The Rise of Pulsar Company

by PygmalionKK

The son of a Mandalorian, two escaped slave girls, and an astromech from the Clone Wars work together to escape Tatooine. As they transition from greenhorns into famous mercenaries, they get into considerably larger amounts of trouble - from murderous pirate lords and serial killers to bioterrorists and ancient horrors of a long dead race, all in the pursuit of more credits.

35. A Host Of Sorrows

I forgot February was a short month and thought I had enough time to get this out before the end of the month. Oops.

You know what I dug up on my computer? I found a folder called 'Beyond Death' that had a partially written chapter for a Warcraft fanfiction inside, centered around my Alliance and Horde mains, named as such because the Horde character was a Forsaken, and the Alliance character was a Death Knight, and both were brothers. I wrote this up right when I was getting back into WoW at the end of BFA and was setting up my TRP profiles. Might be something to do after Pulsar Company is complete, if I can dig up the TRP profiles since I uninstalled WoW. If you guys want, I can go more in-depth about it since I did have the general idea for it as far back as 2016/2017, though little was made that was concrete until I started writing said TRP profiles outside of a screenshot of the Forsaken character inside the Escape from Durnholde instance.

Also, I binge watched the entirety of the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy, the TASM duology, and Homecoming, Infinity War, Endgame, and Far From Home, all just to watch some fucking chinese camrip of No Way Home that was almost never in focus. I have never felt more fulfilled by a movie in my fucking life.

Read and review.

---

Kyra disembarked the MPLV, and made sure the medics were taking Sawei to a vitor tank, before she headed for the command tent. The frontlines, with what little she had glimpsed of them, seemed like nothing short of hell itself. The foliage had all been burned away by a combination of incendiary weapons and defoliators, leaving the trenches exposed to rainfall, leaving them muddy and in horrid condition. Sniper towers and heavy autoblaster nests pockmarked the landscape, and weapons fire was omnipresent, along with the screaming of artillery shells, and the occasional air battle. Calling it dreadful would be a compliment.

Entering the command tent, she happened upon the ranking officer in the middle of a briefing. He was a green Twi'lek, wearing a partially damaged helmet, and his lekku seemed to split at the ends. He glanced up from his map at Kyra, motioned for her to hold, and resumed his briefing. "Scout reports say that this," he said, pointing at a specific spot on the map. "...is the weakest link in their lines. Hand this up the chain and tell Blackwall that we need to hit this with everything we have if he wants to break this stalemate before he dies of old age." he ordered, handing a puck to the soldier he was briefing, who saluted him, before leaving the tent, brushing past Kyra on his way out. "Heard from the specialist you were coming, Dreamer. To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"I heard you have a problem I need to deal with." Kyra said with utmost confidence that the officer knew what she was referring to.

The officer blinked twice, seemingly taken aback. "Huh?" he replied. "I had no idea you were even coming until the specialist flagged me down and told me we needed to send out CSAR for you."

Kyra approached the command table, and tapped roughly along the lines where the previous briefing officer had pointed out the deceased artillery spotters. "Dead artillery spotters, right here. Cut up and butchered like animals, ringing any bells?" she questioned, and the officer had a look of realization on his face.

"Oh, those." he murmured, before leaning over the table. "I've already tasked some scouts to find out who did that-"

"Then those scouts are dead already." Kyra grimly interrupted, causing the officer to narrow his gaze at her. "The ones that shot my transport down and the ones that killed the spotters are from the same group. They're Force users – Sawei was overwhelmed by them and nearly killed when they shot us down, and I only managed to drive some of them away, not kill them." Kyra admitted, trying to lay the seriousness of the situation onto the officer. "They're dead, and if they're not, they will be soon." she continued.

The officer processed this, and hung his head, before swearing under his breath. "...Typical that I get left in the dark about this – shit doesn't change whether you're on a merc payroll or being led by clones." he continued, letting out a frustrated sigh. "I'll send an order out to recall those scouts, but part of their mission was to help coordinate strikes against enemy emplacements here, here, and here." he noted, pointing at several locations on the map that had been marked out, namely a large, heavily fortified command post, flanked by a set of heavy artillery and anti-air defenses. "I need these things taken out so they can't support against our offensive."

Kyra looked over the map a few times, and then looked back to the officer. "That's all well and good, but where exactly do I come in?"

The officer raised an eyebrow, surely about to propose some laserbrained idea. "Ever been inside an assault walker?"

---

Kyra took stock of her situation. Somehow, someway, she had been convinced into going with the exact kind of laserbrained idea she was expecting to hear from the officer. She was, at current, standing in an AT-TE's rear troop bay, next to a BARC speeder meant for her. The walker itself was part of the problem, seeing as how it was attached to the side wall of the ring, marching forward silently in the vacuum of space, towards the point where it was supposed to stop, climb back over the wall of the ring, and let Kyra out.

Yes, Kyra may have just done EVA the other day, but the key difference is that she had control of where she moved, and had a couple different emergency functions if something on her suit malfunctioned. The AT-TE was a completely different story – she had no control over it at all, but the driver did, and there was no emergency protocol if the maglocks on the feet failed.

Nervewracking? Yes. Dangerously stupid? Absolutely. Still, here Kyra was, going along with a dumb plan. Kyra reached for her commlink and pressed down to speak to the driver. "Hey, the magnetic locks aren't going to fail, are they?" she questioned earning quite a bit of laughter from the driver.

"'The magnetic locks won't fail, right?'" the driver echoed through his chuckling. "Lady, I've done this hundreds of times back in the War. We triple checked the locks, and they're still good, so no falling into the void today." the driver, a gruff sounding clone, reassured her. ""Course, there was that one time where the locks did fail on a boarding action..." the driver mumbled quietly, barely audible enough for the commlink to pick his voice up.

"What was that?" Kyra questioned, evidently catching the driver off guard.

"Nothing, nothing. We're perfectly safe." the driver backpedaled. "Perfectly safe." he echoed, doing very little to assuage her concerns, before abruptly cutting the commlink.

Typical.

In an attempt to take her mind off the very real possibility of falling into space, Kyra knelt down next to the BARC to take a look at what it had going on underneath. Pulling the rear engine cowling off with a nearby arcscrew, she was rather surprised to find a completely different array of parts underneath, at least, compared to the pair of BARCs they had on the Knight. The engine assembly was almost entirely aftermarket parts – factory new, too, by the looks of things. The Republic had a habit of labeling and marking every little piece of equipment issued, but these were completely clean. Recalling what she had learned from performing maintenance on their BARCs, Kyra noticed a few key changes. First, the power cell was much larger than the original, feeding into the engine and repulsors at multiple different points, along with a smaller backup cell. The engine also took up much more space inside – the original engine on the BARC was actually fairly compact for how much power it put out, so this was almost assuredly an upgrade to squeeze as much power out of the space they were working with. The air compressors on the side attached to the turbines also looked like they were changed.

Kyra felt the walker stop, and begin to rotate to the right, before walking again. Quickly reattaching the cowling to the speeder, Kyra ran through her bag of supplies to make sure everything was set for her mission. Macrobinoculars with rangefinder, check. Long range commlink, check. Spare ammo, check. Lightsaber… check.

Feeling the center of gravity shift as the walker moved to the top of the wall, and then shift again when it started walking down the wall to the drop point, Kyra readied herself, getting onto the BARC and waiting for the walker to stop moving so that she could drop out of it. When the walker righted itself, the red light that had been dimly illuminating the bay switched to a bright green, and Kyra used the Force to push the button to drop the speeder.

