Virulous, Unleashed!

Mr. Tranit's six rivals worked together in two warehouses situated next to each other on a large parcel of land about five kilometers from the edge of town. Along with the two large structures were several small out buildings used as storage sheds for various materials, items, tools, and a small workshop. The structures in the compound were all enclosed on four sides by a four meter tall fence. The six rivals held their offices in the two warehouses. Virulous had decided to take them out, first.

She used The Force to speed her way from behind a large rock to the fence, at the back of the compound, and then leapt over it. Landing on her feet, on the hard packed sand, she dashed to the nearest out building. Crouching her already small stature low, she crept to the corner and, peeking around it, surveyed the huge wide open warehouse entrance. She could see all the way through to the opposite end of the warehouse to its other wide open entrance. Loud, boisterous music blared out from within the large structure, entertaining the workers within. The music momentarily cut off while an overhead announcement was made. Then the music resumed.

The diminutive Sith lord was surprised at the apparent lack of security, until she realized that the workers were all armed. Everyone there was packing a blaster pistol. Yet, everyone there was busy at work. None were paying attention to their surroundings. Taking advantage of this, she zipped to the side of the warehouse, just around the corner from the main entrance.

Her excitement grew as she considered that she was about to enter a warehouse full of armed gangsters, becoming jittery as adrenaline shot through her being. She could feel the power of The Force begin to well up within her, reminding her to turn her apprehension into hatred.

Virulous used The Force to mask her presence, taking advantage of shadows, ducking behind crates, and hiding around corners, to finally arrive at the bottom of a staircase inside the first warehouse. She climbed up the two flights of stairs to reach the second level. According to Mr. Tranit's information, that was where some of the administrative and business offices were located. Virulous expected to find some of her targets there.

The second level offices were all located on one side of the warehouse with a catwalk giving access to the office doors. The Sith lord, seething with hatred for everyone in the warehouse complex, looked down at the workers through the bars of the guardrail at the edge of the catwalk. When she was satisfied that none of the workers below were any of her marks, she turned her attention to the catwalk and the office doors alongside it. The blaring music cut off for another overhead announcement, and then resumed.

The first door Virulous came to was opened. She walked by it quickly, looking inside as she passed. It was a small conference room with a round table and a few chairs around it. Three men were inside, seated at the table, holding a meeting. She instantly recognized two of the men from the images in Mr. Tranit's datapad. The third man had his back to the door, so she could not identify him.

Virulous stopped at the side of the door and prepared herself. She chose to arm herself with her chrome plated lightsaber. It was a gift from her previous master, Darth Silthar, who took her as his apprentice when she passed her trials at the Sith Academy on Korriban. Closing her eyes to steal herself, she took in a breath.

The Sith lord exhaled and opened her eyes, her face contorted by hatred and rage. Then rounding the door frame, while igniting her weapon, she rushed into the room, decapitating the man with his back to the door. Then leaping over his chair and onto the conference table, she immediately pierced the chest of the man sitting at the table to her right with her weapon, while blasting the third man on her left with a bolt of Force Lightning. His chair tipped backwards as though he'd been knocked back. Virulous quietly got down from the table and pierced his chest with her bright red lightsaber, ending his violent convulsions from the electrical shock.

It was over very quickly, and quiet had returned to the conference room when she deactivated her weapon, silencing its deep menacing hum. Virulous turned to look at the severed head on the floor and stepped over to it. Looking at its face, she determined that the man who'd had his back to the door was indeed on her target list. Revulsion for what she'd done threatened to take the edge off of her hatred and anger, and she knew that would lessen the power of the Dark Side of The Force coursing within her.

Virulous hardened her heart and furiously spat on the dead face, then quietly made her way to the doorway, edging closer to the door frame so that she could peek outside the room. It seemed that no one on the busy and noisy warehouse floor below had heard her lightsaber nor the crack of her Force Lightning bolt.

She thought excitedly, "That's a million two hundred thousand credits, already!" Then angrily, "That blasted Mr. Tranit had better not try to cheat me! He'd better pay!"

Although no one on the warehouse floor seemed to have noticed the commotion, the door to the office next door made a noise as it opened, and the sound of someone approaching from that door towards the conference room made Virulous' heart leap. By the sounds the shoes made on the resicrete catwalk, she determined that it was a woman that approached.

