Private Crystal Hell.

[Serina Calis]

"Hard choices require hard minds."

Tags - Raef Malstadt

The chamber was not the same one from before.

This room—deeper within the Polis Massan citadel—was darker, quieter, more angular in its design. The walls absorbed not just sound, but certainty. Blue light from the holotable carved long shadows across the polished stone floor, casting Serina as a silhouette behind a veil of starlit geometry.

Raef stood at attention before her, still new—still raw—but no longer uncommitted.
And now, it was time to test what she had purchased.

Serina did not look up immediately. She let the silence linger, a thin sheet of ice stretched over something vast and dark beneath. When she finally raised her gaze, it was with that same infuriatingly elegant gravity, as though she was not looking at him—but through him, down the long corridor of what he would become.

"You have accepted service," she said, the words flowing like oil across durasteel. "Now you will be put to use."

She gestured, and the holotable flared to life—rendering in crisp relief the jagged topography of a world that few in Sith space even remembered by name.

Orax.
A dust-choked frontier world long forgotten by most, independent by virtue of obscurity. No government strong enough to provoke Sith retaliation. No defense grid capable of withstanding orbital assault. But beneath its barren surface, veins of crystalline compounds ran deep—minerals refined into energy matrices suitable for starship reactors, lightsabers, and arcane foci alike.

"Outside the Empire's sphere. Outside its laws. Unaligned, unguarded... unguarded, but not unclaimed." Serina's voice held no anger, no joy—only intention. "That makes it perfect."

She turned her eyes back to him. They were cold, but not indifferent. This was not malice—it was strategy. It was architecture.

"A private operation, sanctioned by my personal writ, not the Assembly's. Off-the-books. We will use a series of ancient smuggler routes—reforged, expanded, and concealed through the shadow of Polis Massa's natural terrain—to bypass the Blackwall entirely. We will exit Sith space without notice. We will return the same way. There will be no record of this expedition. No request for permissions. No need for political theatre."

Her fingers danced across the controls. The hologram shifted. Now it showed orbital approach paths, encrypted signal routes, and—highlighted in blood-red—one jagged scar deep in the planet's southern hemisphere: a crystal mine perched atop an old tectonic fault.

"This is your target."

She spoke the words with an elegance that stripped them of drama, but none of their weight.

"You will be deployed via orbital drop alongside several of my other assets—mercenaries, saboteurs, blackcell commandos. Your role is to secure this mine intact. Not scorched. Intact. The compound is fortified, but undermanned. Their equipment is outmoded. They will not expect a strike from orbit. Still—brutality must be executed with discipline. Break them quickly, and you will inherit the mineral flow unimpeded. Break them messily, and we waste time extracting what should already be in transit."

She stepped away from the holotable and toward him, circling slowly, as if re-measuring his frame for a suit of armor he did not yet deserve to wear.

"This is not a battle. It is a demonstration—of my reach, and of your utility. This world exists in a blind spot, tucked beneath the folds of a galaxy too distracted to care. That makes it ours."

She stopped in front of him, voice lowering, eyes sharp.

"And ours alone. The Sith Empire cannot know of this yet. We will feed the mineral shipments into my internal projects on Polis Massa. Requisition flows will be masked as repurposed asteroid yields. Any mention of Orax will be redacted before it reaches the Bureau's archives."

The air grew colder. Not from temperature—but from truth.

"You are a knife I am sending into flesh not yet aware it has been cut. Do not fail me. Do not improvise unless improvisation is what survival demands. And above all: do not pity them."

There was no rage in her voice. Only precision.

"They are not innocents. No one is. If they had the strength, they would do this to you. The only difference is that they did not act quickly enough."

She returned to her place behind the desk, and now, finally, her tone shifted—just slightly. A current of iron expectation beneath the cold surface.

