They attacked Din from behind.

The cramped space he had been walking through opened up into a shallow—but still more spacious and artificially-lit—chamber not some forty winding feet from the entrance. He had just spotted the end of the tunnel, where he hoped the databases he was looking for resided. With the wind outside screaming across the opening of this hole, masking all sounds but his own trapped breaths, the path had seemed a lot longer than it actually was, and he was relieved that its end was finally in sight.

He had felt a thread of familiar unease in his gut begin to unravel as soon as he had stooped down to enter the hole, leaving Cara, Lyrian, and the Child outside. The way his headlamp had done relatively little to sift through the thick, earthy darkness that stretched all around him hadn't done much to lessen that feeling, either. He also wasn't sure how much of the unease was due to his cramped, vulnerable position and how much was a result of his previous misgivings about stopping on Toong'L in the first place—and the fact that this entire contrived errand was really just a delaying of the bigger, more unpleasant mission he had gotten himself and the kid caught up with.

But he really did have to get a lead, find some other Mandalorians to confront for guidance and assistance in his quest—if only because it would seem to take him one step closer to finding out where he was supposed to take the Child. Or what he was actually supposed to do with Lyrian.

Those thoughts alone were enough to force himself to ignore the unease and push on, despite years of experience that said his instincts were trustworthy—when it came to combat matters, that was.

Regardless, Din hated being attacked from behind even on a good day, when he wasn't crammed too tightly into a tunnel whose ceiling rose only to his neck.

To make matters worse, he knew as soon as the first blows landed that he was being attacked by at least two people.

His first assailant kicked things off with a white-hot flash of pain across the back of Din's calves. It was a calculated strike, using a blade that bit easily through the material of his flightsuit and directly into the skin underneath. A second individual behind Din simultaneously landed a bone-jarring blow to the back of his knees. The pain from the lacerations and the fact that his balance was already compromised due to his stooped posture ensured Din was down on his knees before he could help it.

Din grunted at the pain and the impact, heartbeat skyrocketing and adrenaline flooding his bloodstream. He jerked his arm up to reach for his Amban rifle, but before his hand got past his shoulder, a third attacker, appearing out of thin air, hit him hard from the front and locked both hands around the back of his neck.

Din instinctively reacted to the clinch-hold by shooting one hand up to shove viciously against the inside of one of his attacker's elbows. He reached forward with his other hand at the same time to grasp the back of his assailant's neck, if only to counteract the clinch.

He knew instinctively that he was in a bad spot right now, especially so early in the fight—the head-lock variation his enemy was using would effectively allow him to control Din's movements. Or, alternatively, it could allow him to rip Din's helmet off, breaking his Creed and rendering his head exposed.

Din only got a few seconds to struggle against the hold—seconds in which he tried unsuccessfully to ram his larger opponent against the walls of the tunnel—before the blows began on all sides. The being in front of him began bringing his knees up against Din's chest repeatedly as Din struggled to break the clinch-hold without taking his helmet with it, pounding his chestplate with enough force to shatter unprotected ribs. Behind him, Din's other two attackers were landing punches where and when they could, trying to avoid injuring their comrade over Din's back.

And that was what gave him the leverage he needed, because there were only two ways anybody could move in this tunnel.

Din mustered his strength and wrenched himself backwards right as a knee to his stomach—just underneath the lip of his cuirass—was at the peak of its momentum. The rocking movement didn't have enough power to break the clinch-hold, but it knocked his assailant off-balance enough to allow Din to safely loosen the grip he had on the creature's elbow. He flicked his wrist as soon as he had the mobility to do so, and a stream of fire sprouted from the flamethrower on his vambrace. It splashed directly across his attacker's face and chest.

The Mandalorian was rewarded immediately with a shriek of pain and the involuntary relinquishment of the clinch-hold. Knowing that the two figures behind him were still capable of attacking, however, Din couldn't take the time to breathe after this small victory. He deactivated the flamethrower again with another flick of his wrist, and then, twisting as he did so, quickly flipped himself onto his back. He faced the other two assailants with a single clenched fist lifted and extended directly at their looming, dynamic shadows.

He didn't waste time in firing what he dimly thought might have been the last of his Whistling Birds, which shrieked out of their compartment and killed the two attackers instantly. The figures, cloaked and nearly indistinguishable in the dark, sprawled to the ground with a dull thump, and Din made the instinctive mistake to let out a sigh of relief—right before the figure he had burned leapt on top of him, twisting its body strangely so that it ended up straddling him, a curved dagger glittering in its raised hand, a rough, scaled face careening wildly in and out of the light from Din's headlamp as he struggled against the hand at his throat and the pressure on his abdomen.

"They will die, Mandalorian," the creature hissed—right as it plunged its blade down with unnatural swiftness, aiming directly for the soft spot just below Din's helmet and just to the side of his pauldron.

