So
Mythos
could fly too, eh?
Syd should have anticipated the one with the highest rank having more than a few tricks in that armor. She frowned as he flew above the blast, watched him clearly drop the thermal detonator...and just left?! Seriously?!
Though she hated to do so, Syd could not help but compare Mythos to her old Sith self, Phyre.
Phyre would have
never made such an error.
...would she...?
Syd honestly wasn't sure: Her memories of being Darth Phyre had so many holes in them she was pretty certain many would never be recovered. But she knew Phyre would never have made such a blunder. She made sure someone was dead. This was one thing Phyre and Syd had in common.
That being said...
...as Laertia had been repeatedly demonstrating throughout the day...
Thermal Detonators due a metric fethton of damage...
Syd barely spotted it in all the flames, She barely managed to catch it with telekinesis, causing it to burst in the air.
She still caught a good amount of it. Her psychic shell warped and deformed from the shock wave. Bursting it and the suit open in some parts and flinging her backward.
The melted looking creature lay bunched up in an utterly disgusting melted state on burning rubble, greatly weakened, but feeding on the inferno around her slowly repaired her shell ruptures and she was soon looking normal again, walking through the flames.
She had learned many things so far. Mythos was cocky, didn't care if he lost a general, even a valuable one. Didn't care if literally thousands of his soldiers died, along with Force knew whoever else.
No wonder he had been unseated from power the first time.
Still though, the guy had his tricks, and he was still alive, which is more than could be said for a lot of people who had stepped up to her.
Syd was going to try and kill him again, but he had at least the foresight to leave behind a detachment of HK droids. He still should have stayed behind to make sure.
Syd tried to activate her split saber but only one blade went active. The thermal detonator had damaged it.
The HK's opened fire with portable blaster cannons, forcing Syd to deflect the powerful shots as she moved through the flames, relying solely on her Soresu. She dodged the slugs and sonics using a combination of Force Flight and and flames ruining and fowling their thermal scans to evade the rockets as they battled in the burning streets. Her blade passed through limbs, then head. Bolts ripped through her head sometimes but the inferno and the suit repaired it often in the span of minutes, her blade slashing through HK's like it was going out of style, but apparently a detachment to Mythos equated to Zerg-Rushing, because for every droid she slashed through two more took their place, marching and climbing over rubble into the inferno to shoot at her, and Syd flooding every exposure in the chassis with fire, the heat so intense at this point it was rapidly shorting out any thermal shielding they had, tornados of flame snaking away to rush through dozens and dozens of HK's. Syd slashed and hacked and gutted...
Until she came across a fried corpse of what had clearly been a civilian.
The Flame Geist got as close to feeling guilt as she was capable of in this state. She could not tell whether this one had died because of her or Mythos. But the desperate situation was forcing her hand.
So focused was she on the corpse that she barely blocked the charric bolt for her head, which flung her into the air until she righted herself, evading shots and driving her still working blade into the droids one by one, until she or her flames had finished them all off.
She had time to regroup and think in the inferno, trying to decide the next course of action.
When all you have is a hammer...
She began searching droid corpses for something useful, locating an intact focusing lens on one cut open blaster rifle. That would go a ways to repairing the Lightsaber...
She spent the next ten minutes searching the area, until getting interrupted by the massive blast Laertia had inflicted on half the city to stop the mad would be King's advancing army. It was such a powerful series of blasts the glass in her area shattered in every remaining window, knocking her to the ground. She watched in horror as one half of the city went up in flames and smoke. Who had been so desperate--?
Laertia. Syd felt her. They had met a while back on Geonosis, and a tentative trust had formed. Laertia was a killing machine, like Syd was. She related greatly to her because of that. She felt a strange, faint disquiet at the sudden, intense admiration for Laertia's skill, even the dead Phyre within her had hints of this where Laertia was concerned, though for the life of her she was unsure why she felt it.
Syd shook herself from this musing. She was not even certain Laertia could survive this.
But by the Force she sure as hell was gonna try and see to it she did...
Syd spotted the corpse of a fallen Sith, killed in the fuel line blast. He had been instagibbed by it. Only his double bladed lightsaber looked intact.
Syd activated it and watched regular pulses of energy run up the red blades. A set of compressed energy crystals.
Syd shut it off and dismantled it telekinetically, removing the crystals and whispering the litany of purification on it, her shell rippling as she worked her magic. The red crystals flickered, glowed orange, burning hot, and were soon free of corruption. She set one in the damaged hilt, removing the cracked blue crystal within and placing the orange one in its place, removing the other crystal in the other hilt, replacing that also. She kept them, of course. Even a damaged crystal was always useful. Just not now.
Repairing her lightsaber with the parts from the fallen Sith's blade took ten minutes, and when she activated the now orange blades of her lightsaber, those same pulses now ran up her own blades.
Giving an experimental spin, watching the firey trails the blades left behind, Syd then flew up into the night air, looking for a way to bring the fight back to the False King.
