wagging, they laid a plan for us, and sowed the seed of desire for hasty triumph. They claimed knowledge of the Maykr's source of power in the demon realm; a vast foundry of souls where the innocent are put to the fire for the Essence. In the foundry's destruction our victory is assured, they told us; and the fools that we were - that I am - believed their lies.
On their word, we sent the Doom Slayer and the Night Sentinels to destroy the foundry, and the priests cast a gate for their egress. As the last veteran entered the demon's empire, our final hope of reclaiming our dominion, the Deag closed the path and left them stranded. They were trapped, lost in the eternal void by the action of the traitors.
How could I not see their intention? Am I blinded by grief for the loss of Taras Nabad? Of my people?
We have fled again, with barely a legion of the Night Sentinels left to protect us. The Deag are gone, returned to their mistress. May the Wraiths forgive my failure.
Gargoyle
Like their Imp brethren, the Gargoyle is an agile, relentless pack hunter. Native to the Sentinel world, this beast has plagued the Sentinel Guard for centuries. As one of the few demon breeds that could bypass the walled defenses of Sentinel Prime, the Gargoyle could appear without warning and claim hapless townspeople before disappearing into the wasteland. Only the most skilled marksman of the Night Sentinels could intercept this aerial threat, a peril which demanded an ever vigilant watch over the city's perimeter.
Hell Knight
The Hell Knight, warrior beast among demons, has earned its place over the millennia in service of the eternal Archdemons. As imposed by the sovereign houses, Hell Knights have long served as barbaric enforcers of the netherworld, impelling lesser demons by way of brutality. Rare among demon-kind for its innate regard for primal orders of hierarchy, the Hell Knight exhibits adherence to the prevailing rule of its demonlord masters. Requiring little compulsion on behalf of its highborne masters, Hell Knights readily serve the Elder Hell-gods for the extent of their lifespans, reaping great satisfaction in the way of war and desecration.
The Wolf
Argenta legends speak of Sentinel beasts, loyal creatures that lived as companions of the hardened warriors. Often larger, swifter and stronger than others of their kind, these animals shared instincts with their masters and aided them in battle. The Night Sentinels never shared publicly the origin of these creatures, for only they stood worthy of them.
History of the Sentinels - Part I
Translation from the 'Ligra Sultagenta' (Book of Kings)
In the days before man first spoke, an immense shard of rock and metal was cast unto the world from the heavens. Thunder and cataclysm shook the land as the skies were torn asunder. The Cosmic Spear cleft a hole through our mortal lands, pole to pole, from the cold wastes of the Umbral Plains to the fetid swamps of Ironfang. The Womb of the World opened and the Elemental Wraiths, the Firstborn, spilled forth. They took to the skies, fierce in their emancipation. In their exultation, they brought vitality to the land, and all that felt their breath were awakened from eternal slumber. Fierce beasts and an unforgiving biosphere rose in the passing of their shadow as the Wraithcall echoed across Argent D'Nur.
First came the Ancestrals, feral creatures invigorated by the magic of the Wraiths. They grew to enormous heights, mighty behemoths who waged war with each other for years untold. Their battles tore the land asunder and destroyed all creation caught in their wake. The Wraithcall continued to spread across the land and soon the Argenta emerged from the steppes, our souls stirred into form by the power of their breath.
The titans towered over the wild-blooded tribes but found them uncowed. The Secret of the Sword was discovered, and in the darkness of sweltering mountain-forges, we beat steel until it was strong enough to pierce bone and sever flesh.
Thus we came to be; born of rock and fire, lowly in birth but risen by the strength of our will. By the blessedness of the First Ones, we forged sword and shield and took the hammer to the Ancestrals. We claimed dominion of creation by right of blood and magick, and the Time of Man came to be.
With the Ancestral beasts driven back to their bleak valleys, we rose. We tilled the fertile land, husbanded beasts of burden, and built towering cities. In the Hallowed Palace, on the Obsidian Throne, we crowned King Ormero the Father, the first of the line that shall weigh in perpetuity. We built the Cathedral of Reflection to worship the First Ones and formed the Order of the Deag, whose priests pay tribute to the Wraiths and appease their tempestuous hunger. Our sons and daughters chose the path of the sword or the path of the alchemist, for each duty honors the Gods.