"You will deploy in twenty hours. Your team will brief at station THETA-9—ask for Commander Selik. He will give you your drop coordinates and authentication cipher. When you land, you will take the mine. Then you will hold it. And when my freighters arrive masked under Polis Massa mining ID codes, you will hand it over and vanish like smoke into the next assignment."

A pause. A final glance. A quiet, crushing pressure disguised as polite observation.

"And if you succeed," she added, voice low and deliberate, "there will be more. Better. Bloodier. You are not here to serve, Raef. You are here to ascend."

She turned her back to him, returning her gaze to the maps and lights of a galaxy she had already begun to dissect.

"You are dismissed."

No fanfare.
No applause.
Only the slow turning of another gear in a machine that would one day reshape empires.

 

[Raef Malstadt]

Who are you willing to become?
​

---

Tags: Serina Calis

He was starting to get used to it; everything becoming easier when the thoughts were cut short and never an ounce of acknowledgement was given toward one's self. This was the life Raef was willing to sacrifice for, to be put to use just like a cog inside of a machine, to turn endlessly with the same rhythmic motion, to die never once blinking in the face of certain death.

These coming days, months, years were to be a restructuring project. He was no longer a soldier, but instead a professional. The days of clinging so closely to doctrine had vanished and the mind for his fellow man had darkened into an unknowable void, its depth endless like a night sky without stars, its very occupation of space twisted with the colors of contempt.

Crimson would flow, and the credits too.

For all the worth every life had, for all the lives lost so that he could survive. This was his final, passing thought of them.

How easy it was for Serina to shift Raef's spirit, how eager he was to refine his edge into a thing to be feared across the galaxy.

Being escorted away from the briefing, Raef could only hear the Sith's words echoing within his skull, the persistence of promise and of death. Ascension.

His contracts previous to this were only small scale - cleaning up undesirables, skeleton crew operations, lonesome travels far into the Outer Rim due to smuggling and piracy, crews of strangers he'd never talk to again in his life. This should be no different, yet somehow it felt far more wide in scope than anything else he'd experienced.

Expendable until he wouldn't be anymore, that is how he would remain steadfast. That is what his mind would focus on.

For now he would run a diagnostic on his weapons and gear, tools of the trade that he so heavily relied upon. Scars and depressions upon the torso, peppered with scorch marks and pockets where shrapnel and piercing ammunition had settled. A datapad came to life showing a history of previous conflicts, injuries, types of weaponry encountered.

COMPREHENSIVE OF MEDICAL CRISIS:

• HEAD TRAUMA x3
• SEIZURE BROUGHT ON BY EXTERNAL HAZARD x5
• BURST BLOOD VESSELS x2
• INTERNAL ORGAN FAILURE x5
• SEVERE BURNS x3
• MALNUTRITION x10
• DEHYDRATION x10
• BONE FRACTURE x4
• MENTAL COLLAPSE x ???

He would make his mark. He would go beyond the will of every man before him. The datapad chimed with a notification, his time until departure soon approaching. He would need to be ready.

He began the process of suiting up, feeling the weight with each piece that was added to his body.

Time to begin again.

 

[Serina Calis]

"Hard choices require hard minds."

Tags - Raef Malstadt



The room was silent again.

Raef was gone.

Not dismissed like a subordinate. Not discharged like a veteran. Simply—gone, as a tool is returned to its drawer after its purpose has been reaffirmed. Outside, somewhere in the bowels of Polis Massa's hidden docks, his boots would echo down the same basalt corridors that had swallowed thousands before him. Most had walked those halls thinking themselves unique. Almost none had been. Raef… might be.

Serina did not stand.

She remained where she was—seated behind the obsidian-slab desk that dominated the command chamber. Fingers steepled lightly. Shoulders relaxed. Spine straight. Her eyes, however, remained fixed not on the console or the holoscreen flickering beside her—but on a small, worn datapad that lay facedown at the edge of her desk.

It had belonged to another mercenary. One long discarded. She hadn't deleted its data.

Always study your failures.

The pad remained untouched. Forgotten by some. Useful to her.

