Baltimore wasn’t like Manhattan; it wasn’t an island and it was impossible to ‘quarantine’ the entire city by simply blocking off some bridges and tunnels. There were several highways, which were easy to block off under ‘normal’ circumstances.

Nearly the entire police force had been attempting to contain the riots, but once they started getting infected by the enraged and psychotic ‘protesters’, the situation became much more horrifying than any ‘zombie’ movie. There were some people who were literally unable to control themselves and simply clawed, bit, or beat each other to death.

However, the most dangerous were the ones who had retained the majority of their senses and were merely starting to lose their rationality; those were the ones who were still able to remember who they were. There were cops in full riot gear, with shields, tear gas, and obviously guns. Then there were SWAT officers who had fully automatic assault rifles, bulletproof vests, and a decent amount of training to rely on: even in their nearly hysterical state.

‘Little Italy’, ‘Harbor East’, and ‘Fell’s Point’ were the main locations where the ‘protests’ had been taking place when the outbreak began, but the amount of people there were relatively insignificant. They were merely the places with the most news coverage, though that quickly ended as all of the reporters and journalists either fled or were killed.
Even though it was only five-thirty in the afternoon, it was already extremely dark outside. A beautiful elven woman with porcelain skin and pitch-black eyes was floating a kilometer or so above the city.

Arcana murmured “Humanity… Without any rules or restrictions, they become nothing but mindless beasts fairly easily. For the most part, their souls are incredibly temperamental and weak. Compared to the minuscule number of Humans on this planet, there are far more other creatures and lifeforms to choose from. I wonder how many souls Michael will be able to gather, before his time runs out?”

At that moment, there were entire blocks of row-houses that were engulfed in flames in Highlandtown to the east of Patterson Park. In the western distance, near the National Aquarium, a series of explosions rang out. They created huge plumes of smoke and fire, as the top of the trade tower and several other extremely tall buildings had bombs detonated on their roofs.

Dozens of fairly large radiological dispersal devices were planted and had been prepared for quite some time, to be used at a later date by one of the many terrorist organizations. One of their agents was infected by the ‘Super-Rabies’ and decided to activate it prematurely, killing himself in the process.

Typically, RDDs were considered ‘Weapons of Mass Disruption’, because they could cause chaos rather easily, while not actually having much lethality. However, that was under the assumption that the ‘dirty bomb’ was small enough to fit inside of a briefcase and detonated at a low altitude.

The dispersal of radioactive materials was on a far bigger scale than predicted; anyone who was in the downtown area, outside, would be exposed to potentially deadly levels of radiation. Of course, getting rad-sickness was definitely not something that the people in the area were worried about.

Hundreds of ships were leaving the harbor, fleeing the disaster-zone before the quarantine could possibly come into effect. Many were simply driving away in cars, trucks, or vans; the public transportation system had collapsed almost immediately though.

Unfortunately, there were many cases of the infected purposefully crashing their vehicles into buildings. When humans are suffering casualties, they tend to ignore other animals completely.

While tens of thousands of people were experiencing rabies symptoms, they were actually detrimental to spreading the disease, since they were mostly killing each other. On the other hand, the roaches, rats and mice were the true driving force of the pandemic.

They were inside homes, shops, hotels, and just about every building within a two mile radius of Michael’s house: The middle of eastern Baltimore. He was essentially the epicenter of the entire disaster, though he never even went anywhere.

That original glowing red cockroach hadn’t traveled more than a few blocks, but it had grown tremendously. Its body was the size of a cat, and the paralytic venom in its fangs was potent enough to sedate a horse in a single bite.

Within two days, it ‘only’ produced around five-thousand direct descendants. However, as they continued to fan-out through the houses, they managed to infect the ‘normal’ pests with that strain of ‘Super-Rabies’. Rather than the offspring, it was those mice, rats and roaches that proceeded to attack humans. They didn’t have the intelligence or genetic programming required to avoid drawing attention to themselves, but two days was still plenty of time for them to disperse properly.

