The roar of hovertanks and starfighters seemed to fade.
To Kovach Na Kranakh, they became no more than background noise.
All around him, even the mighty clash of vehicles and troop formations was
dwarfed by the tectonic upheaval. It seemed as though all of
Tythos Ridge was bursting into flame, ancient peaks splitting open to spill their molten blood, valleys crumbling to dust until each became a jagged abyss. So much ash and steam flowed up from the fissures that a curtain of shadow fell over the battlefield, blotting out the sun. Beneath the sweltering darkness, glowing lightsabers and flying blaster bolts provided erratic bursts of illumination.
Finishing off a toppled Raider Walker with a precise stab of his laser sword, the Jedi looked up and met Kovach's challenging gaze. The ground rumbled and churned between them, threatening to throw anyone standing there from their feet - or even to give way entirely, as it had on the southern side of the ruins, toward Kaleth. There would be no reaching that ancient city now, Kovach knew. The Scar Hounds would have to fight and die
here, locked in with the Alliance forces like a pair of felinxes tied in a bag and thrown into a raging river.
The Jedi did not
walk over that dangerous ground. Instead he
leapt, clearing the entire rumbling field and landing a short distance away from Kovach. It was an inhuman distance to jump, a reminder that his sorcery made him far more powerful than his outward appearance might indicate. He advanced slowly, calmly, as if strolling through one of his temple's meditation gardens rather than facing a deadly foe in the midst of the apocalypse.
Such arrogance. It made Kovach burn with hatred, and his hatred lent him strength.
The Jedi struck one-handed, for the other hand held a smoking fragment of the ravaged moon... and yet that one arm stuck with the strength of five men.
Accursed sorcery. Kovach strained to hold back the blow, muscles bulging, hydraulic exoskeleton sparking. The edge of his dread blade rasped against the lightsaber in a tortured scream, as if one kyber crystal recognized the maimed half of another. Finally, gasping for breath, the Scav King managed to force the lightsaber aside before it could split him in twain down the middle.
But as they had clashed, reality had
unraveled.
It had been attempted before, of course. The infamous
Darth Vitiate had learned to strip the Force itself from entire planets, and had planned to remake the entire galaxy as he saw fit, an immortal god to rule over all. The so-called Droid God Omni had attempted to pull all of realspace into his realm of Oblivion, aiming to put an end to all chaos and inflict a new necro-mechanical order on the universe. And now Darth Solipsis, mastermind of the Maw, took his turn at remaking
all that is, with Tython as the lathe to reshape the cosmos.
An unearthly golden wind - can a wind
have a color? Somehow, this one did - whipped across the temple ruins, and it carried unearthly
potential along with it. Before Kovach's eyes, rust and battle damage flaked off his armor as if they were nothing more than dust being wiped away. Strands of ruddy brown appeared in his ash-grey beard, and the crow's feet around his eyes began to smooth out. A hundred meters to his left, a river of bubbling lava began to run
backwards, as if the ground were somehow slurping it back up.
From the west, a different wind blew, this one somehow
purple and carrying the reek of earth and rot. It blew across a scaly
wingmaw, the invasive predator flapping frantically as it tried to escape the battle. The creature crumbled
instantly to bones and dust, then scattered on the musty breeze. The ground to Kovach's right shattered like glass, a circle of it a meter across suddenly resembling the surface of a broken mirror. Beneath it, bathed in crimson light, he thought he could see the face of the first man he'd ever killed.
"The gods are here among us!" Kovach bellowed in exultation, eyes bright with fanatical flame.
"Witness this, Jedi! Neither your kyber blade nor your magic can save you now!" As the winds of the Netherworld howled around him, the Scav King lashed out with a two-handed strike, his cybernetic augmentations interfacing with his mighty battleframe to make the strike swifter and more powerful than any ordinary human could possibly achieve. He had the might and precision of the machine on his side.
"HAIL THE INEVITABLE!" he cried, dread blade howling.
Nothing, it seemed, could crack the Io cruiser's armor.
Though missiles, bomblets, and ion cannons pounded away at it, in addition to the few remaining guns of the grounded star destroyer, the
Rhand-class vessel just wouldn't go down. Surely the Alliance would have liked to have a few of these at Coruscant, or the NIO at Nirauan! The ship's return fire slammed into the grounded
Crucifix II star destroyer, breaking through shields at last to rupture upper decks. Surges of flame raced through its corridors. Bulkheads slammed shut in an effort to contain the many cascading explosions.
The damage was good news for the cruiser's gunners...
... but
very bad news for those in close proximity to the ship.
Draco Miles
, for example. As she cut her way through the ranks of Mawite defenders, the wounded (but not yet finished) star destroyer's upper levels went up in flames. A rain of razor-edged debris, white-hot from the fires of the torpedoes, spewed out across the battlefield. Warriors screamed as the blazing shrapnel burst through their bodies, ripping them apart or impaling them like pinned insects in some collector's display case. That wave of destruction came straight at Draco. She'd have to think fast to survive.
