The Sharp End

[Eralam]

Crime scenes were not Eralam's specialty. The ancient Shard was no one's idea of an investigator. Investigations required patience and subtlety, two things that he had never been known for. None the less, he found himself standing in a room full of dead bodies, trying to piece together what had happened.

The location? A Shard Network safehouse on a small world of no great importance. The locals knew the place to be a small tavern with excellent beer and mediocre food, but that was just a front. The safehouse was more of a way station than anything, a place where Shards passing through on official business could stop in and relax for a little bit before heading back out into the galaxy.

The planet was out of the way enough that it didn't attract much in the way of commerce, but close enough to a major hyperspace lane that cheapskates who didn't want to deal with the inflated costs associated with major travel hubs could make their way here easily enough. That made it more or less perfect for the Network's purposes.

The tavern itself sat over the safehouse, which, like most safehouses, took the whole "underground" thing literally. It was strewn liberally with blood and offal, the stench of death thick in the air. Whatever had come through here had literally torn the occupants limb from limb, and in some cases, had beaten the victims to death with their own body parts. And yet, as near as Eralam could tell, none of the bodies had physically been touched. There were no ligature marks, nothing to suggest that they had been manually gripped for the removal. It was almost like a bomb had gone off, but there was no trace of a chemical explosive, and the mayhem was far too organized.

Down below, in the safehouse, the scene was perhaps even worse, from a Shard's perspective. The Shards had been torn from their droid bodies, ground into dust finer than flour, and spread across the room. It coated every surface with a fine layer of powder, into which strange runes had been scrawled.

The runes were found upstairs as well, scribbled in the blood and feces and occasionally spelled out with entrails, but the ones upstairs left no real impression in the Force. At least, not one that Eralam could sense. Downstairs, however, stank of something Dark. It was almost like Alchemy, but somehow corrupted, which was quite a feat, considering that Alchemy usually started Dark and went downhill from there.

The place felt like a yawning chasm in the Force, and the stench of decay and corruption hung heavily in the ether. The Iron Knight was quite sure that the culprits were long gone; the bodies were cold by the time he got there, and the impression had started to fade. He was just as certain, however, that this place was going to attract any nearby Force users, just like it had attracted them. Maybe they would have answers.

[member="Cerita Sarova"]

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Eralam"]

The galaxy was filled with places overlooked by most sentients.

Worlds that just weren't all that eye-catching when compared towards the Coruscants, the Ruusans or the Korribans of this Galaxy. But this was exactly why Cerita was here in the first place -- see, most people make the mistake of putting their little, pretty things on these worlds with lots of history, lots of potential and consequently lots of traffic. It was hubris, probably, thinking that they had the sole claim on worlds that were embedded into the very fabric of history.

Cerita? Cerita just cared about anonymity and privacy.

There were lots of people out there who spend more time eyeing up other people's property, instead of trying to come up with their own little thing.

She was still looking at Tatooine for her bigger projects, the location there perfect for what she had in mind, but it was never a bad idea to spread your eggs over a couple of baskets. So here she was and here things were getting more interesting by the minute, she had landed about three days ago with a small squad of Qo'saarai Tuk'ata and some hired mercs; astrogation experts from Clan Rekali, things like that.

They weren't in space, but a couple of 'em had a real knack for finding out some interesting locations just by walking. Part of her wanted to study it, the majority spoke against it and told her there were more important things at hand. They had found the perfect spot about two days ago -- a cavern system with a variety of crystals, not as bountiful as Antlean, but few worlds could compete with that one, it would be good for a few little crafting projects here and there.

The locals had pointed out the tavern first, but the closer she came... the more she started to wonder. The mercs and Tuk'ata were still back at the site, trying to figure out how to best ensure structural integrity while expanding the caverns to fit their need.

So she couldn't rely for them on help when the woman sensed that particular sense of darkness. Alchemy, Ceri could smell it from miles away if it was palpable enough.

This was.

The Inn came into view, no big crowds were surrounding it yet, so whatever had happened; and something big had happened, otherwise she wouldn't have felt it from three clicks away, wasn't public knowledge yet. Again, a part, not the majority, but a part, wanted to turn around and leave.

Her curiosity won this time and she crossed the distance between the forest outskirts and the inn itself.

