Hey all. This is Zach, otherwise known as Fell Blade of Angmar (if you get the reference, much kudos), and this is my first Fanfiction in, well, forever. I've been a fan of Starblazers and its Japanese counterpart since I was a toddler, and with the release of Space Battleship Yamato 2199 my love of the series has grown even more! I started writing this story in late June of 2015 as a personal project to pass the time between graduating and going off to college, with me doing the writing bit and one of my fellow Yamato fans doing illustrations. And as you can attest, the last few weeks have seen a flurry of new content posted, I post chapters as I write them so the story can continue onwards. Now, some thank yous.

Big thank you to Madison Bastiaans, who designed the absolutely gorgeous over art at my pleading. Her deviant art page, where you can see much more of her wonderful work, is Huskeylover.

Thanks goes to Connor Lesch, who is currently working on character designs for the story. He was a big help in coming up with the concepts for this story as well as the tech involved, and I know will be gracing these pages with some wonderful art.

Finally, thanks to the Starblazers Fan community. Without you guys, I probably would not have found the inspiration to write this little shindig. Your stories are amazing and add a whole new layer of depth to the series.

Well, enough thanks, sit back and enjoy Subterranean!

Prologue: Desecration

They came from the darkened sky above, giant balls of crimson death hurtling from the outer territories into our atmosphere, decorating the brilliant Ohio sunsets with mushroom clouds and seeping radiation. Our instinctive response, of course, was to run. But how could you run from fear itself? Like the bodies lain across the empty streets, blasted from their homes or slowly decayed into nothingness by radon, uranium, and a thousand other metals we didn't even know could kill a man, our souls were blasted into nothingness, we became numb to death and its consequences. Life was merely a statistic, a percentage that was in freefall towards zero. Our only solution to the crisis at hand was to go underground. Run from the unescapable. And so we dug at the reddened soil, dug at the hollow oceans, dug around the bodies and the fires, dug until we could find shelter.

But even then we weren't safe. Nothing could stop the radiation leaking in like mold from the outside world. No one could escape the fact that food, water, and air were running out. Not one person could forget the cave-ins, fires, and street wars that plagued our newfound homes. Our lives, as we knew them, were over. But instead of committing ourselves to another Masada, we hoped. Hope was like a drug in those darkened tunnels, making us climax in the drunk lust of powerless pleading to a silent god, hope bore fruit and multiplied, giving us the new generation that had never seen sunlight. Hope manifested itself in a tiny capsule sent from a distant planet, locked away in the myriad of waltzing stars we knew as the great Magellanic Cloud. And hope, dear sweet hope, left us in an ark of iron, bidding adieu to Mother Earth's withered hands to save the human race.

And so we waited. The air became thin, punctuated with the cries of a desperate people. There were stories of Sub-Mumbai, where, their air and rations running out, the population had turned against one another, families ripped apart over a crust of moldy bread, a drop of water mingled with the blood of the four people scrambling madly for it. Collectively we shuddered at such tales. We prayed for our safety, our sanity, and our sanctity. The buildings, only a few years old but already withered from years of neglect, creaked in misery. We lived hollow lives, trapped in a root cellar that was slowly filling with mustard gas, corroding our flesh and lungs until we breathed no more.

And then, one burning June day, when the kids, those who were able to walk, of course, were out playing soccer in the bedrock and cement park, and while the parents, those who were still alive, wailed in pain as their bodies slowly deteriorated before their very eyes, we heard a sound unlike any other. It was like rushing water from some long-ago vaporized brook in the Appalachians, except it was accentuated by the collective sigh of relief that every citizen in our town made when they saw the Argo touch down on top of the baked and dying surface of our Earth. We couldn't believe our eyes. Our savior, almost too late, had arrived a mere day before we were scheduled to expire. The shielding protecting us from the worst of the radiation was set to fully deteriorate at midnight the next day.

We wondered if, like a mad trick of Satan, the Argo was indeed too late, and would simply watch as we all succumbed to the sickness that had murdered so many others. But a few minutes after its arrival, the miraculous Cosmo DNA restored a large patch of land above Sub-Kyoto, the city where I was stationed throughout the entirety of the Earth-Gamilon war. With little to no time to spare, the ship blasted off again, hoping to find any city still alive. We had not known how long the Argo had been on Earth, all communications had been stopped a month before to conserve power and, after all, there was no point in communicating our suffering to the rest of the world. For all intents and purposes, the rest of the world was dead to us.

But as we moved, mob-like, up the elevator shafts leading to the surface, a wave of expectancy swept through the entirety of our town's surviving members. Hope, elusive as it was, had returned to the beaten and defeated citizens like a brutal tyrant, subjugating us to a wave of empathy for one another's anguish, despair, and relief. We had survived the war. We were the ones left to take back the earth. We were-. And then our thoughts stopped. For in front of us lay a single ray of sun, filtering through the dust into the closed elevator doors. As the rusted portal slid open, we filed one by one into the airlock, and collectively stepped out into our new world.

Most never came back.