Sol Stazi
was in the same danger, if he was still in the area.
As the Io troops and tanks continued their advance, their high-power arsenal of incredibly rare weapons tearing through foes with merely ordinary equipment, the Flooded Plains were transforming. The last of the water along the marshland's eastern side drained away, leaving only exposed tree roots and boiled amphibians and a layer of silt that sucked at the boots of the warriors. With no water left to provide them shelter or relief, the trees and shrubs of the swamp went up in flames, blazing from the heat of the flowing magma.
The marsh became a forest of
torches.
As the mud and vegetation that had sheltered them dried out or burned, the Legion of the Leech was forced to pull back. Still guided by their tactically-minded elders, the lugubraa retreated in good order. They fall back to the northern shore of the lake, beyond the worst of the
Scylla AI
's ravages, though it seemed that nowhere in Tythos Ridge was truly safe from the devastation. Their heavy repeaters blazed the entire time, returning the enemy's fire with infantry-shredding rounds while starfighters gave them cover.
Just as the survivors of the raging battle began to adapt to the heat, of course, the battlefield went the other direction. A wave of cryonic energy spread out from the Io ritual site, its extreme cold freezing the burning trees so swiftly that they cracked like glass under the strain. As a great swath of burning marshland
shattered from the sudden temperature change, the warriors in the way were not spared. The lucky ones died instantly, frozen into gruesome sculptures. The rest felt the heat swiftly leached from their bodies.
They fell in eerie silence, pale and stiff, eyes wide open.
Beneath the starfighter stalemate, each side dividing its attacks between ground targets and airborne rivals, Onas Korv watched as her weapon arced through the ash-choked skies. For a moment she was just a girl of seventeen again, back in her school on Shor, listening to the roar of the crowd as her javelin flew further than
anyone else's on the field that day. For a moment she dared to believe that someone like her, an ordinary person, could
matter, could make some mark on this galaxy thick with gods and monsters.
Then, with contemptuous ease, an Io sorceress flicked it away.
Onas closed her eyes. So much for those dreams. Not in this galaxy. A simple soldier like her would be a legend with forty confirmed kills; the champions all around her waded through the bodies of
thousands. They took lives like hers without even
noticing, without stopping to wonder who she'd been and what had led her to this point. She was just another nameless enemy grunt to them, hardly even worth tallying on their figurative scorecards. She was a pawn in the endless conflicts between immortal, invincible gods.
Darth Vader, butcher of millions, had been offered redemption.
The heroes never even
asked all the stormtroopers they killed.
Onas opened her eyes to a trio of bright muzzle flashes up on the hill, and she knew she would be dead before she even heard the shots. There was no cover, nowhere to take refuge, and her armor would not stand up to repeated explosive rounds. This was it, then. All her life amounted to. She'd hoped she could make one last difference, go out with some kind of
meaning... but in the end, all she had to fall back on was that she'd been brave enough to charge a
god with nothing in her hands but a stick strapped with detonite.
She faced the shots head on.
And then the skies broke open.
The howling winds of the Netherworld scoured the battlefield, called by the world-shattering power of the Dark Voice's ritual. The sorcery was reaching a fever pitch, and
reality itself was beginning to warp and twist like a wooden board left out in the rain. The trio of explosive rounds streaked toward Onas... and then slowed to a
crawl a meter in front of her. They still flew, but in slow motion, the supersonic wakes of disturbed air they kicked up visible behind them like ripples in clear ballistic gel. Onas flexed her hands. They moved normally.
It was only the explosive rounds that had slowed...
... from flying at 1,700 meters per second...
... to a mere
centimeter per second.
Maybe the gods
were watching.
Or perhaps it was just a chaotic echo of the Force Slow curse unleashed by one of the Io commanders in orbit, the one currently wreaking havoc on the bridge of the
Fatalis. But Onas couldn't know that. She only saw what was right in front of her, and she took it as a sign. Maybe she could still die well. Maybe she could still
matter, with a little help from the Avatars. Rushing over to a nearby Mawite, who stood frozen and dead in the shadow of a broken tree, she wrenched his blaster pistol and warblade free of the sculpture.
Along with a frozen finger, which she hastily dropped.
Turning around, she ran down into one of the deep trenches that had once been the bottom of a woodland pond, the water evaporated and the silty bottom frozen solid enough that it didn't suck at her boots. That Io warrior who'd fired on her would no doubt be coming to finish the job, so if she wanted to
matter, she had to figure out
how before he did. She picked her way closer to the hillside, using the trench for cover, then popped out to squeeze off a flurry of shots at the charges being enchanted up there. Maybe, just maybe...
... she would still be able to trigger them.