She turned slightly, issuing no verbal command, but the motion was enough. The room's automated systems registered her presence shift and brought forth a layered projection—live telemetry from Raef's quarters, medical scans, weapon diagnostics, suit calibration. She watched the readouts cascade, but not with clinical detachment.

She watched them with intent.

Scars. Broken ribs. Ocular hemorrhaging. Lapses in neural conductivity. Psychological tremors traced like hairline fractures down the spine of his soul. The litany of failure—and survival. Not worthy of pity. Worthy of use.

A lesser mind would see these things as damage. Serina saw them as traits. Qualities of interest. Ingredients.

She tapped two fingers once against the side of the holotable.

"He is already rebuilding," she said softly, the words spoken to no one—yet ringing like law. "That is the sign."

A pause.

Then, a second voice—synthetic, low, female—crackled from an unseen comm embedded in the desk.

:: Field status: initiating zero-hour readiness. Shipyards are staging sleeper runs now. Drop trajectories locked for re-entry masks. Do you wish to open formal theater command? ::

Serina did not answer immediately. Instead, she reached out and gently turned the datapad over.

The past faced upward again. Useless sentiment in most hands.

But not in hers.

"No," she said at last, voice dry silk drawn across the edge of a glass. "There is no theater. Not yet."

She stood slowly, each movement deliberate, as though she were peeling herself out of a former shape. She let her fingers trail along the map—Orax's jagged mountain ridges, its crystal veins glowing faintly with outdated mining overlays—and stopped at one cluster near the southern pole.

"Send auxiliary recon flights. Low-orbit, passive scans only. Let them see shadows. I want rumors on local channels before the assault. Let the panic build." Her tone sharpened, but not in volume. It tightened—like a noose behind polished words. "No alarms. Dread. Dread is worth more than any orbital cannon."

:: Confirmed. ::

Serina allowed a thin, private breath—more gesture than necessity—and folded her arms behind her back. She did not speak again for some time. When she finally did, it was not a command, but an epitaph spoken in anticipation of deeds not yet committed.

"They call what we do cruelty. They see it as indulgence. A savagery of tyrants."

She turned slowly from the map, stepping toward the viewport, where the ghostlight of the dead planet's surface cast her silhouette in pale angles.

"But the truth, Raef," she murmured to the dark, to the cold, to the silence itself, "is that order must begin somewhere. And if no one else will bloody their hands to lay the foundation…"

She raised one hand and placed her palm lightly against the glass.

"…then I will."

The void beyond did not answer. But it didn't need to.

She had already spoken enough.

The descent had begun.



[ORBITAL DROP – Orax, 00:23 Local Time]

The stars had vanished.

No horizon. No moonlight. No welcoming sprawl of cities. Just the black. The kind of black that didn't end where your eyes stopped working—but where light itself had never dared to touch.

Inside the drop pod, the only illumination came from the faint glow of Raef's visor HUD and the flickering tactical panel to his right. A red strobe pulsed above the door, synchronized to his breathing, as if mocking the last vestiges of humanity clinging to the inside of his chest.

AUTOMATED STATUS: STAGING COMPLETE.
BURN SEQUENCE INITIATING.

The pod shuddered.

Thrusters screamed to life, punching through Polis Massa's shadow with a muted thunder that only grew louder as gravity reclaimed him. He was no longer drifting—he was falling. Not as a soldier. Not as a man. As a sharpened instrument, sheathed in composite plating and preordained violence.

Around him, five other drop pods entered their terminal descent in formation. Mercenaries drawn from Serina's private network—each vetted, compartmentalized, expendable. None of them spoke. There was no chatter on the line. Only silence and the boil of re-entry.

The clouds came next—if you could call them that. Toxic silicate vapor layered like diseased gauze over the planet's surface, refracting his pod's landing lights in greasy halos. Through that haze, the mine appeared at last: a half-buried facility wrapped around a tectonic fissure, its skeletal conveyor towers clawing into the sky like broken fingers.