Though our ways were righteous, we were not without strife - storms and great quakes cast our spires down, barbaric tribes laid siege to our fields in search of the great gifts mother Argenta has bestowed upon our work, and the song of the Wraithcall threatened to drive lesser men into madness. We were not lesser men. We defended that which the First Ones gifted to us, our lands and right to the bounty held within. We beat back the barbarian hordes and hardened our resolve. We rose above the fire, our bodies and souls tempered, and an unbreakable will was shaped in the forge of battle. What emerged was the heart of our legion - the order of the Night Sentinels.
King Novik
King Novik ruled over Sentinel Prime for many years as its warrior patriarch, ordained protector of the sovereign Sentinel worlds. The Sentinel people, defined by a legacy of war, deem only those of warrior caste fit to rule, and in times of battle it is expected that the King lead from the battlefield rather than from the safety of the throne. As it is written in Sentinel law, a King unfit for battle is likewise unfit to rule.
For millennia, the Sentinel people have secured their civilization against the threat of invasion from beast and human alike, passing on the mantle of battle to each subsequent generation and refining the craft of war into an art of ultimate mastery. Even in times of peace, the Night Sentinels remain vigilant, developing new technologies of conquest, each the more capable of securing their dominion across the sovereign worlds.
Plasma Rifle
Designed by the UAC's military-tech division, the Plasma Rifle is the standard in energy-based weaponry. Firing a superheated plasma in rapid-short burst intervals, the Plasma Rifle is capable of overloading energy-based shielding and liquefying enemy combatants.
Revenant
The Revenant program, a bio-weapon experiment utilizing re-animated necrotic human tissue, was believed to have been destroyed with the collapse of the UAC facility on Mars. However, the emergence of the Cultist enclaves on Earth - former UAC deviations now under Hell's direct control - have begun work on a second wave of production of the Revenant program. While much of the platform's existing weapon payload is preserved as originally designed, the cyber-neural programming has undergone modification. Patterned signals are wired to the host's frontal cortex, which in turn simulate a state of frenzied, unrestrained bloodlust. While these signals are active, the host is incapable of thinking or feeling anything but a singular compulsion to inflict death and violence on the living.
History of the Sentinels - Part II
Translation from the 'Ligra Sultagenta' (Book of Kings)
In the Time of Grief, when King Etrex took the throne, a blessing came to the people of Argenta. White porcelain beings from another world above our own brought gifts to D'Nur. Observers to our great deeds, admirers of our convictions, they sought to make bond with our swords and bring lasting order to our world.
These were beings unlike any we had seen before, sword and shield held no weight against them, for the ethereal flesh of these luminous beings seemed unbound by mortality. Able to move through time and space, they held sway over all dominions of the known and unknown dimensions. Through their ways we grew stronger, our society bolstered by their infinite wisdom and all-knowing power, assuring our peoples' safety for all time - in this world and the next. Where we sharpened the blade and mastered our magick, they bolstered the soul and spirit. Death would no longer be the end for our people. The ones we call the Maykrs, our new allies in this brutal world, have given us the security in death we fought so hard to achieve in life. We would find eternal peace, and our minds would rest easy with the knowledge that those we fought alongside in battle would join us in the lands beyond the mortal plane. The strength of our ways, the purity of our essence, would by Maykr law grant us passage to the great city in the clouds. There, women and children, warriors and kin alike would welcome us.
We adopted the holy doctrine of the Maykrs, gifted in exchange with the change to earn eternal rest for our immortal souls in blessed Urdak. The covenant we held now under the embrace of our new Gods fostered a peace we had never known, for they were unlike the First Ones, whose presence offered no paradise from fear and the uncertainty of existence in a harsh and unforgiving world. The Maykr's embrace was warm, and guided us into an era of spiritual prosperity.
