Protect Prosperity
Deep Space
Prosperity
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Michael, Gabriel, Raguel, Sariel, Raphael, Jeremiel, Connel
[Any text in brackets signifies comm-link usage and not face to face conversation]
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Rides
Gear/Armor
SURGICAL - CRYBERNETIC IMPLANTS
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Shadow Sanctuary - Enterprise
Someone looking at Connel Vanagor in that moment might have mistaken what they saw for anger.
That would have been easy.
Anger was a simple thing. A match struck in the dark. Heat without direction. Noise without discipline. Anger wanted a face to break, a throat to close around, a body to blame until the universe made sense for one ugly second.
This was not anger.
Rage, then? No. Rage scattered itself. Rage wasted motion. Rage killed whatever stood nearest and called the wreckage justice.
Punishment? Too crude.
Vengeance? Too small.
Consequence? Closer. Connel had been consequence before. He had worn it like armor. He had let enemies look into the dark visor and believe they understood what was coming for them.
But this was not even that. This was recognition. The quiet, terrible kind that came when a man reached the edge of himself and saw what waited on the other side. He knew that place. He knew the shape of it. The old hunger. The clean lie. The part of him that whispered that the galaxy was simpler when every problem had a trigger, a blade, or a body count attached to it.
His father had once needed a child in a street to remind him what he was becoming. A little girl to whom he would happily wave to every day, until the day he thought he had lost everything and would take everything from those responsible. That day she saw someone different and crossed the street.
Connel would not wait for a little girl to save him from himself. Not today. Not while younglings ran through white-marked corridors with terror in their lungs. Not while Cora’s evacuation routes flickered like fragile veins across his visor.
Not while the Sith believed fear would do the work for them.
Every white dot still moving was a verdict. Every second bought was a confession. Every child who made it one door farther from the killing lanes was the mirror held up to him. Not later.
Now.
So Connel Vanagor moved through
The Prosperity as the “Light’s Wraith” the mask ritual made him, carrying a fire most men would have named wrong because most men needed hatred to explain what they feared. It was not hatred. It was not fury.
It was purpose.
And purpose, when carried by a broken man who had chosen not to break, was a far more dangerous thing. Cora’s map burned across the inside of his visor. White dots moved. Red dots gathered. Two hostile clusters split from the main assault lane and entered the Engineering artery.
Connel slowed.
Their movement told him everything. Tight spacing. Overlapping fields of fire. One team advancing low while the second ghosted high through the maintenance gantries. No panic. No wasted motion. No tremor in the Force. Discipline.
Obedience.
Violence trained until it barely resembled thought. The Infamous Blackblade Guard.
Not stormtroopers.
Not frightened men in armor, mistaking formation for courage. These were Carnifex’s butcher-saints. Mechanized infantry. Augmented. Shielded. Conditioned to break Jedi, Mandalorians, barricades, and anything arrogant enough to call itself a line.
Good.
Connel had not built a line. He had built a wound. The first squad crossed into Junction Dorn-Seven. Connel pressed the detonator once. The blinder charge did not explode.
It pronounced judgment.
White light consumed the artery. Optics screamed. Targeting feeds broke into static. The nearest Blackblade staggered half a step as his shield flared hard enough to paint the walls in dying gold.
Half a step was mercy.
Connel dropped from the maintenance lattice. He did not ignite his saber. Not yet. His boots struck the deck between them, one hand already moving. The first Blackblade brought his particle rifle up. Connel was inside the barrel before it cleared centerline, palm driving the weapon aside as three shots chewed smoking holes through the wall behind him.
His elbow found the seam beneath the helmet. The soldier hit the deck. Not dead, but down.
There was a difference.
Connel took the rifle before the body finished falling.
The second Blackblade recovered with inhuman speed, personal shield snapping bright as he surged in with a vibrosword. The blade shrieked through the dark, eager and precise. Connel fired once.