She called out, as she neared the conference room, "What's with all the racket, boys?" Adding, with concern tingeing her tone, "You rough housing in there?"

Just as the woman stood at the threshold, Virulous pivoted from the side of the doorway and, reaching up, grabbed the taller woman's throat. Using The Force to assist, she yanked her into the room while crushing the woman's larynx.

The woman crashed onto the body of the man she'd zapped with Force Lightning, lying on the floor beside his upended chair. Unable to scream, she flailed her arms and legs, pounding and kicking the floor with the heels of her feet and with her balled up fists, when she wasn't clutching at her collapsed trachea. Virulous became alarmed at all of the noise the woman was making, fearing anyone working in the warehouse below the office floor would hear.

She used a Dark Force technique that severed the woman's mind from her body. The woman lay still, with her arms and legs left in odd angles. The Sith lord quickly turned her attention to the doorway as she inched her way to the door frame.

She watched the workers on the warehouse floor below and was so focused, trying to determine whether anyone had heard the racket the woman had made, that she failed to notice the hate filled fury in the dying woman's eyes behind her. The woman's eyes seemed to bore her hatred into the back of the veiled and hooded stranger as her killer peeked outside the door.

Virulous was too overcome with worry, whether anyone else was approaching, to notice the woman's tears as she bitterly lamented her coming death. The woman slowly faded away as she watched the hooded stranger slip out of the conference room. Shortly after, she passed out from asphyxiation and then finally died.

Virulous walked down the catwalk to the office from which the woman had emerged. There was no one else there. She searched each office until she'd reached the last one. They were all empty of office workers. Virulous looked down at the warehouse floor, giving the warehouse workers another look as she searched for her next target, but she saw no one else on her target list.

"Maybe they're in the next warehouse," she thought.

She used The Force to ease her descent, as she jumped down to the dusty resicrete floor below. Spinning quickly about, she found stacks of crates behind her, underneath the catwalk and the second floor offices, and quickly ducked between the crates under the offices above. After ensuring no one in the area had noticed her, she made her way to the wide open warehouse door at the opposite end of the building from where she'd entered. Exiting the first warehouse, she made her way to the other structure, using The Force to quickly dash to the next building.

Virulous stopped just at the edge of the large open doorway of the second warehouse, and using The Force, she sensed the interior for anyone near the entryway. Sensing no conscious being nearby, she button hooked her way into the warehouse and tripped over the legs of a worker who was taking a nap, seated just inside the entryway.

The worker was startled awake, giving a short yelp. Virulous scrambled to her hands and knees and hurriedly crawled to the angrily protesting worker. She placed her hand on his shoulder and used the technique she'd learned from Darth Zash when she eavesdropped on Zash's meeting with Darth Nox at the Sith Academy. However, in her haste, she failed to execute the technique properly.

The worker howled quite loudly in pain, but very briefly. He slumped down to his side, moaning in agony. After her attack, he was too weak to move about or to call for help, but his initial cry of pain had caught the ears of others in the warehouse despite the loud music.

Angry at her failure to keep silent, she simply zapped him with Force Lightning, ending his misery forever. Virulous, crouching, ran towards the stairs leading to the catwalk and second level offices in the second warehouse.

As she made her way up the stairs, the music stopped which allowed her to hear the voices of men and women shouting in alarm from outside the warehouse. Just as Virulous reached the top of the stairs, someone shouted for help where she'd left the worker at the warehouse entrance. Some of the office doors opened, with worried office workers stepping out to look down at the warehouse floor as they looked for the source of the commotion.

One of those office workers was her mark. As luck would have it, he was at the far end of the catwalk. Virulous decided the time for subtlety was past. It was time for brute power.

She grasped her sabrestaff and, igniting both ends of it, ran down the catwalk, cutting everyone down that she passed on her way to her target.

Her target drew his blaster pistol and began shooting at Virulous. She deflected some of the blaster bolts with her sabrestaff, and took an opportunity to activate her shield generator during a pause between blaster bolt shots. Realizing his shots were being easily nullified, the man turned and ran to the far end of the catwalk towards the stairs at the other end. Virulous did not let him escape, blasting him with a bolt of Force Lightning from ten meters away.

She ran to where he'd fallen onto his face and then attempted to crawl away. Workers on the warehouse floor, could barely make out her Force concealed form, but began to shoot at what they could see of her from below. She wasted no time, impaling her mark through his spine to pierce his heart.