She knocked.

 

[Eralam]

"What the kriff?"

It wasn't that Eralam wasn't expecting someone to show up. You couldn't throw a rock these days without hitting a Force user (possibly as a result of natural selection, now that the Jedi weren't maintaining celibacy and the Sith were out in the open), and anyone with half a talent could feel the wrongness of the place.

No, what he wasn't expecting was that someone to knock.

He opened the door, only to find a green woman who gave off enough of a Force aura for the Shard to suspect she could be dangerous. The green tint wasn't anything unusual. There were plenty of green species, after all. However, something told him that she wasn't from the typical evolutionary branches. He was terrible at deciphering minds, and this one was more alien than most. Maybe plant based? There were a few of those out there, though for the life of him he couldn't think of any names.

Oh well.

"I'm going to assume," he said as he gestured for her to enter, "that you felt the same disturbance that drew me here. If that's the case, welcome."

The Shard's voice was deep and gravelly, like a foghorn that had been used as a rock smasher. There was a slight electronic buzz to it that hinted at its mechanical nature.

"If not, well, you may want to turn around if you've eaten recently. Someone made quite the mess."

That was an understatement. Despite the age of the scene, the remains were remarkably well preserved thanks to the sanitation field that covered the inside of the tavern. However, no amount of technological wizardry could halt the decay forever, and the smaller bits were starting to rot. The smell must have been incredible.

[member="Cerita Sarova"]

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Eralam"]

"Not originally no." The Vinithi responded after a moment of observing the speaking droid. She could clearly sense the Force within him -- so not a droid at all... there were a couple of possibilities roaming through her mind right now, with the biggest contender being that the droid was simply a chassis for something inside.

Something old, ancient, something that dwarfed her in both experience as well as mastery of the Force.

There was just something sobering about meeting someone who probably outlived you by a couple of centuries, but whilst for most people that might have been a sign to check out... for Cerita it was a sign to check in.

"I found myself in need of something to eat and drink." Water with some sugar, if they had any. She looked past him towards the scene inside.

"...they really did a number on this place, didn't they? May I?" If allowed, she would brush past or follow the Shard inside to check out the scene in greater detail. The plant, because she was a plant-based species... mostly, didn't show much in the way of emotions, there wasn't any repulsion brushing her features.

Just her nostrils flaring slightly as the scents washed over her.

"Interesting."

 

[Eralam]

"Interesting sums it up nicely," Eralam replied as he stepped out of the way. "Whatever did this is long gone, so I'm pretty sure it's safe to be here, but watch your step."

While the green woman was looking around, the Shard pulled a high grade holocam from a belt pouch and began taking footage of the massacre. There were a number of different things that caught his attention, but he wasn't sure which ones were relevant and which ones weren't. There was an unusual number of female corpses, for starters. Places like this tended to cater towards male clientele. The bawdy songs that played softly in the background, the holograms of dancing girls that one could view at the tables, the racy posters on the wall, it all screamed "lonely spacer bait." And yet, fully half of the corpses were women of varying age and species, most of them dressed like locals.

Though their bodies were horrifically mangled, they appeared to have died more cleanly than the males. The males appeared to have been ripped apart and eviscerated while they were still alive, while the females were mutilated postmortem. Or at least that's what he thought, based on the lack of bruising around the wounds.

Could that be a clue?

Possibly. More than likely it spoke more of the nature of the killer than the crime.

The runes looked strangely familiar, but there was something off about them. Off the top of his head, Eralam could think of a few languages that used similar inscriptions. They were mostly cuneiform-based, like something one would find on a Massassi temple, but there was a jagged roughness to them that made identification tricky.

Experimentally, he poked one with a finger. Not his finger, mind, not when there were plenty of spares to be had. The digit blackened and crumbled into ash. The Shard dropped it before the corruption could spread to his own hand.

"Yeah, definitely watch your step," he called out, taking a step back from the smoking pile of ash. "These things are live."

[member="Cerita Sarova"]

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Eralam"]

"No kidding." Cerita mumbled, while doing her own prodding around the scene. This didn't particularly concern her -- in the sense that she wasn't getting anxious about the scene, instead she methodically went through her observations and pondered the ramifications of the greater scene starting to from in her mind.

