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-CHAPTER START-

Realm SWL-5

Unknown Regions – Asar System

The Imperial force stationed at Ilum were a little worried. Recently, hyperlane communications with the rest of the galaxy had been cut off. It was probably just a glitch or a shifting of spacetime that temporarily obstructed communications, but… Still, they had a job to do. Lord Palpatine and Lord Vader may be dead, but these Imperials would still carry out their Emperor's now-posthumous order: convert the empty, icy world of Ilum, once a sacred site for the Jedi Order and a prime source for the Force-imbued power crystals that served as cores for their lightsabers, into a fortress world and an enormous weapon. Construction had begun, teams and droids beginning to carve what would become a massive trench encircling the planet's equator. There was only a handful of armed ships here, corvettes and frigates led by a single Star Destroyer, the Eminence, all overseeing and protecting the organic & mechanical workers who were setting up shop.

The Eminence's captain relaxed in his chair, unable to help enjoying the view of a relatively close nebula. But then, he heard loud, rhythmic alarm-like beeps coming from the nearby station of one of the bridge crew.

"What's that notification for?" he asked the man at the terminal.

"I-It's the external radiation sensor, sir" the ensign replied. "It's detecting… Cherenkov radiation?"

"What type of radiation is that, ensign? Do we need to worry?"

"It's not really harmful to humans, sir, but… It's a kind of radiation emitted whenever particles travel through a medium faster than light travels through said medium. In old-timey fission reactors, you see it as a vibrant blue glow in the deep pools of water the reactors are situated in, since light travels comparatively slow in water compared to a vacuum."

"…But we're in space" the Captain realized. "For something to be going faster than light in a vacuum… There shouldn't be anything moving that fast other than in hyperspace, and we have that realm monitored top to bottom for 2 ½ light-years in all directions. So what…"

"Something on visual!" another ensign shouted. "Far range! Magnifying the image now!"

A large holoscreen projected a vastly magnified live image of several thousand kilometers away, where space seemed to be rippling in a circular motion with a dark bluish tint to it. Then, the ripples suddenly transformed into swirling vortex-like portals of black, blue, & white, and a multitude of warships of seen & unseen designs emerged into realspace – Rebel Alliance cruisers, UNSC destroyers and a pair of Vindication-class light battleships, and three Sangheili Yermo-class cruisers formed up around a Sanghelios-class battlecruiser. They numbered a dozen ships in total, all of them oriented toward the stunned and outnumbered Imperial force and closing in.

The Imperials fired first, green turbolaser bolts streaking through the empty blackness, aimed mostly at the Rebel Alliance vessels. The DDF ships moved to evade, shields lighting up as they absorbed hits, and returned fire – red turbolaser shots, plasma torpedoes, and Archer missiles. An Imperial frigate was struck by three plasma torpedoes; the first and second wore away its shields, and the third burned deep into the vessel, gutting it. Another Imperial frigate tried to move and flank, but a UNSC destroyer got it in its sights and landed a MAC round, wearing down the Imperial ship's shields by more than half. Fire from the other ships finished the shields off, and then an unshielded hit from one of the light battleship's MACs punched a gaping, flaming hole all the way through the ship, and its engines died as it drifted dead through space, flames and secondary explosions ravaging its mangled hull.

"W-What the hell kind of weapons do these Alliance sympathizers have?" the Eminence's captain muttered in stunned horror. "They just destroyed two of our frigates in seconds…"

"T-The new, bulbous-looking alien ships appear to be using plasma-based weaponry, sir" a junior officer replied. "Rate of fire nowhere near as high as turbolasers, but packing several orders of magnitude more power to compensate. And the angular gray ships… By the stars, they have kinetic-kill weapons – slugs, of all things, magnetically propelled to c-fractional velocities! Giant coilguns that run much of the length of each ship, and the power levels we're picking up from them are enormous! Even our Star Destroyer's shields wouldn't withstand more than 4 or 5 hits from those things at full power, and an unshielded hit would literally tear a hole right through us…"

The captain felt grim. It had been tens of thousands of years since the peoples of the greater galaxy discovered blaster technology and mostly abandoned slugthrowers and projectile weapons as "obsolete"; it appears this new civilization took much longer to develop practical directed-energy weapons, and so compensated by developing their "primitive" projectile weaponry as much as possible, resulting in advanced and ludicrously deadly anti-ship weapons.

