Chapter 47: Fargo
The smell of scorched floor mats always did a wonderful job of clearing the sinuses.
Ahsoka rotated her shoulder, tracking the bright blue flash of Maris’s lightsaber as it clashed against the pitch-black, crackling edge of the Darksaber. Ben was holding his ground with that annoying, immovable Form III posture he’d perfected, but Ahsoka wasn’t about to let a perfectly good sparring match distract everyone from her absolute triumph.
“And then, I swear to the Force, he was all like, ‘Oh, please, spare me!’” Ahsoka ducked beneath a stray ricochet of sparks, gesturing wildly with her own unlit hilt. “And you know, because I’m a Jedi and all, I did. But I totally could have crushed him like a tin can if I wanted to. Just a little push, right in the lung-breezer.”
Maris disengaged with a sharp hiss of her blade, her pale Zabrak features twisting into a snarky, dark-lipped grin. “You left out the part where he coughed a pint of black oil onto your boots, Skyguy’s padawan. Very majestic. Very Jedi.”
“Details!” Ahsoka scoffed, crossing her arms and leaning back against a structural pillar. Honestly, they were just jealous. She had single-handedly sent General Grievous running for his life at Skytop Station using Ben’s ridiculous cheat-and-compress methodology, and she was going to milk the bragging rights until the next planetary siege. “The point is, the cyborg is a fraud. Next time I see him, I’m bringing a giant magnet.”
Ben deactivated the Darksaber, the weapon vanishing into his robes with a sleek, metallic click. “If you bring a magnet, make sure it’s a big one. Otherwise, he’ll just slip away from you again.” He wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead, looking entirely too smug for someone whose secret alter-ego was currently running a clandestine Sith Empire across half the Outer Rim.
“Hey, he got away from you first.” Ahsoka pointed out.
“He had a hostage!” Ben defended himself. “What’s your excuse?”
“Um… I don’t know, the station was bowing up?” She snarked back, but neither of them could resist the grins that were tugging their way onto their faces.
It was a miracle they were all even standing here in the Temple, considering the sheer velocity at which the galaxy was tearing itself apart. The whole one-year armistice thing had just been a countdown timer, and now that the Clone Wars were officially in full swing, finding five quiet minutes to just bicker over sparring styles felt like a luxury.
Ever since Mandalore legalized clone citizenship and Dooku lost his mind—and Anakin lost a hand—everything had been operating at a frantic, breathless pace. So, a moment of tranquility? Went a very long way.
The heavy blast doors to the training sala slid open with a synchronized hiss, cutting their post-match analysis short.
Ahsoka’s montrals twitched.
The tiny, green, hunched figure shuffling into the room wasn’t moving with his usual measured, grandmasterly grace. Grand Master Yoda looked like he had been dragged through a garbage compactor on Nar Shaddaa and then force-fed a crate of sour meilooruns. His ears were drooping at a tragic, unprecedented forty-five-degree angle, and his gnarled hands were white-knuckled over his gimer stick.
Maris subtly shifted her weight, her blue blade disappearing as she slid closer to Ben. “Uh oh,” she muttered under her breath, her inner darkness practically radiating a protective shield of pure apathy. “Look at the ears. Someone’s in trouble, and for once, I don’t think it’s us.”
Ahsoka felt a cold spike of dread in her chest.
She instantly began calculating every single rule she’d broken in the last forty-eight hours. Had Skyguy complained about the modified coolant lines in the Twilight? Had the Council figured out that the creepy “protocol droid” Maris brought back from Tatooine was currently sizing up Jedi Knights?
“Padawan Kryze,” Yoda croaked, his voice sounding hollow, like a man who had stared into the cosmic void and found it completely devoid of peace. “A word, we must have. Urgent, it is.”
Ben offered a perfectly disciplined, respectful bow, though Ahsoka caught the slight, uneasy narrowing of his eyes. “Of course, Master. Is there a disruption in the Force?”
“A disruption, yes. A testing of my sanity, there is,” Yoda groaned, leaning heavily on his cane as he stared up at his student. “Inside the Temple walls, Representative Binks has been. For three days. To Rodia, a diplomatic escort he requires. To Senator Farr.”
Ahsoka suppressed a sudden, violent urge to gasp.
Jar Jar Binks.
The walking, talking, galactic disaster area. The Gungan was currently residing in the Senate district, but the mere fact that he had crossed the threshold into the Jedi Temple was enough to violate a millennium of spiritual tranquility.
“To the archives, he went,” Yoda continued, his voice trembling with a very un-Jedi-like undercurrent of deep, suppressed rage. “Knocked over the bust of Master Kael, he did. Tied his tongue to a structural plasma conduit, he managed. Tested, my nine hundred years of zen have been. To the very brink.”
Ben blinked, his face completely blank as he tried to process the mental image of the Grand Master of the Jedi Order being psychologically broken by a Gungan. “I... see, Master. Surely the Temple Guard can handle the security detail?”
“Strong in the Force, the Guard is, but survive this, they cannot,” Yoda murmured, closing his eyes as if fighting off a localized migraine. “Considered trying Kessel spice, I did. Truly. To numb the headache, just a little. But then, remembered I did... a Padawan, I have.”