Din wrenched one shoulder up right before the blade was supposed to land, though, and the blade bounced harmlessly off his Beskar with a short-lived spray of sparks. His attacker had been so confident in the blow that the sudden miss gave it a panicked pause, and by the time it realized that fact, Din had drawn his vibroblade from the sheath near one calf and thrust it into his enemy's chest.

It let out a hissing gurgle and then fell off him, dead.

Almost as soon as it hit the ground, a deep, reverberating BOOM came from outside. The entire tunnel vibrated with the force of the sound, and a rush of urgency bloomed in Din's chest, hiking his heart and breathing rate to their maximum.

That was the sound of an explosion, Din thought.

The sound of destruction.

And it was coming from outside, where the two kids and Cara were.

Din managed to stagger to his feet, but the identical gashes he now sported on both calves were deep, and bright pain pulsed out of them with every slight contraction of his muscles. He could feel blood, too, hot and sticky in the folds of his flightsuit and the tops of his boots.

The Child—

Lyrian—

Din clenched his jaw, breathing deeply through the pain, and traveled back the way he had come mere minutes ago, moving as swiftly as the tight tunnel allowed, pushing roughly past the three bodies that now hindered his way out. He grabbed his rifle—which had been torn from his back sometime during the scuffle—as he went.

When he emerged from the hole, breaking out into the wind-ravaged atmosphere of Toong'l once more, the scene he saw was everything he had hoped it wouldn't be.

A swath of the ground not far from the building he had directed Cara and his two charges to was partially in flames, burning with a strange black fire and emitting waves of smoke that were whipped into a spiraling frenzy as soon as they drifted high enough to meet the rushing wind. Din could make nothing out of the smoke, and with the way his vision was already going around in circles after his recent claustrophobic encounter, he didn't think he wanted to risk trying.

The building itself seemed to have just caught on fire itself, and he could now see Cara a dozen or so feet away from it, engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a cloaked figure like the ones Din had just defeated.

Some distance away from her was another figure, hunched over what appeared to be a fission cannon—most likely the cause of the blast that had just been fired. Lyrian and the kid were nowhere to be seen.

Din widened his stance and rocked back on his heels, wincing at the pain in his calves. He trained his rifle on the person leaned over the cannon. If the weapon was reloaded and the attacker got another shot off—

The Mandalorian wasn't sure if his rifle—modified as it was—would have good enough range to make the shot he needed to make, but he wasn't going to take any chances. The kid was out there somewhere, as was Lyrian—and while Cara seemed close to defeating her own opponent at the moment, that could change in an instant.

Despite his trembling fingers and the way his vision began to blur at the edges from the amount of effort and focus he was using to aim the rifle, the first shot he fired hit the cannon-wielder below Din squarely in the chest. He disintegrated upon impact, and Din lowered the rifle to his side.

He leaned forward to begin the quick thirty-foot or so descent back to Cara (and hopefully the two hiding children), but gravity and fate seemed to have different plans in mind because yet another attacker plowed into him from behind, pinning both arms to his side as it did so and sending both of them careening down the stone steps that climbed the edges of the Crater.

Din hit the steps shoulder-first, sending a jarring flash of pain through his entire left side, and then he was rolling down the edge of the crater, black glass spraying up wherever the Mandalorian and his flailing enemy dashed the ground. For a few moments, everything was a wild blur of colors and varying degrees of pain as the two of them tumbled down the entire length of the stairs—head, legs, arms, everything banging against the steps and glass and unforgiving stone.

When Din and his assailant finally reached the bottom of the steps, the Mandalorian landing with a breath-obliterating crunch on his back, a surge of darkness overtook his vision briefly, threatening to suck him into unconsciousness.

It was only the pain, radiating from every possible part of his body, that kept him from succumbing—that and the dim recollection of the kid. He had to find the kid, and he had to find Lyrian.

Disoriented and likely only alive because of his Beskar armor, Din rolled into something akin to a crouch, one hand raised seemingly of its own accord, holding the vibroblade he hadn't even known he'd drawn as he rose. He wouldn't be able to fight very well with one hand—as one shoulder was definitely dislocated. hanging limply and painfully at his side—but he would sure kriffing try.

But the attacker who had—like an idiot—attacked Din from above on a hill, of all places, was crumpled not far from where Din had landed. It seemed that the cloaked Trandoshan hadn't fared nearly as well as Din without any armor to protect him, and the Mandalorian could tell without looking very long that he was dead, or at least very close to it if that head-gash was any indication.

So why—

"Mando!"

Din stood up too quickly and stumbled, reaching across himself to grab and somewhat stabilize the arm whose shoulder had been dislocated. He turned to Cara's voice and struggled to focus his eyes on her form—only to realize that she was less than ten feet away from him already, apparently having dispatched her own opponent and rushed to his aid when he fell.

