A/n : Please be aware that this chapter involves sexual themes. Nothing overt, but if you think you might be offended, the best censor is the "Back" button! In addition, a number of terms used in this chapter are from the Wookieepedia entry for "lightsaber combat".
This five-chapter story is complete – but if not all of it is published when you read this, check my profile for details of the publishing schedule.
Part II : Usaki and Obi-Wan
This is how it feels to be Obi-Wan Kenobi.
You are facing a Dark Jedi, a master of the Force whose supreme arrogance has turned her inability to conquer her emotions from a destructive disadvantage into the gateway towards the limitless power of Dark Side. In her hands rests the synthetic blade of a Sith bloodsaber, a weapon perhaps capable of shorting out the natural crystal of your own weapon. You face a former apprentice of one of the most deadly Jedi the Order has produced, and whose fighting style shows a dangerous mastery of at least Juyo and possibly Vaapad. You are fighting on a world whose ruling council knows you are aware of their treachery and whose forces are augmented by droids of the Separatists' armies. Although you are not here alone, you are with a Jedi whose eagerness has already cost him a hand of flesh and whose love for the woman beside him will prove a distraction to any and all things. You are not a single target, but you only have a single blade.
You are on hostile ground, facing one of the greatest threats the Order has ever faced, alone and yet not.
Hatred whips around you like the slashing tentacles of the namesake of Mace Windu's fighting style, raw barbs of anger and rage and fueling-fear. The dark power of the Force prickles across your aura, trying to find invasive weaknesses and slither into your physiology and interfere with it. The crimson spear of light that is Usaki's 'saber is a smear of bloodshine against the metallic darkness of the dimly-lit corridor, moving so swiftly you cannot see it coming. She leaps and rolls and flips and dives, seemingly anchored to the walls and ceiling as much as the floor. The long flowing skirt and billowing sleeves of her rancor-leather dress float around her in a Force-gale, the laced bodice tight and inviting over her magnificently muscled and gloriously gorgeous torso. Lust flickers like a Krayt dragon's tongue at your perception, memories of Siri lash between the plates of your emotional armor. Her luminous skin shines with the sweat of exertion and her hauntingly beautiful face is drawn back into a rictus grin of effort and rage – yet the dark Force powers that caress your mind and soul tell you that it is pleasure that contorts her face so.
And you let this storm flow over you like wind through the leaves, like a cascade of water through a luminous river of light. You have no need to reach into the Force, because you have already allowed the Force to reach into you.
The endless cycle of energy that swirls through and around and by all things cascades through you in a perpetual torrent of perfectly pure clarity; that great sparkling stream flows through you and out of you without a single interference or interruption from your conscious mind. And as it flows through you and you flow into the endless pool, there is nothing with which you are not intimately connected, or that is not you.
You are the deck beneath your feet, and the ionized air burned to ozone by the hum of two lightsabers. You are the gleam of the muted glowglobes in Usaki's brilliant green eyes, and you are the vision those eyes behold of yourself with a taut jaw and narrowed eyes and not another display of effort or anger on your face. You are the pressure of her hands on the hilt of her blade, you are the concern and tightly-controlled rage of Anakin running up behind you, you are the even-more tightly-controlled fear and panic of Senator Amidala.
And you are Usaki herself.
You are the well-honed muscles rippling in their embrace of hot leather, the curve of her powerful thighs, the concave planes of her flat stomach, the arc of her long neck that sweeps down into her full breasts. You are the rage and the hatred and the isolation that fuels her anger and her passion and her hollow power, you are the vortex in her heart that seeks to suck you into her and crush you to powder and beyond and try to fill the endless void inside her that always hungered and was never satisfied.
You are the intention of her blows and the movement of you own arms before you have even considered your response. You are all these things, but you are also Obi-Wan Kenobi.
That is why you will win here – because you are submissive to the will of the Force and realize there is nothing more in this universe than that.