The Sith lord ran back the way she'd come and entered his office, touching the contact which slid the door shut, thus escaping the blaster bolts as they disbursed their energies on the catwalk railing and on the exterior office wall. The angry shouts in the warehouse had increased, along with the screams of shock and grief, as the friends of the dead came across their severed corpses on the catwalk.

Virulous deactivated her sabrestaff, securing it to her belt. She turned around as she grasped her lightsaber, freezing momentarily in her tracks as she made eye contact with a woman, sitting at her desk, also frozen in fear.

Virulous quickly realized the woman was not on her target list.

She demanded of the woman, "Where is your blaster?!"

The woman, hearing her Imperial accented Basic, realized the attacker in her office was not a Jedi, but one of the dreaded Sith.

Her lips quivering, and tears pouring from her eyes, she pointed a very shaky finger on an unsteady hand towards the wall opposite from her desk. The woman choked back a sob, believing she was very near to the end of her life.

Virulous turned her gaze to the wall and saw, hanging from a hook on the wall, a utility belt with a small holster containing a compact blaster pistol, and decided the woman was not a threat to her.

"The stars favor you today," she said in a mocking sneer, adding, "I will spare you so that you may live to tell the story of how you survived being in the presence of a rampaging Sith lord. Tell any, I haven't slain, that I am here seeking vengeance in the name of Darth Nox. Tell them, I'm only getting started."

She laughed at her own silly declaration as she proceeded to make her way to the office window. Using The Force to wrench it open, Virulous leapt out through the window and landed on the sandy ground, two stories below.

Virulous ran as fast as The Force would allow her towards the tall fence that marked the edge of the property. Leaping over the fence, she made good her escape.

Excitedly, she thought, "One million six hundred thousand credits! Easy!" but then fearing getting cheated, fumed angrily, "He'd better pay!" Finally, introspectively critiquing her own performance, "Four out of six isn't bad."

In her excitement, she'd forgotten the eight she'd killed to get at those four.


It was early evening. One of Tatooine's suns had set. The temperature had dropped considerably, making the environment much more tolerable.

Virulous had ridden her stolen speeder bike to a ranch a hundred and twenty kilometers outside of town. She climbed up a moisture vaporator tower and used her, also stolen, macrobinoculars to scan the low domes and out buildings which made up the subterranean villa. It was the home of one of the leaders of the Exchange Gang on Tatooine. Armed guards were posted sparsely on the surface of the estate.

Virulous was glad to have taken a bath and change her clothing. The stink of her blood soaked robes was attracting too many flying insect pests and was starting to become unbearable. She'd broken into the home of a moisture farmer, Force Persuading the family into letting her bathe, supply her with fresh clothing, and feed her.

She lifted the macrobinoculars from a work bench and stole the speeder bike from their workshop as she left. It wouldn't be until the father of the household had reviewed the security footage with his family a day later, that they would recall what had happened to them the day before.

Virulous wanted to execute the final stage of her mission in the dead of night. She'd become excited that the teenaged daughter had black robes in her wardrobe and availed herself of those. Wanting to blend into the darkness of night, she sought to avoid light colored clothing. Of course, she ended up regretting leaving the farmhouse with the twin suns still up. It was decidedly much hotter in black robes than it had been in her light colored clothing.

Virulous looked forward to Tatooine's second star to set and to dip below the horizon. The teenager had told her that the temperatures could drop to an astoundingly cold 29 degrees Celsius after the second sun had set and that, in the wee hours, the temperature could bottom out to an unbearably freezing 24 degrees Celsius.

"I look forward to the 'freezing' temperatures." She laughed, amused by what Tatooinians thought of as freezing weather.


Eight hours after the second star had set, in the wee hours of the morning, Virulous luxuriated in the balmy weather of Tatooine's early morning hours. She looked through the crystal clear dry air at the predawn sky which dimly lit up the sands with its multitude of stars.

Using The Force to mask her presence as she'd done before, she approached the villa, crouching low and ducking behind the vaporators which dotted the landscape around the villa. She dashed to a parked speeder, unnaturally fast, then creeping around it until she caught sight of a sentry who stood guard at a side entrance of one of the low domes. She believed the dome led to stairs which descended into the subterranean villa.

