Mikkos lowered his field glasses and turned to Cylon, who also peered out of the small wooden cart where they were sent for their scouting mission to intercept a unit of the slow-moving Egyptian-Greek forces deep in the Levant. Mikkos coughed, then said quietly,

“It seems as though the dogs are moving southward. They seem weak; perhaps they have not eaten?”

Cylon let out a few quiet hacks and bundled into his thin burlap robe, his machine gun placed loosely at his feet.

“We have not eaten either… Look again. Perhaps they suffer from illness.”

Mikkos looked through the old glasses once more, then told Cylon,

“Pox, I postulate. They walk as though their limbs were shattered by a Cretan bull.”

Cylon did not know what ‘postulate’ meant, as he never had never learned to read. He clenched his moist aching head and went on with eyes closed,

“They retreat in cowardice. We shall take them by nightfall.”

Though Mikkos was able to alert Patriarchal command before the sun set, both he and Cylon’s souls surrendered to fever and they passed before the offensive began. In this way, their situation was similar to that of a large portion of both the Patriarchal and Ptolemaic military, with the latter’s committed army suffering massive losses from illness since the unofficial ceasefire that had begun two years ago. During the time of the ceasefire, Ptolemaic diplomatic parties had all but ceased, with most of the few dozen assigned Egyptian emissaries being ordered back to the Pharaoh under cloudy circumstances, leaving much of the world curious about the internal state of the cloistered feudal state.

As years passed, and no word was heard from the Pharoah, detachments of the West Bank’s Roman army were dispatched to the banks of New Alexandria in an effort to compile information on the nation’s status, only to find the metropolis abandoned; starved, battered, rotting corpses lining the shore in droves as if all were rushing to the water to be saved from something. When the West Egyptian soldiers made ashore, they were met with deafening silence, broken only the quiet moaning prayers of those who remained, their thin frames covered in white bandages as though they were lepers. When asked, the survivors disclosed that the Pharaoh and his family had been taken by plague, and that the kingdom was no more. The Pharaoh's armies had escaped down the Nile, some said to Ethiopia, others to the Field of Reeds. None remained in New Alexandria, as it was a place cursed by God himself.

After Roman inspection, it was reported that upwards of 1.5 million Ptolemaic citizens and slaves had perished from diseases such as typhoid, smallpox, etc., and that the entire Ptolemaic dynasty had died from exposure, leaving their kingdom in veritable ruin. While it was a concise answer, it left many Roman bookkeepers wondering whether the plague had ended with the Pharaoh, or had simply gone unnoticed for several years in other nations due to the lack of professional physicians in the Levant. After a short visit with several Patriarchal Defense Forces, the latter had proved to be true. Over fifty percent of all Patriarchal soldiers were suffering or had suffered from serious illness in the past three years, but their illnesses had simply gone unreported by the priests, who doubled as physicians within the Patriarchal military.

Though the full impact of the plague had yet to be realized, Roman bookkeepers noted its presence, and alerted Patriarchal leadership of its existence, to which their response would be equivocal, with most priests choosing to gather their followers in prayer to force the illness to leave their bodies; a practice which soon resulted in a large portion of southern Patriarchal citizens to contract one or more of the illnesses from the Ptolemaic chemical cocktail.

Though the future looked grim for many in the Roman sphere, many officials recognized that something could be done to stop it, and demanded their tributaries act while it was still feasible, and while the plague remained in the Levant exclusively.

[The East Egyptian Kingdom collapses into anarchy, with paltry amounts of land being surrendered back to West Egypt via treatise.]

[Antioch, due to its poor social services and lack of any sort of welfare, begins suffering the brunt of the newfound plague. -10% production in all resources. -4% growth rate until measures are put in place to halt the plague.]

If something is not done on a national level within other Roman vassals and her allies, disaster will encompass the entire continent.