Daringly, Syd began to muse that a more magical approach might be necessary, and that tomb she had been raiding was deep enough underground that she figured it had survived the worst so far.
One of the reasons she had been exploring it was because she suspected she had once studied on Atrisia. Before being turned into the Flame Geist. Before even becoming Darth Phyre...
That tomb contained traces of an old magic. A forbidden magic.
Forbidden magic related to flame. Forbidden magic whose incantations disturbingly reminded her of her own approach.
Syd made the journey flying, keeping low and close to the various infernos to frustrate targeting for space craft enemies. As she flew over part of her handiwork she got a terrible sense of familiarity. Phyre had partaken in such slaughters. She'd instigated many of them.
But this wasn't being done for enjoyment. Not for Syd. Syd was enjoying exactly
none of this. Phyre would have had a ball of it. This was some horrible, godless killing going on, and Syd had instigated almost a tenth of it by her estimates. How many had died just initially carving her way to Mythos?
But what else could she do? Mythos had forced her hand. Thousands of his soldiers and supplies on the streets, the vicious oppression it would have required to subjugate them...Syd had no alternatives to even trying to wound his invasion attempt. Brute Force was the only thing someone like him understood. Anything to avoid admitting to himself that he was unworthy of Atrisia.
Syd intended to bring him all the Brute Force he could handle...
She went past the military convoy she had initially wiped out to get to Mythos, all the way to the small tomb complex that was being excavated. She flew inside, getting an eerie feeling as she went past the ancient stone entrance. Something was active magically that had not been before. Syd went into a chamber of gray stone with ancient wards written on the walls. They reacted to her as she touched them, hesitantly, and she spread fire across the walls by instinct. They split open, revealing a hidden entrance.
Closer...she heard in her mind, seeing a strange, flickering orange glow at the end. She floated forward, witnessing with fascination a tuft of flame in the middle of a circular chamber that formed into the shape of a long, winding Atrisian Dragon.
"What are you?" Syd asked, fascinated.
"I am called Kagutsuchi, young flame..." the entity answered quietly, its voice the wizened voice of a man. "I have been expecting you for some time. Ordinarily I would have struck dead any who dared to enter a chamber of The Jei Priestesses of Flame."
"What the hell makes me so special, Spirit?" Syd asked.
"God...with a 'little G'..." Kagutsuchi corrected. "I have my reasons..."
"Well, I'm here. Now what?"
"You came here seeking to win by other means..." Kagutsuchi answered. "The one known as Mythos...he ruled all of Atrisia at one point...and he was driven away for good reason, as you can clearly see..."
"You're a 'god', right? Stomp his ass. I gotta imagine even Sidious couldn't tank a fethin'
god."
"It doesn't work that way, I'm afraid."
"But you
can do it though, if you wanted?"
"If it were not for the Red Tape from the other side, then yes, that nerfherder would already be a skidmark on the road." Kagutsuchi answered contemptuously in regards to Mythos. "By the Gods I miss the days of yore. Back then, when a Mortal like him pissed one of us gods off doing stuff like this, we had
options. We could send a plague to him, drive him nuts in his sleep. One time Ryujin just visited one dude's house in the middle of the night with a claw hammer. Ryujin is
The Water God, by the way..."
Kagutsuchi snickered a little at that last bit.
"What's so funny about that?" Syd inquired.
"The dude that got beaten with the claw hammer? He was a
nail manufacturer."
Both Syd and Kagutsuchi burst into laughter for a solid five minutes, each seemingly sharing a similarly fethed sense of humor.
After that though they got back on task.
"Do you wish for more power to stop Mythos?" Kagutsuchi asked after all the laughs were out of their system.
"What's the catch?"
"I will increase your powers over flame and magic...but you will receive a terrible burden in turn...one quarter of your memories as Darth Phyre will be restored. All at once..."
Syd backed away, horrified.
"Do you know how dangerous that is?!" Syd asked.
"Your power is great, but you are limited from your true potential in two ways...one is your nature as the Flame Geist. The other is your refusal to accept Darth Phyre as truly a part of you, of accepting where you came from. Over time, the cognitive dissonance this would create inside of you would be much worse than being forced to live with what you have done. In the end, were it to grow, the chances are very high you would once more become a threat from The Dark Side hardly any better than Mythos, and far worse in many ways, due to your Sith Persona's innate sadism."
Syd was quiet for a moment, wondering if she could bear this.
She thought of everyone Mythos had killed just setting foot here. Thought of her own crimes as Darth Phyre. Wondered what the worst outcome would be, and how it would manifest.
She stared at the Dragon of flames.
"What's in it for you?" Syd asked.
"An Atrisia with a Mythos-free future."
Syd had to really think for the next few seconds. Finally, she looked at the spirit and her gaze hardened.
"Do it."
Syd began to scream as Kagutsuchi chanted in a forbidden language that's not safe to even write down...
Junko Ike