This is how it feels to be Obi-Wan Kenobi. This is how a great Jedi makes war.
o
o
This is Usaki Ketsubo Daikatana.
Her limbs – a beautiful organic machine of flesh and blood and bone – move in a framework of curves as beautiful as her body, as powerful as her exquisite face, driving her 'saber in a hooked net of gleaming light that seeks to ravage her opponent. Raw rage flows from her, as if she is a never-ending fountain of crimson emotion, a wellspring of fiery anger that fuels the Dark Side powers she exults in using. She is a devastating warrior, a stunning paragon of womanhood, far beyond the petty loveless charlatans of the Order.
This is what she would have you believe. And sometimes, on those nights when she lies spent but not satiated alongside someone – or some few – and she is too tired to notice her own emptiness, she can almost pretend she believes it.
The truth, as she well knows, is more complex.
There is a hole at the center of Usaki, a void, an empty space. She does not have the furnace heart of a Ventress or the crystallizing coldness of a Dooku. She is a hole punched through reality into nothingness – not even into the sunlit meadow of the Force that is Kenobi's perpetual birthright – and she has been falling and eroding into that hollow void for nearly all of her life.
She cannot bring herself to analyze what might have caused that airlock to blow into the cold void of interstellar space, that eternal hungering nothingness which constantly demands more and is never filled. But – deep in her empty heart – she has some inkling of the truth.
It was not at her birth twenty-nine standard years before that the rot set in. She was born to noble parents in a wealthy country of a pampered planet, a beautiful baby girl and the salvation of her family. It may have begun when political games were played by hereditary retainers more concerned with their status quo than that of her blood, for she was bartered before she was weaned to be married to the eldest son of the ruling Daimyo – a move that would cement the fortunes of her family for decades to come. Their sons would be the great Daimyos, the Senators of the Galactic Republic. Their daughters would command such a high price from the other noble families their name would last until the planet and Republic fell.
The vacuum that blew the walls of heart open might have started before she could walk, with the hormonal injections and glandular-replacement therapies and genetic restructuring which were designed to tweak her adult appearance towards the exotic eroticism of the women of the Core Worlds – taller and more curvaceous, voluptuously sexual and improbably alluring. And with those burning green eyes like leaves under ice – as rare as the teeth of tori on her home planet, the eyes only the gods had.
The hypno-indoctrination and psychotherapy that had made her borderline-obsessed with maintaining her physical appearance and which twisted her psyche into demure obedience could not have been responsible for it, because when she was taken by the Jedi Master from her cosseted and pampered existence he had scoured her mind clean of them. He had said so – and she was certainly no longer demure or obedient.
And yet even now her body was a paragon of perfection, with not a hair out of place and her make-up perfect and her skin glowing from the Mon Calamari seaweed creams and the Mustafar volcanic sand-scrubs. Had the Jedi torn enough out of her, or too much?
When she was as honest as she ever became with others, she would lie and tell them the things done to her when younger were why she was the way she was. And then the shame of her own weakness and the fact she had lied would come; either her 'saber or her thighs would engulf them, her Vaapad or her erotic embrace would take them and crush them to her and suck what they were into her. But she was never filled, never satisfied – the ravenous void would always be the same infinite emptiness it was before.
But in her darkest and coldest moments, when she was totally alone and not even the Dark Side filled her with slimy, writhing warmth and her hands fell away from her body in disgust and realization nothing would fill her, she knew when it had truly begun.
It had begun when she realized what she could gain for them was more valuable to her family than anything else they possessed. It had begun when she realized they valued her not for what she was but for what she could achieve. It had begun when she realized she could have anything she could imagine simply by asking, "I want."
I want. Such a simple phrase. A simple statement that because her name and the very expression of what she was. I want.
