Tu'teggacha was blessed with a dark gift of great and terrible power: he could worm his way into the minds of his sentient prey. With knobby fingers and slick, oily tentacles he could pick through their memories, dredging up the worst moments of their lives to torment them and break their will. With this gift he had created the first slave-soldiers of the Brotherhood, ripping out compassion and decency and love from his captives like clumps of bloodied hair. In their place he had left a burning hatred of the cruel, callous galaxy... and faith,
unshakeable faith, that the dark gods of the Maw - and they alone - could change it.
That was the power of
Memory Walk, which some called Torture by Chagrin.
Though he stood among the greatest masters of this technique in all the wide galaxy, and had taught it to all his lesser overseers so that they could break countless more slave-soldiers to the will of the Maw, the Ebruchi had a disadvantage: Memory Walk was his
only gift. Not so with the hated Jedi. They had, it seemed, an answer to
everything through application of the Force. In their hands it was both weapon and shield, healer and interrogator, personal guide and battlefield coordinator. It let them catch lightsabers in their hands, negate poison gas, throw entire squads of foes around like children's toys...
... and survive heat that would melt lead, then use it against their foes.
Tu'teggacha knew by now that there was no stopping Jedi. To him they might as well be
gods, angry gods who could annihilate in minutes what had taken him
years to build. But in almost every culture's tale of the gods, there was a devil - adversary, trickster, tempter of the righteous. And the devil, though he could not match the power of the gods, always managed to slip away. In his preparations for the inevitable arrival of these beings of blazing wrath, the Taskmaster had not even
tried to find ways to
halt them. He had instead readied the tricks and traps that might just buy him enough time to escape with his vile creations.
So it came as no surprise to the Ebruchi when the Jedi he'd spotted dropped out of the vents totally unharmed, without so much as a singe on their robes... nor when they used the energy he'd tried to kill them with to incinerate a swarm of his misbegotten spawn. They were closing in faster than he'd like, but he still had a few tricks up his sleeve. One, of course, was a classic deception, pulled from those legends of gods and demons. Self-righteous, all-powerful gods tended to underestimate their foes. They looked at a barbarian horde like the Brotherhood and assumed them to be stupid, drooling, illiterate monsters.
Tu'teggacha and his minions weren't stupid. They knew how to spell Laboratory.
But the haughty Jedi could easily assume otherwise.
As Starlin cut through the door labeled "Labratory", the trap was sprung. The door gave way, falling from its saber-severed hinges... and a
swarm of hideous
Skitterwings scuttle-glided out. The horrid little predators, some unholy fusion of arachnid and bat, chittered madly as they scented meat. Their scent glands sprayed out, marking warm-blooded prey, and they pounced. The huge mandibles on either side of their ringed mouths opened wide, attempting to lock around the limbs of the Jedi with enough force to crack ceramite armor. If any managed to latch on and bite, their nausea-inducing venom would go to work.
Perhaps the Force would warn the Jedi of the approaching threat in time...
... or perhaps the Dark Side clouded everything down here.
Two doors down, in the
actual (unlabeled) laboratory, luck or fate had allowed one Jedi to slip past all of the Taskmaster's delaying tactics. Tu'teggacha gawked at the intruder, dumbfounded and enraged as the youth leveled a blazing blue lightsaber at him. Had the accursed Force somehow guided him here, another of the Jedi's countless gifts, or had it just been bad timing in closing the security doors that had trapped the lone apprentice in
this part of the complex?
Stay right there, the Jedi commanded, and the Ebruchi scoffed - a sound like a felinx hocking up a hairball, only
wetter. He had no intention of submitting.
Fortunately, his guards were not far. The
Pontifical Palatini were seldom used by the Brotherhood any longer, not with the ranks of the New Sith Order swelling, but Tu'teggacha trusted them far more than any of the Sith; there were only twelve of them in the entire galaxy, personally trained in the Jedi arts by the Dark Voice himself, and both chemical addiction and fanatical faith ensured that they would never betray the high priests of the Maw - or the Taskmaster they so honored. They had saved his life from an NIO assassination attempt in the tunnels beneath Goshen War Camp on Lao-mon. He trusted them to protect him again.
Against the NIO, the Palatini had wielded deadly
vibro-voulge polearms to keep their foes at bay... but this foe was a Jedi, with more on the way, so they faced their foe with weapons equal to his own. Three crimson lightsabers snap-hissed to life in the darkness, casting a bloody glow over the greenish-black machinery of the lab. With one well-aimed swing the first of the Palatine Guard forced Silas back, away from the Taskmaster. Then the three of them fanned out around him, forming a triangle - one in front of him, the other two slightly behind him, and at his flanks. He could not turn to see all three of them at once.
"So very young," Tu'teggacha drawled, ignoring Silas's bold claims.
"As ever, the Jedi send children to fight their battles." He was confident that the three Palatini could easily take this young whelp, who had not yet grown into his full godlike power... but if he delayed too much, the
other Jedi would arrive, and then the Brotherhood would be outmatched again.
"You're only a little older than the Chiss children who provided the genetic material for my Ebruchized. Imagine what I could create with a sample from you." He inclined his bulbous head toward Silas, even as he began backing away.
"Kill him, and bring me a sample of his blood."
Tu'teggacha scuttled toward the small escape hatch at the back of his lab. It was a rounded door set into the wall, small enough that only a hunched and rubbery creature like him could easily worm his way inside - an adult human would never be able to follow. The Palatini, inclining their crimson helmets in a unified nod that acknowledged his order, closed in. They had trained and fought together for
years, and moved as one. The one in front of Silas came in with a quick horizontal slash, aimed to bisect the padawan at the hips. The other two closed in from the sides, one guarding high, the other low, to intercept any dodge.
Silas would have to think quickly if he wanted to survive.
Michael Sardun
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Ishida Ashina
