Strong Kerrigan

When you win Starcraft 2 Heart of the Swarm in brutal difficulty without losing Kerrigan even once, you get an ending with a truly strong Kerrigan. Well, you would, if I got my will.¹²³⁴

“Clearly you are my greatest failure. Now at long last, you will die.”

Emperor Mengsk activates the Xel'Naga artifact again. As the lightning from the artifact tears at her flesh and cracks every part of her body, Kerrigan rasps an answer:

“You forged me, but I chose my own path.”

Mengsk takes a gun while Kerrigans bone-wings flail through empty air. She whispers:

“There’s something you don’t know.”

Her talons touch the base of the Xel'Naga artifact. Crushed by limbs which tear through the armor of siege tanks, the base cracks, breaks through the ground and disappears, taking the artifact with it.

Mengsk fires without a blink. The shot hits Kerrigans head and throws her backwards to the ground.

“I enjoyed you, Kerrigan. Every dominion needs an enemy. You helped me stabilize my rule. But I could not give you the time to recover.”

Kerrigans limbs shiver, her mouth forms silent words:

“I am the swarm.”

Mengsk fires again and Kerrigans body goes limp. Then Mengsk takes a rug to clean his gun. As he puts it away, a scream from one of his surviving guards echoes through the cracked door to his room. Moments later two Zerglings throw themselves through the opening and at Mengsk. Two sure shots take them out.

Then a faint voice echoes in Mengsks mind:

“As long as…”

A Hydralisk appears in the door, its fangs wide open, a spine readying deep in its throat. Mengsk fires and his shots shatter bones, but the spine stays poised. Alien eyes focus on Mengsk, and the voice in his thoughts is no longer quiet. It booms in his mind and in all those around him:

“…the swarm lives,…”

The voice cuts through the mind of every being on the planet. Children cry, old men stumble and even the strongest are shaken to their very bones, as they see the image of Mengsk through the eyes of the Hydralisk. A distorted image of their Emperor, shimmering in the throb of blood within his veins. They feel the sudden release of the tension in the sinews of the Hydralisk as it catapults the spine towards Mengsk. And a voice pierces their minds which they will never forget in their lifetime:

“…so do I.”

The spine cuts through Mengsks armor and crushes his chest. Bone fragments fly from the wall behind him and blood spills over his Uniform. As the Emperor slumps down and more Zerglings fill the room to tear him apart, the voice continues:

“I am the swarm.”

Billions of terrans stand witness as Kerrigan breaks free from a Zerg egg. Watched by a thousand Zerg, her bone wings extend into every corner of the living chamber that gave birth to her new body and caress the walls which pulsate with the rhythm of an alien heart. Her voice imprints her words into the memory of every terran on Korhal:

“I now see my true enemy. He awaits for me in the void. Wielding powers I cannot imagine. I go to face him, having renounced everything. My humanity. My identity. The man I love. But I will not face this enemy alone.”

The presence weakens. Then a vast darkness fills the minds of all terrans on the planet, while they realize that now, they are alone.

“I am the swarm.”

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¹ This is what I’d have wished to see. But it is just a fantasy, not the actual ending.

² All characters in this story belong to Blizzard. I also published this pastiche shortstory in the Starcraft forums:
eu.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/14381660825.

³ The one thing I resent about Kerrigan in Starcraft 2 is that they made her weak.
In SC1 Kerrigan embraced and ruled the swarm. She started as strong terran, never to let anyone talk down to her, never afraid to say what she wanted. But she was ruled by others. Then she was betrayed and got infested, and she prevailed over the infestation, becoming the queen of blades, ruling the Zerg instead of being ruled by the Overmind.
In the cutscenes of SC2 she’s a helpless wreck, ever reliant upon the help of others and exposed as a tool of the overmind to free the swarm from Amon. It feels as if someone wrote the story to deconstruct the legend of the queen of blades. The in-game story seems much better, though: it’s mainly the cinematic cutscenes that make her weak. Including the last one — and that last one is what I set out to fix in this text.

⁴ You can find this story on my website:
draketo.de/kreatives/strong-kerrigan