"This... this is very bad."

She stepped closer towards the runes, while making sure she didn't touch them herself.

"That? Those are the regalia of the Ninûshwodzakut." Knotters of entrails.The syllables flowed past her lips like she was pronouncing something ordinary and common, instead of a five-syllable word in a language mostly dead this side of the 'verse. "They were Sith- Pureblood, nasty caste of shapers and alchemists who ended up exiled from Korriban, because even the Sith thought they went too far."

A frown rose up.

"They shouldn't be alive... they shouldn't be here." The Centrality? She could have understood that. Tund was insane when it came to the Darkside corruption.

"How bad is it downstairs?"

 

[Eralam]

"Bad," Eralam said, hints of a grimace in his voice. "Maybe not from an organic perspective, but trust me, for a Shard, it's just as bad as up here."

He paused for a minute.

"Uh, Shards are inorganic crystalline lifeforms. We can use droids sort of like organics use bodies. Whoever did this ripped a mess of Shards from their droid bodies, crushed them into powder, and coated the room. More runes like this."

The Shard was no fan of the Sith, but he made a habit out of learning as much about potential enemies as possible. That was the whole purpose of the Shard Network, after all. But these guys, he had never even heard of them. Which told him that the angsty little bastards were better at keeping secrets than he had thought.

"These...Ninûshwodzakut, you called them? What was their deal?"

[member="Cerita Sarova"]

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Eralam"]

"A Shard, I knew it!" She exclaimed, before shaking her head at herself. "Wasn't sure if Tsils had a habit of wandering around the Galaxy in a droid chassis, but Shards... yes, now I see it."

Then Cerita caught herself in her excitement. This wasn't the scene to be excited in -- even if it didn't bother her all that much, the feces, the gore and blood and ripped bodies, the darkside corruption deep, deep down... maybe someone else would have been disturbed by it all.

But she had been in the presence of the Dark Forge. Worked her arts around it and was taught by Valik, Rave and Dissero, if there was one thing she was good at?

It was filing away horrors into little sections of her brain for later self-examination.

"My apologies, I have always wanted to meet a Shard." Ceri explained her enthusiasm, before taking a longer look at the way the corpses were spread out.

It seemed... too clean. Obviously it was a horrible scene, gore, blood, all the things, but it seemed too analytical. Methodical. Almost like the alchemists had been wanting to divert attention away from something else, and this was just a shock-factor.

"Ninûshwodzakut - knotters of entrails, the rough translation goes. You can already imagine where that goes. Most Sith... they got a goal in mind, power, control, domination, some ruthless destruction." A shrug followed. No two Sith were really the same, they always had their own little quarks and ambitions. That which made them what they were. "The knotters were fascinated with flesh-shaping, they merged things together, twisted them inside out."

Nose got turned up on that.

"The details get only more disgusting. Let's suffice it to say that their idea of perfection was quite different from what most sentients would think."

Her head tilted slightly. "Show me the scene downstairs, please?"

 

[Eralam]

The Shard nodded.

"That fits. This was clearly some sort of ritual. Maybe they were trying to make something?"

There was a ring of truth to that, but it felt like there was something more. Some detail that was out of his grasp.

Man, organics were messed up. Just when Eralam thought he had them figured out, they had to go and prove that they were even more messed up than he could ever imagine.

"We'll go take a look. However, I'd recommend a breath mask. You really don't want silica dust getting in your lungs. That stuff causes all kinds of long term health issues."

It took a few minutes to bypass the entry system that led to the safehouse below. It was designed specifically to keep organics out through any means necessary. Eralam didn't know anything about this woman, but she seemed to have answers, and that was one thing he needed right now. His people had been slaughtered, and that would not be allowed to stand. Could not be allowed to stand. It was one thing to kill a bunch of random organics. That happened every day, and they were always coming up with new and inventive ways to do it. To kill Shards, on the other hand, was something he couldn't ignore.

Sure, it happened, but usually in ones and twos. Some agent would blow their cover and do something suspicious, and a security team would take them out, thinking they were droids with nefarious intent. It was rare for a mass killing like this to happen, and the method in which they had been killed was unheard of. It should have been impossible, not with a powerful Iron Knight present at the time. Eralam didn't know the Knight well, but she had a reputation for being a powerful wielder of the Force. For them to have killed her...

