kukuruyo

Hundreds of years ago, humanity didn’t stand a chance against monsters; they survived their early stages mostly as nomadic tribes, and humanoid monsters were much less common. At some point the technological advances allowed them to live from agriculture, but living permanently on an specific area was very difficult, when unbeatable monsters lurked around, so the places to start a village were scarce and fights for them started over. Some humanoid monsters helped some of this villages; some helped them to fight other humans or even other humanoid monsters; some stalked human villages to steal or kill. That very much affected humanoid monster acceptance today; some villages greet any one of them because they were helped in the past; some villages fought against some race in the past and doesn’t like them today; some villages were attacked by them and doesn’t trust any humanoid monster race.

Many conflicts rose, but the most relevant one was the menace of the Asgard empire. This humans made settlement on the hard and freezed lands of
the north, where not many monsters live, and they created probably the first country on Robukan. Their lands had a hard environment that created hard men, but they had few problems with monsters, and thus they expanded and improved their villages and their technology, and became an empire.

This empire had plans to expand on the more fertile lands at its south, even crossing the sea, and that made the few other village to made truces against them. This way they resisted for some years, but the empire somehow managed to do a significant breackthrough in their technology (for a medieval standpoint), and was apparently preparing for a full scale assault when something happened. Dwarves came.

Dwarves are a mysterious small and strange race that appeared from outside of Robukan in slow streams and numbers. They are few even today, villages usually having no more than one or two families of them, but they changed everything forever, because they have the ability to conserve the essence of a monster in their dead bodies, and thus in equipment made with those bodies.

With the equipment made this way, humans or humanoids can awaken their latent elemental powers by increasing their essence affinity wearing and using those equipments. That completely changed the balance against monsters; now a group of trained warriors with equipment could take down a dragon-like creature, making a land completely safe of monster attacks, and on the long run, create an army of elemental users.

The villages completely forgot about waging war for territory; now they could expand almost wherever they wanted and thus maintaining their old settlements made no sense. The villages on close proximity to the empire simply traveled to the other side of the sea or made settlement on the coast paying a tribute to them (one they could now afford). The empire controlled then (and today, even if the coast is controlled mostly nominally) the entire northern region, but with the growing power of the villages, they couldn’t launch an invasion across the sea with chances to succeed. Technology was then viewed as a negative thing, since the empire did so many evil with its inventions and now it wasn’t necessary at all. Complex mechanics interfere with the flux of essence, and affinity grow slower, making mechaniced weaponry less useful to hunt monsters than traditional ones; so things settled down, technology didn’t improved almost nothing in hundreds of years, and there was not any relevant struggle or battle, until the year 957 (13 years ago by Guild adventure standard)

On the week close to the event called the “red moon” (in which the moon literally turns red), a huge, kaiju-size monster appeared on the lands of the north. It was a known specie, the Senku boru gödetsu, the biggest monster species registered, but one that was never seen outside the eastern seas, and this one had a size four times the normal size of this creatures, which were already titanic to begin with.

This event wrecked down the empire, since they never had to fight any significant monster, they were totally caught by surprise by the apparition, and totally unprepared to fight it. The creature traveled shout in a straight line, leaving a trail of destruction and reached out for the sea, but it didn’t stop there, it traveled south with no attempt for subtlety. Some hunters tried to stop him at the sea with hunting ships, but he destroyed them all easily, his power far beyond anything any hunter had ever seen; he reached the island of Lars, homeland of the race of Slazs, and then stayed there while sprouting small creatures that attacked the humanoid monsters on the isle. The slazs had to completely evacuate the island and make an exodus to the closest village, Potoka, at the coast.

Lars was completely destroyed by the creature, now nicknamed “Leviazan”, but the disgrace of their people was the blessing for the rest of Robukan. For whatever reason the Leviazan stayed on Lars, it gave Potoka the time to receive the news and prepare a defense. Luckily, just a few days before, Potoka hosted the great Potoka hunter tournament, the most important in all Robukan. The best hunters in all the villages were there, and Potoka dispatched fast mails to reunite the best of them.

Even so, when the creature finally attacked Potoka, the combined force of the hunters wasn’t enough to stop him, they could only manage to stop the small creatures to swarm the streets, but couldn’t stop the Leviazan himself. Everything would have been lost if not for the latter called “legendary hunters”. The best hunter of every cardinal point was there leading his team for the tournament; the four agreed to join on a single team and lure the creature out of Potoka while the other hunters cleaned the streets. In the end, they not only managed to lure the creature out, but also to kill it.

The heroes were greatly celebrated and became living legends, but the event made clear that hunters alone weren’t enough. Some people then started to talk about creating technology again, but most people still fear or hate it because of the stories of the empire, and only slowly new weaponry and mechanics can be seen, with much distrust for many people, especially old ones; but still some younger people choose to try it (like two of the main characters on Guild adventure, Leika with her bowgun, and Reika with her gunlance), and Potoka itself was reinforced with some canons in its walls.