The Balancer, Genesis (MH fanfiction)
“Hey, I found an inscription!” a young archaeologist shouted. His voice echoed loudly inside the empty chambers of the ancient temple ruins.
An old Wyverian quickly ran toward him. Even though he was small and looked frail because of his old age, he moved incredibly fast — as if he had just discovered a priceless masterpiece.
“Where? Where is it? Let me see,” the old man said, rubbing his hands over the stone carving. His face quickly changed from curious to completely shocked, and his hands suddenly started to shake.
“What does it say?” the young archaeologist asked.
“This is the story of the ultimate balancer,” the old man said, pausing for a moment to calm himself down before he began to tell the tale.
***
Before the first breath of human civilization — long before even the Ancient Civilization raised their spires toward the heavens — there existed a Nergigante. A solitary watcher, it peered from the shadows of a dying world, observing a cataclysmic clash between Safi’jiiva and Alatreon. Two gods, locked in a dance of mutual annihilation.
Desolation reigned. Monsters fell like ash, and the very cradle of nature was torn asunder by their wrath. With a scream that rent the skies, Alatreon coalesced the fury of four elements, unleashing them upon Safi’jiiva. Yet, the tides of battle turned on a razor’s edge. The Emperor of Dragons inhaled the cataclysmic energy, absorbing the storm into its chest, before expelling it back at Alatreon with unbridled ferocity.
Safi’jiiva knew well that the Dark Dragon commanded the chaotic elements through its crown of horns. It bided its time, searching for a fatal flaw in the deity’s stance. The moment arrived when Alatreon gathered its essence to unleash a blast of finality. Knowing its own life was fleeting, and recognizing this was the final dawn, Safi’jiiva drove the Dark Dragon against a towering precipice, shattering both of its majestic horns in a single, devastating impact.
It was a glorious, suicidal strike. The resulting explosion vaporized the mountain peak, leaving nothing but a hollowed, smoking crater in its wake. Safi’jiiva survived the inferno, though its flesh was grievously torn and its limbs severed. Alatreon, however, met its demise, choked to death by the wild, uncontrollable elements raging within its own unanchored chest.
As the mangled Safi’jiiva crawled forward to feast upon Alatreon’s remnants, the lurking Nergigante struck. It descended like a falling star, a flurry of brutal, unyielding malice. Its claws tore through the sapphire scales protecting the Emperor’s life-core. Safi’jiiva did not perish quietly; it fought with the desperation of a dying god, unleashing torrents of sapphire flame, slashing blindly, and radiating a heat so intense the air itself began to bleed.
Yet, its defiance was in vain. Driven by a gluttonous, primeval hunger, Nergigante dug deeper and deeper into the Emperor’s chest. With its final spark of consciousness, Safi’jiiva sought to detonate its own core, intending to turn the crater into a grave for them both. But Nergigante did not recoil. Its instincts whispered that this was the threshold of ascension. With a final, desperate surge of strength, Nergigante clamped its jaws around the glowing core and swallowed the Emperor’s life-force whole. The Emperor’s final song was cut short, silenced forever by the Extinction Dragon.
Its hunger still unsatiated, Nergigante turned to the carcass of Alatreon, devouring the dragon of twilight before burrowing deep into the womb of the earth. There, cradled by darkness, Nergigante slept. But slumber brought no peace. Having consumed two supreme deities, Nergigante had become an anomaly — a sin against the natural order. Drawn by the scent of this forbidden power, other Alatreons descended upon its resting place, seeking to purge the abomination.
So many Alatreons bled and died in that subterranean war that a subterranean lake was formed, filled entirely with the glowing, cursed blood of Elder Dragons. Then came Fatalis. The King of Kings. The God of Despair. Consumed by an unquenchable, ancient fury, Fatalis bathed the cavern in his apocalyptic flames. Nergigante fought with the desperation of a cornered beast, but the divine fires were absolute; they melted its flesh and incinerated its bones, slaying the titan where it stood.
Yet, no strike against the balancer is ever truly in vain. From a single, surviving quill, Nergigante’s cell regenerated, birthing a successor. And within that newborn soul, the unyielding vow of the original lived on.
***
Locked in a deep, centuries-long hibernation, the successor heard a desperate plea. It was the crying of the earth itself, calling for an end to the war between mankind and Schrade’s calamity. Driven by an awakening instinct, the beast rose to answer the call.
Upon the battlefield, the mortal Hunters had pushed Fatalis to his absolute limits. Grievously wounded, the Black Dragon succumbed to madness. He took to the sky, a shadow of pure malice, preparing to breathe a flame that would erase human civilization from the annals of history. Mortals fled in terror, their spirits broken. Only a handful of exhausted Hunters stood their ground, braving the scorching winds. They knew they could not slay a god, but they fought nonetheless, offering their lives to buy a fleeting moment of time for those fleeing the inferno.
The divine fire swelled within the dragon’s throat. A suffocating heat blanketed the land, and the very gates of hell seemed to swing wide. At that catastrophic juncture, Nergigante descended from the heavens. It slammed into the deity’s spine, driving a shattered Dragonator — left behind by fallen Hunters — deep into the god’s flesh. Its jaws locked onto Fatalis’s neck.
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With feral savagery, Nergigante drove its black spikes through Fatalis’s wings, tearing the leather and stripping the god of his dominion over the sky. Fatalis retaliated, exhaling a concentrated stream of white-hot fire directly into Nergigante’s flank, scorching the balancer’s wings.
