The psychically sensitive races of our galaxy felt it first, a subtle tingle of primal warning instincts firing. A few days later the dread feeling of being hunted by an unseen predator was ubiquitous. Species and Empires that had only days before been hellbent on each others extermination had cast aside their wars and either fled to the perceived safety of home or simply merged fleets on the battlefield.
The whole galaxy huddled,shivering in the dark like surrounded herd animals against a foe none were sure actually existed.
When the universe bulged and erupted into a grotesque wound the length of the galactic plane just outside one of the spiral arms of our galaxy it was almost a relief, almost.
The pulsating tear in reality looked more like a gaping wound in flesh than a spatial anomaly and from it enormous tentacles were expanding and moving slowly to envelop the galaxy. The first ships to get in visual range reported they were made up of quintillions of individual creatures moving together, from the size of fighters all the way up to star system sized organisms. The swarm had no uniform shape and simply looking at them for any length of time caused nausea and a fog in the minds of the observers.
Every being in the galaxy felt a gnawing hunger tickling their minds now, a ravenous need to devour was oozing out from the tear and from the creatures moving to surround the hundreds of billions of stars that made up their home.
The feeling of hunger was nothing compared to the feeling of being hunted they all felt though, that feeling hadnt changed when the universe ripped open, but it had steadily been getting stronger still.
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When a second rip in the universe opened near the first the psychic backlash stunned even nonsensitive species.
This was the source of the predator.
The massive rift of kaliedoscoping colors and sparks emenated the predatory feeling a moment longer before being replaced with an even stronger one.
FOUND YOU
Every being in the galaxy froze, unable to move, fight or flight replaced with an overriding need to appear harmless. The encircling invaders,guided by a stronger single mind started closing the wound in space,prepared to cut off the countless ships that wouldnt make it back inside in time.
It was too slow.
Beams of energy stabbed into the malignant wound from the new rift. They seemed to tether the two together and draw them into one spot. The swarm was giving off nauseating waves of a new feeling now.
Fear.
The sparking rift slipped inside the first tear, more beams stabbed into space burning swathes of trillions of organism at a time from the swarms that hadnt made it back inside.
With a few last flashes of light the two rifts winked out of existence.
There wasnt much for us to clean up, the countless creatures that had survived were floating aimlessly in space, it was simply a matter of enough high energy fire poured into them to burn them away.
The psychic pressure the galaxy had been under was gone, there was a brief moment of the feeling of dying fear when the kaleidoscope rift reopened but it was quickly replaced by a soothing feeling. A single ship emerged from the rift long enough to launch a bouy before returning to the breach which closed behind it.
The container was retreived and opened.
It contained an animated drawing of an ape bashing a rift creature in the head over and over with a club while swinging its other hand around with only the central digit raised.
A single line of text was printed on the bottom.
-Sorry for the inconvenience, love, Humanity.