Ahsoka bit the inside of her cheek so hard she tasted copper. Yoda was actively weaponizing his own apprentice as a meat shield. It was brilliant. It was cruel. It was the most relatable thing she had ever seen the Grand Master do.
Maris let out a slow, silent exhale, her shoulders visibly dropping as she realized the green menace wasn’t looking at her.
Thank the stars, Ahsoka thought, sending a brief, fervent prayer to the Force that Yoda didn’t look to his left and notice the convenient padawans also completely available for a suicide mission.
Of course, if Yoda did decide this mission needed a multi-padawan task force, she was going to jump out a window.
“Go alone, you will,” Yoda decreed, tapping his cane sharply against the floor as if sealing a death warrant. “Protect the Representative. Protect the peace. Protect my remaining sanity. A transport is waiting in Hangar Four. May the Force be with you, Padawan. Need it, you will.”
Without waiting for a reply, the ancient Jedi turned on his heel and shuffled back out the door, his posture noticeably lighter now that he had successfully passed the curse of the Binks onto the next generation.
The silence left in the wake of the Grand Master’s departure was thick enough to cut with a lightsaber. Ben stood perfectly still, staring at the empty doorway with the look of a man who had just realized his entire life’s trajectory had been derailed by a creature that couldn’t even walk down a hallway without causing a localized natural disaster.
“Well,” Maris said, breaking the silence with a slow, appreciative whistle. She stepped up beside Ben, patting him on the shoulder with a look of profound, dark amusement. “Look on the bright side. Maybe he’ll die.”
Ahsoka winced, though she couldn’t entirely disagree with the sentiment. “Maris, shut up, that’s terrible. But seriously, Ben... a week in a enclosed hyperdrive vacuum with Jar Jar? I’d rather face Grievous with my hands tied behind my back.”
“He is a monster,” Ben muttered, his voice dropping into that low, dangerous register he usually reserved for planning the overthrow of corporate cartels. “The sheer probability of his survival defies every known law of physics and logistics. Not to mention he gave Palpatine the emergency powers. He is the architect of the entire structural decay of the Republic.”
Ahsoka frowned, her montrals twitching at the bizarrely specific political theory. Ben always talked about the Senate like he was certain they were responsible for the galaxy’s greatest evils… he wasn’t entirely wrong but still.
“You don’t think that’s a slight exaggeration?” Ahsoka crossed her arms, raising a brow? “I mean, sure, it’s a little unorthodox to serve as Supreme Chancellor for this long, but these are pretty extreme circumstances. And besides, it’s not like Chancellor Palpatine has done anything wrong yet.”
“You’re jinxing it.”
“You’re overthinking it.” She rolled her eyes. “Look, what’s done is done. It’s not like you can go back in time and stop Jar Jar from doing it, now can you?”
“Missed opportunity,” Ben whispered, a dark, calculating glint appearing in his eyes that made Ahsoka incredibly glad she was his friend and not his target. “But there will always be more. Maris is right, you know. Accidents happen on diplomatic missions. Structural failures. Tragic, unavoidable mechanical mishaps. It’s a dangerous galaxy out there.”
“If you need to borrow an HK unit to make it look like a tragic hunting accident, you know my frequency,” Maris offered cheerfully, leaning against the pillar with a smirk. “I’m sure 47 would love the target practice. He’s been complaining about the lack of organic liquidation lately.”
“No droids,” Ben said, pulling his outer robes tight around his chest and letting out a long, long-suffering sigh. “Padmé is going to be on that transport too. If I deploy an assassin droid, she’ll notice within five seconds. Too much experience. I’ll have to handle this with precision.”
Ahsoka watched him walk toward the door, feeling a genuine wave of empathy for her friend. He was going into the breach, a lone warrior marching into the most irritating battle of the Clone Wars. “Good luck, Ben,” she called out as the blast doors began to close. “Try not to let him knock the Darksaber down a garbage chute!”
The doors clicked shut, leaving Ahsoka and Maris alone on the scorched mats. Ahsoka looked at her friend, a sudden, lingering paranoia washing over her. “You don’t think Yoda’s going to remember he has other padawans if Ben fails, right?”
Maris grabbed her training hilt, her eyes flashing with a wicked, yellow light. “If he comes back for us, Tano, we’re hijacking a dreadnought and heading straight for the Outer Rim.”
“That can’t be your answer to everything.”
“It can for as long as it works!”
…
The sleek, silver hull of the Naboo diplomatic cruiser glided through the swirling, hypnotic blue of hyperspace, a stark contrast to the absolute circus taking place inside my head.
I leaned against the chrome countertop in the galley, slowly rubbing my temples as I stared at a wall console. I was actively running the numbers. In an enclosed environment like a starship, there were approximately forty-seven different ways to stage a fatal, tragic mishap that the Jedi Council would simply chalk up to the living Force clearing out a cosmic error.
A localized atmospheric vent failure. A sudden, unexplained power surge in the gravity generator. Maybe just a firm, telekinetic nudge right as the Gungan walked past an unshielded plasma manifold.
The galaxy wouldn't just thank me; future generations of nerds would write epics in my honor.
The man was a walking, talking crime against cinema. He was the reason I had to suffer through midichlorian explanations and logic-defying dialogue about sand. More importantly, he was the idiot who handed Palpatine the keys to the galactic kingdom on a silver platter.