Seeing a spark of hope amidst the ash, the dying Hunters found their second wind. Some rushed to load the final, heaviest Dragonator, others shielded the wounded, and the rest rained artillery to aid the beast. Forced to change his stratagem, Fatalis fought like a demon possessed. He unleashed every terror in his ancient arsenal. His strikes were blind, chaotic, and apocalyptic. Iron gates melted into rivers of slag, the earth trembled as if weeping, sand fused into sheets of jagged glass, and the very soil dissolved into a sea of churning magma. Yet, neither the indomitable spirit of mankind nor the primal ferocity of Nergigante would break.
The toll of the battle was catastrophic. Fatalis unleashed a breath that completely melted Nergigante’s right foreleg. But in that exact moment of agony, Nergigante jammed its spiked tail into Fatalis’s maw, shattering his jaw and choking the flames in his throat.
Sensing the climax, a lone Hunter fired the fortress’s final Dragonator. The massive iron spike tore through the air, piercing Nergigante’s wing before burying itself deep into Fatalis’s chest. Ignoring the agony, Nergigante’s instincts remained locked onto its quarry. It thrust its remaining claw into the god’s ruptured chest, tearing out the glowing heart of Fatalis.
Nergigante let loose a roar of triumph so terrifying, so primordial, that the surviving Hunters fled into the smoke, their supplies spent and their minds shattered. They left the beast alone to devour the remains of the calamity. From that day forth, whenever a Fatalis surged, the beast would appear. Its final recorded sighting was after a brutal skirmish with the Crimson Fatalis; it was found deep underground, weaving a massive cocoon around itself, accumulating a cataclysmic reservoir of energy for a distant, impending duty. The world forgot its name, remembering it only as a myth: The Guardian Nergigante.
***
Days faded into months, months into years, and the legend of the Guardian dissolved into the mists of forgotten lore.
Until the day the Ancestral White Fatalis descended, leading a pantheon of four other Fatalis dragons. They brought with them the end of days. Crimson lightning fractured the heavens, striking the earth in a relentless barrage that tore the ecosystem to shreds. The sky wept fire, and the world was brought to its knees. Faced with total ecological collapse, the world itself awakened its sleeping warden.
From its long slumber beneath the foundations of the burning city, the legend arose. With terrifying speed and unadulterated raw power, Guardian Nergigante erupted from the fractured earth. It blindsided the divine invaders, slamming two Fatalis dragons into the dirt simultaneously, unhinging its jaw to siphon their energy just as its ancestor had done to Safi’jiiva. Its eyes then locked onto the Ancestral One. The Hunter’s Guild, witnessing the clash of titans, dispatched their finest elite to shadow the beast.
Nergigante launched itself at the White Fatalis. The ancient deity responded with a tempest of divine lightning, yet to the horror and wonder of the onlookers, Nergigante’s body acted as a conduit, absorbing the celestial currents with terrifying ease. The Hunters arrived at the epicenter of this divine theater, realizing their weapons were futile against the Ancestral One. They resolved to use Nergigante as a living shield, navigating the crossfire of a war no mortal armor could endure.
Nergigante reverted to its primal doctrine, attempting to drag the White Fatalis from the heavens and cripple its wings. Yet, its efforts were thwarted by the god’s blinding, celestial speed. The White Fatalis, too, felt a tremor of shock; never in its millennia of existence had it seen a creature endure its divine lightning, let alone grow wilder, more ferocious, and more feral with every strike it absorbed.
Sensing a moment of hesitation in the sky, the Hunters coordinated their fire, launching a hidden Dragonator directly into the White Fatalis’s flank. The impact broke the deity’s momentum, granting Nergigante the opening it needed to tackle the god out of the air, crashing into the earth in a shockwave of dust. Yet, it was not enough. The Ancestral One possessed a terrifying gift — its wounds closed and knitted together instantly, leaving no trace of the strike.
Desperate, the Hunters charged the fallen god, striking with everything they had, even as their blades bounced off its divine hide. The White Fatalis answered with a breath of pure, concentrated ruin. The blast mimicked a volcanic eruption, transforming the battlefield into an inescapable hellscape of ash and smoke. The Hunters were scattered, forced to abandon their offensive to seek immediate shelter.
Seeing the god distracted, Nergigante gathered the entirety of its siphoned energy for a final, catastrophic dive. Recognizing the approaching doom, the White Fatalis pivoted, redirecting its cataclysmic breath upward into the path of the descending titan. The collision of their ultimate powers was nothing short of apocalyptic. When the smoke cleared, both lay grievously wounded, their hides shattered and bleeding.
The White Fatalis paused. It gazed upon the ruined city, observing the smoldering ash. Seeming to deem that its purpose of purging human arrogance was complete, the ancient god turned away, tearing a rift in reality and departing back to its timeless dimension. Nergigante, sensing that the immediate threat to the world’s core had been averted, desisted.
Returning to the heart of the ruins, Nergigante ignored the fleeing humans. Its eyes fell upon the shattered remnants of the city’s secret project: the Equal Dragon Weapon. It was this abomination that had drawn the ire of the gods. Refusing to wage an unnecessary war against mankind, the exhausted titan sunk back into the deep fissures of the earth, returning to the shadows to mend its broken flesh and drink from the life-stream of the planet.
In the wake of the cataclysm, the Hunter’s Guild looked upon the ancient text and officially christened the entity: Genesis Nergigante. The Root of All Balance. For they finally understood the cosmic law: When humanity oversteps its boundaries, a God (Fatalis) shall arise to smite them. But when the world itself faces total annihilation, Genesis shall rise to protect it.
***
“And that is the story on this old stone carving,” the old man said as he took his hands away from the wall.
“This is an incredible discovery! We have to report this to the Guild right away!” the young archaeologist said with a huge smile on his face. The old Wyverian nodded in agreement.
