This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Proximal_Flame on 2025-05-16 20:14:50+00:00.

My patrons voted for it, so here it is: a new update for The Last Angel: The Hungry Stars. This continues the interrupts, looking back at Nibiru’s past, from its founding to the schism that tore it apart to its recovery. This gives a look at what happened upon the Prophet’s Hand during that time. It was a section I always wanted to write, but never got around to, distracted by more current affairs in the story. It’s gone through several different versions, some more off the wall than others, from Confederate holdouts to Naiad-fused survivors, but this is a version I’m quite happy with. It gives us an idea what happened during the One-Day War and another reason, beyond the sheer scale of the Hand, why it’s taken the League so long to not just repair it, but retake it and ensure that is it – heh – safe.

A brief snippet can be found below, but the full chapter can be found at the links above. Enjoy!

~

They’d been trying to sweep and clear one of the barracks towards the edge of the territory the League expeditions had secured. An enemy squad had prepared an ambush for them, but before Lonsdale had worked up a plan to dig the fuckers out, there had been a lot of shooting and screaming from the Triquetrans’ position. His first thought was another Confederate squad had gone in, but there was no one in the area. His next guess was blue on blue; League reinforcements had arrived and been mistaken for his people. What he found was unlike anything he’d ever seen before.

The bodies that had been burned by laser fire or blown apart by high-ex rounds were nothing new. He was old enough to remember the war, when he’d been a snot-nosed recruit told to fight monsters. He’d learned quick enough that Tribs weren’t monsters – they could die just like anyone and anything else. What he saw squatting amidst the blood and death of a dozen human bodies…thatwas a monster.

It crouched on six legs, toes spread wide and foreclaws sunk into a broken chest plate like the armour had the consistency of rotted wood. Its muzzle was inside the dead Leaguer’s chest, tugging and pulling at viscera. At the base of its skull, it had a fringe of tendrils, each more than a foot long. Bands of colour pulsed along them, blues and muted greens. Then, a brief flash of white and the creature pulled its head back.

The… thing had a long, pointed head that dripped with gore. Its hairless flesh was a dark, almost metallic grey broken up by bioluminescent spots. It had a thin whipcord tail that ended in an ugly hook. Its sharp, slicing teeth were half the size of a man’s finger and it held something red and dripping in its mouth. At first, the sergeant first mistook it for a chunk of meat or even the heart of the poor bastard whose chest this thing just had its face buried in, but some part of his brain was still working and he realized that it was holding part of the Triquetran marine’s implants.

Vihaan expected the creature to drop it when it realized it wasn’t holding a juicy gobbet of flesh, but an inedible hunk of metal, circuits and neural connections, but it didn’t. If anything, it seemed more interested in the technology, taking hold of it in its forelegs as three tongues and a pair of those winding tentacles probed the implant. It looked like… God, it looked like it was studying it, maybe even trying to connect to the implant to see what it did.

A chill formed at the base of of his skull and ran all the way down to the tip of his spine as he watched the creature examine its prize. Was it even a creature, though? He’d thought it was, but there was something about it that made it feel like it wasn’t actually alive, but some Godforsaken type of machine…

Whatever it was, it quickly realized it wasn’t alone. Its head came up, a pulse of white tinged with yellow chasing across its skin before turning to a sharp red. It looked directly at the Confederate marines, but it had no eyes that Vihaan could see, only pits where its eyes might have gone. It opened its mouth and let out a static shriek, bounding away before he or anyone else could react.

More screams answered the creature, echoing through the hallways. They didn’t sound like they were far away… and, he realized with a rush of fear, they were already getting closer. “Fall back,” he ordered his people. “Fall back,now.”

~

My patreon / subscribestar / website / twitter