Every second he drew breath was an insult to the structural integrity of the timeline. If I could use my meta-knowledge to erase Darth Vader and save the Jedi Order, I could damn well eliminate a Gungan for the crime of existing near a Senate pod. It wasn't murder; it was aggressive retro-active editing.
“You look like you’re contemplating the violent restructuring of the banking clans, Ben.”
Senator Padmé Amidala stepped into the galley, her elaborate Naboo travel gowns rustling softly against the deckplates. Her warm, expressive eyes carried a heavy weight of exhaustion, but she still managed a gentle, almost maternal smile as she poured herself a cup of tea.
I straightened my posture, letting my hands fall back into the deep sleeves of my Jedi robes, shifting instantly into my perfectly practiced good little Padawan face. “Just reviewing the flight logistics, Senator. It’s a delicate hyperspace lane to Rodia.”
“Mm. Satine warned me about your diplomatic face,” Padmé said, fixing me with a knowing, sharp look over the rim of her cup.
So, you have betrayed me, mother.
As I always knew you would.
Padmé leaned against the counter, her tone dropping into something far more personal. “And Obi-Wan sent me a very long, very stressed transmission before we left Coruscant. He asked me to keep an eye on you. He mentioned that your performance against General Grievous on the Malevolence was… concerningly cruel.”
I kept my expression perfectly neutral, though internally I was rolling my eyes.
Of course Obi-Wan had checked in.
My biological father’s capacity for worry was practically a galactic superpower, even if he still thought he was just my overly concerned 'uncle' or whatever cover story we were running this week. “I merely utilized the environment to neutralize a threat to the Duchess, Senator. Cruel is a matter of perspective.”
Learned that one from the greatest pirate to ever exist.
Suck it, Hondo.
“He said you cut off more than two limbs,” Padmé countered smoothly, though there was a flicker of amusement in her voice. “Ben, I know things have changed. With Mandalore’s new standing, the clones, and the war… everyone is on edge. But you cannot solve every political crisis with a lightsaber. Or a heavy object. We are going to Rodia to help an old friend of my family. Uncle Ono is desperate, and we need to handle this with traditional Republic idealism. Peace, diplomacy, and patience.”
I bit my tongue to keep from pointing out that traditional Republic idealism was currently funding a massive corporate slave army, but I nodded anyway. She was Anakin's secret girlfriend and my mom's best friend; pissing her off wasn't on my to-do list.
“Mesa found the bouncy-bouncy ball!”
The loud, wet, booming echo of Jar Jar Binks’s voice shattered the quiet atmosphere of the galley before I could even formulate a polite, non-committal rebuttal. The Gungan came barreling around the corner, his long ears flapping wildly as he scrambled after a glowing, stray droid power-cell that was skittering across the floor.
My eyes narrowed.
This is it.
I reached out with a fraction of my mind, tapping into the cold, calculated precision I’d honed under the Holocron of the Emperor’s Wrath. No lightsabers. No drama. Just a subtle, invisible grip wrapping around the primary environmental seal of Jar Jar’s private cabin just across the hall. I bypassed the local safety overrides with a simple telekinetic twist of the internal wiring.
The door would lock from the outside, a silent, clean vacuum decompression would occur, and the galaxy would be cleansed of the worst part of 1999.
“Whoa, whoa! Big maxi-big trouble!” Jar Jar screeched.
Instead of chasing the cell into the cabin like a normal sentient being, the Gungan tripped over his own oversized webbed feet, lunging forward blindly. His flailing hand caught a decorative, heavy silver senatorial spoon from the galley table, and with a loud, echoing clack, the spoon was forcefully jammed directly into the manual emergency override slot of the galley’s main hydraulic blast door.
A sharp, metallic chime echoed through the ship's PA system.
My jaw tightened.
On the galley wall, the primary maintenance console suddenly flared from an orange warning light to a flawless, efficient green. The ship’s automated computer chimed: “Structural alignment corrected. Internal seal efficiency increased by twelve percent. Thank you, maintenance crew.”
Jar Jar blinked, hanging upside down from a cabinet door handle, the spoon still wedged tightly in the wall. “Ooh! Mesa fix it?”
Padmé stared at the console, her eyes wide with genuine surprise as she set her tea down. “Remarkable. The captain was complaining about a persistent micro-vibration in the lower atmospheric seals since we left the planet. Jar Jar, you just fixed a structural misalignment that the engineering droids couldn't locate.”
“Mesa just open-clapping the snack box!” Jar Jar beamed, detangling himself from the cabinets and giving a proud, toothy grin.
I stood entirely frozen, staring at the silver spoon sticking out of the high-voltage override panel. The sheer, unadulterated probability of it was maddening. The Gungan had not only completely avoided walking into my beautifully prepared kill-zone, but he had somehow accidentally solved a localized engineering crisis with tableware, thoroughly cementing his status as a useful idiot in Padmé’s eyes.
The dark side of the Force was supposed to be a pathway to many abilities, but apparently, it was entirely useless against weaponized, cosmic stupidity.
“You see, Ben?” Padmé smiled, giving my armored shoulder a gentle tap as she walked past me to help Jar Jar retrieve his power-cell. “The universe works in mysterious ways. There is value in every single member of this Republic. You just have to have faith.”
