1 Prologue
I am the author.
Type-Moon (Nasuverse)
Prologue
*****
Night. Cold. Fire.
- Oh, shit… - came a muffled whisper from the boy.
There was a real picture of Hell all around: a sky the color of blood, thick black clouds, crushing with their mere presence, and tarry smoke blanketing the earth. The city had barely had time to sink into sleep when a firestorm descended from heaven, like the wrath of God. The apocalypse had come to this world. The four horsemen had been frolicking in the flaming wasteland for a long time. Over there, Death was feasting on bones; over there, in the other direction, Famine was playing with children. And there, on the mountain, War and Pestilence were arguing over who would reap more mortal souls.
The black sun, which covered the moon, gawked at the whole thing. Like a gateway to another world, dark, terrifying mud poured from the sun. In a crimson glow, the mud fell to the ground and spread out in all directions, like a hungry monster from the darkest depths of the ocean, devouring everything in its path.
So what in all this madness had a simple boy forgotten What, someone once said: "People die when you kill them." Well, that's a lie. And to prove it, we'll have to start from the beginning.
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His name was Murphy. A beautiful name - poetic. What a pity it means "failure. There's even a law of the same name in one of the many worlds that says, "If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong." And indeed, it did go wrong.
Opening his eyes for the first time in his life, he was greeted by the bright and blindingly clear light of this beautiful world. Endless green meadows stretched around him, and there, in the distance, could be seen mountains like a sleeping dragon above the world. A clear sea of azure with a fabulous world inside, and a wild jungle whose fauna was as beautiful as it was dangerous.
But light cannot exist without darkness, nor can darkness exist without light. By day is a beautiful world, by night is the domain of monsters. Like an immortal army of a powerful necromancer, hordes of skeletons and zombies came out hunting, wiping all the living off the face of the earth. Nasty, vile creatures, nicknamed goblins, could stab you in the liver at any second. The only monster that was at least cute was the slug, but even it managed to be annoying in its survivability.
As a result, night in this world is a struggle for survival in its purest form. Sword, torch, and potions were my best friends at the beginning of my journey. Though to be honest, over time it took on a taste and I think I even fell in love with it. A new monster is a new challenge. New challenge, new adventure. It was the ultimate drug.
It's a shame, though, that the sword's property of breaking down spoils the whole experience. And Murphy has to pick up a pick and shovel and go to the mines. Of course, the armor and weapons do not make themselves, but who really likes it. So besides the monotony, the mines held dangers that did nothing but irritate. Some insane bat would dive with a nasty squeak right on his head, or a multi-ton boulder would want to repeat the feat, repeating after the winged one.
It wasn't that bad, no, when he managed to find magical artifacts or stumble upon unknown dungeons and new "biomes. This spurred the adventurous spirit and brought a certain amount of "quest" to the monotonous life of a miner.
Life merged into a continuous cycle of killing, pain, mines, and killing again. Amidst the goblin genocide, the rain of slugs, and the digging of tungsten, Murphy tried to have as much fun as he could. By finding the magical staff of the Meteor Rain, he orchestrated a "dinosaur extinction" scene on a scale of 1 in 1,000,000. Or by finding a mushroom biome, he began to study cooking and came out pretty good. But the most enjoyable and joyful thing for him was meeting new people. New acquaintances, new stories. Socializing helped him not to lose his mind completely. In addition, he learned a lot of interesting things about this world from them, one of these discoveries was the name of the world - Terraria. In addition, from them, he learned a lot of interesting things about this world, such as its name - Terraria.
As he killed more and more monsters, he became a true master at it. Digging for days on end in the mines, he listened to the ground and could figure out the approximate location of a vein. Clearing ancient dungeons, Murphy learned how to disable traps and, as a consequence, create them.
After a couple of years, a small settlement somehow formed by itself, with his house in the center. All the people, for some unknown reason, who entered this world, tried to settle down in one place. It was trivial to defend themselves more easily, and life became easier and more fun. The funny thing is that every new "traveler" who stayed to live in the settlement was a true master of his or her craft. There was everyone from great mages, ancient shamans, and woodland dryads, to engineers, subversives, and nurses.
Murphy tried to learn something useful from each of the inhabitants of the settlement. For example, a dryad taught him how to make poisons and antidotes, a magician taught him how to make magical artifacts and potions, an engineer helped him create firearms, and a shaman helped him make magical wings. Knowledge and skills in magic, mechanics, engineering, pyrotechnics, weaponry, medicine, trade, shamanism, and more not only brightened Murphy's time and saved him from the madness of loneliness, but also helped him survive even in the most hopeless situations.
But the more Murphy learned, the more strange this world became. For example, it felt like Terraria was one big island surrounded by the sea, beyond which it was impossible to swim because of some invisible wall. Although even stranger was not the fact that the world was strange, but that I realized it. There were questions like: where do all these monsters come from, they seem to arise out of thin air, and if someone creates them, who and why? These were the questions Murphy was looking for an answer to.
They say that he who seeks will always find. And one day, I met someone who began to unravel this tangle of mysteries. It was a monster of gigantic proportions and had no less power than the "boss" of monsters, and his name was the Eye of Cthulhu. After killing him, Morphey got clues that would guide him to the next "boss" and so on and so forth. Cthulhu Brain, World Eater, Queen Bee, Skeletron, Wall of Flesh... Each new battle forced Murphy beyond his limits. Sometimes he grew stronger, gaining new weapons, and sometimes his body could only be reassembled thanks to a nurse and a shaman.
As time passed, the monsters increased in number, new ones appeared, and the old ones grew stronger. The possessed armor was a ghost in armor, terrifying you at night; demonic eyes appeared as revenge, monsters that kept you awake, revealing your deepest fears.
If a new "boss" appeared, Murphy had to run headlong to fight him. The twins were defeated. Destroyer destroyed. Skeletron Prime is buried underground, where he belongs. Each new "boss" called out to Murphy, testing his skills, defining his limits.
"The Bloody Harvest," as Murphy called this "quest," in honor of the path he traveled and the accomplishments he gained.
As time passed, Murphy picked up the big picture of the world and the main thing he learned was about the Moon Lord - a massive supernatural horror that seeks to destroy the world. A creature that had long ago been banished, parts of its body continued to spread spoilage and bring misery to the world at night. This creature, no one was supposed to touch, but there was a madman who was plotting to bring it back to life. Murphy nicknamed him after it, "the mindless cultist.
That was the main antagonist of this world - the "Last Boss," so to speak.
And so the day came when Murphy had to fight this Evil God. Their battle was legendary. Murphy had never been this close to death before, no a couple of times he definitely died. Eventually, half-dead, without an arm or an eye, he lay in a small crater filled with blood. Murphy watched as the sun rose over the Moon Lord's severed head and the moon set behind him. That moment was the end of an old era and the beginning of a new one.
Murphy may have once acknowledged that he became a kind of hero who saved the world, but now, he considered himself just a "Monster Hunter," really... "Assassin of the Gods" sounds cooler, but still, he's a hunter with such an unlucky name - Murphy.