When the bay doors dropped and let Kyra out, she immediately kicked the BARC's engines on and shot off into the forest, the roar of the speeder's engines dwarfing anything else she could possibly hear. Glancing down at the electronic display on the speeder's dash, Kyra realized there was a map with her destinations pre-programmed. Of course, as she was spotting for artillery and airstrikes, it'd be up to her to find the best vantage points to call the strikes in.

Focusing on dodging the trees, Kyra only barely sensed a new presence, rapidly on approach to her location. Rear right, and closing fast. Opening up the throttle, Kyra blazed through the forest, with the whine of the turbines only growing louder and louder as she picked up more speed. Not exactly stealthy, as her pursuer had so clearly shown, but it's not like much would be able to catch her, anyways.

The deep forest gave way to a large open field, with a lake occupying about half of it. Now that she didn't have to dodge trees constantly, Kyra afforded herself the precious few seconds to check her six, and immediately ducked as a slug shot overhead with a loud crack, piercing through the roar of the BARC's engine. She sensed a similar presence as to what she felt from when her gunship was intercepted – her pursuer was part of the Hand, that much was certain.

Using the Force to control the BARC for the next few moments, Kyra stood up on the seat, maintaining the delicate balance needed at such a high speed. With a flick of her wrist, she engaged the automatic shutdown, before jumping off backwards, activating her lightsaber mid-flight, and landing on her pursuer's speederbike. "Surprise!" she quipped to the surprised Rakata, before bringing her lightsaber to bear on the pursuer. With the sound of flesh searing and melting from heat, the Rakata screamed out in agony as his left arm was severed, turning what remained on his body into a bloody, if mostly cauterized stump.

Naturally, he immediately lost control of his speederbike, and Kyra jumped off, watching it veer off into the waters of the lake, taking its driver with it. A green pulse beneath the water that was as bright as it was brief seemed to confirm his fate, and Kyra was almost disappointed at how easy it was. Just one flashy stunt, a dismemberment, and that was it?

Kyra, still suspecting that something was up, began to walk back to the BARC, which was idling a comfortable distance away from her. That suspicion, unfortunately, proved out to be correct – Kyra sensed something heading her way fast, and dropped to the ground, catching the barest glimpse of a long chain coming from the direction of the lake. Getting back up and readying herself for battle, Kyra saw the pursuer coming out from the waters, soaked through and covered in vegetation, swinging one blade over his head, like a rotor blade, while the second was being held in his mouth, both weapons attached by a chain. Shock, evidently, was not a thing for the Rakata.

With his sole remaining hand, the Rakata launched the free sword at Kyra, like a spear, before charging forward to meet it. Dodging out of the way of the projectile, Kyra danced around to her opponent's rear, before moving to thrust her lightsaber into his back. What happened instead was the pursuer pivoted around immediately, throwing the end of the blade that was in his mouth at her head. Dropping low, Kyra swung her lightsaber in an attempt to cut the chain linking the two swords, only to be met with an ear piercing grinding sound as the chain continued unabated, aside from being a little hotter after contact with her blade. The grinding sound stopped, along with the blade, and Kyra struck upwards again to cut the now still chain.

Kyra caught a glimpse of her attacker – he was holding his end of the blade with his fingertips – an incredible feat under normal circumstances, the fact that he was doing so while missing an entire arm seemed almost impossible. The part of the chain closest to Kyra began to shuffle and move of its own accord, and Kyra immediately dove away after sensing what was coming – the other blade scraped against her helmet for a brief moment, before returning to her pursuer's side, hovering in the air through the power of the Force, while the other end was firmly in his hands.

Kyra attempted to close the distance between herself and her hunter, only for the chain to lash out at her with such incredible speed that she barely had time to react, resulting in a scrape across her viewplate. She was being zoned and controlled by his superior range, not aided by the fact that his loss of an arm didn't really seem to bother him, as he was just using the Force in place of it, anyways. He stood there, panting from the exertion of crawling from a watery grave with one arm left, and after a while, he straightened up and his breathing normalized. Kyra couldn't really make out his features through the vegetation, but what did stick out to her were his glowing, yellow eyes, that emanated a kind of sickly energy.

Kyra extended her lightsaber out into the pike configuration to at least give her a bit more leeway with her reach, and again made a move towards the Rakata, and again, he struck out with the weapon at Kyra's position. She dodged it, but instinctively raised her lightsaber to defend anyways. In the brief moment that the weapon was stuck there in the air, Kyra noticed that it seemed unusually rigid, and then realized she wasn't seeing things – it was rigid, and when the Rakata moved to strike her again, she saw the chain loosen up. Rolling back outside of its effective range, Kyra came up with a plan.

She had already balanced herself on a moving speeder – who was to say she couldn't do the same with what was basically a metal tightrope?

Her opponent wasn't intent on pressing his advantage – he was completely content to let Kyra wear herself out when she was completely outranged, which made it all the more easy for Kyra to bait him. Dashing inside of his range once again, the weapon lashed out, and Kyra dodged it, as predicted. In the brief moment she had before the miss registered for her opponent mentally, Kyra launched herself on top of the chain, and as she had predicted, it barely moved under her weight. Bolting down the chain towards her now defenseless opponent, she felt it give way and begin moving again. Once again on solid ground, Kyra closed the distance, and as the Rakata raised his end of the weapon to block an incoming strike, Kyra drew her blaster and shot him in the stomach, dazing him for her to have just enough time to maneuver her saber around his defense, under his arm, and shk!

Off with his other arm.

Wasting no time in taking advantage of the situation, Kyra pressed her blade against his throat. "How many of there are you?!" she asked, hoping to gain some kind of answer to aid her. Instead, she saw what looked like… fear? Not fear of her, no. It was something else. Something she couldn't pick out.

Instead of answering her question, Kyra heard a loud crack come from the alien's mouth, and his eyes rolled back, along with his mouth foaming up, before he fell backwards, dead. He had cracked a suicide pill – one hidden inside of a molar, if the barely visible flow of green liquid pooling at the back of his open mouth was any indication. That the Hand would sooner commit suicide than be captured…

Kyra stared at the corpse for a moment in shock, and she holstered her weapons, before glancing at the weapon laying on the ground. With a simple gesture, the two ends rapidly rose from the grass, before rushing at each other and connecting through some unseen latch – Foreman would love to get his hands on this. Kyra quickly checked the body to find some form of intel – a datapad, a physical piece of paper, anything would be good. What she found was, almost literally, nothing. Her pursuer had a water canteen on him, some empty packages for what might have been ration packs, and a sheath for his weapon in its travel configuration. Not even a commlink or medical supplies.

Annoyed that her attempt to gain some form of lead on the Hand had been frustrated, Kyra picked up his weapon and headed off towards her BARC to continue with her mission. She popped open the storage compartment of her speeder, put the weapon inside, and closed it, before hopping on and casting one final glance at the corpse. Something inside Kyra's mind doubted that he was truly a member of the Hand. Perhaps he was an initiate, not fully developed like Shuu'Tao or the others seemed to be.

Kicking the BARC on, Kyra focused forward and sped off into the trees, keeping an active screen going to sense any new incoming threats. For once, it seemed to be quiet – the pursuer was the only sentient other than her for quite a long way. Every other living thing in the immediate area was wildlife – Compdogs, mostly, but there were a few Gargans that were stomping around. Considering their past displays of aggression, it was at least a bit of a surprise that they weren't coming after her, but the less armored giants she had to deal with, the better.

It wasn't long before she could hear the sounds of battle return, gradually glowing closer as she approached her targets. Again, it all seemed so quiet as far as enemy contact went. Suspicious, yes, but Kyra didn't exactly have room to complain – any bit of leeway as far as avoiding the enemy was good.

