Chapter

1

IMPERIUM VICTORY DESTROYER:NIGHT SKY; YAMANTO SPACEPORT, NAVII LYA PRIME

28:06:14 ABY:

She was surprised that Zak could ignore the pain of his fresh wound. But he managed it, and he sprinted ahead of his sister, flicking one blade of his weapon to life and spearing it straight for her chest.

Alitha brushed it aside with her own weapon, and the boy spun, switching on the other blade of his weapon and bringing it slashing around at impressive speed to her ankles.

Rookie, she thought, and jumped over the blade. But she quickly realised her mistake; Tash was already using her brother's bent knee as a springboard. Her lightsaber was steady, and she leapt over his head and twisted in the air, kicking out at Alitha with both feet.

Her feet connected, and Alitha felt the wind leave her lungs. Pain gripped her, desire for air, and then more pain when she crashed hard against transparisteel and slumped down to the deck before it.

She struggled for air first. Pain would pass, and was second to her at that instant. If she could not breathe, she could not fight.

By the time she had finally gotten breath back to her lungs, the Arrandas were already upon her again. Tash's blade came down from her left, and Zak's from her right. Surely, they couldn't have thought themselves the victors? Surely they knew that she had powers much greater than any Jedi?

She raised her left hand, lightsaber gripped tightly, and the blade went up to meet Tash's. She fought through the pain in her chest to maintain the force she expended in holding Tash's blade at bay. Meanwhile, her free hand shot up to Zak's incoming blade. Most would never have attempted this. She reached deep within herself, clutched the Force and demanded its power. She smothered her extended hand with as much dark energy as she could, shielding it when Zak's blade made contact and was flung away as though her hand had been a lightsaber itself.

Alitha took advantage of his surprise, and kicked out at his legs. He went down, and his sister quickly backed off before her legs could be taken out from under her by Alitha's lightsaber. As soon as she was back on her feet, and the pain in her chest forced to the back of her mind, she charged at Tash.

She switched her lightsaber to her right hand, and raised it for a high strike. Tash brought her lightsaber up from the right to send the offending blade away from her.

Before the weapons met, something fast and blurred caught the younger woman hard in the chest and flung her backwards across the bridge. She slammed hard into the durasteel bracing crisscrossing the forward viewport, only a handful of steps from where Alitha herself had ended up, and slumped to the deck in pain.

Her lightsaber slid from her hand and roll across the deck away from her until it clattered to the lower deck and the blade sucked back into the hilt.

The blur came to her side and stopped, looking down at Zak with a neutral expression that Alitha could not read.

Long, dark reddish hair was matted into clumps around the hybrid's face and shoulders, scaly growths clearly visible growing from the strands of hair and pinning it together in odd places. The brown robes and the darker clothes the hybrid wore marked her as an informally dressed Jedi, and they were tattered, torn, barely modest by any human standards.

The woman-thing's eyes were instead pitch black, with no sign of iris or sclera, though the truth was that they had just taken on the exact colouring of the pupils to terrifying effect. Her skin had paled to a sickly green-grey and was now tougher than a human's—more akin to leather and scale now than actual flesh. The tips of her fingers were pointed into menacing claws that made her appearance even more terrifying, and a row of short, sharp spines were growing from her forearms, starting at the wrists and angled back along the arms.

She watched as Zak got up and looked around at her, he looked up at Alitha to see that she'd acquired an unlikely ally. The shock of what he saw froze him in place, and Alitha experienced a moment of pleasure, revelling in her victory over him.

Alitha did worry some about her unexpected ally, but at the same time, she could barely contain her glee. She had not been able to contain that sensation since the first moment she had sensed the hybrid's thoughts.

The creature opened its still mostly-humanoid lips to sneer at Zak, revealing the blackened forked tongue and the rows of razor sharp teeth along both of its jaws.

Smiling, Alitha whirled on her heels to face Zak and his sister again, and the energetic look on her face that was meant to dispirit him didn't have the effect she was intending. She felt anger well up within him—anger that she sensed he had been trying to contain for some time now. A darkness that frightened a tiny, human instinct inside her: the instinct to fear a predator. But she shook off the feeling quickly. She was the predator here.

Slowly, Zak started to approach them. She wasn't expecting him to be so steady on his feet, and though she did her best not to show that disappointment on her face, he seemed to sense it anyway and smiled.

He took another look at the hybrid, and then his eyes widened with surprise when recognition set in, realisation dawned. The colour fled from his face, and it staggered his next step.

"Jaina!" he gasped, breathless and horrified as his gaze lingered on the creature beside her.