Which is why I can hear her through the wind, of course.

Cara pointed at the cyclone of dark smoke, the remnants of the blast that had occurred while he was in the tunnel, seemingly the result of a random or otherwise hindered shot from the fission cannon.

"Lyrian is over there!"

Din's breath hitched.

Lyrian was in that? How was she—

Where is—

Din struggled to reroute his splintered thoughts and the last of his fleeting attention toward sprinting to the place where Cara had pointed—the place she was now running toward as well. The smoke was so thick at first that Din couldn't discern any shapes or figures, but now, as he got closer—

He saw Lyrian, lying on the ground as if she had been flung by some giant hand.

But where is the Child?

And he saw two more attackers, one dragging Lyrian's limp form unsteadily through the sea of fused glass and ash and the other one seeming to reel drunkenly through the smoke, coughing and cursing in Basic in between ragged breaths.

His previous pain fading into the background, washed away temporarily by the adrenaline once more, Din kept running, surpassing Cara and lifting his arm toward the figure who was dragging Lyrian by the hood of her cloak.

The grappling line that zipped out of his vambrace hooked around the fleeing coward's arm, and Din wrenched it savagely to one side upon contact. The movement was so violent that it wrenched Din's dislocated shoulder, too, and he let out a sharp cry of pain even as his target stumbled and let go of Lyrian.

Panting heavily through the haze of smoke and his own undulating vision, Din clumsily pulled the blaster at his hip from its holster, aimed, and shot the fallen bounty hunter—for that's what he assumed the figure was.

When he was certain his marksmanship had been true, Din lurched himself to his feet and took a few running steps towards Lyrian, panic clawing up from his belly, his gaze frantically searching for any external wounds.

She hadn't been hit or she would have been burned beyond recognition, but she was so limp, so quiet, so still—

And the Child…where is he?

For the third time in less than an hour, Din's tunnel vision proved to be his downfall, and someone rammed into his side, accompanied by a sharp, fiery burst of pain from low in his side, under his arm and below his ribcage, where the cuirass didn't quite cover.

It was the other hunter, the one who had been staggering through the smoke before Din had taken his companion down. The hunter he had somehow managed to forget in the few seconds it took for him to spot and be distracted by Lyrian's predicament.

Din managed to land a weak blow to the figure's side as it withdrew a blade from Din's side, but he only had one arm and he could barely breathe and he could feel the blood, the pounding of his heart, the bright sky getting brighter and then retreating, falling—

There was the sound of a blaster discharging, and suddenly Din's attacker had fallen away from him, crashing into the black glass without another sound.

Din fell to his knees at the same time, breaths ragged, helmet lolling against his collar, struggling against the pain to stay awake, stay alert, to get to Lyrian and find the Child—

"Mando!"

It was Cara, at his side, an arm wrapped around his torso to keep him from falling face-first into the glass. Din turned his head, the feeling like wet cotton stuffed in his ears combined with the ever-present roar of the wind making it impossible to focus for very long.

"The…Child. Cara, where—"

"He's safe, Mando. Behind the crates. We need to get to Lyrian."

Din exhaled sharply, the tension in his shoulders releasing enough that he almost pitched forward again, and Cara had struggled to compensate for the sudden movement. She said something, concern leaking from her voice, but Din only had one thought at the moment.

Lyrian.

Din raised his head, and with momentous effort, the Mandalorian managed to get to his feet and take a stumbling step toward the Chiss girl. She looked pale—her skin was lighter than he had ever seen it before, and he couldn't tell whether or not she was breathing at all. There were cuts all over her face, and she hadn't moved at all from where her attacker had dropped her.

Cara supported him as he walked, and Din dimly registered the fact that she had pressed a heavy hand to the bleeding slit in his side, where the dagger had sunk into him. The adrenaline was fading now, bringing with it an entirely new intensity to his pain, making him aware of aches he hadn't even suspected were there before.

But Lyrian needed him.

He hadn't been here to protect her when they'd been attacked.

And the Child—

Cara said he was safe, but where was—

There.

The Child was waddling through the glass toward Lyrian, coming from who knew where—the direction of the building that was still burning, maybe. It was obvious the heated glass was hurting his bare feet, but still—he moved faster than Din had ever seen him move before. As Din pushed away from his friend and fell to his knees next to Lyrian, the baby reached her as well and looked up at the Mandalorian. He let out a loud, mournful coo.

"I know," Din panted, mirroring the Child in reaching out with one hand. He took the little one's hand between his thumb and forefinger, gulping back ragged breaths and the rest of his adrenaline-fueled fear and maybe even some of his own blood.