I stared at the spoon for three long seconds, my fingers twitching toward the hidden hilt of the Darksaber beneath my robes. I fought down a massive micro-aneurysm, took a slow, deep breath of the newly optimized galley air, and let out a sigh that felt like it aged me ten years.
I was going to need a much better plan.
…
The humid, heavy atmosphere of the Rodian Glass Pavilion was supposed to be a triumph of architectural climate control, but it was doing absolutely nothing to stop the steady stream of sweat trickling down Onaconda Farr's collar.
He smoothed the front of his senatorial robes with trembling, green hands, his large, multifaceted eyes darting toward the transparent dome overhead. Just beyond the reinforced glass, the dark, suffocating waters of the Rodian ocean pressed in from all sides. It was beautiful, usually.
Today, it felt like a tomb. In just a few minutes, the silver Naboo cruiser would touch down on the landing platform, delivering Padmé Amidala directly into his waiting hands. And then, he would deliver her to Nute Gunray.
Onaconda's stomach churned violently at the thought, a wave of profound guilt washing over him. Padmé trusted him. She called him Uncle Ono. But trust couldn't fill the empty grain silos of his homeworld. The Republic had abandoned them, leaving his people to starve under the crushing weight of wartime supply blockades, while the Separatists offered food, ships, and survival.
It was a simple, mathematically tragic equation: one Senator’s life in exchange for the salvation of an entire planet. He kept repeating that to himself, a desperate mantra to drown out the voice in his head calling him a traitor, but the knot in his gut only tightened as the automated hangar clamps hissed to life.
The silver ship settled onto the platform with a heavy, pressurized sigh.
Onaconda forced his features into a practiced mask of warm, welcoming hospitality, stepping forward as the main boarding ramp began to lower. The steam cleared, and there she was. Padmé stepped down onto the polished floor, her face bright with that tireless, naive Republic optimism that he was about to snuff out forever.
“Uncle Ono!” Padmé called out, extending her hands in a traditional gesture of peace. “It is so good to see you. I only wish the circumstances were—”
She didn't get to finish the sentence.
The air in the pavilion suddenly turned ice-cold. It wasn’t a malfunction of the atmospheric scrubbers; it was a physical, suffocating weight that dropped onto the room like a collapsing roof. Onaconda's breath hitched in his throat as a second figure stepped off the ramp, walking a pace behind Padmé.
He wore the traditional robes of a Jedi Padawan, but everything about his presence completely contradicted the rumors Onaconda had heard about the Republic’s monastic peacekeepers. The Jedi were supposed to be serene, detached, and spiritually distant. This boy was a walking thunderstorm.
He was young, practically a child, but he carried himself with the heavy, terrifying authority of a seasoned executioner. His gaze locked onto Onaconda, his eyes cold, calculating, and completely devoid of the mercy his Order preached.
Onaconda didn't know much about the arcane mysteries of the Force, but as the boy closed the distance between them, every primal survival instinct in Rodian biology began screaming to run.
The invisible aura radiating off him felt dark, heavy, and violently sharp, like a vibro-blade pressed against the back of Onaconda's neck.
“Senator Farr, please allow me to introduce you,” Padmé began, completely oblivious to the spiritual suffocation happening right beside her as she turned to her companion. “This is Padawan Kryze, he has been assigned by the Council to—”
“Senator Farr, you have five seconds to cancel the ambush.”
The boy’s voice was entirely level, completely cutting Padmé off without a shred of diplomatic decorum. Before Onaconda could even gasp, Padawan Kryze stepped directly into his personal space, towering over him as he flicked his wrist. A small, sleek holo-projector flared to life between them, casting a sharp blue glow across the Senator's terrified face.
Onaconda's heart completely stopped. The projection showed a live, real-time tactical feed of the lower maintenance bays. Hidden right beneath their feet were Nute Gunray’s Separatist battle droids, completely surrounded by a perimeter of tiny, blinking thermal signatures that looked suspiciously like heavily armed security droids he didn't recognize.
“W-where did you get those?!” He demanded.
“Four,” The boy said instead, his eyes narrowing into a gaze so predatory it made Onaconda's knees physically wobble. He didn't pull a weapon, but his hand hovered inches from his hip, where a strange, angular metal hilt caught the light. “Three.”
“Ben, what are you doing?” Padmé demanded, her voice snapping with sharp, senatorial authority as she took a step forward, her face a mix of shock and sudden alarm. “What ambush? What is the meaning of this?”
“Two,” he continued, completely ignoring her as he leaned in closer, his whisper carrying a terrifying, resonant weight that echoed directly inside Onaconda's skull. “Cancel it before I use the Force to turn this entire pavilion into an underwater aquarium. I am not a patient monk, Ono. And I don’t do hostage situations.”
The structural glass dome overhead gave a sudden, terrifying, localized groan, a tiny fracture line snapping through the reinforced material as if responding to a microscopic twitch of the boy's fingers.
The sheer, brutal reality of the situation shattered Onaconda's resolve into a million pieces.
This wasn’t a diplomatic negotiation. This wasn’t a Jedi Council representative who would respect his title or listen to his political grievances. This was a monster in a bathrobe who was going to drown them all in the dark ocean before Nute Gunray could even press a button on his transmitter. The fragile justification Onaconda had built up over the last week collapsed under the weight of pure, unadulterated terror.
