Wuhu! Hero Appears!

Daelaam world, Swopes (Swampus).

Swopes was a world reeking of putrid decay. Its surface was covered in swamps of acidic pools as thick as mung bean soup, with countless black, withered branch-like trunks jutting crookedly from muddy sludge toward skies heavy with poisonous miasma. Bronze pyramid-shaped structures stood amid the viscous mire and fetid air, each as immense as a mountain, so grand they seemed to have come from another world. Green globular lightning wreathed their proudly rising spires.

Around these colossal structures, ancient altars, obelisks, and broken high walls could vaguely be seen. They were all unimaginably vast, as though they had belonged to giants of antiquity.

The Protoss had arrived on Swopes and established a settlement thousands of years ago, but these ancient pyramid-like structures and the ruins of old cities had not been left behind by them.

This planet might once have belonged to a civilization of unimaginable splendor. Even today, the shattered remnants of its great cities appeared miraculous. But that must have been an affair of the distant past. Now, Swopes was merely a patch of rotting mud sunk in the river of time.

Today, Swopes had become a true hell. Deep-purple Creep and Zerg covered both sky and ground, spreading across the swamplands and swaying like summer clouds of mosquitoes. These twisted monsters, clad in solid biological carapaces and gleaming bronze-green all over, belonged to an offshoot of the Fenris Brood. They were commanded by a younger second-generation Mini Cerebrate or several Brood Queens.

Swopes's brutal natural environment was harsh even by Protoss standards, but it suited the Zerg perfectly. Once the Brood arrived on Swopes, Creep and hatcheries spread across the planet's surface like blotches, while every native life-form was assimilated and absorbed.

And once Swopes had been completely transformed into a Brood