Location: Observation Post, Center Complex, outside wall and tower base
Objective: Warn Eclipse Forces of trap and initiate extraction
Equipment: One (1) custom-made shoto lightsaber,
One (1) CR-1 Blast Cannon, One (1) 50-meter length of syntherope, Four (4) standard thermal detonators
Appearance: Nondescript Imperial Uniform, (minor customizations). Mismatched with
standard-issue Ultranaut helmet.
Ground Forces: Eclipse ground troops, airdrop unit. Approx. 21 troops
Interacting with:
Dash Typho
,
Ingrid L'lerim
,
AMCO
,
Kainan Wolfe
(cameo)
Nearby Tags:
Loreena Arenais-Valhoun
,
Kascalion Giedfield
, Grand Moff Aut-X,
Will Westender
,
Kyrel Ren
, Adelle Bastiel, Curtis Learchin, Cedric
The Sergeant had been right about Na'an's ribs hurting like hell. That was expected; falling as far as she had, only to jerk to a sudden stop, was bound to cause a few bruises. Fortunately, Vidalu Na'an was used to powering her way through far worse than a few bruises. By the time the battalion made their way to where she was dangling, she'd managed to catch her breath and regain some footing.
"Good eye, Sergeant," she said, angling her helmet to acknowledge the soldier above her.
"You've got a decent instinct." He merely grunted at the compliment; his partner one line over, however, was whooping like he'd just seen the face of the Father himself.
"Good eye? Good eye? Star's END, what was that? What even WAS that?" The boy's feet danced along the tower wall, unable to contain his excitement. Na'an could feel the heat of her own flush warming the air inside her helmet, and once again she was grateful she'd chosen a full-face disguise. If he'd idolized her before for just taking out a few tanks, what she'd just done certainly wasn't going to help matters.
"You just exploded a--with literally nothing but a--and Dag, you--you were amazing--I have never--"
Interestingly, that got a reaction out of the Sergeant--his coarse face reddened, and suddenly he was busy fiddling with the line on his wrist. "Shut it, private," he said gruffly.
"We lost good men to that fighter, and we're not done yet. Stop squealing and focus."
"...Oh. Right."
The mention of their dead compatriots seemed to put the entire battalion back into a serious mood. The next 20 or so meters of descent passed in relative silence. Thankfully, the success of Na'an's little stunt seemed to discourage any fighters from breaking through the Commander's flight patterns and following after the first, so their only impediments were the occasional stop to blow up a turret.
Na'an had once again deferred to the Sergeant's direction during the descent, focusing more on their surroundings than on the progress of the men. For the most part, the chaotic prickle of lives--Light, Dark, otherwise--were all in conflict around them, but too far away to be a risk. She felt a familiar pain as they passed a certain floor (
triple fire across the shoulders, hot dust and coppery blood), but it was inside the tower, distracted.
He wouldn't even think to look farther than the black hole of ego he'd chosen to focus on, and telling the battalion they were just now passing the Eternal Emperor would only scare them. Instead, she simply urged herself down further to make room for the Sergeant, only sparing a second to scratch the itch at her shoulder blade.
Coming down from the outside had been the right call. They'd completely bypassed anything the men wouldn't be able to handle...At least, until they were five meters from the ground.
That was when the Sithspawn emerged.
Na'an caught the feel of them seconds before they emerged, while the Sergeant was prepping the first few men for dismounting the ropes. She stilled at the coppery
zing of blind hate and bloodlust, her mind once again spinning fast and hot. Of course. This wasn't a lab, but of
course there were going to be Sithspawn. The Sith of the Unknown Regions were pompous and arrogant and far too rich, of
course they'd bring slaves to do their fighting for them. And these ones were
nasty--Na'an caught a glimpse of massive vibro-axes, bright silvery armor capped with sharp-bladed wings.
"Stop!" Only the Sergeant stopped at first when she started yelling; she had to put a little effort into it to get the other lines to listen.
"Hostiles below! I repeat, hostiles below!"
The Sergeant's partner caught on quick. He turned so fast those on the rope below him spun, bellowing at the top of his lungs to the lines Na'an's voice couldn't reach.
"Everybody, stop!! We've got trouble below, you're gonna get killed, everybody, stop, STOP!!"
That was when the first of the Sithspawn heard them. Its head swiveled upwards to regard the battalion, dangling from ropes just overhead. Then, as Na'an watched in horror, its wings spread wide, and it let out a horrible screech as it leaped straight upward, aiming right for the private's line.
The private didn't seem to even notice, still trying to warn the other lines. Na'an opened her mouth to yell for him to stop, to
move out of the way, but there was no time.
"If you don't stop you're gonna die, We need to regroup, the Jedi said--"
The first Sithspawn swung its axe. The Private's shouts were cut short, and at the sight of five more men falling to the ground, one of them missing an arm, it wasn't Na'an's voice that sounded next.