“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, Padmé!”
Onaconda's knees hit the polished floor with a loud, painful smack, tears welling up in his large eyes as he completely broke down, grabbing the hem of her travel gown.
The guilt, the fear, and the sheer pressure of the boy's terrifying presence came pouring out of him in a desperate, breathless torrent. “There are droids in the lower levels! Gunray... Gunray promised us food! My people are starving, Padmé! They blocked the shipping lanes, we had nothing left! I was supposed to trade you to the Separatists for supplies! Please, you have to believe me, I didn't want to do it!”
Padmé stumbled back a step, her face draining of all color as the confession hit her like a physical blow. She looked down at him, her chest heaving with a mixture of profound betrayal and utter disbelief, before slowly turning her gaze up to the teenage Jedi.
Ben Kryze didn't look surprised at all. He casually deactivated the holo-feed, the terrifying pressure in the room vanishing as quickly as it had arrived, leaving Onaconda sobbing on the floor like a child. He looked down at the Rodian with a cold, almost bored expression, slipping his hands right back into his deep sleeves.
“Sorry, Senator.” Ben said, giving Padmé a perfectly calm, entirely unapologetic look. “Sometimes your ‘traditional Republic idealism’ needs a little… encouragement.”
…
The shrill, piercing wail of a Separatist proximity alarm ripped through the Glass Pavilion, completely shattering the brief, stunned silence that had followed Onaconda’s weeping confession.
Padmé barely had time to process the sheer weight of her oldest family friend’s betrayal before the reinforced blast doors at the far end of the plaza blasted inward. Thick, acrid smoke poured into the elegant courtyard as the synchronized, mechanical thud of heavy metal boots echoed off the crystalline walls. A massive battalion of B2 super battle droids flooded the plaza, their dual wrist-blasters already cycling to life with ominous, high-pitched whines.
Gunray, Padmé thought, her sorrow instantly hardening into cold, defensive resolve. The Viceroy was panicking. With the trap exposed prematurely, the coward was trying to salvage the operation by taking her by force anyway.
“Jar Jar, get down!” Padmé shouted, smoothly drawing the sleek Naboo blaster concealed within the deep folds of her traveling gown. If the Trade Federation wanted a war in a diplomatic sanctuary, she was more than prepared to give them a healthy dose of aggressive negotiations.
She ducked behind a decorative stone planter, leveled her weapon, and squeezed off two precise shots, melting the faceplate of the lead droid.
But as she went to aim at the next target, her breath hitched.
Ben Kryze had already bypassed the perimeter line.
He wasn’t hiding. He wasn’t seeking cover. The young Padawan was moving through the dense formation of heavy droids with a terrifying, rhythmic efficiency that made him look less like a peacekeeping monk and more like a localized natural disaster. He didn’t even draw his lightsaber.
Instead, he swept his hand in a casual, backhanded motion, and a massive structural support column snapped like a twig, flying across the hangar to crush an entire squad of battle droids against the far wall.
Padmé watched in a mixture of awe and growing horror as Ben executed a fluid, no-look spin, his left hand clenching into a tight fist. Instantly, the reinforced steel torsos of three super battle droids collapsed inward with a sickening, metallic screech, their internal wiring sparking violently before they dropped to the floor as scrap metal.
It was a brutal, overwhelming display of telekinetic power—completely devoid of the defensive, passive elegance Obi-Wan usually championed. This boy fought with the absolute certainty of a predator who had already calculated the exact expiration date of everything in the room.
Then, the chaotic skirmish took a turn for the bizarre.
“Help-a me! Help-a me! Save-a mesa!” Jar Jar shrieked, running in frantic, wild circles around the center of the plaza while blasters fired in every direction.
Through the haze of smoke, Padmé tracked a rocket-droid emerging from the rear flank. It leveled its shoulder-mounted launcher and fired a heavy, heat-seeking missile directly into the fray. The projectile zipped through the air, heading on a clear trajectory toward the far side of the pavilion.
But Padmé’s sharp eyes caught a subtle, deliberate movement. Ben, who was currently back-kicking a regular battle droid into a translation console, briefly glanced toward the projectile. He flicked his fingers in a sharp, horizontal gesture.
The missile violently altered its course in mid-air. It didn’t veer toward the incoming droids. It veered directly toward Jar Jar’s spine.
Padmé’s heart leaped into her throat.
He’s not going to make it, she thought, a cold dread freezing her muscles. The Gungan was completely oblivious, screaming at the top of his lungs as the high-explosive ordnance zoomed closer and closer to his back.
At that exact microsecond, a stray blaster bolt clipped a high shelf on a nearby fruit vendor’s stall, causing a bright purple Rodian glis-berry to tumble toward the ground. Jar Jar’s large, bulbous eyes locked onto the falling snack.
“Oooh, breakfast!” Jar Jar gasped. He lunged forward, completely tripping over a loose decorative rug on the floor, and dropped flat on his face with a spectacular, limbs-sprawled thud.
The heavy missile sailed precisely two inches over his flailing ears. It maintained its newly adjusted trajectory, blasting straight past the fallen Gungan and slamming directly into the command column of the attacking super battle droids. The resulting explosion was massive, a blinding fireball that violently obliterated the remaining Separatist forces in a single, roaring blast of heat and shrapnel.
