It has been two days since your arrival to Utapau, the secret outpost of the Separatist Council whose security you were in charge of. You tried to spend your time as far away from them as possible, least you ended up choking the life out of the ignorant imbeciles who were only good at weaving pointless lies and intrigues to conspire against each other. They made you sick, particularly those who never even bothered to find out who was the general of the very army they represented. Few knew who you were and fewer yet were not convinced you were another droid. You never really considered this political scum your allies, just tolerated them long enough as a necessary evil. You can't help playing with the idea of just watching them die in case the Republic really sent troops like your master foretold they would, hardly a loss the Separatists could not recover from when they had you around, a far superior leader.
You did not have to wait much longer as your sensors alert you of a new presence just as the man lands behind you and boldly calls you out, and of course, it is the one person you really did not want to see. Of all the Jedi masters you had yet to slaughter, they chose to send the one you wanted to kill the most, and your long time rival – Kenobi. You scan your surroundings, expecting to find more support, but he appears to be alone, to your surprise. A few possible scenarios run through your logical modules to deduce the best outcome, but you already know you are the only one skilled enough to destroy the invader. Your troops can only buy you some time at best and never enough to lead the Council to safety.
The Magna guards ready their stuffs to intercept the enemy, but you instantly order them to step down as you turn to engage the Jedi scum yourself. Obi Wan looks his usual confident self, choosing a simple textbook Soresu stance as you smirk at him, reminding the Jedi you have mastered all fighting forms and trained under one of the greatest duelists in the Galaxy. You could pick any style favourable for this matchup, but you don't feel like playing around this time and answer by splitting your arms into four and igniting their respective lightsabers while you settle into your own unique combat stance that took advantage of your cybernetic augmentations.
The mechanisms in your shoulder joints rotate and click lightly into positions to spin the weapons in your top set of arms like a lawnmower, turning the steady blue and green lights into whirls of blur, while you gradually and mercilessly advance behind their protection. Piercing golden eyes in the sockets of a skeletal metal mask are your only visible organics, tracking your prey with the intensity of a natural hunter and proved combatant, and the precision of extensive neural enhancements and advanced tracking programs. Obi Wan senses the danger and tenses at this flashy display, his eyes betraying a hint of hesitation as he slowly retreats from the whirlwind of death.
You stalk him calmly, advancing ruthlessly and with perfect precision, your mechanical joints ready to spring and to strike the moment he shifts away from this defensive stance. You have already calculated his most likely moves and know the one to attack first will be at disadvantage, but you have no need to hurry. In a few seconds the Jedi will realize it all went as you planned. Obi Wan stops when he loses his footing at the end of the platform, finding himself suddenly at the end of the bridge. Of course you had studied this structure beforehand and held a three-dimensional map in your mind just in case you would need to track your surroundings during a fight. You would use it now to leave the Jedi no room for maneuvers. Kenobi had finally seemed to catch on, the look in his eyes changing as he resolved to face the whirring vortex of lights. You have anticipated that as his last option, narrowing the possibilities for the programmed parts of your brain, but moments before the blades meet in a flash, you know that he still found an angle to stop both of your blades. Grunting in anger, you switch the control back to your other arms, leaving the first pair on the peripheral processors in your attempts to overwhelm the combatant with the number of blades while you still had the advantage, motors whirring in bursts in your chest as you unleash one deadly blow after another.
Kenobi only had to block one before he takes his blade in both hands, organic arms clearly losing in both strength and reach to your mechanical ones as you unleash a relentless barrage from unpredictable angles. Yet even with only one blade Kenobi manages to hold his ground, the movements he practiced for more than a lifetime both sharp and fluid in their precision. You exchange preemptive and counter strikes at blinding speeds, trying to read each other as Kenobi's Force precognition races against your advanced combat programming to predict the opponent's next move, your computer parts working furiously to dissect and analyze his fighting style as you plan your next move. It appears to your mild annoyance that you are equally matched, for now. However, in a drawn-out fight your cybernetic enhancements would give you the advantage since your arms and legs did not tire at all while the human would be gradually weakening in both strength and the Force. He might be one of the best, but one little mistake was all you needed to send him to the afterlife and add his lightsaber to your infamous collection.
Obi Wan must have realized that too as he suddenly changed his tactics with a surprise Form IV leap above and over you to change sides – a meaningless move really when you could turn your upper torso fully around to continue attacks, then slowly follow with your feet at your leisure while keeping the pressure, forcing the Jedi Master to block, parry and dodge as he retreats once again. He seemed stunned by your style of moving so fluently and gracefully in ways impossible neither for an organic being, nor for a droid.