IMPACT IN: 10 SECONDS.
MOTION SENSORS DETECTED.
UNSHIELDED LIFEFORMS WITHIN 200 METERS OF LANDING ZONE.

The mine was active.

Whether defenders or laborers, it didn't matter. They would soon be the same—flattened beneath the logic of Serina's war machine. A logic Raef now embodied.

The pod slammed into the dirt with a brutal crunch of alloy and bone-rattling inertia. Hydraulic locks disengaged. Steam hissed from the seams. The door blew outward in a shower of gravel and ash, revealing the choking gray of Orax's fractured dusk.

Raef emerged.

Boots hit stone. Air filters auto-adjusted to the atmosphere. His HUD flashed immediate contact markers—scattered, disorganized, panicking. Fleeing figures. Gunfire—sporadic, uncertain.

The enemy wasn't prepared. Not for this.
But he was.

Above, the other pods impacted in staggered rhythm—thud-thud-thud—punctuating the silence with rhythm, like war drums buried beneath ash. His comms lit up with identifiers for his fellow operators: CORDEN (Demolitions), SELVACH (Electronic Warfare), IYARA (Sniper Overwatch), and two untagged units marked only by designation codes. Clean. Anonymous.

No leaders. No hierarchy. Only results.

Raef's briefing had been clear. He was to breach the facility's eastern arm—an auxiliary shaft leading into the central crystal excavation zone—and hold it until Serina's "collection teams" arrived. Alive, if possible. Dead, if necessary. What mattered was the mine. The rest was scenery.

A panicked voice cracked over local comms—civilian frequency, old world dialect. "W-we've got landers! Sound the evac—oh stars, they're already in the—!"

It cut off.
A scream replaced it.
Then silence.

The mine was waking to its final hours. And Raef stood at the edge, not as a liberator—but as a catalyst.

This was the start of his war.

OBJECTIVES:

– Breach the EASTERN EXCAVATION SHAFT
– Neutralize resistance (civilian panic acceptable collateral)
– Secure crystal reserves intact
– Hold ground until collection unit makes contact

OPTIONAL:
– Identify any high-value individuals for extraction or interrogation
– Locate alternative exit tunnels for future operations
– Maintain total blackout on Sith origin

 

[Raef Malstadt]

"You've got new blood on this, make it count..."
​

---

Tags: Serina Calis

It was the first mission where nobody uttered a word; almost as if they were droids, no need for banter or feathered rhetoric, simple and to the point with nothing but efficiency in mind. Commander Selik didn't regard Raef with much other than the slightest of nods, and about as little care upon his features.

His words to them all before zero hour were streamlined, much of the same he'd already digested from Serina's information. Everything went just as she described, and he entered his drop pod with nothing but an eerie stillness to follow. An emptiness to hold in his mind and heart.

Raef let himself detach from everything in that capsule. All of the rage, all of the emotions he didn't have words to speak on, the lack of having a vision in order to shape the object of his desire. His end goal.

This would be an endless endeavor, something that would repeat on and on until the bones themselves become the minerals of whatever planet his corpse rots on. Wherever he would happen to meet his end, some part of him did desire something sunny, perhaps on a beach elsewhere.

Down into the mines, down into darker pits hunting those that hid and ran for safety. A safety they could've had, if only whomever had employed them for their services had the credits to counter such an unfortunate fate.

At first he watched the others dig in - their blasters and specialized personal effects making short work of any access restriction, personnel, or defensive measure put in place. It was ruthless and made Raef's heart sink somehow lower into a part of his stomach that didn't physically exist.

He slung his LMG over his shoulder by its strap and unholstered his sidearm - blaster bolts over slug rounds seemed a tad more appropriate; less mess, still the same result. It worked for him, and it would have to suffice Serina. He raised his weapon and expended four bolts, striking down three crew members - his aim was focused, but his nerves were troubled.