The smoke cleared. The hangar fell completely silent, save for the crackle of burning droid components and the wet, rhythmic sound of Jar Jar happily chewing on his newly acquired berry from the floor.
Padmé lowered her blaster, her chest heaving as she stared at the total devastation.
The entire droid battalion had been neutralized in under two minutes. But as she looked from the smoking crater back to the young Jedi, her shock transformed into sharp, maternal fury. She marched over to Ben, grabbing him firmly by the upper arm and pulling him away from the sobbing Onaconda and the oblivious Gungan.
“Ben, what in the name of the Republic was that?” Padmé whispered harshly, her voice tight with absolute horror. “I watched you! You redirected that missile! You tried to kill a representative of the Senate!”
“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, Senator,” Ben said smoothly, his face an impenetrable mask of innocence as he brushed a speck of droid soot off his sleeve. “I was merely neutralizing the enemy command structure. It was a highly sophisticated, tactical trajectory shift.”
“Don’t play games with me, Ben,” Padmé hissed, crossing her arms and fixing him with a glare that had intimidated hardened war-profiteers. “It was tracking directly for his back! If he hadn’t tripped over that rug, he would be scattered across this hangar in pieces!”
“Exactly. He tripped,” Ben countered, though his jaw tightened, a sudden, deeply rooted bitterness leaking through his calm exterior. He looked over at Jar Jar, who was now trying to detangle his ears from a piece of scorched droid plating, and Ben’s eyes flared with a look of genuine, existential frustration. “Because I totally knew that missile would miss him and get the droids instead. Totally. After all, I’m a Jedi. Pre-cognition is part of the job description, Senator.”
Padmé narrowed her eyes, completely skeptical. The sheer venom in his tone was hard to miss.
“If I wanted to kill the Gungan, he’d be dead, Padmé,” Ben muttered, his voice dropping into a low, fiercely irritated whisper as he leaned in slightly. “Trust me. There is no logical, physical, or spiritual reason he would survive me trying to kill him. No sentient being is that unreasonably loved by the Force.”
“What about the Jedi?” She crossed her arms.
“No! Not even the Jedi!” Ben insisted, looking even more outraged. “In fact, I bet more than half of the Order would die before Jar Jar if he really had that much favoritism. It’s unfathomable really. Simply not possible. So the only reasonable explanation is that I wasn’t trying to kill him. Okay?!”
Padmé stared at him, her mind racing as she tried to reconcile the boy’s bizarre, personal grudge with the reality of what had just occurred. He sounded less like a rogue assassin and more like a deeply exhausted mathematician who had just been told that two plus two equaled an empty space-biscuit.
She looked around the pavilion. Onaconda was neutralized and ready for custody. The entire Separatist ambush had been entirely dismantled before they could take a single hostage or secure a diplomatic foothold. And Jar Jar was standing up, entirely unharmed, brushing dust off his vest without a single scratch on him.
It was reckless. It was terrifyingly aggressive. It violated every single rule of traditional Republic protocol she had just lectured him about in the galley. But as Padmé looked at the completely secure hangar, she had to quietly admit to herself a very frustrating, very undeniable truth.
His absurdly chaotic methods got results.
“Just... put your hands back in your sleeves, Padawan,” Padmé sighed, rubbing the bridge of her nose as she turned back toward the ship. “We still have a Viceroy to catch.”
…
“Launch the ship! Launch it now, you incompetent piece of scrap metal!”
Nute Gunray slammed his fists onto the back of the pilot droid’s command chair, his throat burning from the sheer, panicked volume of his own voice. His elaborate, heavy Neimoidian headdress precariously tilted over his brow, but he didn’t care about dignity anymore.
The entire Rodian operation had collapsed into absolute ruin in a matter of minutes. The droids were gone, Farr had broken like a brittle twig, and Amidala’s pet Jedi was currently hunting for him.
The battle droids at the console droned in their infuriating, monotone voices. “But Viceroy, the pre-flight diagnostics require another—”
“I do not care about diagnostics!” Gunray shrieked, his eyes darting frantically to the viewport of his hidden escape shuttle. The swampy, rain-slicked docks of Rodia were entirely obscured by a thick, suffocating mist, but he could swear he heard footsteps echoing through the humid air. “Override the safety clamps! If we do not leave this miserable planet instantly, the Republic will lock down the entire atmosphere!”
A sudden, sharp crack echoed through the cockpit.
Gunray’s breath hitched in his throat. He froze, his gaze locking onto the heavy, reinforced transparisteel of the main windshield. Right in the center of the viewport, a spiderweb of fracture lines rapidly expanded across the glass.
Standing right on the nose of the shuttle, completely unbothered by the whistling Rodian wind or the torrential downpour, was a lone figure. His dark grey robes whipped violently around him, but his stance was completely, terrifyingly immovable. It was the boy. The Kryze padawan.
Before Gunray could even scream, the boy casually raised a single, leather-gloved hand and clenched it into a tight fist.
The metal framework of the cockpit canopy groaned, a screeching, ear-piercing sound of tearing durasteel that vibrated directly through the floorboards. With a violent, explosive pop, the entire top section of the shuttle’s bridge was forcefully ripped outward, peeled away from the hull like the wrapper off a ration bar, and thrown carelessly into the murky swamp below.