He let go of the Child's hand after a few breaths and, as gently as he could, gathered Lyrian into his lap, off of the too-hot ground. He cradled her head against the Beskar and cursed the way the wounds on his legs burned viciously as he leaned his weight onto them. And yet she did not stir, and he didn't know what to do.

Is she breathing?

Is she even alive?

He barely registered that Cara was beside him, and he struggled for a moment—fingers slipping, shoulder screaming in agony—to remove his glove so he could check for a pulse—

Please please let there be a pulse—

Before Cara reached forward and did it for him, her fingers pressing against the artery in Lyrian's limp wrist.

Din couldn't stop looking at Lyrian's face, couldn't stop thinking that she was a kid, just a kid. If he had let her die…if he hadn't protected her, then—

"She's alive…but she's fading, Mando," Cara said, and her voice was so flat that Din glanced over at her in surprise. Maybe even in disbelief.

It would be his fault if she died. They both knew it. And what would he be, then? What would he have done?

They also both knew—somehow—that Lyrian didn't deserve to die like this. To die at all.

"We need to get her back to the ship," Din said, his voice thin even as it bounced around inside the confines of his helmet.

But Cara just looked at him with eyes that seemed almost as glassy as the shards beneath their knees—and just as dark—and his heart sank to his stomach. She looked down at the baby, who was still staring at Din, looking at him with something urgent in his eyes, something like an expectation.

"I think he wants permission," Cara said suddenly, and the flatness in her tone was gone.

Din looked down at Lyrian, heart hammering, black anger bubbling up behind his sternum as he saw even more cuts, saw the trickle of blood (red, like mine) coming from her nose, from her ears.

Just a kid.

"He wants to heal her, Mando. He can heal her." Cara was getting excited by the idea, tensing, leaning forward, hoping like Din was.

Din looked again at the baby, still fighting the fluttering unconsciousness that threatened to pull his attention away from what mattered right now.

Of course.

"Do it," Din panted to the Child. He leaned forward, to punctuate his words, to make sure the baby knew what he was giving permission for. "You can do it."

"Mando, you—" Cara began hesitantly, something steely in her voice as her hand pressed harder against the wound that still pulsed in his own side.

"He heals Lyrian," Din snapped, though even that burst of words made his vision buck again. He was weakening, he knew. He was losing a lot of blood now, too—faster because of his furious heart rate—but he had to make sure Lyrian was alright. He had to make sure that she was saved and that his mistakes hadn't cost her innocent life (another innocent life).

"It's alright," Din whispered as the Child tentatively reached forward with one small hand and placed it on Lyrian's forehead, his big eyes never once leaving Din's helmet. Even with Din's permission, the baby seemed hesitant. How many times in the past month had the Child wanted to heal one of Din's minor wounds and Din hadn't allowed him to? Did the Child know that Din was hurt, too?

How much energy will this take from the kid?

But Din nodded through his doubts and racing thoughts, hoping the Child could sense the movement and know what it meant. He poured all his waning concentration into staying upright, into staying conscious at least long enough to see the cuts fade, to see the color return to Lyrian's cheeks.

Because there was something about her—

Something like the kid—

Something he had to protect if only because he was the only one willing to—

The Child at Lyrian's side closed his eyes then, eyebrows furrowing. Din and Cara watched, neither one breathing, both of them silent as they kneeled under the swirling sky of colors.

Din dared to close his own eyes in the second before the Child began to heal Lyrian, and in that moment he made a promise. It wasn't a promise he could put into words so much as a promise he could feel—something that unconsciously shifted his priorities, his energies, rearranging his life yet again.

But one thing had to happen before he could make good on that promise.

He opened his eyes again and looked at the Child, and the infant must have known Din looked even with his own eyes closed because his ears perked up. Din couldn't hear the sound his tiny charge made—his little mouth opening and closing again like it did when he cooed—but he could have sworn it was a sound of reassurance.

Din carefully took one of Lyrian's still hands in his own, wanting to be able to feel when she became responsive again just in case he wasn't conscious enough to see it happen.

Save her, little one.

He gritted his teeth against a wave of pain.

Because I can't.

A/N: Well. It is a new chapter. What else is it? I'm not sure, but...

Fight Scenes = HARD TO WRITE (but this is a Mando fic, so I guess it's kind of a big deal?)

Clinch-Holds = REAL (I did not make them up...)

My Level of Gratitude Towards Everyone Who Has Stuck With This Story and Enjoyed It So Far Despite Chapters Containing This Kind of Questionable Content: SO HIGH.

Seriously, everyone. Thank you for reading, thank you for your support, thank you for your likes/follows, and tHaNk YoU for just being here for the craziness of this story. You are amazing, and once you leave this page, you BETTER have a good day. Because you need and deserve one. *hug* :)

~Roanoke

"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places."

-Ephesians 6:12