Those strange purple spiders made their way over to patterson park and began infesting the area shortly after they were created. Everything they consumed was transformed into Darkness mana and fueled their rapid growth, while also slowly polluting the area with their noxious aura of death.

However, even with all of those potentially world-ending disasters already in effect, another catastrophe was about to begin. Where there is Chaos, Nature will always be present as well.

 

Michael had finally satisfied himself for the fifth time, when there was a loud explosion down the street and the power immediately shut off in his house. He grumbled “Ugh, this was really poor planning on my part… There’s literally no flashlights in my room, and it’s nighttime, so it’s not like opening my window-cover will be useful. Actually, I’m almost a hundred-percent certain that the moment I do, some kinda weird monster is gonna… Ah, well, I do already have at least one of those in my basement, but that’s beside the point. Welp, it’s a good thing I’ve had a lot of practice moving around dark places without using my eyes. Might be a little hard finding some clothes to put on though… I probably should have found them before masturbating, huh?”

Pushing his office-chair backwards a bit, he reached to his left and grabbed both the butcher knife, which was in a leather sheath, and the three throwing knives. After picking them up, he muttered “I probably should have charged my phone… Oh well, it’s not like I have anyone to call.”

He reached into his desk drawer and found his black wallet, with a little over a thousand dollars in it. Since the world hadn’t ‘ended’ quite yet, money still had value to most people.

Surprisingly, Michael managed to avoid stubbing his toes on anything, as he made his way into the back of the basement. However, it was at that time when he realized that ‘Violet’ wasn’t completely useless afterall.

“Holy shit, Draco-Rat! Look over here for me! Aw~, good girl~! Hahaha~, okay, just stay like that for a few minutes…” Her serpentine eyes were glowing bright red, so it was difficult for him to judge what the colors of everything were, but it was still better than nothing.

Placing his weapons and wallet onto an empty shelf, he started searching through his closet for some clothing to wear. Eventually, he settled for a pair of dark-blue jeans and switched from the blood-stained white t-shirt, into one that was relatively ‘newer’ and tighter. Then he grabbed his old leather jacket, that he hadn’t used in years.

The wallet was placed into the front left pant-pocket, while the knives were hidden inside of his jacket. Although, considering the situation, there was no real ‘need’ to hide anything.

“Fucking shit, shit-cunt, cum in my mouth, ahn~! Onii-chan~…” As he was getting dressed, a disturbingly seductive voice was yelling at him.

Michael immediately turned around and saw the grizzly-bear sized rat-headed demonic dragon. It was innocently staring at him and making some squeaking noises, obviously having no idea what the words and phrases it was speaking meant.

“Seriously, Violet, you do sound like a cute little onee-chan and all, but I just came a ton of times already. How about later, okay? Well, that’s assuming that you can actually squeeze through my narrow-ass door…” He smiled wryly, while talking to the beast as if it could actually understand him.

Once he put on some white ankle-socks and his extremely old black sneakers, Michael walked over and carelessly scratched the rat’s neck. It closed its large glowing eyes and made some awkward moaning noises, so he gently massaged its scaly back for a few seconds before whispering “Ya know, if you didn’t have spikes all down your spine, I’d definitely try to ride you like a horse… Then I’d probably get motion sickness and have to walk anyway. Okay, I should probably collect some ‘supplies’, since I’ll probably never come back here.”

As he was walking towards the stairs, he heard a loud ‘dinging’ noise, and looked down towards the floor. The white tile was dyed red from Violet’s luminescent eyes, but he was able to tell that there was a small coin laying on the ground.

Michael muttered “Dafuck is that, a penny?” However, rather than picking it up, he just continued guiding the clueless rat-dragon into his room. Perhaps if it had landed onto a black tile, things would have turned out differently, but the miscellaneous coin didn’t manage to pique his interest at all. His senses were also far too dull to notice the copious amounts of arcane mana that were slowly leaking out of the seemingly mundane object.