Roughly a week ago, 24 hours after Marshall drank Korak
Marshall was seated at his desk, dutifully completing the extra math problems his mother had assigned him. Not because he wanted to, mind you, but because he had to. If he didn't, his VR gaming privileges would be revoked for a full week! And that was unacceptable when he and his buddy Dennis were about to recruit a lady to help them advance their kingdom in UGW 2000. His mouth was watering just thinking about it! Dennis might be an innocent little boy, but Marshall fancied himself a man.
As he worked, an itchy sensation began to spread inside him. He absentmindedly scratched his chest. Wait, how was he itchy inside his chest? Wasn't itchiness supposed to be something only your skin could feel?
All of his thoughts became dominated by the horrible sensation as it spread from his heart to his bones, to every fiber of his being. Soon, he could do nothing but wish to be freed from it.
Shortly after that, relief finally came as his mind -- and body -- splintered into hundreds. Hundreds of what, you ask? Hundreds of small, flying insects, each with three words serving as an overarching directive to govern their existence: SPREAD. BITE. BREED.
His parents were the first to go. While you might expect a swarm of insects to consume wherever they go, such was not the instinct of these. Instead, the instant the first insect bit Marshall's mother, all the rest lost interest in her and spread out to look for new subjects to bite. It was the same with his father. As soon as he was bitten, the swarm split. It wasn't long before the swarm had dissolved to become hundreds of individual insects seeking victims separately.
What happened to Marshall's parents, you ask? Well, as soon as his mother was bitten, she dropped to the floor, convulsing, then dissolved into an inert pile of seeds. How boring, right? Well, you might find what happened to his father a little more interesting.
Marshall's father slapped at his arm, but missed the bug that bit him. "The devil are these?" He yelled, woozy. "Wh-whaz goin' on?"
Staggering drunkenly, he started chuckling to himself. "Hehe, hehe, awww is somebody lookin' for their mommy? Hehe, don' worryyyy, I'll find yer mommy! Yep!" He hiccupped and tripped, falling forward. The painted makeup of a clown appeared on his face and he continued to laugh, the sound slurred and irregular. His legs bent and twisted, growing curly fur and hooves, soon resembling those of a goat. Ram's horns sprouted from his temples and fairy wings from his back.
Jumping to his feet (well, hooves), he whooped triumphantly, as if having the time of his life. He ran out into the halls and kicked down a nearby door.
"Hellooooooooo neighbors!!" He called loudly, words jumbling together, laughing. The inhabitants of this apartment happened to have all the vents blocked off, so they'd been missed by the bugs.
Startled, a large family of seven -- all doing their own thing -- demanded to know what the heck was going on. They all spoke over one another frantically, but it was too late.
What used to be Marshall's father, and was now some strange Satyr with fairy wings and clown makeup, tackled the nearest person to the ground. This happened to be a little girl. He then began lunging from person to person, touching or biting them as he pleased.
The girl screamed as she melted into a puddle of lava. One of the sons turned into a foot-tall preying mantis with a football for a head (and promptly died for lack of a brain), another morphed into a snowman (which began to melt), while the third son turned into a hideous statue of an excessively buff octopus-man with a thick double chin. The mother turned into a snake that melded with the Satyr creature, making it so he now had a green python growing from one shoulder.
As for the last two individuals in the room (the father and the second daughter), upon being touched by the Satyr hybrid creature, they both burst into confetti, accompanied by the full-volume sound of a cargo ship's horn.
Simultaneously in various rooms in the apartment and on the nearby streets, hundreds of bugs were biting innocent victims, causing them to spontaneously mutate in unpredicted ways. Those who survived the mutation then proceeded to spread the mutation to other humans. Unlike the Chaos Fire from the attack on Faxton, only living things were mutating. Living things were sometimes killed, or transmuted into nonliving matter, but nothing nonliving was altered in any way.
In this fashion, the Human Alliance's city of Iritia fell before Toltura's Army ever attacked.