Both Silencers shot back to the Supremacy, its entire massive underside glowing a pure rollen, the color of the Darkness' lightsabers.

With their Third Hands, they gathered a first grip on the many cannons - living arms - of the Supremacy. They did not sense the shuttle coming up to barely rejoin the fleet before shooting into another layer of the universe.

From atop the body of a thousand invisible Destroyers, their Father called to them:

"My sons. Now you will do as you have trained: guide my many hands to keep this target out of enemy hands."

The enemy's pulled out, Kylo Ren thought to himself. He did not need to guess that his Brother Serbris thought the same thing. But a line had been crossed, and it would not be permitted ever again.

It seemed simple enough, and indeed it was.

And note the more complicated now that their enemy was already pulling out. Now that his bodily mind out the question to itself, this amounted to office bureaucracy on the planetary scale: not at all meant to be a show of force, but a casual chore. A long-disputed source of material for their enemies to use against them, transmitting lie after lie to not just their enemies, not just their allies, but everyone. And its holos became historic truth for those who consumed.

Not just taking out everything stinking alien condemned to death on this world; the Knights of Ren euthanized alternate truths. Lies. Guarantees of their own inferiority.

If Serbris had thought of this, he would have refused to do something so trivial by this point; instead he would have asked why he hadn't been called to do so earlier. But now he would be just another errand boy, just like rebellious boy Kylo (though the two were roughly the same age).

But this fact didn't bother Kylo Ren. By this point it was his natural outlook on the Order.

He would destroy Jakku for his "Father" anyway.

Outside, the Silencers took their place on either side of the Supremacy, some sixty kilometres apart, the rollen glow of the cannon arrays on its underbelly casting their aura now on the whole scattered fleet.

Some of which jumped to hyperspace back to Starkiller, their role in this drama accomplished. TIEs of several models returned to their home ships by the hundreds, each Star Destroyer booming through the emptiness and winking out in an instant. The Supremacy and its escort would remain until the job was done, and back at base their crews would deliver the news in the mess halls, their barracks on Starkiller Three, as part of subjugation patrols on Four and Two. In the end, they would know the truth His Supremacy graced them with. That's what this was about.

Across space, the two Knights joined with every hyperlaser strand, hands feeling the warmth of building destruction - and a sensation almost like a handshake. If energy could feel, it would be tickled.

Their Third eyes saw Creation from the compounded perspective of every laser they reined in: Jakku was a monochrome ferrum sphere, not quite light at the pole facing them, deep rust at the lopsided equator, darker still at the great expanses where it is suspected there was once ocean. Black clouds cleared, but within what remained great magnic storms doled out punishment as lightning.

It was almost as if it mocked the Supremacy. And no matter their true allegiances, it fueled the Knights, just as it fueled His Supremacy himself, and every officer he peered upon through his own Third Oyo.

The Knights closed their fists in one another around the laser bolts. Every primed cannon released its terrible ordnance, which gradually funneled there and hovered just under the titanic thing's belly.

It released in a ribbon no thicker than an ordinary lightsaber beam, disintegrating Net Station's giant obelisk as the "brothers" opened their fists. The beam kept going down, down, down, deeper than any junker had ever dug for treasure, or any primordial strip miner had ever gotten desperate enough to try. It sent hairline fractures along the world's crust, letting comatose tectonic plates come apart naturally as the crimson blade stabbed deeper. The magnic power of the world tried pulling the beam away, to shield itself, do anything to survive. It could do nothing.

Half-solidified internal magma boiled in an instant, expanding along those hairline cracks in the surface. Temperature difference raised new wind currents at a power even the oldest junker had never imagined in her most traumatic nightmare. Even if a moon-sized chunk of the world remained and was technically habitable, nothing from bacteria to the greatest subsurface Đraig would live that long when the air they breathed was burned apart at the molecular level.

Every one of these things, the "Father" and his "Sons" felt. They were compelled to share a twitch of the mouth as one, urged to expand it into a smirk as the core exploded, swelling like their collective smile as the Darkness fully claimed this place and it was removed from the grand system of the Light.

There came a point when they could see and feel no more, and their beings shrank back into their bodies.

That doesn't even touch on the hundreds of scattered voices crying out and suddenly silenced. It was a scream even in the black vacuum, heard in the back of every First Order officer's mind.

Luke Skywalker wished he had not been told to see this.


His first Master had felt something like it, a long time ago, the day before his death. Ironic, if that's what this was. But he had listened, and now he would deliver his message.

As a non-existent entity, he let himself expand further, touching the being that might have once been his nephew. His other students in that fleet would listen too, if so it was willed. But Kylo Ren was the one he intended to reach. With a hand that was not his own, he gripped the young man.

Ben. Your mother wants you home.

The answer was just as quick.

She's not my mother anymore.

And that was it. The Will of the Force had been carried out. It was no longer even his place to wait for other replies. Any other time, it might've suggested a mentor eager to embarrass his pupil in front of his friends. He even felt like that himself, if only a little.

The Hexect limped away with the guidance of its pilot to a blind spot in First Order sensors, possibly the only one: an asteroid just outside their inner sensory sphere. There a small carrier swallowed his stolen fighter and made its own running leap to a rendezvous point.

It was here that Luke was greeted briefly by the now-sullen extravagance of an old man who had saved his life more than once.


"Nothing?"

Luke shook his head and kept walking. The black hood and cape dared to suggest a silhouette Lando did not want to remember.

He did not walk to the bridge with his old "friend". Instead into the unknowable solitude of a hollowed-out back cargo hold, where he would meditate. But if the old gambler knew anything of the old Jedi's face, he would not be listening.

He'd seen that face on men gone to plead before a court. They didn't win often.

"I felt what they did to Jakku, too. We all did."

That turned Luke for a moment, already halfway down the darkening corridor but not gone. Only that terrible black shadow remained. He found himself praying for his old host's mercy without thinking.

The grayed blue eyes glowed through the darkness, stabbing into his soul.

"You didn't. You felt nothing."

End of discussion.