He shook his head as the door opened, revealing the smooth ramp that led down below. It was located in an unused corner of the tavern, a place where droids could disappear to without anyone noticing. The choice of ramp over stairs was a concession to the astromechs and utility droids that many Shards favored. They were both innocuous and completely incapable of navigating stairs.

The room was more or less exactly the same as it was when he first appeared: bits of shattered droid everywhere, the dust, the runes, but there was something different.

"The hell? That wasn't there before," the Shard muttered, pointing to the spiral pattern in the floor in the center of the room. "How did that get there?"

[member="Cerita Sarova"]

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Eralam"]

While he was fiddling around with the bypass she did something about the whole silica dust thing.

In truth Cerita doubted that it would negatively impact her, her physiology was too different from a baseline near-human to really be bothered with some dust. Especially considering she didn't... necessarily need to breath with them to survive, but it wouldn't do to take chances at the same time. So she plant-surged herself -- he would maybe experience it as a sudden spike in her force presence, from pinpoint precision to something more grounded and expanded -- her nose disappeared and the skin around her mouth knitted itself in.

Her voice would sound muffled behind him.

"I am not sure," Before brushing past the shard and crouching down next to the pattern. "I don't suppose you have more severed limbs lying around here to test out if it has the same effect as the thing upstairs?"

"Didn't think so."

Cerita studied the pattern for a moment, before her presence in the Force shrunk down to a pinpoint again. Focused, like an angle prodding at the fabric from different directions.

"It seems inert now... I think this was a ritual, it may have gone badly, might have gone well -- we can't know for sure -- point is, the killings might have been a way to fuel whatever they wanted to do." She gestured towards the pattern. "This wasn't here before, because the ritual was still working its uh... magic."

"I bet that if we go back upstairs, the runes will be inert as well."

 

[Eralam]

If the transformation phased him, Eralam didn't show it. He was too busy swearing violently.

For most people, that would have been a metaphor. When Eralam swore violently, little bits of the room started to fall apart. His Force presence surged outwards wildly as he struggled to keep control. There wasn't a hint of Darkness; what does a glacier care about organic notions of Light or Dark? It was as cold and impersonal as an avalanche, and promised the same sort of swift, absolute destruction. The building began to shake, or rather, vibrate. It was less earthquake and more subharmonic resonance that rattled the very bones of the earth.

It took him a moment to realize that the surge of anger wasn't entirely his own, and he struggled to dial it down.

"Inert, but not totally," he said thoughtfully, once the dust had settled. "I think at least some of them might have been foci for the ritual. They take negative emotions typically associated with Dark Side use and amplify and focus them. Makes it easier to lose control."

He sighed heavily, the organic gesture completely at odds with his mechanical nature.

"If the ritual is complete and the runes are more or less dead, we're probably just about done here. If they were still active there would be a chance of tracing their power back to the source, but I didn't think of that now. You have any ideas?"

[member="Cerita Sarova"]

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Eralam"]

Sarova wasn't much in the way of scared or concerned.

It might have been because whilst she was a paranoid person, inherently made by her training, she didn't have much in the way of instinctual self-preservation. If anything she was curious about how the residue of the ritual was affecting the Shard, but before she could start analyzing it or him, something else took her attention.

It was a shimmer of red at the edge of her sight, she turned her head towards it while Eralam calmed down, and then she smiled.

"I think we got a chance here." She stepped carefully around the broken parts -- it was just scrap metal to her, but to him it were his friends and associates. Probably best to not needlessly aggravate the machine-sentient who was so much more powerful in the Force than her.

"Look." And there it was, right before her. A couple of droplets of blood, deep red with some miasmatic aura of yellow amber. It wasn't humanoid, but more importantly... droids didn't bleed, not even those who held Shards. "A ton of cultures subscribe a lot of value towards blood, you know? Nightsisters from Dathomir have a ritual, the... bloodtrail, they call it."

"It allows them track anything that has their blood on 'em."

It needed a specific ritual to bind the blood, technically. But a particular trip with Ophidia had given her more insight in the works of Count, who had once used the blood of a Grandmaster... to bind him towards his will.

And this was still fresh.