Behind his visor sweat was beading upon his brow, his breathing steady and correct; an unknown voice filled his ears as he cautiously moved closer towards the coordinates he received. "You've got new blood on this, make it count..." SELVACH uttered.

A large shutter door slid upward into a stone wall, Raef stepped forward slowly, scanning his corners and clearing rooms. Explosions could be heard in a farther, western area of the facility followed by a cacophony of blaster fire. All vitals from every mercenary serving were green, all was going as planned.

"En route to secure reserves, setting marker on entry point - other points of interest will be pinged."

Precise, surgical, no nonsense. That was the job, and he'd do just that.

"Do try to incapacitate any higher authority wandering about - I'd hate for this to be my first assignment and I don't show my enthusiasm. Over and out."

No leaders, no hierarchy, only excellence.

Only proof that she was correct in choosing him.

 

[Serina Calis]

"Hard choices require hard minds."

Tags - Raef Malstadt



The deeper Raef moved, the louder the mine began to scream.

It wasn't sound in the traditional sense—not just blaster fire or collapsing architecture—it was the warping of atmosphere, the pressure of fear expanding like gas inside a sealed container. Cracks were forming. Human ones.
And Raef was the tip of the spear driving into them.

Behind him, SELVACH's comms channel clicked off without ceremony. Ahead, a winding steel corridor descended into the belly of the mine—angled lighting flickering where power had already begun to fail. Red emergency strips painted the walls in blood-light, illuminating the abandoned tools and dropped datapads of those who thought they still had time.

A harsh scream echoed down the shaft—cut short. Then another, farther off.

CRACK-CRACK.

Return fire somewhere deeper in the complex. Scattered. Desperate. His HUD parsed it: old-model slugthrowers. Inaccurate. Loud. Panicked.

A perfect theater for domination.

– PRIMARY SHAFT — POINT OF ENTRY.
– CRYSTAL STORAGE VAULT: 3 LEVELS BELOW.
– CURRENT DISTANCE: 87 METERS.

Raef's marker pinged green on the team's tac-net.

CORDEN and the unmarked unit dubbed G-17 were advancing on the north loading corridor. Explosives placed. Minimal resistance. Clean breach. Efficient.

Raef's own progress was about to meet resistance far more personal.

A security gate three doors ahead slammed shut—manual override, not automated. Someone was trying to lock down the vault.

"Manual lockdown detected," IYARA chimed in dryly. "One shooter, maybe two beyond the gate. You've got ten seconds before they try to reroute power and drop the ceiling hatch. Might want to move, new blood."

9 seconds.

A shriek of metal echoed overhead as a crossbeam dislodged. Dust rained down. Sparks kissed the hallway.

8 seconds.

Raef's HUD lit red. Lifeforms converging—heat signatures behind the wall to the right. Two bodies, mid-motion. Civilian garb. No weapons visible.

They were trying to escape through an unmarked crawl tunnel—a shortcut used by workers to bypass the heavy elevator system.

They hadn't seen him yet. Not truly.

7 seconds.

The wall trembled. The gate lock began its hiss-click cycle.

"Vault access closing, Malstadt," Selik's voice barked now, cutting through the comms like a vibroblade through bone. "Move."

 

[Raef Malstadt]

"Move."
​

---

Tags: Serina Calis

• WALL SECTION C-5 WEAKNESS DETECTED! BREACH POSSIBLE.
• EXTREME KINETIC FORCE RECOMMENDED.

6 seconds.

There was a weakness spotted in the wall where the heat signatures came from, as if it had been broken and sealed over again - bits of debris and rock masking it to appear like the rest of environment. Holstering his sidearm, Raef retrieved his LMG and aimed directly at the wall ahead, squeezing the trigger hard as a mechanical whirring announced the heavy repeater's readiness.

