The storm swallowed the landing pad in darkness, its downpour drumming against durasteel and stone in a relentless rhythm. Lightning raked the sky overhead, painting the spire of Bastion in brief, violent flashes. The Diarch's voice carried calm and cordiality through the tempest, but even as his offer lingered in the air, the storm answered with something else.
It began with a sound. Not thunder. Not rain. A sharp, mechanical click. Then another. And another. Ten in perfect unison. It was the snap of safeties re-engaging, the sound of kill-orders rescinded. The
rifles had been primed the moment the visitors arrived; Rellik's words had stayed them. The soldiers had not lowered their weapons, only locked their triggers, as if acknowledging that for now these ones would be allowed to breathe.
The sound did not come from one place. It came from everywhere at once. Lightning illuminated four silhouettes clinging to the sheer wall of the structure Rellik had emerged from, and before the echo of thunder faded, they moved. The soldiers walked straight down the vertical plane as though gravity itself no longer bound them, harnesses whispering against stone. At the bottom they dropped together, boots striking the flooded ground with a single, resonant thud, and they rose as one, faceless and silent, advancing to fall behind the Diarch.
Two more emerged from the curtain of rain on the far left of the pad, their counterparts mirroring them on the right, while stormlight rippled like liquid silver across the black plates of their armor. None moved and none spoke, the pair on each side simply anchoring the platform in a cage of angles.
The final two revealed themselves last, not from shadow or from the walls, but from beneath the Jedi's own vessel. They had been there all along, lying in wait with the patience of carrion birds, their forms masked by storm and silence until the hiss of the freighter's hydraulics drowned the subtle scrape of armor against metal. When they moved, it was without flourish or haste, sliding out from under the belly of the ship as if they had always belonged to its shadow.
At first, they were nothing more than shapes at the edge of vision phantoms in the corner of the Jedi's perception, half-formed outlines where the rain fell strangely thin. Then, with a shift of lightning, the illusion shattered, and the soldiers stepped fully into sight. Rifles lifted in unison, they advanced in perfect measure, their path cutting directly across the Jedi's periphery.
They did not turn their heads. They did not acknowledge the figures they passed. Their silence was not hostile, but it was not indifferent either; it was the silence of inevitability, of executioners certain of their ground. Every step past the Jedi carried a message deeper than words: this was not a negotiation. The pad was theirs. It had always been theirs. And the intruders had only been permitted to stand upon it by choice, not by right.
Ten soldiers with ten rifles locked the field in a perfect kill box, and yet through it all there was nothing. To the Force they did not exist. No ripples, no intent, and no spark betrayed them. If the Jedi looked with their eyes, they would see soldiers with rain-slick armor glinting under floodlamps and stormlight, but if they closed their eyes they would feel only the downpour. These were not men merely trained to resist the Force, nor were they blanks like ysalamiri. They were phantoms carved from absence itself, utterly severed and utterly wrong, their voidlike presence pressing down on the landing pad heavier than the storm.
From the silent ranks one figure peeled forward. His steps were deliberate, each bootfall nearly swallowed by the hiss of rain, until he came to stand at Rellik's left shoulder with crisp posture and movements so precise they bordered on inhuman. A distorted voice carried from the vox of his helmet, low and metallic: "
High Commander marked the ships the moment they broke orbit. One of the defense platforms flagged them as suspect. He judged it too great a risk to broadcast feared even a trace could be compromised. He was already en route to your office, sir."
The soldier's helmet dipped once, a precise acknowledgment, before he became still again. Rain coursed down the black plates in rivulets, reflecting stormlight like oil-slick glass. They wore the
LO-62C Commando configuration, a design not built for spectacle but for something far more unsettling. The armor bore no crests or embellishments, every line sharp and utilitarian, the uniform of executioners polished to anonymity. More than simple protection, the plating acted as insulation, reinforcing what was already unnatural in the men themselves: a total and irrevocable severance from the Force.
The effect on the Jedi was immediate and visceral. It settled in the pit of their stomachs as a sensation that crawled like ice beneath the skin. These soldiers were not merely hidden, nor simply absent. They were cut loose. No thread of the living weave touched them, and when one reached outward with the Force the only answer was recoil, as if the current itself refused to acknowledge them. It was not the emptiness of cortosis or the blank of a ysalamir, but something worse: a wound in reality that would not close.
Diarch Reign
Diarch Rellik
Kyric
Jand Talo
Feridade Parthi
of Eshan, the Jedi seek to determine the state of the Diarchy in the aftermath of the rebellion. Many within the Senate question the possibility of an alliance with the neighboring nation, but the Diarchs' recent attack on Hapes leads others to believe it an impossibility. 