No-one ever thought to ask her what she might need. They had all rushed around, falling over their robes and their ceremonial swords to bring her whatever she said she wanted – toys and exotic pets, carved necklaces of japor, Thyferrian icoberries sauteed in hallucinogenic wines from Barkhesh, Twi'lek dancing girls trained as geisha – priceless treasures from the far-flung corners of the galaxy she had no need for, and which only increased the pressure from without as her soul became emptier and emptier.
I want, I want, I want.
And then the stocky man with the skin as dark as Canton-plum sauce and the sword of light came to her world.
She had been young – unformed and unfinished, precocious and precious, a work in progress and nothing more. She had watched with puzzled interest as he introduced himself as a Jedi Knight; the Jedi were legends, of that she was certain – warrior-monks from the Core Worlds, impossibly powerful Samurai-figures with preternatural abilities. Not in living memory had one come to her planet – far out and isolated on the galactic rim, nominally a member of the Republic but in reality far divorced from it. Their civilization was older and greater than the petty squabbles of the democrats in the Coruscanti Senate, hereditary autocracy ruling with a fist of jade inside a silken glove.
What had brought the Jedi to her world, she never learned – but she learned what his purpose quickly became.
A vergence in the Force. That was the phrase he used – a vergence in the Force. And his dark eyes quickly settled on her – scarcely a child, growing into something quite unlike the rest of the Court, the promise of power for her family for decades to come. He had spoken with her parents – negotiating, she had assumed, for the right to marry her. She had smiled; even at that tender age she had known the power her union with the Daimyo's heir would bring her family. They would never agree to it, no matter what the outlandish and uncouth Core World gaijin offered them. What could he possibly have to barter for a jewel as bright as she?
And then the Jedi had come to her and offered her his bartering chip – come and I will train you as a Jedi.
Suddenly, a whole new world was opened to her innocent eyes – for all of her short life she had been made into something somebody else wanted, an expression of another person's desire. Her genetically-coded beauty and seductiveness, her training as a Daimyo-ko of fine breeding – these were for the benefit and pleasure and desire of her future husband. Her betrothal to the Daimyo's son was for the advancement and strength and desire of her family. Her family's joining to the ruling clan was for the elevation and acknowledgment and desire of her family's retainers.
She was, she realized, nowhere in this. She was given whatever she wanted, because she was already giving exactly what everyone else wanted to them.
And so, in a twist of hideous irony that she could not appreciate and Mace Windu was unable to see, she went with the Jedi Master to the Jedi Order because she did not want to be a servant to anyone else. She became a Jedi Apprentice because of her own desire. Because it was what she wanted.
Her family did not let her go willingly, and she was too young to remember the first time men killed over her. It was not to be the last, although the later times she would engineer and exult in – watching them fight for her affections, for her whiplash caresses that soothed her wounded soul with brief, torrid ecstasies.
And so she became a Jedi Apprentice, and later Padawan. She learned the arts of the Force from one of the greatest living Masters, and for many years there was nothing she wanted more than that – to learn and to add to her power and to be the very greatest Jedi she could be. She took to Vaapad like a mynock to power-cables – something which should have warned Windu that not all was as it seemed with his new Padawan, for Vaapad's power drew itself from the darker aspects of the Force; not quite the black realm of the Sith, but from the emotions that most Jedi steered well clear of. Practitioners of Vaapad had to learn to enjoy the fight, to hate the enemy, to channel their fear and rage and bloodlust into the most-deadly of the seven forms of lightsaber combat.
And still she wanted.
She wanted more. She wanted everything, and for reasons she could not fathom. She wanted wisdom and restraint and even – paradoxically – freedom from desire. She wanted to be the most powerful Jedi, the greatest warrior, the finest negotiator. She wanted more transitory things as well – the most elegant clothes, the most beautiful jewels, the greatest accolades.
Her Master counseled surrender to the Force as a means of overcoming desire, of allowing things to pass from her life. But it was not that she wanted to preserve what she had – because she knew she really had nothing. It was a ravenous, salt, black desire to have something, anything to fill the void her perpetual I want had carved within her.