"I think I could do the reverse here, though whoever bled here, they will immediately know our location as well."

It was a risk and the inherent question in the statement was known. Did he want to try it and take the risk?

 

[Eralam]

"Good," Eralam said simply.

Up until this point, he'd had his usual cloak over his shoulders. The lapels twitched open, revealing the ancient revolver on his right hip and the odd, rapier-styled lightsaber hilt in its truncated scabbard on the left. The grips of both were clearly worn from use, and polished to a sheen by the Shard's grip. They were stylized implements of violence, older than most living beings and perfectly suited to the being who carried them.

"I reckon they'll be dying to meet us."

It had been a while since he'd had a good scrap. Hell, he had placed himself smack dab in the middle of a warzone not long ago and still hadn't managed to get into anything fun. It wasn't that Eralam took pleasure in killing or anything, he just loved to fight, and most people at his level played for keeps. Anything else was just asking for trouble, as even a split second's hesitation could be fatal.

Whoever, whatever, had done this, they were going to learn what it meant to fight a duelist with the better part of nine centuries of experience under his belt.

"So how does this work?" he asked. "I've seen blood trails in action before, but I've never seen anyone reverse the trail. I'm pretty sure a fair few Nightsisters would insist that it's impossible."

[member="Cerita Sarova"]

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Eralam"]

Sarova surveyed the scene for a moment.

Those green eyes took in the little details - the scuff marks on the wall nearby the blood, the broken parts of the droids themselves and their specific layout, the splatter of dust from their hull... it was all important in one way or the other. This gave her the time to best formulate a way to commence the ritual without causing any undue complications.

Like accidentally blasting both of them to pieces.

It wasn't an unlikely preposition either way, what with blood and force bonds being fairly... volatile things.

"Force bonds is the answer, Shard." He hadn't provided his name and neither had she. Shard would do for now. "Blood is simply the medium."

"Whoever did the things they did here... they left an imprint, a part of themselves, left in anger and fury and death. The blood only makes it easier to hone in on it."

Brows furrowed.

"It might be best if you stay outside the room for now, it might come running for us and you will want to get ready to meet it."

 

[Eralam]

"Fine by me," Eralam said, nodding. "You're gonna feel things get a little...odd in a moment. Once that passes, go nuts."

And with that, he left the green skinned woman to her work. The Iron Knight would never ever pretend to have finesse when it came to Force use. He was a blunt instrument. If you needed to knock a hole in the wall, he was your Shard. If you were trying to fish a wire through it, not so much.

Raw power and destructive potential he had in spades. So much, in fact, that he tended to keep his Force presence tightly wound around his being. This did absolutely nothing to make him less noticeable, but it did cut down on property damage. Unpacking that potential could be done in a hurry, but actions borne from haste almost always bore some fairly severe negative consequences a little later on down the line. So when he had a moment to prepare for a fight, he usually took advantage of the opportunity.

The universe seemed to subtly warp as Eralam released the mental bonds that held his power in check. It was almost as though the spillways on a dam had been opened, relieving the terrible pressure that had been building behind them and releasing the restrained power back into the ecosystem. Reality itself seemed to creak and groan under the strain, as though the limits of what was possible and what was not were being tested to the breaking point.

And then, everything snapped back into place, leaving no trace of the distortion that had occurred mere moments ago.

It wasn't necessarily that Eralam was any more powerful than the average Master-level Force user. On the contrary, compared to some of the greats that roamed the galaxy, he was at a disadvantage. However, he was extremely old, and had a knack for storing potential energy. At any given moment, at least a few layers of his digital attention were devoted to skimming the surface of the Force around him, Absorbing the latent energy and storing it for later use. It was from that vast reservoir of energy that he drew when he really needed to cut loose.

For this engagement, he had taken a portion of that energy and wrapped it around himself like a suit of armor. Whatever he was about to face, it was going to learn that there were beings with whom one did not kark lightly.

[member="Cerita Sarova"]

 

[Jairus Starvald]

Cerita waited patiently for [member="Eralam"] to leave the room, before she calmly settled herself on the ground.

