Felt more like writing star wars today so I shifted the schedule around a bit, please no lynch xD
The Acolyte
The automated personal speeder lifted off the moment I stepped onto the metal platform overlooking the Imperial outpost in the lower valley, blasting me with even more hot air in the process.
I glared at the ascending droid driven vehicle and clicked my tongue. ‘The person who decided to make those damned things open to the elements needs to die.’
Tugging my loose hood down I descended the lift and entered the forward outpost, passing by the multiple large plasteel cages containing creatures from the common tuk’ata and shyrack to things I couldn’t even begin to identify.
And knowing what I knew about Sith alchemy, no one not versed in the art could either.
Tempted as I was to simply go about my business I knew there was opportunity here, and so I approached a large and well maintained metal open air section of the base, immediately zeroing in on a rotund man looming over a massive tuk’ata specimen, digging into its guts while humming an unfamiliar tune.
I’d almost laugh at just how wide he was if not for the unmistakable aura of power surrounding him, and just as I acknowledged it, so too did it acknowledge me.
“Approach, Acolyte.” The Lord of the Sith ordered.
“My Lord.” I stopped a few steps behind him and bowed.
He did not look away from his beast. “A mighty specimen, isn’t it? It took three whole squads of Imperial regulars to bring it down.”
“An ambush?” I asked after a beat.
“Perceptive.” He voiced approvingly. “The tuk’ata are cunning beasts, drenched in the Dark Side. No challenge to a true Sith, but there are few creatures that are.”
“Impressive.”
He chuckled and rubbed his hands “Yes. The Force holds many secrets. Secrets I will uncover.”
He cleaned off his hands and turned to face me, revealing a face covered in black veins spreading from around his eyes. He looked at me for a moment and I felt his gaze deepen in the Force before he spoke. “You are here for your trial, yes?”
“I am, my lord.”
“Good.” He nodded. “I need an errand ran deeper in the valley, and you have the look of someone who won’t die to the first maddened failure lost within.” Seeing me waiting attentively he went on. “There is a mutant tuk’ata prowling one of the lesser tombs, you will fetch me its brain. Do this and you will be rewarded.”
Multiple questions sprang up in my mind despite already knowing what he wanted. Like why not go himself? Or why not send his Apprentice?
But the one in greatest need of answering was this: “Pardon me, my lord. But how exactly am I to extract it? Or transport it back here for that matter?”
I really should not have expected a Sith to be reasonable.
He merely smirked. “The brain should be quite resilient. I am sure you will figure it out.” He typed something out on this datapad and I felt my own vibrating with a notification.
My scowl only seemed to amuse him. “Well?”
“I will do as you command.” I inclined my head, doing my best not to sound defeated.
“Excellent.” He says and turns back to his work, not caring one bit for the lack of courtesy and longer paying me any attention in general.
Accepting my fate, I refilled my water canteen and went to leave, only to be accosted by a young woman, clearly an Apprentice judging by her presence in the Force, and the lightsaber on her hip.
“You, Acolyte.” She called me over as I reached the checkpoint. “You just spoke to Lord Renning, correct?”
I looked at her and frowned. “Yes?”
“I’m Malora. His Apprentice.” She introduced herself, sounding non too pleased at the fact. “And you are the newest fool he sent to chase his mythical beast.”
‘It’s almost as if she listened in on our conversation. Her and half the camp.’ I thought sarcastically. “Yes. What of it?”
Her eyes narrowed, clear with frustration. “I’ve spent months doing nothing in this Force damned bantha hole while he chases his obsession with rabid beasts. If you survive his suicide mission, bring me the brain and I’ll make it worth your while.” Seeing my skeptical look she added: “Credits, far less nebulous than whatever my Master offered.”
Thinking about it briefly I answered simply and non-committaly. “I will keep your offer in mind, Apprentice.” And walked by her without waiting for a response.
The Sargeant in charge of the checkpoint took my datapad ID for corpse identification purposes before looking back up and giving me another once over.
A moment later, as I stepped out I heard my datapad beep and quickly flicked it up to find a message from the man detailing some of the dangers I was most likely to face.
‘Would you look at that, treating soldiers like people actually works.’ I smirked to myself and in a few steps I was walking the wilds of Korriban.
I kept my distance from the roaming beasts as best as I could, and only had to blast one tuk’ata lizard hound with lightning on my way down to the lower tomb area, despite the constant growling and howling both near and far I could make out with each step.
The creatures had strong instincts, and they knew to keep their distance in most cases, so the real challenge wasn’t killing my way to my destinations but not baking in my own robes on the way there.
Thankfully, the rebreather I bought had a minor heat filtration function, so I was mostly only a bit cooked from the outside while my insides were saved from turning crispy.