The sudden rush of damp wind and stinging rain hit Gunray square in the face, knocking him backward into the communications array as his pilot droids were instantly pulled from their seats and hurled into the darkness by an invisible, swirling vortex.
“No! Stay back! This is an outrage!” Gunray babbled, scrambling backward on his hands and knees across the wet deck plates.
An invisible, iron grip suddenly wrapped around the collar of his elaborate robes. Before his brain could process the motion, Gunray was violently dragged out of the shattered cockpit, flying through the air to land with a heavy, painful thud on the slick durasteel grid of the swamp docks. The wind was completely knocked from his lungs. He looked up, his chest heaving in absolute terror as the teenage Jedi leaped down from the ship's nose, landing entirely soundlessly a mere two feet away.
“You cannot do this!” Gunray screeched, his voice cracking into a high-pitched whine as he tried to crawl backward, his rich silks soaking through with foul, stagnant swamp water. “The Trade Federation possesses absolute legal immunity under Galactic Treaties! I have rights! I demand to speak with a representative of the Senate! You are a Jedi, you are bound by code and protocol!”
The boy didn’t say a word. He didn’t draw a lightsaber, and he didn’t offer a single, sanctimonious lecture about justice or peace. He merely closed the distance between them with a cold, robotic deliberateness that made Gunray’s skin crawl.
The boy reached down, grabbed Gunray by the front of his soaking robes, and effortlessly hauled the Neimoidian Viceroy to his feet. Gunray flailed, trying to kick or break the hold, but the boy’s grip was like a hydraulic vice. Before Gunray could even utter another plea, the Padawan raised his free hand and slammed his palm directly onto Gunray's forehead.
…
…
…
The world instantly vanished.
Gunray didn’t just feel a physical touch; it felt as though a red-hot iron spike had been driven directly through his skull and into the deepest, most private corridors of his mind. A blinding, agonizing white light filled his vision, and an intolerable, crushing pressure squeezed his brain until he couldn't even manage to scream.
His memories, his thoughts, his secret bank accounts, and his political schemings were forcefully ripped open, pulled apart by an unseen, invasive entity that was callously digging through his psyche. It was a violation unlike anything he had ever conceived—a dark, boundless weight that made the legendary power of the Jedi look like parlor tricks.
Inside the agonizing void of his own melting consciousness, a name began to echo, repeating over and over like a rhythmic, heavy drumbeat.
Darth Sol. Darth Sol. Darth Sol.
The name didn't come with a face or a context, but it carried an overwhelming, primal terror that rewrote Gunray's absolute baseline of fear. It was an anchor dropped into his subconscious, weaving itself into his nerve endings.
Anytime his thoughts drifted toward corporate asset shifts in the Outer Rim, anytime he considered defying secret logistical demands, the name flared like a solar radiation spike, triggering an instinctual, blinding panic attack that made his lungs seize and his heart hammer against his ribs.
The name was authority. The name was absolute obedience.
Then, just as abruptly as the agonizing intrusion had begun, a cold, heavy barrier slammed down over the entire experience.
The pain dissolved into a numbing, freezing void.
The memories of the iron spike, the invasive probing, and the boy's hand on his face were systematically erased, locked away behind an impenetrable wall of mental static.
Gunray couldn’t remember the assault. He couldn’t remember what had been done to him, or the name that had just been burned into his soul. He was left with only the residue—the echoing, unexplainable phantom terror, the crippling panic, and a subterranean certainty that disobedience meant total, absolute annihilation.
…
…
…
The boy abruptly released his collar, letting Gunray collapse back onto the wet deck plates like a discarded sack of cargo.
Gunray lay flat on his stomach, gasping for air as the Rodian rain poured down over his shivering frame. His chest heaved violently, his vision swimming as a full-blown panic attack racked his body, though he had absolutely no cognitive understanding of why he was suddenly so profoundly terrified.
His limbs shook so hard he couldn't even raise his head. He was a completely broken, hyperventilating, compliant mess, staring blankly at the metal grates beneath him as the phantom shadows of a nightmare he couldn't recall danced behind his eyes.
Above him, the boy casually adjusted the heavy sleeves of his dark grey robes, turning his back on the weeping Viceroy without a second glance as the distant sounds of Republic security forces finally began to echo through the spaceport.
“P-please.” He stammered. “Don’t go. Help me.”
“Don’t worry, Viceroy.” The boy said, his back still turned to the cowering Neimoidian. “I have a good feeling we’ll meet again. Soon.”
And a Nute Gunray had a very bad feeling he was correct.
…
The neon glow of a flickering, grease-stained sign for Level 1313’s finest subterranean noodle counter did absolutely nothing to improve Maris Brood’s mood, but it was still a vast improvement over the pristine, suffocating hallways of the Jedi Temple upstairs.
Maris aggressively stabbed a pair of chopsticks into her bowl, wrapping a massive clump of synthetic algae-noodles around the wooden sticks before shoving them into her mouth. The underworld always smelled like oxidized metal, cheap coolant, and questionable meat, which was exactly how she liked it. It was grounded. Real.
It didn’t require her to pretend she was a peaceful, detached monk under Obi-Wan’s constantly stressed, hyper-vigilant supervision. Beside her, Ahsoka was quietly poking at a bowl of spicy fried rice, though her gaze kept drifting toward the third member of their little triumvirate.