Amidst the dust and metal bones of the deceased she waited, until something shifted. It was subtle at first, but then only increased in its intensity -- a ripple that turned into a tidal wave and washed in a radiant angle across all in its vicinity. She shuddered just a little bit as that power washed over her, as mentioned before... there wasn't any comparison possible between the two of them in the conventional sense of the word.

Oh, she was good at what she did, but raw power potential was quite... lower than most powerhouses running through the Galaxy.

You could either read the ripples or cause the ripples, as her teachings had gone, and she was definitely more a reader than a causer either way.

But then that same power dissipated again. Maybe it was simply the fact that she got used to the feeling now, her mind blunting her senses to protect her or maybe it was folded back in again -- didn't really matter either way, not when there was a job to do. Briefly Ceri wondered how she got roped into this. Could have just walked away, probably, this wasn't her fight, was it? Why there was a hidden outpost filled with droids --- Shards --- underneath a tavern in the middle of nowhere was beyond her... yet it was that same curiosity that made her stay.

Hell, that brought her here in the first place.

Her presence in the Force shrank to a pinpoint again, microscopical attention paid to the shard of blood on the wall. Eyes closed there was darkness first, until strands appeared. They lit up in the shadowy dark and they symbolized connections in the Force. Most of them were ripped to shreds, lives died before their time.

But then... then there was that dead strand attached to the spot of blood.

There were ways to describe what happened next, but for Cerita it was just as easy as simply touching that dead web with her mind, with that pinpoint perspective.

And the web reacted, it shuddered and suddenly lit up.

In the distance, the far, far distance a roar sounded. It wasn't a natural roar, it hummed through the Force in the same way Erelam had revealed his strength within the Force.

"Kark, that doesn't sound good." She mumbled to herself.

 

[Eralam]

One second, the room was empty. The next second, it was gone.

Eralam wasn't sure what manner of beast it was; huge, grey, maybe scaly maybe not, but with one swipe of its massive claws, it tore the front of the bar clean off. What's worse, the blow wasn't purely physical. As the claws raked the building, they raked the Force as well, and the building exploded into matchsticks. The safehouse was probably still intact, but there was nothing left up top.

The Shard had been hammered by power that the mortal mind could scarcely comprehend before. He was used to fighting outside his weight class. This was something different altogether. If he hadn't wrapped himself in the armor of the Force, he would have likely been smashed to bits. Instead, he went flying through the air, straight through where the wall would have been if it still existed.

"Oh HELL no," he snarled, his feet coming back underneath him as he Absorbed as much of the kinetic energy as possible in an attempt to arrest his slide. He bounced lightly off the side of a nearby building before coming to a halt, and for the first time, he got a look at the beastie.

Four meters tall if it was a centimeter. Claws like scythes, dripping with some sort of fluid that, if he was to guess, was probably toxic to organics. Dull red eyes, and a face that only a blind mother with a prefrontal lobotomy could love. Its hide was not actually scaly, but rather, covered in the same sort of runes that had been drawn on the floor. They oozed red, having apparently been etched into its grey flesh.

Its very existence was an affront to the Force. That was not a metaphor. The Force was physically straining against its very existence, trying to force it back out of reality. The pressure built up was enormous, and it was that pressure it shaped into a weapon. It was a clever technique. The being would be short lived, but it would be immensely powerful.

Two could play that game.

If the beast could use its mere existence as a weapon, so could Eralam. He opened himself up entirely to the Force, and let the pressure flow into him. People liked to use water imagery to describe the flow of the Force. They called it a trickle, or a stream, or a waterfall, or some damn thing or another. This was nothing like that. This was like a bomb going off inside the Shard's very soul.

The strain of it nearly killed him on the spot, but once the initial shock faded, the world was a very different place.

Eralam took a step forward. The force of his footfall sent a spiderweb of cracks through the asphalt of the crudely paved alleyway. He took another. The cracks grew. And then he seemed to vanish as he sprang towards the beast, sonic booms echoing in his wake. There would be hell to pay later, for power does not come without a price. For now, the Iron Knight was simply content to unleash it.

[member="Cerita Sarova"]

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Eralam"]

But why.

That was Sarova's question, the only one she really cared about. The dead and destruction in itself wasn't an affront to her sensibilities, she intimately understood that corrupting desire welling up deep inside of you - it hounded you day and night, didn't let go of you and it always whispered: try me out... test and experiment, find out the possibilities.