And then her body matured and she blossomed from a child into a woman, a stunning physical paragon with lusts and desires and wants and what she thought were needs she had never even conceived of before and which she was ill-prepared to defend against.
Suddenly, her power increased tenfold, a hundredfold – not over the Force, but in baser ways. She realized it, exulted in it, knowing her merest glance and coquettish flick of her hair could twist men as easily as any Mind Trick. She disdained her robes in favor of form-fitting jumpsuits, provocatively exercising to flaunt her physicality in the Temple playrooms.
She was the sweaty, torridly-pleasurable downfall of more than one Padawan, and the death of more than one innocent but weak citizen in the bars of downlevel Coruscant. In moments like that, she felt fulfilled – or thought she was. Brief emotion flared through her, and though it was corrupted and dark and only brought her pain in the morning, for those moments it soothed the gaping wounds in her psyche. She knew she was debasing herself for transitory pleasures of the flesh, and yet there was nothing she could do about it. Her desire had become an all-consuming force that found a shape to mold itself into in her burgeoning sexuality.
She fled the Order before the full truth of what she was became apparent. The Order pursued her, of course – she told herself it was out of jealousy and hatred of what she had discovered; for she almost managed to convince herself the Jedi were fools for not allowing themselves the pleasures of fulfilled desire. An ignorant, puritanical Order of loveless charlatans – hypocritical loveless charlatans, given how easily some of them had fallen to her wiles.
She did not realize the real reason the Jedi pursued her was the real reason they had fallen to her; that she was already slipping further and further away from the light and towards the darkness, that her own raw desire was being channeled into something dark and hideous and altogether terribly powerful that sought to fill its own endless void with the pain and lust and longing of others.
The Jedi knew she was too dangerous to be left to consume herself, collapsing inwards like a dead star falls into a black hole, her own dreadful gravity drawing those around her into her crushing darkness.
And so for years she fled the Jedi, selling her services to the highest bidder and selling her body and affections for far less, trying to fill the void within her. She herself cannot remember all the assassinations and assignations she had been a part of; the tale of how she ended here, in passive league with the Confederacy of Independent Systems and a pupil of Dooku half-tormented by frustrated desire for him, facing a Jedi who exemplifies everything she hates and wants to be would be too complex to relate.
It is enough to say what she is.
This is Usaki Ketsubo Daikatana. And she wants.
o
o
As the red chained-lighting of Usaki closed on him, Obi-Wan held his stance. He met the flurry of anger and rage and hatred and lust and longing of Vaapad with Soresu. His sky-blue blade moved in a bewildering defensive velocity so fast that the enumeration of a single exchange would have been an advanced okuden for learned Padawans.
Usaki's blade was everywhere, her face snarling and snapping, Force attacks on the physical, psychic, physiological and spiritual planes stabbing at him. He met them all with Soresu; more than a fighting-style, a philosophy of combat, of life. His blade was never truly fast, but was just fast enough – spoiling the aim or the angle or the speed of one of her attacks even as he leaned away from the ones that were coming at him before the afterimage of the 'saber had faded from his retinas. His psyche moved just enough so the more subtle Dark Side attacks slid from him, and woven into his physiology was a rippling net of the Living Force that deflected the poisonous barbs of her hate.
Usaki snarled, and drew deeper into her own personal void of lust and longing, ramping up the speed and ferocity of her attacks, the hurricane of the Force cracking her leather dress like a thousand whips, sweat boiling off her like condensation from a sublight-thruster cowling. Obi-Wan centered himself, relaxed everything he was, let go of desire and offered himself to the Force.
He closed his eyes and fell in a perfect dive into Soresu, a limpid, ever-churning waterfall whose currents he simply had to respect and be ruled by in order to win. There was no desire, no wanting, no needs – there was only the Force. All of Usaki's desire-driven attacks failed against his desireless self. As patient as stone, Obi-Wan simply waited for Usaki to make her mistake.