At times you hated how artificial your existence has become - a feeling particularly emphasized during your routine maintenance when you were taken apart and stayed in a bacta tank as just a sac of organs while your other components were being taken care of separately. You hated to be so vulnerable, to rely on electronic machines so much that you could not even move without them. Unable to touch, eat or sleep, you felt your severed existence cut from the rest of reality. Only a twisted reflection of it, constructed from the screens in your mind, not from your eyes, heard through the settings of filters in your audio receptors, but not with your ears, touched with your duranium fingers and described as numbers on sensors, not feeling the touch. You did not feel like a living person when you headed for maintenance, with new, ingenuitive ways created to sustain you in a semblance of life.
It was only in times like these, in a death fight against a worthy opponent that you felt alive, breathing and feeling. You knew it was but an illusion, a faded memory of your old body, tempered with by Geonosian engineers, but it felt so undeniably real. It was only at times like this that you could forget what you now lacked and, perhaps, even secretly take a little bit of comfort in what the technology gave you. You have entrusted your construction to science and were not disappointed. Cybernetics have finally made you more than a match for those seemingly invincible Jedi magic powers. You always wondered why did some get them and others did not? Who decided that some were more worthy of them than the others?
Why was it not given to you? This was unfair. Nobody was born a warrior - famine and misery forged determined young souls into ones. Nobody should have been just born a Jedi. You were the best on your planet, certainly more worthy of special powers than the scum who seeded wars against innocents under the pretence of peace. In a way both disturbing and pleasing, it was only appropriate to kill them with their own weapons - something you were very eager to learn when you were offered a chance. You wanted to fight and kill them all so badly that you were looking into anything from dark magic to alien technology, so desperate for revenge that you entrusted your body to be turned into machine. You endured and even agreed to computerize your brain further to be programmed in every lightsaber Form that took years to learn and lifetimes to master. Body and mind, you became a killing machine for this sole purpose, but even that was not enough, and you trained relentlessly to become truly unstoppable, to hone your skill and sense of combat, even developing your own unique style.
You hated your robotic parts and the Jedi who plunged your home into famine and tried to kill you, your world's protector, forcing you to undergo this procedure. Your rage ignited the ocean of grief like oil and lit on fire what little must have been left of your soul, destined to burn forever in this construct of a body. Bitter rage opened up links in your reconstructed brain that you never knew existed. Your past was gone, burned in the flames with everything they took from you, but you would move forward, now as General Grievous. The flame of your hatred was not contained or extinguished - it was only refined and focused inside the machines that made you. It was this state of mind that made you more than the sum of your parts, a single organism fully accepting all the atrocities and pain that were done to it. You would be forever grieving and spread your pain to those who made you and the ones you loved suffer.
The Jedi was getting quicker and quicker, his reflexes seemingly adjusting to even your programming as he caught you in the middle of a swing and slid the saber along yours to cut your arm off. Enraged by your momentary distraction, you punish him with crushing blows, devastating Kenobi's defense. He sways and flings forward into an opening, completely forgetting about your feet as you meet him with a readied kick and send him flying back and over the railing. You can't help but smirk victoriously, knowing your artificial talons are powerful enough to crush his ribs, but you see him struggle back to his feet, holding his chest and coughing blood, but with the same focused and unwavering expression as he readies a new stance. You grumble in frustration and take a new stance as well, one that will favour you against his. You were hoping to take him out with that kick, but you should expect as much from Kenobi. He must have shielded himself with the Force in the last second. However, judging by his state, the Force was not quite as durable as durasteel.
No matter, you think, as you spring towards him in an instant, swiping your three remaining arms in a sickle-like motion. The Jedi suddenly meets you with a perfectly timed parry that grazes two of your swords and threatens to take your head off. You sway back on instinct, a little too far in your haste, but your mechanized parts can endure this much and quickly bring you to balance after the heated plasma passes inches away from an antennae on the side of your head. You slide back and out of his range, bewildered that your programming could not catch up with this move. He was too powerful, you realize, and he was cheating with his tricks. You know now you were wrong in your initial estimation that prolonging the fight would benefit you. Kenobi was barely holding his ground before, but now he was confident enough to go for a counter right against your first move. You had to finish this quick.
