The floor beneath Brandyn began to break apart, disintegrating in jagged fragments beneath his boots. He twisted back, his knee flaring with pain from the earlier collision with the wall, just as the durasteel plating gave way to the abyss below. For a fleeting second, there was nothing but open dark beneath him.
The smell hit immediately. The hallway filled with the putrid stench of the undercity, rot, chemicals, and something far worse that clung to the air like some dying thing. It burned at the edges of his senses, but Brandyn did not falter. The pain, the filth, the decay...all of it...these were constants now. Mere background noise. His focus remained fixed on the figure ahead.
Metal screamed as it tore free from the collapsing floor, wrenched upward by an unseen force. Shards and splintered plating twisted through the air, drawn toward the figure at the far end of the corridor.
The Soulbound.
It rose slowly, framed by a flickering, dying light that cast its form into a shifting silhouette. What had once been a man stood there still, but only just. The gauntlet fused to his arm pulsed with a sickening life of its own, drinking in the debris around it. Atomised fragments wove together in writhing streams, coiling and reforming into jagged armour that crawled across his body.
Brandyn exhaled slowly, steadying himself.
The man before him was a nobody, most likely. Some gutter rat or desperate soul plucked from obscurity and remade into this. The Unblessed had always favored the expendable. But the weapon…the weapon made him something else entirely.
Tendrils of metal lashed and recoiled from the gauntlet, shifting between blade and shield with unnatural fluidity, as though guided by a mind separate from its host. The Soulbound tilted his head, as if studying Brandyn. Then, without warning, the metal surged forward.
Brandyn reacted in half a heartbeat. He pivoted on instinct, ignoring the protest in his knee as a spike of reforged durasteel screamed past his shoulder and shattered against the wall behind him. Another followed, then a storm, shards hurled with lethal precision, each one guided, each one alive murderous intent.
Brandyn did not advance. Instead, he gave ground. It retreat a calculated risk. Each step backward drew the creature further down the corridor. Brandyn's breathing remained steady, though sweat gathered beneath the edge of his faceplate. The faint hiss of microinjected bacta filled his ears, barely dulling the ever-present burn that gnawed at his skin.
He could end this. A single decisive strike. A moment's surrender to instinct, to
anger, to the part of him that whispered how easy it would be. But that was not why he was here.
Another volley came. He deflected what he could, dodged the rest, letting the barrage drive him further back, closer to his goal.
Almost there.
The Soulbound relentlessly advanced, feeding on the very structure around them. Walls peeled apart, the corridor unraveling in its wake as more material was consumed and repurposed. It was growing stronger.
Good. Let it commit.
Brandyn's gaze flicked, just once, to the barely visible seam in the wall behind him. The trap, hidden and awaiting the moment.
"Come on," he murmured under his breath, voice ragged.
The Soulbound stepped forward, Brandyn reached for the device on his wrist, pressed the button and the trap was sprung. A single, targeted tranq-dart hit the Soulbound on the neck. The beast roared in anger, but did not even stagger.
Brandyn's eyes widened. Stepping back towards the edge, the floor behind him being missing from earlier in the fight. He pressed the button again. The Soulbound swatted the dart away with acrimonious contempt.
The monster charged, a spike growing from the gauntlet as it directed a blow straight for Brandyn's neck.
Metres were crossed in seconds. The button on Brandyn's wrist was pressed twice in quick succession. He closed his eyes...and hoped.
~~~~~~~
The light of the distant sun reflected off the polished hull of the Nubian luxury yacht as it cut cleanly through the void, its silhouette elegant and unmistakably opulent against the darkness. Not a Jedi vessel, but a family ship, quietly requisitioned from extensive reserves on Hapes. It would be harder for the family to trace, harder for questions to be asked.
Briana, at least, would not be looking here. She kept her distance from Hapes these days, and she was the one most likely to start digging.
As the yacht angled toward the planet below, its engines shifted to a low, controlled burn. The stars stretched and bent across the viewport before giving way to the growing curve of atmosphere. A moment later, the ship slipped into descent.
Atmospheric friction kissed the hull in a faint shimmer of heat, the reflective surface now dancing with streaks of gold and ember as clouds parted beneath its path. Inside, Brandyn did not share in that calm that was the vessel's soothing hum. The carbonite slab stood secured behind him, locked into place within the hold. The silhouette frozen within was twisted, unnatural even in stillness, the gauntlet's grotesque shape preserved mid-contortion, as though it might yet reach out and grasp at something unseen.
Capturing the Unblessed agent, securing both the man and his abhorrent weapon, had only ever been the first step. Extraction of intelligence was another matter entirely.
Brandyn's jaw tightened beneath the faceplate as he reached toward the console. For a moment, his hand hovered there, hesitation threading through the ever-present pain that pulsed beneath his skin. The soft hiss of bacta injection answered nothing. Then he made his choice. A private transponder flickered to life, its signal narrow, encrypted, old codes. It pulsed once into the void ahead, a quiet beacon directed toward a single recipient.
Lysander.
Brandyn lowered his hand slowly, gaze drifting back toward the viewport as the ship continued its descent, vanishing deeper into cloud and shadow.
Desperate times, indeed, called for desperate measures.
