Another wave of rumbling shook the asteroid base as Brodan’s strikecraft continued to strafe the facility, shaking the hallway leading to the ion canon’s central control room rather fiercely. Aculia stumbled forward as she closed the gap between her and the guards, who moved forward as if to catch her from falling.
“Hey, caref-”
The words from the leftmost guard were cut off as the woman suddenly turned that seemingly uncoordinated stumble forward into a low ready stance, drew her “multitool” from her belt, and activated it as she made a speedy diagonal upwards cut across the center of his chest in one fluid motion. The guard to the right could only watch in horror as a thrumming blade of pure white that had cut apart his friend was then swiftly brought down on him in a downward diagonal swing as the girl seamlessly pivoted toward him and completed her lightsaber drawing technique as the corpses of both guards fell to the ground. She hadn’t even had to draw upon the Force to execute that, just let her body carry out the motions she had practiced thousands of times.
Weak.
Taking a deep breath, she prepared herself for what was to come, opening herself up fully to the Force. She did not have time to play around and savor what would come next thanks to whatever idiot admiral had decided to deviate from the plan. Extending her senses into the next room, she could easily feel around eight or so pirates and fixed their positions in her mind, with one sitting behind a command desk Some of them were starting to get up from their chairs, hearing the loud thumps as the two guards hit the floor outside.
“What the hell was tha-” the lieutenant started to ask as he began to rise from his seat as the door opened up to reveal Aculia, lightsaber in hand. Her blue eyes were ice cold as the Force flowed into her, bolstering her natural physical speed and strength, and then again enhancing the former to preternatural levels with a combination of Enhance Attribute and Force Speed. Then, the carnage began.
Aculia’s blade tore through the pirates in a devastating flurry of blows that seemed to come from almost every direction at once as she moved like a raging whirlwind through her foes, her afterimage seeming to be in multiple places at once. Most of them hadn’t even managed to realize what was happening before they were impaled or torn apart by her blade, the lieutenant had just barely managed to flip open the leather strap holding his blaster into his holster before he was the subject of a vicious decapitation that sent his head flying into the wall behind him. In a few seconds, it was all over. The technique was not called Divine Whirlwind for nothing.
If another Jedi were nearby, they certainly would have felt the sudden heavy burst of Force usage and then swift, brutal, and cold mist of death and a hint of the Dark Side that followed as eight lives were snuffed out almost instantaneously and with pleasure.
After finishing the brutal display, Aculia smiled as a few beads of sweat ran down her forehead. Although the prey she had encountered so far was weak and uninteresting, especially compared to Ekun himself, at least there had been enough of them to get some decent exercise.
The asteroid base shook violently once more, and she frowned, then pouted, as she reached into the dead lieutenant’s pockets and pulled out his command keycard, placing it on the desk. Then, shoving his headless corpse off the chair, she plugged it into the onboard control computer and started to look through the ion cannon’s systems. Then clicked her tongue with frustration.
Of course this isn’t the only control center, just the main one. Despite being incompetent, they at least had the foresight to have redundant command systems. At the rate Admiral Ignore-the-Plan-I-Need-My-Glory is bringing those three Star Destroyers and strikecraft forward, I won’t be able to reach and disable the other ones in time before the backups kick in or they pull command from here when they realize it’s not firing properly. They’ll start opening fire on the rest of the fleet and probably destroy half of it before we can punch through the heavy shields and take out the cannon. Not only will Mr. Glory Hound find himself disabled and dead, the Empire will take so much damage here I’m not even sure they will be able to pay me.
She sat down in the command chair to think for a few moments, tapping her gloved hands on the desk, thinking how best to handle the situation. Disabling this command station would do nothing, and she did not have the explosives or skill in certain Force techniques to destroy the massive cannon on her own. Then, she smiled and began entering some commands into the targeting computer.
[[[WARNING: POWER THRESHOLD INCREASED TO 500% OF NORMAL MAXIMUM BASELINE. SEVERE STRUCTURAL DAMAGE LIKELY IF FIRED. ENTER COMMAND AUTHORIZATION OVERRIDE.]]]
Aculia picked up the dead lieutenant’s keycard and plugged it in to the computer.
[[[COMMAND AUTHORIZATION OVERRIDE ACCEPTED. INCREASING POWER THRESHOLD. STAND BY.]]]
The lights in Aculia’s section of the asteroid base and likely nearby sections began to flicker off and on violently as more and more power was drawn into the capacitors of the ion cannon. Angry messages started to blare from the dead lieutenant’s commlink. She didn’t have much time. Glancing at the targeting solutions and projected arc size, she winced.
The arc of the shot is going to be much wider than usual and have a longer duration and range than usual, as could be expected, and there are no good places to fire it directly into space…it’ll be at least a glancing blow against some of our forces at best…but I don’t have much time.
She glanced at Admiral Glory Hound’s three leading star destroyers. From what she remembered from her blue-skinned boss’s long unprompted speech to her on the capabilities of each ship in the assault that she sort of half-listened to, they were among the sturdier ships of the line the Empire had. If she had to fire the arc somewhere near their forces, they would have the best chance of not imploding.
[[[TARGETING SOLUTION SET.]]]
[[[FIRE [Y/N]?]]
[[[ [Y/N]? ]]
[[[ FINAL CONFIRMATION [Y/N] ]]]
[[[ [Y] ]]]
[[[ FIRING IN 10, 9, 8… ]]]
“Time to go.” Aculia muttered to herself as she quickly exited the chair, moved over the bodies, and swiftly exited the door, lightsaber in hand. That shot was going to cause all sorts of hell she did not want to be around for.
As she walked down the hallway, a massive
THRRRUUUUUUUPPPP rippled through the base, and the outside of it temporarily flared up with blue light as the giant, glowing pulse of ionized energy, far larger than normal, erupted from the top of the ion cannon, its center passing just to the side of Bradon’s lead Star Destroyers, who were lucky to only take a glancing blow. Ripples of ionized energy tore through them, wreaking havoc on every system from life support to shields. The ion cannon itself exploded in a rather spectacular fashion, ionized debris hurtling at high speed in various directions, some hitting the base, some hitting some of the strikecraft, and some barreling toward the three forward Star Destroyers.
This time she was not able to brace herself properly against what felt like a massive earthquake striking the entirety of the base, and she fell onto her knees, only barely able to put her hands out in front of herself before she hit the deck.
“Frig you, glory hound admiral…” she muttered angrily as the lights flickered wildly, red emergency lights started to come on, and alarms started to blare all throughout the base. She was going to have to get out of here, and soon.
“Ac-whatever the hell your name is-what was that?” Borko demanded of her, as he came running down the hallway.
“Command wants to know what happened!”
I don’t have time for you.
Reaching out with the Force, she pulled the vibroblade she had left against the wall forward at speed, twisting it as she did so. With the sickening sound of flesh being torn and a loud
“Urrrk!”, Borko collapsed to the ground in pain.
Aculia stood up.
“H-help…” Borko pleaded reaching out a hand to her desperately. She walked over to the hilt of the blade, turned the vibration function on, and, without looking back, shoved it forward and upwards through his chest and head. Blood spattered across her space suit, hair, and face, and her eyes took on a dangerous light as another death rippled across the Force. She left the blade there as she made her exit down the hall.
“Time to leave this blasted rock…” she muttered softly, making her way to the hangar where her Arken had been, and where her small escape craft had been carefully concealed.
Grand Shepherd Burtch
Omar Dobson
Cruk Tuk
Brodan Dobson
Martin Dux
[60 EP/200 EP].
Loreena Arenais-Valhoun
GreyJedi
Haon Hafey
)