"Gorello!!!"
****
The Sergeant was gone.
Gone. Mindless. Lost. He was barely aware of the Jedi below him screeching, an echo of his own agony. Had he looked, he would have seen her reach out and up as if to grab the
thing that had hurt Gorello--
oh, gods, Gorello, no no no no--would have seen the being shudder to a stop in midair, only to slam into the side of the tower once, twice, five times, again and again and again until it was no longer identifiable as a being at all. As it were, all he could register were the rumbles of those impacts shaking through his boots, into his fingertips.
He'd watched a
monster slice Gorello's arm clean off. He'd watched him fall. Watched him
die. And just like before, he'd done nothing.
Nothing. That boy, his boy,
his Gorello was gone, and he hadn't even--there wasn't even a chance--
"Sergeant!"
The sound of the Jedi's voice was so far away, like it was coming from underwater. He shook his head, not wanting to hear it, not wanting to hear or see anything if it wasn't him, but it came again, too loud and shrill to ignore.
"Sergeant!!"
The Jedi was grabbing onto his boot, shaking it hard enough to make the rope wobble.
"Your men need you," she said roughly.
"I need you. We can save them, but we have to move!"
What? Save them? Dag didn't understand, but the Jedi let go of his boot and pointed down to the ground. The men from the cut line had landed in a pile at the base of the tower, with Gorello visible at the very top. The sight of the private, white-faced and bloody, sent yet another bolt through his heart, but this one was sharp,
galvanizing, because the drop had been less than ten meters, probably not more than seven, and at the top of the pile of men
Gorello was still moving. Feebly, barely, and with clearly great pain, but
he was moving.
"You see it now?" the Jedi said, and he did. He
did. Sergeant Dag had seen what he needed to see, and now he'd be willing to follow this weirdo into hell if it meant saving his boy.
"What do we do?" he bellowed, already shouldering his rifle. A quick look around showed that one of the other monsters had taken to the air, gliding towards the other ropes. To their credit, his men weren't about to have more of them taken out the same way the first had. The lines were already swinging, in a way he recognized as being a less-nimble version of what the Jedi had shown them only minutes earlier. Even clumsy, their position gave them the advantage of being unpredictably mobile. One of the lines had even mastered the trick of slacking the rope to change directions in a second, leaving the monster burying their vibro-axe into the empty space their trajectory should have sent them. The beast howled in frustration, shrugging off the rubble as it pulled the axe loose, but the swing had robbed it of momentum, and apparently its repulsors couldn't support its weight in the air alone. It dropped, landing heavily next to the pile of men, and one of the other two took to the air in its place.
"They surrounded the tower, but they're only sending up one at a time. So they don't interfere with each other getting at us, see? And the way they're choosing targets, the fact that they're ignoring the ones that fell..." The Jedi fell silent in a way Dag was beginning to recognize; she peered down at the ground, watching the two Sithspawn there with a sharpness even
he could feel.
"I'm going down," she said suddenly.
"Keep the men moving, and keep them LOUD. You want whichever one's in the air not knowing which direction they're swinging in. Yell, scream, fire any direction you want, but BE LOUD."
"What's that gonna do?"
"Hopefully enough."
With that, the Jedi reached down for her own feet, and without so much as an explanation kicked off one boot, then the other. Then, with a quick wrench of the rope at her ribs, she cut herself loose and dropped down silently to ground level. Once her feet were on the ground, she didn't go right for the monsters with her lightsaber, like Dag had expected. Instead, she tacked sideways, angling around nearby obstacles until she was behind the nearest one. She moved surprisingly quick for such a little thing--and without her boots, her footsteps didn't make any sound at all.
The Jedi was making a special effort to move quietly. The Jedi had told
him to be loud.
And just like before, Dag suddenly understood.
He understood even before the Jedi sprang for the back of the nearest monster, landing squarely between the wings, and slid her sharp little fingers under the hinge of its helmet, into the tiny gap just under the chin. It bucked, but it couldn't reach around its own wings, it moved too slow to stop her from pulling, hard
. The two grappled for a few desperate seconds, the beast flailing, the Jedi's arms shaking with the strain. When the helmet started to give it gave in pieces, each panel exposing some kind of tendril burrowing into the skin underneath. Those tendrils followed suit quickly--some of them pulling out out whole and slick with blood, others tearing like muscle. The helmet's faceplate finally gave way with fizzing wires and snapping tubes and spurts of mottled green fluid, and as the Jedi flung it away the monster gave a horrible strangled screech that said this helmet was far more crucial than simple head protection. The monster dropped the axe and dropped to its knees. It scrabbled desperately at its own face, and Dag now could see it had no eyes.