An hour into my trek, just as I saw the first signs of the greater complex that made up the Tomb of Marka Ragnos, the wind around me had started picking up considerably.
Feeling it in my bones that a sandstorm was coming, I prepared to rush for the entrance as quickly as my feet and the Force could carry me, but just then I felt a premonition, and immediately dropped down just in time to feel the heat of a blaster bolt whizzing past where my head was only a moment ago, followed immediately by the loud report of the weapon catching up.
Twisting on my feet I quickly threw myself aside with a Force enhanced leap, giving me just enough time to count a large squad of troopers decked out in desert gear rushing at me with desperate rasping battle cries on their lips.
And leading them with two worn vibroswords in hand was a fellow Acolyte, and the only one with his face revealed.
And that face told me everything I needed to know about these people.
There was no will behind those yellow eyes, only hunger, and rage.
The Acolyte raised his swords upwards and roared in ancient Sith: “Take his water, and his blood!” And leapt after me with greater velocity than my own.
But the fool did not consider that his move would leave me grounded, while he was not.
His main hand sword exploded in his grip as he was blasted back in a burst of lightning and I was already moving again, twirling my vibrostaff as best I could to ward off the mindbroken troopers’ haphazard blaster fire.
But even in their sorry state, these were still trained combatants, and I was just barely managing not to get shot, and I could still feel the Acolyte’s presence through the rising sandstorm.
So I changed my strategy, leaping sideways away from their fire, and palming one of my thermal detonators.
‘The instruction holo said it blows up in three seconds.’ I thought rapidly. ‘Let’s hope they didn’t sell me a dud.’ I kept forcing my legs to move far faster than they had any right doing as I counted down, before letting the Force take over and tossing the beeping device towards the clumped squad and throwing myself into the sand.
The next half a second was filled with explosions, screams, and dying echoes in the Force.
Immediately, I was already moving again, scrambling to my feet and rushing the confused soldiers, bisecting two of the least injured with a Force empowered twirling slash of my staff and moving in to finish the rest.
My staff went up on sheer muscle memory as the Acolyte announced his presence with another hateful roar, my knees nearly buckling under the powerful two handed overhead strike, and he wasn’t about to stop there.
He kept battering at my desperate defense with enough force to shake my bones, but he was also predictable, so with a roar of effort of my own, I pushed against his next attack, deflecting his blade up just long enough to point my off hand at him and summon my lightning.
Only to feel myself get flung away like a leaf in the wind as the mindless Acolyte blasted both me and his remaining men with a desperate force push.
If not for the tumble that followed I would have probably mused about how freeing the feeling of free flight was, instead I twisted in the air just as Overseer Kara taught me, and fell on my feet, stepping aside immediately just in time for a far less fortunate soldier to fly by me and smash into the rock behind me with a bone crushing crack.
The mad Acolyte wasn’t just standing around and waiting while I reoriented myself though, and in the next instant I was once again defending against a flurry of berserk blows.
Unlike me however, he wore no rebreather, and we were in the middle of what was by now turning into a rather powerful sandstorm.
Each blow grew weaker than the last, and as he went in for another battering overhead, I parried it with the top of my staff, moved it aside, and twisted myself rapidly, disemboweling him with the bottom blade.
The man choked, and for the briefest moment I saw a hint of reason return to his eyes, before all life left them and I felt his death in the Force.
I found myself oddly stunned by the intensity of it. I’d felt people die before, numerous times in fact, but this one felt heavier for some reason…
It was an odd sort of morbid peace that I felt.
But I was not given too much time to ruminate this as I just barely managed to catch another premonition, and move aside, feeling a flash of agony as a blaster bolt clipped the top of my left shoulder and immediately zeroing in on the source, finding it to be the broken body of a trooper just barely holding his weapon up.
With a snarl of pain and anger, I ended his suffering in a stream of lightning.
I wanted to sag in relief as I felt he was the last of the sentients to die, but the closing growls of the beasts attracted by carrion made me move again.
Visibility was pretty much zero by now, but I did not need eyes to know where I was going. The beacon of Darkness to my west made sure of that.
‘No wonder they went insane.’ I thought as I focused on the tomb’s subtle and constant whispers.
As I strode to the entrance I took out one of my kolto injectors and jabbed it into my shoulder, depressing the device and feeling the cool liquid in my veins, I let out a pained hiss at the jarring feeling.
Which proved to be a mistake as I felt multiple bestial heads turn in my direction in the same instant.
I stopped in my tracks, feeling dread pool in my stomach as the tuk’ata began circling me, just barely out of sight in the flowing sands.
There was no way I could fight the dozen or so beasts as I was. Tired and wounded. Not without losing a few limbs at least.