A volley of slug rounds slammed into the weakened surface - a thick cloud of dust kicked into Raef's visor, shards of brittle binding agents and stone itself scratching up his helmet. A small crack forming in the transparisteel, but it didn't matter now. Repair costs weren't a new concept, a good quarter of his pay would be spent on just that. Should any functional components be thrashed, then it's going to be a downgrade.

5 seconds.

Raef could feel vibrations through the floor and all around him, the ceiling above about to give way. Throwing the sling of his weapon over his shoulder, he charged forward in an attempt to break through the wall but was met with a disheartening thud. There was still something blocking the way. He tried for it again, backing up and throwing himself harder.

3 seconds.

Alarms and crying steel announced themselves, his final warning had been given. Another panicked attempt to escape was unleashed upon the wall, Raef bursting through to the other side, falling face first onto the ground. He lay there momentarily to catch his breath, blinking several times to clear his vision.

As he picked himself up from the dust and rubble, a deafening roar nearly ruptured his ear drums as he scrambled away from the place that was almost his tomb. Free burial and all. The grip of his blaster pistol dirtied by his glove as he drew it once more, confined to the smaller size of the tunnel he now walked inside of.

"Raef here. Still pursuing targets, moving on last known position. Pinging current location - there's a chance for comms to get spotty the deeper I traverse. Over."

He moved inward, his HUD switching back to thermal detection - a brief glimpse of movement up ahead, the face of a stranger peeking around a corner before disappearing into darkness. "YOU! STOP!"

The space he had to operate in was becoming cramped, much more than he could've anticipated at a moment's notice. Raef let out a defeated sigh.

"Safest way through? I'm sure this wasn't planned for, and it's not like I have a blueprint of this place. Help me get this done if you want results."

A bit irritated, but not dead yet.

 

[Serina Calis]

"Hard choices require hard minds."

Tags - Raef Malstadt



The tunnel groaned behind him.
Steel, stone, and reinforced alloy folded inward with a predatory finality, collapsing the breach Raef had just forced open. Timing. A second later and he'd be entombed—alive, forgotten, stripped of purpose. The mine didn't want him here. But it no longer had a choice.

Raef pushed forward, the narrow crawlspace bending like a half-formed spine. The walls were close—too close. They pressed on his shoulders, on his nerves, on the fractured glass web forming across his visor. Every step dragged sediment. Every breath tasted of iron and ash.

And yet—

The deeper he went, the hotter it became. Not temperature—presence. Tension thickened around him, viscous and clinging. The fear of prey. The anticipation of violence. He wasn't just in a tunnel. He was inside the throat of something trying very hard not to choke.

His thermal HUD flickered. Once. Twice.

Then contact.
Three signatures—clustered twenty meters ahead behind a modular storage hatch, crude plating peeled back just enough to form cover. One held a rifle. Another crouched low, body language suggesting injury. The third was pacing in a tight line, gesturing frantically. Arguing.

[AUDIO INTERCEPT – UNSECURED CHANNEL]
"—we stay and hold, we die here! You think they'll keep us alive if we give up?"
"Shut up, Brek! Just shut—what the hell was that?"
"They sent one guy? What the hell kind of freak—"

They saw him.

Raef's presence triggered a fusillade. Wild. Staggered. Rounds sparking off the tunnel wall and ricocheting past his head, one slug biting into the shoulder plate of his armor hard enough to jerk his torso mid-step. HUD registered integrity drop. Bruise. No penetration.

But they were trying to kill him. That counted.

A fourth signature flared to life behind the others—cold compared to the rest. No panic. No talking. Deliberate. The shape raised something long and sharp, lean—a cutting laser. Industrial. High-output. Improvised into a field weapon.

They were setting a trap.
Not for victory. But to bury him along with the mine.

Static flared through the tac-net. SELVACH's voice broke through, distorted and laughing.

:: "Tunnel readings spiking. They're gonna cut the roof and drop half a metric ton on your pretty helmet. You're on your own for now. Pathfinding algorithms can't get past the interference." ::
:: "So either improvise—"
:: "—or die photogenically." ::