R E S O L V E
The galaxy had spent weeks waiting for the next blow.
Since the Sith Order's devastating strike against New Cov, the frontier had become a battlefield without a front. Warships vanished into hyperspace only to emerge somewhere else along the Blackwall. Border outposts reported fleeting contacts, convoys disappeared, listening stations went dark, and raiding forces struck isolated systems before melting back into the unknown, leaving behind burning installations, shattered defenses, and a hundred conflicting reports. No two attacks looked the same, yet together they formed a pattern no strategist could quite decipher.
Some believed the Sith were testing response times. Others argued they were searching for weaknesses, measuring how quickly fleets could be pulled from one threatened system and thrown toward another. Every alarm demanded another redeployment, every distress call divided attention across an expanding frontier, and every engagement left the same question hanging over the Republic.
Where would the real blow fall?
The answer came above Thyferra.
Hyperspace ruptured without warning as Sith warships poured from the Blackwall in numbers unseen since the conflict began. Cruisers and carriers emerged alongside assault ships, troop transports, and escorts until the space above the planet filled with the unmistakable weight of invasion. There was no probing maneuver this time, no fleeting contact before retreat. The Sith had come in force, and before the scale of what had arrived could be fully understood, the first weapons were already leaving their launchers.
The missiles did not descend toward military bases or orbital defense sites. They did not seek out shield generators, armored formations, or command centers. Their trajectories carried them instead toward the vast Alazhi fields that stretched across Thyferra.
It was a horror the planet had known before.
Generations earlier, Sith fire had consumed the Alazhi, leaving broad stretches of Thyferra blackened beneath the smoke. The soil had eventually been reclaimed, the crops replanted, and the sprawling network of farms and refineries restored until Thyferra once again stood at the center of the galaxy's bacta trade. What had once been devastation had passed into history, its scars covered beneath generations of new growth.
The Satal missiles opened above those same fields.
Their payloads scattered across the plantations, and fire appeared almost everywhere at once. It began in scattered flashes among the Alazhi before surging outward with terrifying speed, swallowing cultivated rows and racing across the boundaries between fields. By the time the scale of what had been unleashed became clear, the flames were already consuming the Alazhi in great advancing sheets.
Smoke followed close behind, thick and black, rising in immense columns that darkened the sky above the plantations. Years of cultivation disappeared into the spreading inferno as entire stretches of Alazhi were consumed. The target itself made the intention plain. This was no incidental loss suffered beneath an orbital bombardment, nor had the crop simply happened to stand between the Sith and some greater military objective. The opening salvo had been directed at the very beginning of the bacta supply, and the Sith Order knew precisely what it was destroying.
Alazhi became bacta, and bacta bought something warfare could never produce enough of: another chance to live. It filled hospitals and relief vessels, military infirmaries and emergency clinics. It restored bodies broken by violence and kept wounds that should have been fatal from becoming death sentences. The substance had become so commonplace across the galaxy that its existence could almost be taken for granted, yet much of it began here, growing beneath Thyferra's skies.
The cost of the fires would reach far beyond the blackened earth they left behind. Every harvest consumed meant less bacta entering the refineries, fewer shipments leaving Thyferra, and less medicine moving along the supply lines that stretched outward across the galaxy. The full consequence could not be known in that moment, but the cruelty of the choice could. The Sith had returned to one of Thyferra's oldest wounds and reached for it deliberately, fully aware of what would be lost when the Alazhi burned.
Above the planet, the invasion was already spreading into the orbital lanes. Sith warships drove deeper into the system toward freighters laden with freshly processed bacta, cargo that the fires below could no longer touch. Boarding craft broke from their carriers and accelerated toward the transports while heavier vessels maneuvered around them, turning ships carrying some of the galaxy's most precious cargo into battlefields of their own.
Destroying those freighters outright would destroy what the Sith intended to possess. Every transport taken intact represented bacta that could be denied to the High Republic and claimed instead by the Sith Order, making control of the vessels every bit as important as the fleet action surrounding them.
The assault on the surface carried that same deliberate purpose. Sith armies descended beneath the pall spreading across Thyferra, moving toward refineries, processing centers, and the infrastructure responsible for transforming Alazhi into bacta. Unlike the fields surrounding them, those facilities had been conspicuously spared the opening bombardment.
Among the advancing formations came sealed containers and specialized equipment protected with unusual care. They did not resemble the tools of demolition crews sent merely to reduce the refineries to rubble. Whatever purpose they served, the Sith were carrying them toward the very facilities they had chosen to leave standing.
Thyferra was not simply another world to add to a border or another battlefield upon which to bloody an enemy. It was the beating heart of bacta production and trade, a resource whose value reached into nearly every war, disaster, and hospital in the known galaxy. Control of the planet meant control over a resource capable of sustaining armies, restoring the wounded to battle, and influencing how long a prolonged war could continue before casualties became impossible to replace.
That advantage belonged to the High Republic, and the Sith Order had come to take it.
The burning fields did not contradict that ambition. They revealed the price the Sith were willing to exact in pursuit of it. Thyferra could be replanted. Its damaged infrastructure could be rebuilt. What mattered now was breaking the system that supplied the High Republic while seizing the world from which that system could eventually rise again beneath Sith control.
The scattered violence along the Blackwall had reached its end. Whatever purpose the raids and feints of the preceding weeks had served, there could be no mistaking what had now emerged from behind it. The Alazhi were burning, Sith fleets were closing around the bacta above, and armies were descending toward the facilities that remained.
The Sith had burned these fields before. This time, they intended to remain long enough to decide what grew from the ashes.
The Battle of Thyferra had begun.
Above Thyferra, the war is not fought solely between warships as High Republic Command rallies to coordinate a unified defense of the system against the enemy forces threatening to overwhelm it.
Several transport freighters, only recently loaded with freshly refined Bacta, remain trapped in low orbit as the invasion engulfs the system. The largest of these vessels carries enough Bacta to sustain an entire sector through a month of unrelenting warfare, while several smaller transports hold cargoes valuable enough to alter the course of countless battles yet to come.
Neither side can afford to destroy them.
Instead, the freighters have become the center of desperate boarding operations as Sith strike teams, Republic defenders, marines, commandos, and security forces fight deck by deck for control of the vessels. Around them, capital ships and fighter squadrons wage careful engagements, attempting to protect or seize the transports without reducing their priceless cargo to burning wreckage.
Every corridor, cargo bay, engineering section, and bridge has become its own battlefield. Some seek to escort the freighters to safety. Others intend to claim the shipments for the Sith war machine. A single transport secured or lost could determine how long entire campaigns continue across the galaxy.
Participants are encouraged to take part in boarding actions, starfighter escorts, marine assaults, security operations, and limited fleet engagements centered around the Bacta transports. Whether fighting through the cramped interior of a freighter or battling in the void just beyond its hull, your actions may decide who controls the galaxy's most valuable resource before these ships ever leave Thyferra's orbit.
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