Blind. These damned things were
blind. They were depending on the suits to hunt, through sensors or something. The Jedi had said she didn't want them knowing what direction they were swinging in, saying that they could manage that by being
loud. Create enough chaos, muddle the air with enough pointless, hard-to-pinpoint noise, keep the suits from being able to tell good data from bad...
From the moment he understood, then, Sergeant Dag started screaming and never stopped.
He pushed off from the wall of the tower and swung, screaming the news to his men. They caught on quickly, to the broad strokes if not to the details. One repeated his cry, then another and another, until the entire battalion was howling
'blind, blind, karkin' blind' loud enough to echo off the walls. He shouldered his rifle and fired over and over, sometimes at the one on the ground, sometimes at the one in the air, sometimes at both when they traded off, and all the while he screamed. He screamed instructions, encouragements, nonsense phrases, ribald songs, obscenities in every tongue he knew, all the while dancing his line back and forth at random. He even threw one of his spare charges and set it off midair, and was pleased to find that two other soldiers had the same idea, exploding them near the beast like fireworks.
And it was
working--Dag laughed when one missed him, howled his laughter right into its face, even daring a kick as it made its way back down for the tradeoff. Over on the other ropes, one, then another of the men fell to the axes, but that was fewer than it should have been, far far fewer, and even then they screamed like rebels all the way down.
Meanwhile on the ground, the Jedi was doing her job too. That first sneak attack had taken out the spare, but its dying had alerted the other two of the treat, and she'd finally regnited that lightsaber to take the one on the ground as it attacked. The beasts were bigger than her, well over a foot larger, the vibro-axes massive in their claws, but they couldn't match the fluidity and speed of the tiny Force-user. Wherever they swung, her scarlet blade was there to parry; wherever they moved, there she seemed to be, flying through the air like the ghost Gorello had claimed. In contrast to the men on the ropes, she made no sound as she traded blow after blow, staggering her attacks as they each took their turn at her. Before long, both of the remaining monsters' armor held glowing scoremarks where she had struck.
The fact that they
were still taking turns, though, was a worry. Dag wondered, still screaming, if it were an advantage for them or not. Were they were too addled by the noise and confusion to switch tactics, or was this was a strategy to wear the Jedi out and keep the battalion too busy to help? But the Jedi seemed to consider this at the same moment he did, and must have decided to break the pattern before the pattern broke her. She landed from a high, arcing flurry of attacks, stutter-stepped back to put herself out of the range of an axe-swing. Dag almost called out in alarm when she reached for her own helmet next. But rather than take it off entirely, she tilted it just enough to expose her mouth to the air. As the monster roared, rounding back on her with its axe raised, she simply waited.
Sucked in a breath large enough to swell her lungs. Held it, her body shaking, until the moment the beast was on her.
Then the little Jedi opened her mouth and
roared back in a Bellow loud enough to shake the tower stones.
Dag staggered, pulling at the rope to regain his footing, but the monster on the ground had no such luck. The Force of the Bellow hit it point blank, slamming into it with the impact of a train, and it hurtled backwards into the base of the tower. Before it could pry itself free, the Jedi was upon it. She used the moment of imbalance, to close the gap between them, raise her lightsaber and plunge it into the beast's blade-scored neck. The monster thrashed wildly, but for only a second. When the Jedi righted herself, it had already gone still.
Now all that was left was the one still in the air. Dag kept bellowing, his heart glad in his chest as the men all directed their fire at the beast gliding between them. The Jedi took the moment to put away her blade, but before Dag could wonder how she planned to kill this one without it, she threw both hands upwards like she was grasping the sky.
When her fists closed, the monster halted in the air only feet from the Sergeant, its body shuddering. It screamed at him; Dag screamed back, louder than ever, one last act of defiance.
Then the Jedi brought her hands down, furiously, once, twice, thrice, five times. The monster hurtled downwards, slammed into the ground once, twice, thrice, five times. Again and again and again, until it was no longer recognizable as a being at all.
The men fell silent. Dag fell silent, suddenly realizing that his throat was raw from all the noise. It hurt like
hell. But then, you had to be alive to hurt like hell, didn't you?
At least, the Jedi would have agreed. She looked around, like she was looking for one more monster that needed killing. Once again, Dag found himself thinking that she looked a little lost.
When she looked back up at the men on the ropes, though, the moment had passed. It was like she'd finally assured herself the moment was safe for them.
"You did good, boys," she said, breathing hard. Before she slid her helmet back down, Dag could see the shaky smile on her lips.
"Now come get our wounded. We got places to be."
Sterling Kinslayer
Tiberius Bayne
||
Broka the Hutt
||
Marlon Sularen
Hailyn
||
Eldaah Aderyn
||
Thaelius
||
Taeli Raaf