But this was just so random.

It completely went against her scientific approach. Death and destruction could be forgiven, if it was done in pursuit of something higher, in her opinion. Something useful.

Perhaps Ceri shouldn't have expected much from the Knotters, but a part of her was disappointed.

It was the curiosity that won the day, though.

So while Eralam was doing his thing, she was doing hers. And that was trying to pinpoint the location of the alchemist, because so much power, so much structure, the cohesity... it couldn't exist without someone actively supporting it from somewhere. Cerita just had to find that somewhere.

 

[Eralam]

Reality screamed under the weight of the hammerblows that threatened to rend it asunder as the two titans traded shots. The abomination was much slower than Eralam, who zipped around what could only be described as Ground Zero at speeds that would make a fighter pilot nervous, but it was much stronger too, and what's more, it could see the Shard. For every swipe of its massive claws, Eralam rained down a score of punches and kicks, each with enough power to level buildings behind the creature, but nothing seemed to get through. All it would take was one of the abomination's strikes to land to end the Iron Knight.

Something had to give.

Eralam knew he couldn't keep this up forever. In another minute, two at the most, his crystalline body would shatter under the strain. Bright side: he'd almost certainly take out the creature in the ensuing explosion. Not so bright side: he'd almost certainly take out most of the planet. Mortals were not meant to wield this sort of power. An organic would have likely been vaporized. When Shards were pushed beyond their limits, the results were a bit more catastrophic.

A small part of him was aware of the world outside of the fight. The woman, whomever she was, seemed to have something in mind. He could feel the Force swirling around her, not with raw power, but with a subtlety that was just as frightening all on its own. If they were going to defeat this beast, they would need to take out its master, and to do that, they would have to work together. If she could somehow disrupt the creator's concentration, even for a second, they might have a chance.

Too much of Eralam's concentration was devoted to simply not losing his footing and tumbling through the city at speeds that would make a rail gun jealous to reach out to her mentally. He had another idea: music. He began broadcasting a song through the Force, loud enough to be heard, but not enough to be overwhelming. If she was smart, and he suspected she was, she should pick up on the cue and make her move at the right time. If they pulled it off, they had a shot at winning. If not, things would get a lot more difficult.

https://youtu.be/aHjpOzsQ9YI

 

[Jairus Starvald]

Be the pebble that makes waves or the observer that sees the waves.

This was the main general distinction between any two sentient forcers. You had those who made the changes and those who were observing them - the blunt and the subtle, the loud and the silent. Those who drowned out the echoes of the Force, or those who silenced themselves to hear the whispers in the void. If Cerita was the latter, than surely [member="Eralam"] was the former. There was only one reason why she wasn't dead yet- the room itself had been cloaked in certain runes and inscriptions that protected her.

At least for now, she was good, but she didn't have much time to prepare before the beast had arrived.

Without preparation there was only so much you could really do. Sarova watched the waves, the subtle tremors within the Force that could tip her off to the----- there.

It wasn't the rogue alchemist, not her opponent. Vibrations coming off the Shard himself, very stealthy, very... very opposed to his more blunt nature. It surprised Cerita only for a moment, before she realized his plan; she focused on those notes and simply let herself drift on the tune.

Music, at least this kind, wasn't unpredictable.

There was a certain rhythm to it, a certain slope and fall that you could notice, if you paid enough attention to the shifts in pitch. And right now that same music was tangential opposed to the slithering influence of the alchemist. The only thing she needed to do was watch where the divergence started.

It took a moment, ten long, long seconds after the Shard started his song. Suddenly Ceri noticed subtle interference, where the Shard's tune met the alchemist's tendrils.

She jumped at it - figuratively - without caution or regard for herself.

There was no time to be careful, either this was it, or they were all dead anyway. She crafted weaves from that same music, deep bass tunes attaching themselves to the extended tentacle of control. And then she burst into the alchemist's mind- it wasn't subtle, it wasn't pretty and Sarova was no mentalist, but there was pain behind that move.

One singular shard of mind piercing through the alchemist's concentration and making him bleed... mentally.

"Gotcha." Ceri hissed, before starting to visualize the location.

This wasn't over yet, regardless of the beast's fate.