Ben Kryze was currently slouched so low in his metal stool that his chin was practically resting on the sticky counter. He was staring blankly into a glowing glass of neon-blue space-soda, his eyes completely hollow, looking like a man who had stared into the cosmic gears of destiny and watched them shred his entire life’s purpose into confetti.
Maris swallowed her food, leaning her elbow on the counter as she eyed him with deep, dark amusement. “So,” she said, her tone dripping with its usual snarky, goth apathy. “Did the clumsy giant amphibian finally sleep with the fishes? Did you stage a tragic, unavoidable airlock failure over Rodia?”
Ben didn’t move. He didn’t even blink. He just let out a slow, agonizingly long breath that caused the carbonated bubbles in his soda to vibrate miserably. “He’s alive, Maris. He’s completely fine. He didn’t even get a scratch on his vest.”
Maris raised a pale eyebrow, genuinely impressed by the sheer failure of it all. “You’re telling me Darth Sol, Lord of the Sith, commander of the hidden First Order, and the guy who single-handedly pulverized General Grievous’s internal organs, couldn’t manage to accidentally liquidate a single Gungan?”
“The Force is a joke,” Ben muttered, his voice dropping into a flat, profoundly bitter monotone. “Either that, or it's actively plotting against me. I redirected a heat-seeking missile directly at his spine. A perfect, flawless trajectory. No lightsabers, no evidence. And do you know what he did?”
“Tripped over his own tongue?” Ahsoka guessed, finally looking up from her rice with a grin that showed far too much tooth.
“He dropped flat on his face to catch a falling glis-berry,” Ben whispered, a dangerous, twitching edge creeping into his voice as he slowly wrapped his fingers tighter around his soda glass. “The missile flew right over his ears and blew up the entire Separatist vanguard instead. He wiped out a division of super battle droids by being hungry.”
Maris couldn’t help it; a sharp, loud laugh escaped her dark-lipped mouth. “You’re kidding. That is textbook divine intervention. The universe clearly has a favorite, and it’s a guy who can’t walk down a flat hallway without causing a disaster.”
“It gets worse,” Ben groaned, finally pulling his head off the counter just enough to take a miserable sip of his blue drink. “Padmé’s official report to the Senate went live an hour ago. She gave a full briefing to the Chancellor’s office. She spent three entire paragraphs highly praising Jar Jar’s ‘unconventional tactical distractions’ and my ‘decisive crisis management’ in the field.”
Ahsoka instantly pulled out her datapad, her montrals twitching as she rapidly swiped through the latest Coruscant intelligence feeds. A second later, a loud, unrefined snort echoed from her side of the table. “Oh, wow. She really did. Look at this, it says here that Representative Binks’s erratic movements are a brilliant subversion of traditional military doctrine.”
“I want to go back to Korriban,” Ben said, dropping his forehead back onto the sticky metal counter with a heavy, hollow thud. “I want to put the Eradicator mask back on, command my HK droids, and pretend the Republic doesn't exist. I can't do this anymore.”
“Oh, cheer up,” Maris scoffed, reached out with her chopsticks, and casually dropped a slimy, dripping pity-noodle directly onto the top of his pristine, carefully styled hair. “At least you're back. Yoda can't weaponize you again for at least a week.”
“Actually...” Ahsoka’s voice suddenly climbed an octave, her eyes widening as a fresh notification chimed on her datapad screen. She stared at the blue text, her shoulders beginning to shake violently as she fought to keep from bursting into a full-blown fit of hysterics.
Maris leaned over, squinting at the screen. “What is it, Tano?”
“It’s a direct priority message from the Grand Master’s personal terminal,” Ahsoka wheezed, tapping the screen to display the encoded text. She cleared her throat, attempting to mimic Yoda’s distinct, ancient cadence, though she failed miserably due to her giggling. “‘Impressive, your crisis management was, Padawan Kryze. To the Force, a great asset Representative Binks is. For a week-long agricultural summit on Alderaan, an escort he requires. Selected you, the Council has. Keep my remaining sanity intact, you will.’”
Maris froze for a fraction of a second before letting out a massive, unhinged laugh that caused the local Aqualish cook behind the counter to glare at them. “Alderaan! A whole week! Surrounded by pacifists, politicians, and the ultimate galactic wrecking ball!”
Ben didn’t even move to wipe the slimy green noodle off his hair. He just lay there, perfectly still, staring at a stray smear of hot sauce on the metal surface beneath his nose.
“Hey, look on the bright side, Ben,” Ahsoka laughed, leaning over to pat him on the shoulder as he let out another long-suffering sigh. “I hear Alderaan has really beautiful mountains. Plenty of cliffside paths for a tragic, totally accidental fall.”
“The Force wouldn’t allow it,” Ben whispered into the counter, his voice sounding like a ghost that had entirely given up on the concept of reincarnation. “He’d trip, bounce off a mountain goat, and somehow accidentally discover a lost cache of ancient Republic war-bonds. I’m doomed.”
C-3PO was rubbing off on him.
Maris took another massive gulp of her drink, thoroughly enjoying the sheer, chaotic misery of her fellow Sith Lord. “Eat your noodles, Ben. You’re going to need the energy.”
Here’s hoping it transfers to willpower…