Virulous concentrated, focusing her thoughts, her force of will, and the power of The Force to cause the sentry to become struck by unrelenting drowsiness. The sentry began to shake his head. He stomped his feet, pacing to and fro. Shortly after, he sat at the side of the door, jerking his head back up each time he nodded off. Finally, he gave in and simply lay on his side and went to sleep.

This was the first time she had ever attempted this Force Persuasion variant. So, she took out her datapad and whispered in her notes, describing what she'd done, how she'd done it, and the successful results of her impromptu experiment. However, she was winded from the effort.

She added an addendum to her notes, "Find ways to improve this technique. It takes too much effort, and takes too long to get results."

Virulous returned her datapad to its place on her utility belt and then stepped silently to the sleeping guard. She inspected the door mechanism and fount it required a palm print to release the locks on the door controls. She was overcome with incredulity, knowing the effort she'd expended to keep stealthily silent was wasted.

This time, she had wanted to not leave a trail of murder and mayhem in her wake, as she'd done at the other two homes of the Exchange Gang leaders her master had ordered killed. She wanted to sneak in, kill her target, then sneak out, leaving the survivors in a state of panic and fear at how their gang boss had been killed, despite all of their security.

"I could have showed off my stealth skills to the dark lord," she thought disappointed, and worried, "Now he'll think I'm nothing but a butchering killing machine."

Virulous crouched beside the sleeping man. Pointing her lightsaber hilt at the forehead of the sleeping guard's head, she activated her weapon, instantly killing him. Immediately after, she severed his hand, just above his wrist, and deactivated her weapon.

Her eyes had been adjusted to the dark, so the bright red beam of her lightsaber left glowing spots in her eyes, which left her partially blinded in the darkness.

"If it's not one damned thing, then it's a blasted other!" she fumed, deeply annoyed.

Revulsion filler her as she picked up the severed hand, careful not to touch the bloody end where the wrist would have been. It was still warm in her hand. She had to straighten out the fingers to get it to lay flat on the palm reader.

The panel lit up, with a touch pad grid displayed on the palm reader screen. Virulous became deeply vexed at the palm reader, pointing accusingly at it.

Muttering angrily under her breath, she groused, "I have to enter a damned code, too!?"

She tossed the severed hand over her shoulder. It landed, making a thud on the hard packed sand where it landed, behind her. Shaking her head and shrugging her shoulders in frustration, she kicked at the sandy ground.

The Sith lord thought about all of the trouble she had gone through to silently enter the villa. Unlike the other homes in Tatooine's rural desert communities with their sunken open pit courtyards, this home was completely subterranean. Only the low resicrete domes, which were the entrances showed above the sands of the vast flat desert landscape.

Sighing frustratedly, she said aloud, "So much for a stealthy infiltration."

She ignited her lightsaber and began to cut into the durasteel door, becoming surprised with how thin the metal was. The bright red beam easily plunged into the door and made quick work of the thin eighth inch sheet metal door.

Using The Force, she yanked the wreckage of the door out and tossed it behind her, jumping with a start at the metallic crashing sound, as the remains of the door slammed into a parked speeder. She wasted no time entering the dome, quickly, but cautiously, descending the stairs into the home of the third and final Exchange Gang boss involved in the bombing attack of Darth Nox's home on Dromund Kaas.

She reached her hand to the inner door controls at the bottom of the stairs and froze. Her instincts screamed out at her to get out. Virulous turned and ran up the stairs, a sense of impending doom filling her with dread.

"All of the noise I made getting in and no alarms?!"

Just as she reached the top of the stairs, the door below her was blown apart by a powerful explosive. The blast wave blew her out of the doorway at the top of the stairs and sent her flying, tumbling into the air. Virulous used The Force to propel herself further out and away from the compound. It was all she could do to escape the ambush set for her.

The concussive force of the blast wave nearly knocked all the wind out of her. Virulous barely thought enough to roll as she crashed onto the top of a small dune of loose sand. She groaned in pain as she rolled to a stop and turned onto her side.

Her uncooperative hands fumbled on her utility belt and then struggled to get out a kolto injector, but she managed to jab her thigh with it – twice, administering two doses.

"I've got to run," her instincts screamed at her.

She knew the security forces had to be searching for her. She didn't wait for the kolto to start numbing the pain.

"Get up, woman!" She growled at herself.

Using The Force, she picked herself up, and then limping and stumbling her way away from the villa, she made her escape into the open desert.