Scourge Virus

The Scourge Virus stands as one of the darkest episodes in Viltrumite history, a manufactured plague loosed on the planet Viltrum in an age long before the events on Earth. Behind it was the Coalition of Planets, which sought a way to break the empire's grip on the galaxy. The weapon carried a bitter irony: Coalition scientists built it from the genetic material of Thaedus, a Viltrumite turncoat, tailoring the disease to strike only his own kind. He had earlier killed Emperor Argall, gambling that the shock would force his people to reject their conquering creed, but that murder only hardened them and triggered the Great Purge. Left with no gentler recourse, Thaedus resolved on a far grimmer solution.

The virus was smuggled toward Viltrum inside pods buried within an asteroid. As the rock tore through the atmosphere its shell burned away, flinging the capsules across the landscape, and on impact each one vented a green haze that seeped quietly into the populace. What followed came fast. The infection proved brutally contagious, driving victims to spit blood, bleed from the face, and collapse dead where they stood. A few boasted that the sickness would only temper them into something stronger, yet that bravado crumbled as those very boasters wasted away. Once the pods were found and the nature of the assault understood, Kregg and his elite brought word to Grand Regent Thragg as researchers dissected the disease, all to no avail. With no cure in reach, Thragg sealed the planet under total blockade and ordered every enslaved species there put to death, both to smother panic and to keep word of the disaster from leaking offworld. Protective suits and lockdowns did nothing to halt it, and the mounting dead were hauled to Argall's fortress and heaped in its courtyard.

By the time the plague finally burned itself out, it had gutted the race, leaving somewhere near fifty living Viltrumites out of billions. The corpses were flung into orbit, where they settled into a grisly ring circling the world. So few remained that ordinary reproduction would only breed genetic ruin, so the survivors looked outward for species compatible enough to interbreed with and slowly rebuild their numbers. That search pointed them to Earth and its humans, prompting the empire to plant Nolan, himself one of the survivors, among mankind with orders to blend in, father a powered heir, and quietly erode the planet's defenses ahead of a takeover. Thaedus, meanwhile, had never grasped how thoroughly his first weapon worked until Nolan told him, and the scale of the slaughter haunted him enough that he named it his worst sin. He crafted a stronger strain to be held back as an absolute last resort, and after his death he left Allen a recorded plea to keep fighting and, if it ever came to that, to use the virus, a charge that deeply rattled the young hero.