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Behemoth-Bane
Chapter 34: It's been an honor

Chapter 34: It's been an honor

The door opened and Mars appeared, quickly followed by Menta whose tall frame had faded to a dumpy exterior. Menta took a single step into the chamber before he, like Mars and Luna, froze to look at the displays.

There, in the bright lights of the station, they saw a tall wall of red… No, not a wall. Something moving. She keyed for the lights to focus on the movement; the minor motion of her fingers was about all she could do in her unnerved state.

It was a giant face - deformed and half-melted. As if someone had attempted to imitate a human face, but with none of the intelligence for it. Its crooked mouth revealed square, white teeth; visible through the split lip. It had no eyes, not in its orbits. Instead, it had folds of wrinkled, hairy skin, as if the eyelids and eyebrows had grown into one-another.

Its scalp was bare bone and coming closer with sudden, jerking movements.

The thing was crawling on spindly, thin legs- grabbing into the sands to obscure its form in kicked-up dust.

“Logos h-help us… it’s come for us…” Menta whispered, his pants wet with warm piss.

The Monstrum crashed into the station, blindly flailing its head about, as if to allow water to flow into what might’ve been a nose, had there only been skin to cover the hole in its face.

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Automatic alarms screeched through the facility, men and women screamed as hull-plating exploded inwards.

The skin of its hands had been ground back by the sands, leaving only naked palms of flesh and bone, but those were the only tissues it needed to wreak havoc. It tore apart metal in a vicious frenzy- grabbing the tubes connecting the cantons, only to toss them into the darkness. Within minutes, half the station had been compromised - no, not compromised. Torn to shreds.

Small forms soared through the waters, wriggling and writhing; forms Luna thought to be pieces of cloth from the cantina, only to come to the dreadful conclusion that all of them were her fellow stationeers.

Menta yelped, but both Mars and Luna remained steadfast in their positions, staring as the beast’s frantic flailing did something to its chest…

From the meaty ribcage, long tendrils of skin shot out to lap at the sands, like a brush cleaning a stilt. After writhing in statio for a few, scant seconds, the tendrils shot out to the abyss, spreading further and further until nearly all they could see were writhing tentacles of elongated skin.

The tendrils seemed to hone into their prey, where the flesh began to wrap around them, squeezing and crushing them to form clouds of blood before they disappeared back into the jungle of tentacular growths. It had all happened so fast - from the arrival of the beast until the creak of the control-compartment’s hull, only seconds had passed. Seconds in which her frantic mind had been firing at full capacity in an attempt to understand that the inevitable day had finally come. She looked over to see Mars smile a bittersweet nod at her, one she was quick to return with one of her own.

“It’s been an honor, Commander Luna.”