Finally having spotted a decent spot about three klicks out from her first target, which was the leftmost SAM/artillery site, Kyra shut her speeder off at the bottom of a tall hill and got off, grabbing her macrobinoculars and keeping them in hand, just so she didn't have to mess around with her bags at the top of the hill. As she climbed, the only thing she heard aside from the weapons fire and strike aircraft was the wind, blowing calmly in the relatively sparse trees. Kyra got to the top of the hill, and, after taking a quick look with her binos, realized the hill was still not tall enough to get a good look at the site. Thankfully, there was a tree at the top of the hill, and, using the Force, Kyra jumped up near the top, finding the sturdiest branch to sit on. Now she had a clear view of the site. "Hinj, come in." she said over the commmlink hoping the officer had remembered to keep his turned on. "Got a clear view of the site, and..." she trailed, looking harder, before realizing that she could see part of the central bunker complex as well. "...and the bunker complex. Ready for coordinates?"

There was a scrambling from Hinj's end of the comms, like he'd left it on the table and forgotten to put it on. "Reading you loud and clear." he responded after clearing his throat. "The gunners aren't ready, wait one while I tell them to get set."

Kyra raised an eyebrow. "You didn't have them set from the beginning?" she questioned, having a gnawing suspicion that Hinj, the one who came up with this plan in the first place, didn't fully trust in Kyra's abilities.

"No, I mean- I didn't-" Hinj sputtered, as if Kyra had just accused her of some great and terrible crime. "...Wait one." he said in a defeated tone, giving up whatever he was going to say. After a couple minutes, the commlink crackled to life. "They're ready. Send coordinates so we can muck up this brawl a bit more." Hinj requested.

Bringing the binos to her eyes, Kyra zoomed in, looking down at the position like one would an ant farm. "One, zero, zero, two, five, break, six, five, five, four. Fire for effect." she read out from the display on the binos.

"Firing." Hinj responded, and Kyra heard five sets of thuds in the distance, with each thud being sequential, coming out to about ten rounds per set. Then, the guns went silent. Five seconds. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Kyra was about to ask if the rounds were off target, but the SAM site was immediately bombarded right as she opened her mouth to speak. Explosions rocked the area with such intensity that it bordered on overkill. When the shells stopped coming, there was a jet of green fire burning into the air – had a fuel line been struck?

Then, the secondary explosions began. The jet of green fire grew and grew higher in the air, widening as more fuel was fed into it, until it eventually exploded, causing a ripple effect that led back underground where the line was laid. Ammunition began to cook off, too – at first it was just small arms ammo detonating, but as the situation descended into absolute chaos, larger and larger ammunition stockpiles began to go off, until eventually whatever remained detonated at once, creating a huge fireball as a result. As the chaos unfolded, Kyra couldn't help but watch as the situation deteriorated rapidly. Kyra tapped her commlink. "...Good effect on target." she reported, clearly disturbed by the display.

"'Good' effect?" Hinj replied, sounding rather insulted. "I saw the damn explosion from here – that SAM site is void dust!" he exclaimed, very much pleased with the results. "Forget about the bunker, we've only got high explosive for the guns, so there's no way we're gonna do anything other than tickle them. Relocate to the other SAM site, we'll let the Thundercats pop the bunker when it's down."

"Gotcha." Kyra said, before shutting the commlink off and dropping out of the tree. She turned to head back down the hill, only to see a patrol of five Rakata staring directly at her, weapons at the ready. "Oh, for the love of-" Kyra hissed, before activating her lightsaber and jumping into action. Her speed was so great that not a single one of them could get a shot off at her before she had them lying on the floor, dead. Just in case there was another patrol nearby that had heard the scuffle, Kyra ran full speed down the hill, jumped on the BARC, and sped off into the forest, putting the spot far behind her.

---

Lexi had been following the resistance members for a while now. They tended to stick to the tunnels beneath the city, making use of some kind of system of symbols that Lexi could only accurately describe as a 'hobo code'. Whenever they came by an unmarked location, a designated scout would look for a maintenance exit, go topside to check the situation, and come back down to report, before the scout would then mark the maintenance exit with a symbol – a pair of bones that are parallel vertically meant danger, for example.

Still, the wandering seemed pretty aimless to Lexi. The resistance knew where they were going, but Lexi didn't – she was just following whoever was in front of her. Eventually, the cramped tunnel they were in opened up into a wide chamber, several stories high, with a big split down the middle that she could hear things flying down at high speeds. "So, remind me, what's our plan?" Lexi questioned, following Venta to the edge of the split, peering down with her.

Venta pointed to the source of the noise – the automated drones that Lexi had occasionally seen down below the surface. "We have significant reason to believe that the Worldshaper is stored inside one of the caches that Virgilius had set up. The important ones are connected to the maintenance tunnels for the drones to access." she explained, intently watching the symbols on the tops of the drones for what she was looking for. "All we need is to find a drone headed for the Worldshaper's cache, tag it, and wait for it to lead us to it."

Lexi clapped her hands together. "Great! So, how do we tell when a drone is headed for the Worldshaper's cache?" she asked, sounding rather excited at the prospect of getting this done with so quickly. Only for that hope to immediately be dashed.

"We don't." Venta admitted. "There are more caches on these rings than we know what to do with, and most of them are connected to this tunnel system, so it's just trial and error."

"More like a crapshoot." Lexi muttered under her breath, before quickly trying to redirect the topic. "Do you have a list or anything of the symbols?"

Venta stared down at the drones for a while. "Sort of. We've managed to determine a bit of a pattern to the symbols – one with a symbol of the rings themselves is headed for one of the systems – gravity anchors, the control rooms at the polar caps, atmospherics, so on. One with the head of a Rakata is going for municipal infrastructure, so power, sewage, stuff like that, and a drone with a vindht sapling on it is for maintaining the ecosystems. That's just a few of them, but we're looking for the cache drones, which have a blue ribbon-shape for their symbol." Venta explained, continuing to track each and every drone that flew by.

"...A ribbon." Lexi replied flatly, thinking that Virgilius, or whoever was in charge of the drone system when the rings were made, was silly for choosing a ribbon to represent the most powerful creations stored on the rings.

"It makes more sense when you see it." Venta countered, before pulling out some small tool shaped vaguely like a blaster and pointing it down into the crossing. "It's not exactly a-" she attempted to continue, before she cut herself off. "There!" she yelled, and another Rakata hefted some kind of industrial tool, quickly aimed it at the passing drone, and fired, before yanking the device vertically to pull it out from the crevice. Another partisan quickly slapped what Lexi assumed was a restraining bolt-equivalent onto it, and the one with the tool gently set it down, while Venta shot it with hers, attaching a tracker to the construct. Lexi approached the drone to get a better look at it, and Venta tilted it slightly so that she could see the ribbon symbol on the top. "See? Ribbon."

Lexi cast a brief glance at the symbol. "That's a Mabian strip." she bluntly commented, before turning her attention to the drone. She had only seen them at a distance before, but she was certainly impressed with the craftsmanship of the drone now that she had one up close. It was decently sized – about the size of a small landspeeder, but it was incredibly utilitarian, essentially consisting of three major appendages on the top side of the drone – two 'arms' that shielded the delicate body, with manipulators on the end, jutted outwards at a sharp angle, before coming back in front, like a crab's pincers. Meanwhile, the head bobbed in place as the drone continued to try to move, in spite of the restraining bolt, and there was some kind of weapon or tool dangling underneath the chassis.

Having gotten what they had wanted, Venta gestured for the restraining bolt to be removed. "Tracking's set up, let's get a move on with it." she said, and the partisan who attached the bolt moved to take it off the chassis.

"Wait." Lexi interjected, gaining the attention of Venta and the partisan. "There's a port here – maybe you don't have to do this crapshoot 'tag and wait' stuff." she suggested, tapping at a slot on the head, near the base, before pulling out one of her suit's cords and, despite the hardware difference, somehow managed to make a connection.