And so I closed my eyes and remembered my lessons, forcing my fear inwards, focusing on the fight or flight instinct my hindbrain was trembling with, and willed myself to be hidden.
The wind served to hide my scent, and the lower sounds they could pick up without it, but the tuk’ata were force sensitives themselves, and could still feel the presence of sentients.
I could hear my heart hammering in my ears as the closest specimen came so close I could make out its outline, before something clicked, and I felt myself be covered in a whispering blanket of Darkness.
The beast stopped, sniffed the air, and turned around to seek other prey.
Not relaxing for a moment I kept moving, staying focused on the rudimentary technique even as I once again began moving towards the tomb. It took nearly ten minutes of feeling the beasts rip into the fresh corpses I made before they got their fill and left.
By the time I’d reached Marka Ragnos’ tomb, the storm had grown so powerful I could barely walk through it at all, and as I passed some invisible barrier stopping the sands from overflowing the open entrance, I very nearly kissed the stone flooring in relief.
Except I wasn’t suicidal so I kept myself alert, immediately scanning both the area both with my liberated sight and the Force and finding the entrance… eerily still.
This time I did slump on my ass, removing my rebreather and taking a few quick gulps of water while trying and failing to wipe the sweat and sand from my forehead.
“Can’t relax now, Kayd.” I muttered after a moment and forced myself to keep moving. “You stop; you die.”
Giving myself a moment to refocus, I drew the shroud of force back around me, reordering it and feeding it more power as I descended into the tomb. The first chamber of which was covered in the bones of failed acolytes and their retinues, and most importantly the many, many remains of the tomb’s guardian shyracks.
‘So the doomed expedition did do something after all…’ I concluded before shrugging. ‘Well, their loss is my gain.’
Luckily for my chances of survival, my goal was not located in the main tomb proper, but in a side chamber that housed the holocron, so I simply decided to take the win and slunk in as quickly but carefully as possible, avoiding the few beasts still roaming these sections of the halls.
My target chamber was relatively tiny, dominated by the small pyramid holding up the arcane mechanism I was meant to decipher. There was a platform already set up around the device, and as I ascended, I could see numerous traces of the previous attempts to open it.
Knowing what I know, I could only laugh dryly at the sheer absurdity that awaited as I placed my staff against a wall and raised both hands, unravelling my cloak and drawing as much of the Dark Side as I could.
The stream of lightning lit up the chamber, and just as I knew it would the whole construction shook, and the device opened, revealing the crimson holocron hovering on top of it.
“No one ever thought to just-“ I waved my hand and snapped my fingers. “Zap? Ridiculous.” I snorted and picked the artifact up.
It was a damn shame it would be taken from me the moment I stepped back into the Academy, but I could see no real way of keeping it mine that didn’t inevitably end up with my insides getting violently turned into outsides.
Leaving such thoughts for a more appropriate time, I blasted the few shyracks unlucky enough to be drawn by the noise and sped my way back to the entrance, finding the sandstorm still raging on outside.
“Well. I’ve got nothing but time for now.” I thought aloud, eyeing the holocron. “It wouldn’t hurt to try, would it?”
I sat down cross legged, and began meditating while focusing on the arcane lockbox. I had no idea how much time passed as I probed the tightly woven force presence within… until I felt it brushing against me in return.
Startled back into reality, I felt the mental probe intensifying until it became so painful I almost let it in on instinct.
Instead I focused and glared at the damn overglorified USB, daring it to try that bantha shit again.
This seemed to satisfy whatever requirement was imprinted upon it, and in the next instant the presence practically exploded, nearly knocking me out as my mind was assaulted with a series of images and impressions, all of them focusing on one singular concept: the taking and use of lifeforce.
I barely held onto consciousness as I felt the Dark Side thrill at the possible uses of such a power and forced myself to stand up while pocketing the death box and making sure not to poke it again.
‘Once was more than enough.’ I shook my headache away with mixed results and blinked myself fully awake.
Which is how I found myself staring directly into the far too many eyes of a buzzing shyrack juvenile, simply floating in front of me as if hypnotized.
Startled by this… unfortunate development, I instinctively tugged at the force, willing to rid me of the pest that somehow managed to sneak up on me.
I expected the usual blast of force to follow but my mind was still half focused on the mental hammer that the holocron had bludgeoned me with, and my eyes widened as I saw the shyrack spasm, and then wither and crumble in front of my eyes.
I felt myself jolt upwards as I felt the energies ripped out from the beast enter my body and suddenly I felt just as awake and focused as I was during my descent.
Blinking slowly, I looked down at the hand I’d pointed at the creature and grinned.
Oh, I could work with this.
Death field and death field adjacent products go brrrrr.