Then, as most of the DDF ships focused on the smaller Imperial ships and deployed fighters to handle the TIEs coming their way, the Sangheili battlecruiser focused its attention on the Imperial Star Destroyer. The Star Destroyer opened fire, sending a hail of emerald energy bolts that began to pound at the battlecruiser's shields. In response, the battlecruiser fired three full-strength plasma torpedoes, and the Star Destroyer was rocked by the impacts; its shields were drained by over half, and parts of its armor plating were scorched by heat that managed to transmit through the shielding. The Imperial ship had a much higher rate of fire with its main guns, but the Sangheili ship's main weapons packed much more punch than a turbolaser bolt, making up for the lower firing rate. TIE fighters tried to attack the alien ship, only for an array of pulse laser turrets to cut many of them down and chase away the rest, a flight of Seraph fighters forming an additional defensive screen around their mothership and shooting down a couple more TIEs who'd been too slow to get distance.

The other DDF ships soon made short work of the remaining armed Imperial vessels, moving to capture the unarmed ones and harvest lifepods to save & capture survivors. Another wave of plasma torpedoes struck the Eminence, and the Star Destroyer's shields gave one last scintillating flash as they broke down and failed, leaving the ship exposed. A handful of "lesser" plasma bolt cannons raked the Star Destroyer's flank, cutting a line of burning, boiling holes in its hull. As one of the UNSC battleships moved to assist, the DDF ships then received a communication from the Eminence: an offer of surrender, the captain choosing to save as many of his men & women as he could.

A Rebel Alliance cruiser and a Vindication-class light battleship made for the planet and began deploying dropships and fighter-craft, intent on taking the groundside Imperial garrison and any sensitive materials & data there were to find. There were only two Imperial military installations set up and manned this early in the planet's "development", and they were quickly beset by significantly superior numbers when they'd been expecting to never have to fight here at all. It took less than an hour before they were overwhelmed and surrendered.

Taking the planet Ilum may not seem strategically significant for the DDF, but it would play a few important roles. First, it meant they'd reclaimed a sacred site of the Jedi Order and a major source of lightsaber crystals, for use in the New Jedi Order that Master Kota and Luke were planning on creating. Second, this planet would serve as a great outpost and jumping-off point for the exploration of the Unknown Regions (the roughly-half of the galaxy that was mostly cut off from hyperspace travel, but very reachable via slipspace). And third, interrogations of captured Imperial personnel and analysis of databanks revealed the Empire's plan to convert the entire planet into a gigantic weapon; putting a stop to that project before it could really get off the ground was, of course, a big victory.

-CHAPTER END-

And that's a nice little development for the DDF that takes place sometime during the "main" events of this Book. Next up, I'll finish this Book with a data chapter, listing everyone's Keyblades and the Pokémon of everyone who has one.

However, although I already have the former all listed out, for the latter I'm having trouble remembering what everyone already has, as mentioned in previous Books, plus there's plenty of characters I haven't thought of Pokémon for yet. To fix the former, I am now going to take a little while to reread Books 33 and on for myself. But fear not; writing may take me a while, but I'm quite good at reading fast, so it shouldn't take me too long to blaze through those Books. Once I've done that, compiling every already-mentioned Pokémon in the Word document I type up new chapters of Teana's Travels in, I'll figure out Poké-partners for everyone else who has any.

I'm… about 90-95% sure I'll be finished before Christmas, and will in fact probably be done before December is even halfway over. So stay tuned, it won't be too long!