"Clihx, what are you doing?" Venta questioned, putting her hand over her holster. "We've done this before, you don't need to-"

"Time isn't your ally, and it sure as hell isn't mine either." Lexi dryly replied as she interfaced with the droid and worked on accessing its brain. "You can either wait forever for a drone headed to the Worldshaper's cache at that exact moment, or you can just access the memory banks of one that's already been there." she said, and Venta let her hand off her holster.

"We've tried that before. The drones wipe themselves if you try to mess with them, so we haven't been able to grab their travel logs to make this faster." Venta pointed out. Lexi paused for a moment, seemingly doubling back on her work, and changing something else.

"Thanks for that." Lexi said out of the blue.

"What?"

"I just disabled that function. This one isn't going to wipe, and I've just about got him cracked wide open anyways." Lexi boasted nonchalantly, as she initiated the download of the memory banks.

Venta, as well as the rest of the partisans, stood there in stunned silence. "...You did… huh?" Venta stammered, shocked at just how efficient Lexi was with her work. "I- We-" she continued trying to get out. As if to prove that she wasn't full of it, Lexi held out her free hand, projecting a small hologram of what was very clearly a map of the ring's maintenance tunnels, specifically for the drones. More valuable were side paths along the tunnels – the very caches that they had been looking for. Lexi continued to work, pulling as much of the data from the drone as she could, including the recordings from its travels, before there was a slight whine coming from the drone, and it completely shorted out and slumped over, disabled.

Confused as to why the drone suddenly shut off, Lexi tried to force a restart, applying a few troubleshooting methods she had picked up that might just work on the drone – namely forcing the batteries to spit out some power into the drone to get it moving again, not unlike how defib units work. Unfortunately, Lexi had no such luck – the drone was completely dead. Thankfully, though, she had recovered the overwhelming majority of what was contained within its databanks. "Drone's dead somehow, but I've got what we need." she said, before pulling the plug and returning it to her suit, still halfway paying attention to what she had recovered. "A lot of it's… nonsense? The map and recordings are one thing and easy enough to read, but there's codes and terms here that are just gibberish to me." she admitted, glancing through what she had recovered.

Venta came over to take a look, making sure to grab the restraining bolt as she did so. "Doesn't surprise me. We'd need to take it to Kintik to decode and make sense of it all." she said, and when Lexi gave her a somewhat confused look, Venta realized that Lexi had no idea who Kintik was. "He's the 'kid', as you so endearingly called him, and is our resident techie. He rigged up just about all of our equipment we didn't steal from Dantinian." she elaborated, before looking to one of the other partisans. "Vox for a salvage crew for the drone." she ordered, and the partisan nodded, before Venta turned back to Lexi. "Seems like there's more than one killswitch on the drones. Usually it's a lot more… explosive." she commented, and Lexi took a nervous step back from the hulk. "Let's get moving."

---

"Why do you interrupt my meditation, Dunius?" Dantinian asked, his eyes shut, still partially focused in the Nexus as he tuned out to listen to what his adjutant had to say.

Dunius, to his credit, remained calm. "Some reports from the front, sire." he answered, and Dantinian sighed, opening his eyes to grant him his full attention. "First, we've lost contact with Mak'Lo-"

"The one with the hunchuu chain?" Dantinian questioned, and Dunius nodded. "Have a search party look for him." he calmly ordered, seemingly unconcerned with the possibility of a missing member of the Hand. "What other news is there?"

Dunius swiped away at his dataslate. "...Current intelligence reports that the Interlopers are massing for an assault on Tehndu Pass – it's held them back so far, but an artillery spotter appears to have slipped through the lines, as one of the air defense sites, as well as part of the actual complex, were both hit by heavy artillery fire. Significant casualties, though it's not completely unrecoverable."

"Are these incidents related, Dunius?"

Dunius adopted a look of momentary thought. "Potentially. A patrol also went missing a good distance from where we last had contact with Mak'Lo."

Dantinian stroked his chin in thought. "...Remind me, beyond Tehndu Pass is the Durado Flat, correct?" he asked, and Dunius checked something on the dataslate, before nodding. "Their fronts across the ring will have to converge into the Flat, or at least, their ground forces will."

Dunius was quick on the draw today. "You intend to set up a regional ambush, sire?"

Dantinian smiled. "Yes. We let their army cross the flat, and then we ambush them all. Even if they escape, the casualties that will be inflicted upon them will stall their advance any further beyond the Flat for a while." he explained in detail. "Have long range emplacements and mortars placed in the mountains, along with air defense. They won't be able to defeat them easily with the terrain."

Dunius obediently nodded, writing it down onto the dataslate, before moving onto what would perhaps be the most interesting news for Dantinian today. "A maintenance drone has gone dark in sector seven." he bluntly stated, and Dantinian was clearly not impressed. "I understand the mundane nature of this report, however, it sent out a distress signal and a coded message across the local network shortly before the shutdown." Dunius added on, before inputting a command, and a hologram appeared in the room, of one of the larger transport hubs. The drone was staring at a wall, and the pair could both hear something moving behind and to the left of the drone's audio receptor.

"Time isn't your ally, and it sure as hell isn't mine." a distinctly familiar, feminine voice said, in the same general area as the noise. "You can either wait forever for a drone headed to the-" the recording continued, before cutting out, as the hologram briefly became corrupted from interference. "-the memory banks of one that's already been there."

"That voice..." Dantinian trailed for a moment as he tried to collect his thoughts on where he had heard that voice before, before recalling that it was not he who had heard her before – rather, it was their 'esteemed guest' who had heard her before. "That's not just one of the terrorists – that's one of the associates of the Dreamer." he finally realized, before focusing for a moment. "...Lexi – that's her name." Dantinian said with disgust, before wondering not only what she was doing so far from their voidship, but also what she was after, aside from likely wanting to free the Dreamer's lover.

The recording continued on its own. "We've tried that before. The drones wipe themselves-" another feminine voice replied, this one unfamiliar to Dantinian. He then gritted his teeth as he made the connection that Lexi was not working alone, and was, in fact, right underneath his nose.

"Lock down sector seven and flood it with our security forces. I want whatever they've taken from that drone, and I want the Dreamer's friend strung up by her lover by the end of the day." he ordered, and Dunius bowed, excusing himself to issue the immediate order.

---

For most of the trip back, Venta seemed fairly content, but as they grew closer to the cross between sectors, she steadily grew more agitated. Yes, Lexi had basically gotten them what they wanted in one fell swoop, but it seemed so easy in comparison to what they had experienced in the past. Usually a complication or something would throw a spanner in the works, but this was such a smooth job, Venta was sure something was going to go wrong.

Unfortunately, she was correct.

They weren't too far from one of the last few waypoints before they crossed the sector borders, when the tunnels went a dull red, and they all heard heavy metal thuds echoing throughout the area, with klaxons blaring in the distance. "Chucha." Venta cursed, before turning back to take stock of how many partisans they had together. "We need to go back. Now!" she shouted, and the group immediately turned back the way they came.

"Venta, what the hell is going on?" Lexi questioned, hoping Venta could provide something resembling an answer.

"Security forces are raiding our sector. That drone you hacked must have let off a distress signal or something – they don't normally bother doing that, if you haven't noticed." she hissed, seemingly angry at Lexi, before refocusing on trying to get out alive. "We can jump down into that trench and get around the security doors – there's a catwalk that comes out that we can get onto." Venta elaborated, before a slug whizzed overhead. "Khuy!" she cursed, instinctively ducking her head, before firing a volley of slugs down the corridor to her left, where the slug came from, and then promptly running off, with Lexi following behind.