Not at the man.
At the emitter on his belt. The shield burst outward in a violent corona. The Blackblade did not scream, of course he did not. He kept coming. Connel respected that. Then he hated what had made such obedience possible.
Snap-hiss.
“Day” awakened in his hand, bright fire cutting a thin line through the dark. He met the vibrosword with a turn of the wrist, not strength against strength, but truth against momentum. The blade slid away. The Blackblade overcommitted by inches.
Inches were enough.
Connel’s shoulder drove into him. His knee took the soldier’s leg. His saber kissed the rifle harness, severing straps and power coupling in the same breath. The man crashed down beside his comrade.
Alive.
Ruined for the moment. That would do. Above, the second squad opened fire. The corridor became thunder. Particle fire hammered the dark in disciplined bursts. Connel moved before the first shot finished burning through the air. One round struck his pauldron and spun him into the wall hard enough to crack the stone facing beneath the durasteel ribs.
Pain flashed white under the mask.
He let it pass. Pain was information. Nothing more.
The gantry team adjusted immediately. Too fast for ordinary soldiers. They were compensating for darkness, spreading angles, denying vertical space, collapsing his options with professional cruelty. Elite. Good.
That meant they would understand the insult.
Connel reached down with the Force and pulled a Deathwasp projectile from the belt of a fallen Blackblade. It slapped into his palm. He armed it with his thumb and flicked it upward into the gantry supports. Then he moved.
The squad leader saw it.
“Scatter.”
They almost did.
Almost.
The projectile cracked open above them, not with grand fire, but with vicious pressure and shrapnel. Support brackets screamed apart. The gantry buckled, one half dropping, the other twisting sideways, just enough to turn clean firing angles into chaos.
Connel did not watch it fall.
He was already walking backward down the artery, stolen rifle in one hand, detonator in the other. One Blackblade rose behind him. Connel fired without looking. The shot struck the deck at the soldier’s feet and ruptured a conduit. Steam vomited across the corridor in a boiling wall. Not enough to kill.
Enough to blind.
Enough to slow.
Behind the steam, the squad began to regroup. They were not broken. They were angry now.
Perfect.
Connel opened the stolen Blackblade comm with an authorization code still bleeding from their squad leader’s kit. “Engineering resistance isolated. Jedi Shadow confirmed. Reinforcement advised.”
He let the words sit there.
No threat.
No boast.
The most convincing lie was always the one that respected the enemy’s arrogance. The red clusters shifted. More of them turned toward him. Away from the white routes. Away from Cora’s evacuation lanes. Away from the younglings. Connel lowered the rifle.
For one moment, in the trembling dark, he saw the map as more than tactics. He saw children moving. He saw doors opening. He saw seconds becoming lives, and somewhere deep beneath the armor, beneath the scars, beneath the old war and the older grief, something in him steadied. Not healed. Never that easy.
But aimed.
The Blackblades followed. Connel pressed the detonator. Behind them, the first corridor folded inward with a shriek of stone and durasteel. The path back vanished beneath a collapsed ceiling arch.
He pressed again.
A blast door dropped between the squads and fused halfway into its own frame, cutting their formation into pieces.
He pressed again.
Wall housings burst outward in a storm of sparks, smoke, and dead circuitry. The clean arterial passage became a broken throat. Red dots clustered. White dots moved.
Good.
One Blackblade forced himself through the smoke ahead, armor scarred, rifle raised, shield flickering but alive. Connel stopped. The soldier saw him then. Not clearly. Not fully. Just the mask.
Just the pale blade.
Just the shape in the dark that had taken their perfect advance and turned it into a question. For the first time, the Blackblade hesitated. Connel tilted his head.
You wanted the Jedi running.
He lifted the stolen rifle and aimed past the soldier, toward the charge nested in the wall behind him. His voice was calm. Almost gentle.
Run.
He fired.
The corridor vanished in white.
