Braze couldn't see her in the ordinary sense; his eyes registered only blur and motion, but through the Force, her presence shone bright. Within the web of his awareness, the real Kinley moved like a vibrant light inside a darkened storm, every pulse of fear marking her trail.
The floating orbs drifted after her, obedient and relentless. Each one hummed with soft static, their
robust sensor arrays flickering in synchronized pursuit. Designed for subduing Force users, they calculated her escape angles with eerie precision, their programming sharp enough to avoid harming innocents even in chaos. The stun shots were harmless, technically, but enough to drop someone into dreamless sleep if caught in the crossfire.
Braze followed at an unhurried pace, fingers gliding over his wrist console as three more spark droids rose from their ports with a low, electric whine. The corners of his mouth curved in to a devious little smirk.
"You can run," he called loudly, trailing after her,
"but you cannot hide."
He tapped along his wrist console as three
C.A.T.C.H. droids joined in, following Kinley. More little spheres closed in around her, some floating ahead to try and cut off her route.
The first C.A.T.C.H. droids shot overhead, their whine cutting through the city noise like a vibroblade through silk. Heads turned, watching the spectacle of floating droids rush past.
"What the?" someone gasped.
Another person backed into a durasteel column as a glowing sphere zipped past, humming with terrifying menace.
The crowd broke apart instantly. Some ducked for cover, others just gawked, fascinated by the queer sight. One Twi'lek stepped forward, hand half-raised before thinking better of it; whatever this was, it looked official, or at least dangerous enough to stay back.
The droids followed her like a swarm of fireflies. They adjusted formation the moment their sensors locked on. Three units shifted outward, forming a loose triangle around Kinley as they began to close the gap. Their optics pulsed as silent data packets burst outward between them while they calculated distance, angle, and movement in real time.
Every few seconds, one darted upward or veered left, creating a shifting perimeter that tried to force her back toward the center of their cloud. The hum of their repulsors grew sharper as they shifted suddenly.
Then, as one, they fired. Stun bursts arced across the air in overlapping cones of blue light, each volley staggered to leave her no room to breathe. The shots weren't meant to kill, only to overwhelm, to drop her before she could attempt any further vanishing tricks.
Each near miss sparked against the walls, the glow painting the alley ways in flickering flashes of color. The crowd pressed back against doorframes and columns, shielding their faces from the rain of blue lights as the droids tightened the noose with machine precision.
That wasn't all. The C.A.T.C.H. droid spheres deployed their secondary systems, compact
Net Guns snapping open with a sharp hiss.
Thin metallic filaments shot outward, expanding midair into shimmering energy webs.
Each droid adjusted position, hovering in a steady triangle as they recalculated trajectory. Their programming adapted with every move she made, tightening the perimeter, layering stun fire with ensnaring bursts until escape routes dwindled to nothing.
The first three S.P.A.R.K. droids fired fast, about two short bursts every second. Each burst carried six stun rounds, so each droid shot around twelve bolts a second. Together they poured nearly thirty-six stun bolts per second into Kinley's target vector, flooding her path with flashing rings of blue light. That number rose to about
seventy-two stun bolts per second as the next three S.P.A.R.K. droids joined the attack, doubling the storm and tightening the net around her.