All around them they could hear the stomping of boots as the security forces closed in around them, while the partisans ran as fast as they could, exchanging glancing shots with the officers whenever fired upon. Several slugs shot over Lexi and missed by a few inches, so she quickly turned around and fired two bursts from her blaster into the tunnel behind her, mercifully not having to worry about friendly fire since she was last in the line. Unsurprisingly, she missed, and the officer returned fire, this time their aim was much better – a slug grazed her left thigh, tumbling away into the wall, while another slug hit her left arm, and she gave out a shout of pain as her occupied hand went to cover the wound, the adrenaline kicking in full as she ran faster to keep pace with the partisans.

Finally, the tunnel broke back into the large room, and Lexi was too hopped up on adrenaline to pay much attention to the fact that one of the partisans had almost shot her. Still clutching her wound, she ran up to Venta, who was working on getting the catwalk out with a handful of other resistance fighters. As they were having trouble manually pulling the catwalk out from the side, Lexi noticed a slot not dissimilar from the one she had found on the drone at the edge of the trench, and she plugged her suit in. She had to fight it for a moment, as it seemed one of the core systems for her slicing suite had been damaged by the slugs, but she ultimately got in, quickly navigating to the controls. "Move back for a second!" she shouted, and the fighters stepped back, allowing Lexi to sling out the catwalk. "Go, go!" she shouted again, disconnecting as the partisans retreated, descending down into the trench, while those covering the door began a fighting retreat to shore up the rear, suppressing any officers in the tunnel with automatic blaster fire.

The group followed whoever was at the front of the line for a good while, before Venta was shouted to the front, with Lexi joining her to put as much distance between her and the security officers who were after them. Venta pulled up a hologram of their maps of the drone tunnels, which were actually quite extensive, if barren of any notable landmarks, unlike the one Lexi had taken from the drone. "We need to follow this tunnel until we find the first side exit. We'll zig-zag and break across as many paths as it takes before we lose them." she said, clearly already running out of breath. "No way in the name of the homeworld are we going to be able to fight them all – we'll run out of ammunition before they run out of bodies. I want any wounded up front, and anyone with a heavy weapon in the back. Come on!" Venta shouted, taking the lead, with Lexi and a few other Rakata falling in behind her.

As Lexi rode the downslope of her adrenaline rush, she began to feel the pain from the lodged slug in her arm. Peeling her hand away from the wound, she found it absolutely coated in blood, and before she did anything stupid, she quickly grabbed a bacta spray attached to her belt and sprayed it on, sealing the wound. The slug would still be lodged, it would still hurt like hell, and she'd have to trust whatever rusty surgical tools the partisans had lying about, but at least she wasn't bleeding anymore. Lexi cast a glance back at the rest of the group, and briefly caught a glimpse of the defenders cycling to slow the advance of the officers.

Suddenly, there was a loud booming as some kind of internal communications system kicked on. "LEXI SAPPHYRA." it boomed, instantly sending chills down Lexi's spine as her name was called out. "CONSIDER YOURSELF MARKED BY THE RECLAIMER. RUN AS YOU MAY, HIS GAZE IS NOW UPON YOU. YOU WILL NOT ESCAPE." it continued. Outwardly, Lexi showed no response, even as the partisans looked around for someone with her name. Venta, though, gave her a knowing look – it seems she had already caught on, then. Still, they needed to keep moving forward, lest they lag behind and get swamped.

Every time a drone would swoop by, it always shook the catwalks, causing those with injuries on their legs to stumble, sometimes falling over. Lexi had an almost catlike sense of balance, so she eventually learned how to manage it – the same could not be said for many of the others. Their numbers were small enough that anyone who fell from the front wouldn't be trampled to death, but that meant that there were those few occasions where somebody couldn't help fast enough and would be left behind. How many times this happened, Lexi had no idea, but the group had definitely gotten smaller by the time they reached their next obstacle – the catwalk had abruptly stopped, giving way to what was clearly supposed to be an extending bridge that wasn't actually extended. Venta immediately jumped into action, quickly finding the control box for it and getting to work on getting the bridge out, while those with minor injuries joined up to form a defensive line with the healthy, and those not in fighting condition were hidden around the corner, out of the line of fire.

With their progress stalled, the stomping of boots against the catwalk became ever louder, and soon enough, the officers began to appear. They initially didn't expect the firing line to be where it was, so a few of them were cut down in the opening volley, with one sliding off the catwalk and down into the trench below, but the rest quickly scurried back into cover to avoid getting hit. Then, the grenades started rolling – a smoke grenade was rolled down towards them to obscure their vision first, and while some of the less disciplined members opened fire to suppress anyone that tried to push through the smoke, most kept their fingers on the trigger, waiting for any sign of movement in the smoke. Lexi heard the distinct sound of a grenade hammer hitting metal, and immediately dropped, shielding her eyes. "Flash bomb! Cover your eyes!" she called out, and a few managed to follow her instruction in time, as the bomb separated into several different fragments and detonated, blinding quite a few of those on the firing line. The officers then determined that now was the time to return fire, and fired blindly through the smoke, striking quite a few lucky hits on the other partisans. Now that they knew they were advancing, everybody on the firing line began to unload their weapons into the smoke, only stopping to maybe verify a kill as a body slid out of the smoke, unjam their weapon, or reload. Lexi turned her head to Venta. "How much longer?!" she questioned, firing a few bursts into the smoke, hoping that she was loud enough that Venta could hear her over the gunfire. Venta gave her a passing glance, and held up two fingers, which meant either two seconds or two minutes.

With all the projectiles flying through the smoke, it didn't take long to dissipate, and the partisans realized they had added an extra seven or so bodies to the security casualties, and no more were coming across the catwalk to attack them. Still tense despite the moment of respite, they all kept their fingers hovering over the trigger, aimed directly down the catwalk, where the officers would have to come from. Yet, even after a minute or so, none tried to cross. Then, they all heard it – big, heavy metal stomps that shook the catwalk with every step. An Exo was coming.

The firing line immediately dispersed, heading for the bridge as soon as Venta had it out, with one of the partisans packing a demo charge to blow it as soon as they were across. "Venta, we've got an Exo incoming!" Lexi called out, alerting her to the situation. "No way we can fight it head on, we need the bridge out now."

Venta continued her work. "We don't need to fight it." she calmly replied, in spite of the rapidly mounting pressure. "You hacked the drone and got us one of the most valuable assets we've ever had our hands on, so you're the one most qualified to do what I'm about to ask," she started, pausing for a moment to get the controls set. "I want you to hack the Exo and turn it around on them – it's the only way we can stall them long enough to put enough distance between us and them." she ordered, knowing that Lexi likely wouldn't agree to it. "The vision port on the front is the only way for the pilot to see anything, and it's pretty narrow, so if you can stay out of its vision cone, you'll be set to get behind it and turn the sub-sentient AI inside the suit against them."

Lexi understood exactly how dangerous this was – the last time they had encountered an Exo, Nax nearly died after it lit him up. "Got it." she responded, surprising Venta with how readily she accepted the task. "Don't blow the bridge until I'm across." she requested, before engaging her cloak and running down the catwalk to set up a position further past where the firing line had been set so that she could ambush the Exo. Checking every single sightline she came across, Lexi found that most of the officers had pulled back – only empty slug casings that hadn't slipped through the catwalk remained, and quickly found a favorable position that would give her time to hack the Exo before it got too close to the partisans. Soon, her quarry appeared, stomping down the catwalk towards her, loaded up with heavy ordnance, including two heavy autoslugs and some kind of shoulder-mounted grenade launcher. Thankfully, Venta was correct – the vision out of the driver's port was poor – it was a small little slit that even she would likely barely be able to see out of, much less a Rakata with their wide-set eyes.