You curse on your native and swing. Another miss. Kenobi matches your moves perfectly now as he almost disappeared from view to come back with an even faster, pinpoint move that you already know is going to cut another hand off. You reel it back, the motors screeching as you exert the limits of your mechanical parts. You jump back again to the sound of a second hand flying down the shaft with a clang, still holding its lightsaber.
Kenobi is clearly hurting, but he knows he cannot let you gain more ground. He pushes himself and suddenly flies at you with a Force jump, pushing you both off the platform.
You drop all the way down to a small landing dock, where you usually held your private starfighter, the Soulless One. However, luckily it is not currently here, as you left it on the upper deck on standby until further orders, meaning the Jedi will not have an easy way to escape you. You know this will be the stage for the finale as you both hastily scramble back to your feet in attempts to gain better ground first. You react faster. The Jedi is still holding his ribs in pain, but you stumble and drop back on one knee, looking down in surprise. Your left artificial limb screeches under your weight as the knee refused to cooperate, the joint apparently damaged from impact. You disregard it for now, raising on your other good leg and using this one only for balance as you feel a new fit of cough reminding you that while your robotic body might be more durable and replaceable, your living parts were certainly not. The Jedi is clearly hurt even more as he groans and looks around for his weapon, which is not to be seen. You do not have a chance to celebrate this however, since even though you are mostly fine, you cannot find your own weapons either. A grinding sound from your vocabulator indicating your rising irritation, you clamp your hands back together with the two other stumps and clench two duranium fists with three remaining fingers each.
With some help from the Force and sheer determination, Kenobi also finally managed to stand in order to face you. One hand still on his ribs, he Force pushed you away, but you see the hand movement in time and clamp your magnetic feet to the deck as you brace for the impact, standing right through it. The Jedi looks bewildered and then desperate and heartbroken, as he tries again with the last of his strength, while you wait for fatigue to creep in, your own almost fully mechanical body still just as rearing to go, missing arms and a damaged leg hardly hindering you as much as it would an organic being. You are only aware of damage, but you can feel no pain and you never get tired. Once the Jedi's hand drops, you rush him in an instant and kick, hard, in the ribs, knowing full well he was guarding that part all this time after your last kick. You hear more bones cracking against the hydraulics as the human coughs blood and is sent flying to the end of the platform where he wails in pain. With his ribs crushed now, Kenobi can barely hold a lightsaber. You know you have won and approach for the kill, but his eyes suddenly meet yours with unwavering determination.
"Stubborn scum" you think to yourself, reeling your motors to full power.
The Jedi ducks under your punch which leaves a sizeable dent in the wall. You see his eyes go wide in surprise as he noticed up close that your chest armour is already deformed, a crack between chest plates revealing hints of your inner circuitry and organs. He grabs your plates and Force pulls the duranium hinges with his last strength apart to reveal what is left of your body.
You can hear the metal plates helplessly screeching as you look down in terror at your still beating heart submerged into a semi-transparent gut sack with bacta and your very few other salvaged organs as you slowly step back on your good leg, trying to close back the deformed cavity. You really don't like the look on Kenobi's face as he starts to understand the importance of what had just happened. You settle on shielding the intestines with your arms for now as you slowly step back again, glaring down the Jedi with pure hatred for what he has done. Your computer helps you quickly weight every option as you think how to finish your long lasting rival, However, with his last move your only advantage was gone now. No matter how close to victory you were, a well-placed strike could kill you on spot, and Kenobi was a master of the defensive style of Soresu. Adding that to your calculations, you curse the Jedi again and turn around sharply, your servo joints whirring and metal claws clinging in fast pace as they send you to the other side of the platform, where the Soulless One would pick your coordinates in mere moments.
There was no honour in a meaningless death, and Dooku did not mind you retreating when things started looking sketchy. In fact he encouraged you to preserve your life, or what was left of it. At times you wondered whether his wise advice came from viewing you as a valuable apprentice or simply a very expensive instrument, but it mattered not for now. A dead commander would not win any wars.
Your ship descends in a few seconds that you spend trying to fix your cybernetics. With the ship now ready, you duck and throw one leg over to the pilot's seat as you set your next destination with a mental command. Then you turn around to see the exhausted Jedi master finally collapsing to his knees. You observe him for another full second when your audio receptors pick up the shouts of the approaching clone troopers. You curse again, feeling the last opportunity to honour him and collect his lightsaber slip through your duranium fingers. The clones will be here any second now and you are in no condition to fight them. You need urgent repairs, you convince yourself as you climb with frustration into the star fighter and dart off back to the base.