Two years after the catastrophe that wiped out the UAC Base on Mars.
Following the incident, with hundreds of missing or dead people on their charge, along with a non negligible load of demons, the UAC sank quite rapidly. It was a harsh moment for global economy, as the UAC represented Earth's greatest population. A wave of tens of thousands of unemployed people invaded the market. All of the former UAC's bases and laboratories were condemned and abandoned. Most importantly, the United Nations army had to be moved into Martian orbit and fought for over a month with the demon legion, eliminating them down to the last one, at the cost of many lives. The mars base was bombarded and utterly destroyed a week later. It took several years for the scandal to cool down and abate, but in the end the general opinion believed that the case was over, the UAC was dead and all of its experiments with it. They were dead wrong.
If only UAC scientists had examined those runes more in detail, they would have uncovered even more secrets concerning that former civilisation. They would have found out that what they had discovered until then had been created at the war's beginning, and represented all the race's hopes. It was not what had really happened. They would have found out that humanity did not descend from this race, and that there never was any super warrior. The race in question had fought for dozens of years, fought desperately, but it had been exterminated in the end by the hellish legions. And once Evil had been awoken, it never died. It only slept in watchfulness, awaiting a new occasion to bring havoc and destruction into the inhabited worlds. It had taken the spark humanity represented to bring it roaring back to life, and it had only momentarily been stopped by the destruction of the Hell Gate and the UAC's teleportals. The demons were cunning, and would find another way to enter our dimension. It all began again with a simple story…
It had been a week since Earl Rodgers had disappeared while jogging in the forest. From what authorities could determine, he jogged into the forest around six thirty AM one morning, and never came out. About a week later, several reports came in of a strange beast lurking on the wood's borders. People were afraid. It was then the turn of a group of rash young campers who disappeared one night in the forest. This time though, evident traces of slaughter were found. A bloody camp ground, several limbs and innards lay strewn around the place. It was a real butchery. The local police department mounted an expedition in the forest. Fifteen armed men with dogs entered one night. What they found was terrifying. They slew the hellish creature, at the cost of six men. The affair was muffled and the carcass was burned. Nonetheless, evidence was taken, tissue samples and pictures, which were later compared to samples taken back by the marines after the "cleaning" of the mars base. The tissues corresponded. The creature was identified as the species called "Hell Knight". Though the UN muffled the case as best they could, even going as far as to "suppress" several babbling persons, the entire world's surveillance systems were put on alert. Every country was to survey their territory for unnatural power fluctuations. In order to open a dimension portal for the first time, an immense quantity of brute energy was required. Once that gap had been created however, the power needed to transfer material objects, in this case demons, from one dimension to the other was minimal. Very little was known of how the demons created the breaches in the fabric of space and time, and for all the UN scientists could tell, they could only be taken in one direction, and could not be closed again once opened. For the first few days, invasion had been deflected by the simple method of detect and destroy. Scientists could locate a breach up to twenty four hours before it opened into their dimension, because of the abnormal power concentration in that area. The army would gather a small force at the gate and destroy the demon before it went wild. But that method was of course doomed to failure.
First of all, if a breach was opened in a public area, say in the middle of a street, the army would have trouble hiding the affair from the public. Second, the portals were becoming more and more numerous, and with the fact of having to leave a constant guard on already opened portals, armed forces were beginning to spread dangerously thin over the globe. Rumours began to spread of beasts lurking in mountains or forests, and hundreds of places throughout the world became considered as "haunted". The situation rapidly degenerated out of control. Dozens of creatures began to appear every day, some in public areas such as Sidney. The worst accident happened when a Hell Knight appeared on the roof of the Sidney opera and jumped down onto the solid ground, where he slew five people before he was mastered by local police. The population was terrified. No one was safe. Sometimes creatures would appear inside buildings, inside offices or even in underground facilities such as subway stations or tracks. In a matter of weeks, the world plunged into chaos. The population panicked and went, for the most part, insane. Anarchy swept over the planet and in a matter of weeks, several million casualties were to deplore. Any real resistance was whipped out in a matter of days; most of the world's armies were dispersed or slaughtered within the first week. Though humanity as we presently know it was considered as ended, there were some who survived the initial onslaught…