Lexi avoided making any hasty movement as the Exo passed her by, coming dangerously close to physically touching her and potentially alerting the driver. With every stomp, Lexi was afraid the catwalk would give way and send them both falling to their deaths, which thankfully never happened. When the Exo was fully past her, she quickly jumped on and connected to the port at the top of the Exo, immediately getting to work on slicing it. First, Lexi shut off the controls, locking out the pilot from progressing any closer to the resistance. Then, she got to work subverting the AI, which after having been around droids for so long and slicing into just about any security system she could get her hands on, was child's play. She also saw a golden opportunity in the IFF tracker for the AI, which she promptly wiped, replacing the Rakatan tags with her own so that, if for whatever reason the suit spotted her, it wouldn't shoot her full of slugs. As the finishing touch, she gave the AI full control of the suit, and gave it a standing order to not only march back the way it came and open fire on any unidentified targets, but also to detonate the suit if it became disabled by anything. Her work complete, Lexi disconnected and got off, making sure to stick behind the Exo as it turned around. She lingered for a bit as it stomped off back the way it came. A squad of officers poked their heads around the corner. "Why are you coming back?" one of them shouted as the exo stopped in its tracks, raised its autoslugs, and opened fire. Lexi quickly took the opportunity to run back to the bridge, deactivating her cloak so that the partisans would see her coming.

The group had completely crossed, leaving behind a token force of two men, one of whom likely had the detonator. Lexi dashed across the bridge, paying no mind to the lack of any sort of railing, even though if a drone were to pass over, she would likely be knocked off, and quickly crossed. "Blow the bridge!" she shouted, and the one with the detonator pulled it out and pressed the trigger as they ran deeper into the tunnels. The explosion seemed muted in Lexi's panic to get away, but they finally had a way to properly put some distance between them and the security officers chasing them down.

The main group wasn't too far ahead from the bridge, and they quickly caught up. Venta gave a surprised, but impressed look to Lexi. "...So, Venta," Lexi started after trying to catch her breath. "What's our plan now?"

Venta was silent for a good while as she thought of her options. "The city is too alert for us to use the tunnel system to look for the Worldshaper. We'll have to do it topside, and that means leaving the city." she said, still considering what else was going to have to happen. "The cell is going to have to scatter as well, but I suspect Shu'ul is already handling that. Le-" Venta started, cutting herself off. "Clihx," she corrected. "Kintik is the only one that can accurately translate the data you got from the drone, but until we can link back up with him and Shu'ul, I want you taking cracks at it as best you can whenever we have time to spare." she ordered, and Lexi nodded. "Let's get a move on and lose them properly before they figure out how to get to us, yeah?"

---

By the time Kyra had set up her observation post for the second SAM site, night had fallen, necessitating her to use her low light modes on her equipment. Not a terrible thing, considering they provided ample illumination for her surroundings, but it was still a bit cumbersome to deal with. "You there?" she questioned over the commlink.

Kyra heard a scrambling over the comm as Hinj fumbled with his device. "...Yeah, yeah I'm here." an obviously drowsy Hinj replied over the device. "Send traffic, Dreamer."

"Two, zero, three, four, nine, break, seven, five, five, four, fire for effect." Kyra called out, feeling equally as drowsy as Hinj did. She heard the rounds go out, couldn't see the smoke trails, and watched the explosions at the SAM site. It was still as overkill as the last strike, and Kyra was still perturbed by how extensive the damage seemed, even if it was against an enemy. "Good effect on target, I'm heading back."

Hinj let out an audible sigh of relief. "Thank the stars. I'll have one of the droids on night watch let you back in." he said, sounding very relieved that he didn't have to stay up for this anymore, and he cut the commlink.

Kyra, meanwhile, mounted her BARC again, speeding off into the forest, forced to use her foglights to maintain any sort of visibility. After a couple minutes of travel, she came across a small stream that eventually widened out into a full river, and Kyra decided to follow it, figuring that with the imminent encirclement, it was bound to lead to another FOB, and therefore, friendly territory.

Unfortunately, Kyra was much more tired than she had realized, and at multiple points during her ride, began to slip, nearly sliding off the speeder into the water, and her eyelids became heavy as she could barely focus to begin with. After the fifth time she nearly slipped into the river, Kyra stopped the speeder by the river bank, and rested her head against the seat, figuring that a short nap would hold her over until she could get back to one of the FOBs. With a yawn, Kyra shut off the engine and killed the foglights, and she closed her eyes and tried her best to fall asleep in the relatively uncomfortable position she was in.

Then, she heard a tree branch snap underfoot, and she immediately got back up, blaster and lightsaber ready, the former turned to the source of the noise, with Kyra's finger hovering over the trigger. Focusing with her helmet's low-light mode, she saw a figure approaching her from the edge of the darkness. Distinctly humanoid, and tall, too. "If you want your head to stay on your shoulders, I'd stay where you are." she threatened, not exactly in the mood to deal with some random looter coming to rob her.

The figure stopped, still halfway cloaked in the dark. "Not the best way to treat a friend, is it?" a voice Kyra had expected to never hear again said, in a half-sarcastic tone.

Kyra was so blindsided by this that she almost dropped her blaster. "Nax?!" she yelled, her voice cracking under the outpouring of everything she had kept bottled up coming flooding out. The figure stepped forward, and sure enough, it was Nax, looking almost exactly like he did when Kyra last saw him, though he was a little worse for wear, sporting a new scar that started from the bridge of his nose and went down to his left cheek. Kyra immediately holstered her weapons, tore her helmet off, and jumped off the BARC to embrace Nax, who reciprocated without question. "...Nax, I thought you were-" she started, and Nax shushed her.

"I know." he responded calmly, gently stroking her hair as she buried her face in his chest, failing to hold her tears back. "Guess we can add 'captured by a forgotten race of aliens' to the list of times I've almost died, huh?" he joked, pulling Kyra in tight.

Halfway between sobs and halfhearted laughs, Kyra removed herself from Nax's chest and looked up to him. "...Please don't make me start keeping count, Nax. My heart can only take so much." she responded, and Nax chuckled.

"More scars, more stories to tell the kids, right?" Nax joked, causing Kyra to shake her head and pull him in for a kiss. When Kyra expected their lips to meet, she opened her eyes, and realized she was staring up at the night sky, not Nax.

It was all a dream. Of course. There was no way Nax would be able to break out on his own and make it all the way out to the frontlines in one piece. It was nothing but simple wish fulfillment on Kyra's part. Still leaning back in the BARC's seat, she cast a glance over to the area where Nax had come from in her dream, and for a moment, wished that it had been real – that she could finally stop stressing over Nax's safety and just focus on winning the war.

Kyra checked her chrono – she'd been asleep for about two hours, and dawn was still a ways off. She patted her equipment down to make sure she still had her weapons, which she did, and then she restarted the BARC, heading off back down the river. A slight mist began to roll in over the river's waters, encroaching further and further onto the land. Effectively blind, Kyra turned off the foglight on the speeder and started relying more on both what she could see with her low-light equipment, and whatever she could sense with the Force. Every so often, she would catch a glimpse of a figure, deep in the mist that she could only barely make out the basic features of. After catching a semi-decent view of it several times, she realized the figure was almost certainly Nax. Realizing that she may have had a dream within a dream, Kyra smacked herself in the side of the head to wake herself up. Yet, not only did she not wake up, the figure remained. "Nax!" Kyra called out, and the figure turned towards her, looking around for the source of her voice.

"Kyra?!" Nax yelled back, sounding… panicked? "Where are you? There's something out here that's been chasing me!" he continued.

"I'm across the river, Nax!" Kyra yelled back, making the necessary preparations for the speeder to travel over water. "Sit tight! I'm coming over now!" she said, before opening up the throttle to cross the river.

