Chapter 75: Chapter 73: The orange haze of summer

It never stops.

The churning machination of horrors never stops spinning; the wheels, covered in the gore and blood of the young, never come to rest.

Every hundred years, there is a great crisis that rocks our world to its core. Before the breaking of each new century, people gather together in great masses. The economy booms as people train for war and destruction. Magical technologies advance, and the grit of many souls becomes too rough to frictionlessly sustain peace amongst all living beings.

— And then it comes.

It comes in many forms – the crisis. It comes in the shape of a goblin-horde. It comes in the shape of the horrific nightmare we call the Demon-King. It comes as the deep, harrowing flames of revolution that cover the landscape. It comes as ash.

And of those millions of people who prepared for war and prepared for the night to come, most will simply vanish before it ever even begins.

The power of a true crisis is beyond anything that any society is able to fully withstand the brunt of. The wave comes and totals anything.

Only with the help of the gods and with the help of chosen souls, whom we title ‘heroes’, have we been able to survive.

As does the darkness come with certainty every hundred years, so does a chosen soul rise from the rubble to pull us out of the nightwash.

The hero. Sometimes, it is a single person bestowed with incredible power. Sometimes, it is a group of five people, who we dub a ‘hero-party’.

We don’t know how the choice is made by the heavens.

But we know in gratitude that it is so.