The combat changed with the ignition note of Anakin's 'saber. Obi-Wan's eyes snapped open, shifting from Soresu into Ataru in an instant, leaping towards Usaki, trying to drive her back from his former Padawan. But she leaped herself and slashed at him, their blades sparking, the two of them spiraling around each other like rutting raptor-bats, and she landed sure-footed in front of the most dangerous Jedi in living memory.
Obi-Wan could sense the exultation and confidence in the young man's eyes. Obi-Wan knew the younger Jedi knew he was a greater warrior than she.
He also knew she knew exactly what she was doing.
Anakin's first strike was double-handed overhead chop, a perfect Djem So blow that bent her elbows and nearly buckled her knees – no normal human and few Jedi possessed the physical power to meet Anakin Skywalker toe-to-toe. He bore down on her creaking arms with every ounce of his mechanical and Force-driven strength, driving her lightsaber inexorably towards her shoulder, putting a line of scorch through the leather of her coat and into the skintight armorweave bodyglove she wore underneath. Ozone and charring hair fizzled in the air as Anakin snarled like a Corelian garru. He wanted her dead.
He wanted.
He desired, he sought, he hungered. That was the chink in his armor and with a speed he did not have time to appreciate she was inside his guard and inside his mind and then she was above him and raining blows down on him, dominating the duel. Out of pure desperation, Obi-Wan dived into the combat, moving close enough that her 'saber crisped his robe, and wove a gleaming net of light between his former apprentice and the Dark Jedi.
He wanted to defend him, and that moment of distraction cost him dear. Usaki's elbow smashed him in the jaw, sending his head spinning away with the rest of him following it, and then she jumped into the air, kicked Anakin in the chin, and somersaulted over his head, landing next to Padme.
The instant she had been inside Anakin's defenses had been enough. She knew what he wanted. What he loved. Why he was here.
She cocked a single hand as if she were Yuukoku holding the apple of temptation in a kabuki play, and suddenly Padme couldn't breathe. It wasn't as if there was a pressure on her throat, blocking her laboring lungs. It wasn't as if something was constricting her ribs, preventing her chest from moving. It was simply as if she couldn't breathe. Not a single action in the whole complex sequence was possible for her; she couldn't inhale, her diaphragm wouldn't move. Had she been consciously aware of it, she wouldn't have been surprised to find her hemoglobin failing to oxidize as it met air. Her vision dimming to gray, she began to buckle.
And all Usaki did was hold her 'saber at mocking ready, pointing it at Anakin's face and daring him to come closer. For the second time in as many hours, he stood in mute horror and indecision.
Before Anakin could move, Obi-Wan was there, leaping over his head to land with his boots firmly driving Usaki's wrist to the deck. His 'saber was unlit, perhaps even clipped to his belt, and as he stretched out his hand Anakin felt the Force twist and writhe. Padme convulsed like an inflating dirigible, a power as artificial as that which had choked her filling her lungs and blood with oxygen. Usaki cursed enticingly and hauled her blade from the melted hole in the deck, it meeting Obi-Wan's re-ignited 'saber in mid-air.
"Anakin!" Obi-Wan's clipped Coruscanti accent was audible over the crackle and hum of the lightsabers. "Take Senator Amidala and go! Your primary mission is her safety!" Obi-Wan's eyes were fixed on his deadly swordplay, giving ground against Usaki as a means of getting her further away from Padme and Anakin, being driven back towards the hangar. So he could not see the moment of rebellion on Anakin's face, of his desire to stay and defend his friend and mentor.
Perhaps the fact Obi-Wan had consistently shown him up and done a better job of defending Padme might have made him want to stay closer to him, but Anakin's own personal myth of invulnerability had been dented by the ease with which Usaki had threatened Padme. He knew he was the better warrior – better than Obi-Wan and certainly better than Usaki. What had shaken him was that, despite his greater skill and power, the two of them had dominated the situation.