The second Kyra crossed the river, all hell seemed to break loose. The mist swelled and thickened, effectively destroying what little visibility she still had. The BARC's engines began to sputter and fail halfway across the river, and Kyra had to jump off to shore as it dipped below the water, before being quickly consumed by the river. All the while, Nax could be heard screaming for her in the fog. Effectively blind to her surroundings, Kyra reached out with the Force to locate Nax and get to him. Every time he would shout for her, Kyra would search in the direction his voice came from, only to find nothing but the same darkness that Dantinian and the rest of the Hand emitted. Having initially hoped that he really was there, Kyra eventually came to the conclusion that he wasn't, though there was something here with her. "...I'm sorry." Kyra muttered under her breath, before taking off back down the river.

With the illusion ruined, whatever was after her gave chase. She could feel it moving and darting around all around her, but she couldn't see as much as a silhouette in the fog to even shoot at. The fog thickened even further, and the river's water quickly rose up to her waist for seemingly no reason. The current rapidly intensified, and Kyra was swept off her feet and sucked into the river, struggling to gain control of where it was taking her. In the confusion, Kyra felt her feet hit something solid. Somehow, she had gotten out of the river and inside some sort of underwater pumping station, standing on the ceiling. She was stood behind two Rakata, who had no idea she was even there. The pair were monitoring what might have been the control surfaces, with a large transparisteel window in front of them. Before Kyra could say or do anything, the window broke, sending water pouring into the room, swiftly picking up Kyra to return her to the river, with the two Rakata nowhere to be found.

Struggling to find a way to stop herself from flowing further downstream, Kyra grabbed at anything that she could grab hold of in the murky water, which usually ended up being a root that would quickly tear, sending Kyra back down the river every time. Sometimes she would manage to grab hold of a large rock, but she could never get a strong enough grip to hold on for long. Then, Kyra hit what would normally be considered an absolute worst case scenario, but considering her situation, was a blessing in disguise – she collided with a slaughtertree's roots. In an instant, the slaughtertree's limb was in the water and had wrapped around Kyra's leg, plucking her from the river and hoisting her up in the air, before exposing its gaping maw. Kyra quickly drew her '44 and shot several bolts into its mouth, causing the tree to recoil, before throwing Kyra away.

Unfortunately, her blessing did not turn out how she had hoped – the slaughtertree threw her right back into the river, returning her to square one. The current only seemed to grow stronger the further down she went. Eventually, she began to collide with more and more rocks and boulders, growing larger in size, until, for a brief moment, she was out of the river. It was then that Kyra realized that she was about to fall – the river had ended at a waterfall. Kyra did what she could to prevent herself from tumbling in the air, and once she had stabilized, used the Force to slow her rapid descent as much as she could. While she did greatly slow herself down, when she hit the water below, it was with such force that she would be able to walk away with a nasty concussion, if she were lucky.

Somehow, though, Kyra didn't fully lose consciousness on impact, but her body was effectively limp. Drifting in and out of consciousness, Kyra was slowly carried away by the stream, and she stayed like that for what felt like forever, until she felt the rush of water enter her nose and mouth, which forced her awake. Jolting upright, she hacked and coughed to get the water out of her face – it was then she noticed that her armor had been taken from her, and she only had the undersuit on. The second thing she realized was that the swamp that she had drifted into was on fire, with animals screaming as they fled from the flames.

Kyra pulled herself to her feet and patted down what little remained of her equipment – she still had her blaster and her holster, and her lightsaber was attached to her belt still. No commlink, though. Deciding to push forward, Kyra trekked through the waist-high water, trying to keep her head on a swivel. "...Sad…" a distant voice said, barely above a whisper. "...So sad." it repeated, sounding particularly sorrowful. Then, a downpour began, extinguishing the fires around Kyra. She noticed a bubbling in the water some distance ahead of her, and quickly drew her blaster, pointing it at the clearly unnatural disturbance. Dirt and mud and debris in the water began to coalesce into a humanoid shape, before it came out of the water, floating with its back turned to Kyra, who had kept her blaster trained on it the whole time. It was wearing some kind of heavy duty poncho, and she couldn't make any clear features out.

"Are you a member of the Hand?" Kyra interrogated, her finger hovering over the trigger, ready to put a bolt in the figure if need be.

"A vessel of suffering..." the voice continued, ignoring Kyra's question completely. The figure then turned around, and Kyra realized that she was talking to another Rakata. His face was dimmed by his hood, but he had piercing amber eyes that looked down on Kyra with pity. He then pointed to her. "That is what you are, Dreamer." he said, sounding rather accusatory. Kyra's mouth hung open slightly as her finger moved from the trigger, giving the Rakata a bewildered look. The Rakata pulled his hood back, revealing his pale, almost ghostly complexion. "I am Shuu'Lin, brother of Shuu'Tao." he introduced, and it was then that Kyra noticed that while his mouth was moving, it wasn't quite matching what he was saying. "Like you, I too was once filled with suffering. This galaxy is one of suffering. War brings death. Death brings suffering." he continued, his voice carrying an otherworldly echo to it. "The living may not be able to hear them – their voices may fall upon deaf ears, but make no mistake – the dead are not silent." Shuu'Lin ominously warned, again pointing at Kyra. "Now, you will know the suffering of those whose lives you have ended." Shuu'Lin continued, his tone growing darker and darker, as his body began to stretch, before splitting into three separate pieces – head, torso, and lower body, barely connected by bits of bloody tendon, which alarmed Kyra. Shuu'Lin rose up further into the air, moving further into the fog so that he was only just barely visible to Kyra. "Death is tragic, but life is suffering..." Shuu'lin said. "...This way." he directed, motioning for Kyra to follow.

Her movement slowed to a crawl, Kyra pressed on through the murky water, while Shuu'Lin hovered around her, his body moving erratically and unnaturally. At the edge of the fog, Kyra spotted something trudging towards her in the water – something human. Soon, more joined it, and all of them were only partially corporeal. Kyra didn't even have to focus with the Force to feel the pain and sorrow emanating from the figures – wherever she was was flowing with its energy, and the apparitions had a strong presence here. The closer they got, the more Kyra realized who these people were – they were the crewmen that she and Arfive had killed when she first escaped the Bantha. They were all screaming and whimpering from their injuries. Some of them had chunks of flesh blown off, exposing the cauterized muscle and bone beneath. Others had bits of muscle and tendon hanging limply off their body from exposed wounds, and several had bruises and cuts, with little pieces of shrapnel sticking out, coating their clothes in blood. Most of the apparitions didn't pay her much mind, brushing past her without incident, though a few gave her a horrified look, whispering "Murderer..." in her ear whenever they passed.

That was just the first group – the fog became an ominous orange, and out came several that were on fire, fixated on Kyra. "Help!" they cried out as the flames licked away at whatever remained of them. "Please, make it stop! Make the burning stop!" another begged as they shambled towards her. Kyra had planned on just letting them pass, but the second one of them touched her, she felt a sharp pain across her entire body – flames licked her skin as she lived the last moments of whichever spirit had touched her, and she let out a horrified shriek as she fell forwards into the water.

Scrambling to her feet, Kyra quickly got back out, putting as much distance between herself and the burning spirits as she could. Shuu'Lin, meanwhile, moved back into her face. "...Listen to the voices of the dead." he said, giving her a disgusted look, as the flaming spirits behind her dissipated.