Lost Soul
The Lost Soul has its origins among the Damned - former humans who have fallen from the mortal world, doomed to an unliving eternity as sin-branded slaves of Hell. The Damned are seemingly endless in number, their populations growing by the thousands with each rise of the black sun. For many, the tortuous existence of crushing slave labor is all that awaits. The bodies of the Damned are brittle, and those who become broken in labor - their bodies ruined, dismembered, or otherwise incapable of servitude - are transported to the pits where their souls must be extracted for further use. Those fortunate enough to escape this process are what inevitably become Lost Souls; their spirits transmogrified into physical form. The Lost Soul knows only madness, its memory a haunted image of its former mortal life. These creatures live a fleeting existence, roaming mindlessly, seeking only that which can grant them a final death.
History of the Sentinels - Part III
Translation from the 'Ligra Sultagenta' (Book of Kings)
With machine and enchantment of the Maykrs, the Argenta brought our newfound clarity to the disparate realms of the Empyrean Void. We took flight with the support of our Gods, spreading the enlightened word of the Khan Maykr. We discovered there was not one Enemy, but many. Worlds and peoples unknown to the Argenta were unveiled, and we saw our own suffering reflected in their eyes. Our righteous army strode into battle under the banner of the Night Sentinels and fought for the freedom of all peoples from the grasp of those who would exploit and prey upon them. Though we battled on soil not our own, the blood we shed in foreign land safeguarded Argent D'Nur, and the sons and daughters that defended it. Through the strange peoples we liberated, new alliances were formed, and our beliefs became their own. Our armies swelled.
As the Argenta traversed the stars with gleaming war-fleets the Khan of the Maykrs approached King Roan on his throne.
He sensed his God restless by her disquiet manner. The King and Khan spoke, and the God revealed she had foreseen a schism in the blood of Argenta. A test would be required to identify its host among us. She spoke of a holy rite to be performed on the strongest of our warriors; only those that proved worthy would be tested, for the impurity could reside in only the most resilient of our legion. The Divinity Machine, a great tribute by Maykr Scolaris, would help us to cleanse any impurities from our flock, ensuring our continued prosperity in this world and in the Maykr realm that awaited in the afterlife. The Malicious One, if not exhumed from our ranks, would jeopardize our safe passage to the heavenly realm of Urdak.
The Dark One was not amongst them yet, nor would he be for many generations. Only the Mother God, through divination and Maykr-sight, would determine when he stood before them. The Maykrs were truth, and only their unclouded eyes could find the one who was marked. The prophecy of the unholy one was written, but through the ages the warning grew faint until only the Khan Maykr herself and the high priests of the Order Deag still whispered of He that would one day come to threaten their way of light.
Dread Knight
A variation of the Hell Knight breed, the Dread Knight has been modified and hardwired for aggression. Armed with an exo-prosthesis powering energy blade augments, the Dread Knight is the lethal result of UAC Cultist engineering. Epinephrine regulations modulate the Dread Knight with an unbroken flow of rage-addled adrenaline, while its endorphin receptors have been synchronized to respond with the use of its arm-mounted blades. With each kill, the Dread Knight is injected with a flood of artificial dopamine. As a result of its augmentation, the Dread Knight is driven by a biochemically engineered state of pure, unbroken rage - a suffering for which respite can only be found in the act of the kill.
The Betrayer
After years of prolonged war against the demonic threat invading their world, Argent D'Nur launched an offensive strike across dimensions, sending their greatest warriors into the heart of Hell itself. Despite their training and their preparedness, their honor was undone by deceit. Betrayal at the highest level of command left Argent D'Nur's bravest warriors cut off and scattered in the Hellscape.
But of these last remaining Night Sentinels, only one remained in Hell by choice. Betrayer of the Argenta, it was Commander Valen who relinquished the keys to the Elemental Sepulchre in return for his son's resurrection. Haunted by demonic visions, the image of his son's tortured existence plagued him without relent, the whispers of demons pushing him toward madness. In a moment of weakness, he fell prey to the demon's trickery, sealing the fate of Argent D'Nur and dooming the kingdom to which he swore a lifelong oath to protect. Valen chose exile in the Hellscape for his sacrilege.
When it comes to this game I mostly know that it's extremely polarizing, and it will be interesting to have both positions represented among the commentators.
I want Opening to Hell back...