He wasn't irrelevant! He was the Chosen One! He had been chosen . . . !
To defend Padme.
Ah . . .
Inclining his head to Obi-Wan in the bow of a student in the presence of the Master, he turned and grasped the wheezing Padme by her upper arm and – supporting her with the Force – hurried her down the corridor.
o
o
"Well." Usaki spoke for the first time, a voice as soft as silk and quite unlike the frenzied movements of her body. She stood in a Shien-ready stance, flaunting her figure, her head bent and turned slightly to the side, her green eyes peering coquettishly at him from behind a tumbled fringe of glossy black hair, gazing seductively from under heavy lids. Her perfect crimson mouth moved with fluid enticement, her tongue lubricating her teeth and lips with a glossy sheen. "I see the children have left," she purred.
Obi-Wan's blade shrank away and he faced her calmly, a 'saber's length between them in the corridor thick with ozone and sundered metal. "I will accept your surrender, Usaki," he said brusquely. "Give me your lightsaber and return with me to Coruscant to face the Council." She laughed, a tinkling tumble of crystalline raindrops.
"Still so formal, Obi-Wan?" she breathed, moving towards him, her hand extended to caress his face but stopping a respectful distance from the formidable warrior. The Jedi, well-aware of her intentions before they transmitted themselves into actuality, did not move. "When did you make Knight, Obi-Wan?"
"Twelve years ago," he said quietly, and then added with an air of finality, "and it is Master Kenobi now." He couldn't tell if the greater emphasis was on the title or the name. He felt a twist of anger within her, and a brief flurry against his psyche from her invasive Force tendrils. For the briefest of moments, his mind was overwhelmed with memories of Siri – perhaps a result of her attempts to find her way into him, perhaps a sub-conscious defense mechanism.
She sighed, defeated. "So be it," she said wearily. And then her lit blade swept up and he had to leap backwards to avoid having his face sliced off, landing with perfect balance on the litter of droideka parts in the doorway.
She lunged for him, a howling dervish of whipping Vaapad, even as she reached into the Force and made the few heavy blasters that remained intact under Obi-Wan's boots spasm and spit fire. He caught the bolts and threw them back at her. Contemptuously, she battered them aside and pressed her attack, vaulting over his head and out into the wrecked hangar, the droids still standing around holding their fire to avoid hitting Usaki. Obi-Wan spun to face her, his blade moving of its own accord. He had the measure of her by now; he was more than capable of holding his own against her attacks.
She knew it too – she needed more.
The detritus of the dismantled droids and the wreckage of the Republic ship provided just that – she leaped out of range of his 'saber and flexed her mind, hurling fragments of the ruin at him. Pieces of 'saber-sliced droid and cannon-sundered spacecraft flew at Obi-Wan, threatening to shatter his bones and crush his flesh. He reached into the Force and Ataru and vaulted and dived over them, slicing a few of them with his blade, deflecting more with the power of his mind.
Calmly, patiently, he waited for her to make her mistake.
Howling now, her anger grew and she was on top of him, her blade everywhere, moving so fast it was a red tinge to the light and nothing more. Finally, her madness overloaded Obi-Wan's defense.
And so he opened himself up to it.
He opened a hole in his Soresu defense, letting her rage and hatred flow into him. Her 'saber followed, driving deep into his unprotected underbelly, a grim snarl of exultation on her face. She could sense her victory moments away, sense the destruction of this smug, frigid, puritanical Jedi at her hands. And that picture was so clear in her mind, holding so very much of her attention she did not notice it was a trap.
Her blade dove for Obi-Wan's chest as her anger and violence poured into him. And then he whirled to the side, trapping her 'saber with an elegant single-handed bind. He caught her hatred and held it, looking at it with his Force perception as he might examine a flawed gem that could still be cut for jewelery, a gnarled stump that could be used for firewood, a ruined length of plasteel that would make a serviceable mace.
He swept their 'sabers over their heads and – with every ounce of her own desire feeding the blow – punched her in the stomach with his left hand. She coughed and crumbled, unable to breathe for wholly natural reasons.
Obi-Wan grabbed her by the back of her neck and slammed her throat down onto his raised knee. And then he twisted her perfect hair around his fist and hauled her head back as roughly as any lover had done, ripping strands out by the roots, and drove his forehead into the bridge of her nose with an ugly crunch.
It was only the Force flowing through her body that kept her alive and conscious. She struggled weakly in his grip, her 'saber trapped, being man-handled bodily like some Cytherian harlot. The Jedi's skills at what looked awfully like Dun Moch had taken her completely by surprise – that was her specialty! How dare he! Now she wanted to be him even more, if that were possible.
He jerked his arm and threw her unceremoniously into a pile of sundered metal. He breathed deeply, inhaling the calm of the Force and exhaling the remnants of her rage, stepping back into a deep Soresu stance with his blade angling forwards and the first two fingers of his off hand extended before him. A single lunge and it would all be over – Obi-Wan would perform the Cho Mai on her and he could lash her in electrobinders and carry her back to Coruscant. But the Jedi Knight that Obi-Wan was instinctively settled back into his Soresu rather than press his advantage.
Had it been Anakin rather than Obi-Wan, there would have been no question of delay – he would have made that lunge. But Anakin might not have stopped with the Cho Mai, opting instead for the Shiak that would have charred her heart to ash. And the Jedi that was Anakin Skywalker should never have to be placed in a situation where he might have to resort to Dun Moch. Obi-Wan honestly did not know what such a thing might do to him – since Obi-Wan had performed the Sai Tok on Maul on Naboo, he had realized the dangers of actions that might seem to be carried out for the most noble of motives. The line between the Dark and Light Sides of the Force was the width of a shadow.
Obi-Wan did not walk that line. But – just once or twice – he might leap on there; just to remind himself that the spice was not fresher on the other side of the fence.
He jumped down from the line that he knew was as sharp as the edge of a razor soaked in blood and made to perform the perfect Cho Mai . . .
"Open fire!" snapped Usaki, and the air was suddenly sharp and metallic with the taste of ionization. Before the words had even left her mouth, he was in motion, a globe of flashing Soresu battering blaster bolts away from him, not a few of them flying directly for her face. He wondered what her objective was – for she could not approach him through the howling storm of gunfire, and was even now having to do her own fair share of deflection simply to avoid being shot in the back; he was more than capable of dealing with far denser concentrations of blaster shots than this.
And then she ran for the forcefield that was the hangar doors, her 'saber lit and flashing in her hand, and he understood.
Two slashes of her blade destroyed the projectors on one side of the 'field, and it tore backwards like a curtain of shimmering light, shorting out and crackling raggedly on the other side. Beyond the gaping portal, the ice-cold scouring hyperwinds of the upper reaches of the Kyunden atmosphere whirled past, sucking everything in the hangar – air, droids, wreckage, Jedi – towards it and out into the bleak emptiness of the stratosphere.
Usaki had found another way of expressing her state of self.
Obi-Wan could have easily remained in the hangar – the Force could have anchored him like a Mon Calamari limpet to the floor while the droids frantically tried to stay upright. A few sweeps of his blade and they would have tumbled into wreckage thanks to their own blasterfire.
But Usaki had just used the Force to angle the skirt and sleeves of her dress into an improvised aerofoil, and she rode the howling winds out into the perpetual gale, being swept from Obi-Wan's tearing sight in moments.
With a sigh that expressed exasperation she had to make it so difficult, he let go of the floor and jumped, diving into the bleak unknown. The void yawned open to meet him, and not even the Jedi Master could suppress the sense of queasiness that twisted his guts as he saw just how very far he had begun to fall.