"...Ma? Can y'hear me, ma?" a voice with a drawl to it said further ahead, and out of the fog came a young kid, who looked like he had been barely a week over eighteen when he died. He was clutching his chest with his right arm, barely concealing two blaster wounds, while his left hand was busy holding his face. "...It hurts real bad, ma. I don't wanna die out here..." he whimpered. It was then that Kyra remembered who he was – he was one of Dav's crewmates – one that she had shot after they tried to get Lorn to hand her over in lieu of actual payment for smuggled blasters. They walked towards each other, and the apparition lunged to touch her, and she got a good luck at the fear in his face, but Kyra quickly sidestepped his attempt, looking on in horror. The kid then faded away just as quickly.

"MORYNE!" Kyra heard Lostur scream, and she looked ahead into the fog to see him sprinting at her on all fours over the water, blood pouring from his chest, with a manic scowl on his face. "You took EVERYTHING from me!" he howled, before taking a leap at her.

Kyra reacted too slowly, and Lostur collided with her, sending her tumbling backwards into the water. Lostur got on top of her in almost the exact same way she did when she killed him, and Kyra felt a series of rapid, sharp pains in her chest as Lostur attacked her, before wrapping his hands around her throat in an effort to drown her. "I'm going to do what I should have done the second you got on my ship!"

Choking and struggling to breathe, Kyra nonetheless grabbed Lostur with the Force, pulled him off of her, and got up out of the water, a sickened scowl on her face. "Crawl back to whatever pit of hell you came out of, Lostur. I'm sure whoever you're stuck with misses you." she spat, before throwing Lostur far behind her and continuing her march.

It felt like an eternity before another of the spirits came from the fog. This one wasn't making any noise, but it was shambling all the same. Of course Kyra quickly realized why this one was so quiet – there was a huge hole where its face used to be, letting it do nothing but gurgle impotently. She didn't quite remember who it was, just that he had an Imperial officer's uniform on. Again, she sidestepped the spirit, but he faintly touched her arm when he tried to grab her, and Kyra registered another sharp pain, this time accompanied with a brief vision, specifically of her leaning out of a ceiling vent, her blaster pointed at what was probably this spirit's head. On contact, the apparition vanished, and Kyra pushed onwards through another lull in the spirits.

The lull was so long that Shuu'Lin took the time to speak with her. "Is this what you want, Dreamer?" he questioned in an accusatory tone. "To tear a path of death and destruction across the galaxy for your own personal crusade?" he interrogated. "So you can live in peace with your lover, if he even survives, and forget the murders you've committed?"

Kyra scowled. "I'm not a murderer." she countered, denying the accusation. "I've killed in self-defense, but-"

Shuu'Lin rolled his eyes, and balled his hands into fists, before extending them out to Kyra, unleashing some sort of tendril towards her head. When it connected, Kyra was overwhelmed with the emotions of the spirits she had already passed – their fears, the pain of their final moments, and the memory of their faces went one after the other in her mind, burning each into her thoughts. "Look at the dead men and women, Dreamer. Look at them and tell them you killed them in self-defense."

It was difficult for Kyra to bear it all at once, but still, she soldiered on, clearly growing weaker from the mental assaults Shuu'Lin was putting on her. There was a sharp screaming coming from the fog, and Kyra looked up to see two Rakata shambling down the river, with cables and tubes coming from their bodies. They clearly weren't even aware of where they were, let alone the presence of Shuu'Lin and Kyra, and eventually passed them by, their screams continuing well after they disappeared into the fog.

An armless Rakata shambled out of the fog, foaming at the mouth. His head was hanging back, creating a strange balance with his body that forced him to shift most of his weight backwards. With this kill so fresh in her mind, Kyra didn't even have to think to know who he was. She continued following Shuu'Lin, and the spirit of the member of the Hand didn't chase her, but she accidentally touched shoulders with him, feeling phantom pains in her arms and hearing the distant sound of her lightsaber cutting through flesh. Startled, she turned back to look at the Rakata, who was giving her a blank, empty stare as he walked away.

Kyra turned back to find the Rakatan patrol that she had cut down after calling in the first artillery strike blocking her path. They were all horrifically damaged – one was missing his head, with his right arm hanging limp. Another was bisected and missing both of his hands, while a third was split from the head down to his stomach. The fourth and fifth weren't even standing – they were floating in the water next to their comrades.

Then, the fog began to peel back, revealing a legion of Rakata behind them, all of them bearing some sign that they had been caught in an explosion or a fire, bleeding into the water from the numerous wounds in their bodies, turning it into a crimson river of blood. Then, they began to march down the river. Still having to follow Shuu'Lin, Kyra initially tried to move around the apparitions, but there were simply too many of them. One grabbed her and showed her its death, which distracted her long enough for others to grab her, starting a chain reaction. Every lightsaber cut she had inflicted, every piece of shrapnel that had entered their bodies, every limb they had lost in an explosion, the scorching heat of being caught in the fireball – all of it was inflicted on Kyra, one after another. Kyra let out an agonized scream as she was dragged down below the water, forced to endure what it was like to be on the receiving end. She stuggled to even focus on not drowning as the spirits got their turn to exact their suffering upon her, one after the other. For a brief moment, Kyra managed to get her head above water and breathe, before she was pushed back underwater. Holding in the pain that the dead were inflicting on her, Kyra eventually gave up on struggling, opting to just endure it, as painful as it was to effectively have her entire being under assault as her victims cursed her name, calling her a murderer, a terrorist, a threat – anything and everything was being thrown at her.

As if to save her from drowning, Kyra felt a massive pulse rip through the water, and the assaults stopped. It took a minute or so to register that she wasn't under attack anymore, and when it did, Kyra took a second to get back onto her feet, lifting herself up out of the water. She was shellshocked from the experience, and was still processing everything she had felt. "Do you understand now, Dreamer?" Shuu'lin questioned, standing directly in front of her. "You've taken lives whenever it suited you, and then buried your memory of those you've killed." he started, looking… sorrowful? "Your lover thinks of you as an innocent soul, but you and I both know that's not true. You're a killer, Dreamer."

"...You think I don't know that?!" Kyra shot back, giving Shuu'Lin a horrified look. Her eyes were now bloodshot, and she had tears rolling down her face. "Do you think I go to sleep at night and just, not see the face of someone I've killed? Do you really think that I'm so desensitized to death and violence that I don't feel anything when I pull the trigger on somebody? That I would be so callous to watch the life leave somebody's eyes and not feel remorse, knowing that I did that?" she pushed back, trying to keep her emotions in check. Shuu'Lin, instead of responding, was intent on letting her continue. "No. I'm not even close to the monster that you think I am. From the moment I escaped my cell on the Bantha, I've had to kill in self-defense to keep myself alive from those who wanted me for one reason or another – Lostur wanted me back because I was a valuable piece of property that he wanted to help settle a debt. He and his crew could have walked away with their lives, and I would have been happy to never see him again. Instead, he chose to stay, and he poked and prodded and pried to get me, and it ended up with me sticking his own knife in his chest, over and over and over." she continued, trying to take some deep breaths to calm herself down. "It's the same story with his men, or those I've killed in this war. Do you think it makes me happy to call in an artillery strike and watch through some macrobinoculars to make sure everything down there is dead? Do you think I want to be the centerpiece for some revanchist psychopath's plan to reignite a dead empire? No!" she ranted, losing her temper. "But I'm not going to lie down and surrender my life just because some perceived 'superior' says I should! All I've wanted to do since I got off that ship is live my life how I wanted to live it, and I've had to fight tooth and nail to even stay alive!" Kyra went on, growing increasingly angry. "Yet here you are, acting like some holier-than-thou skughole, judging me for not wanting to die! Are you happy? Is that the stars-damned answer you wanted so desperately?!" she finished venting, waiting for an answer.

Instead of shock, or anger, or the accusatory tone he had spoken in previously, Shuu'Lin took on a sympathetic look. "...It appears that I've critically misjudged you, Dreamer." he said, his tone much warmer than it had been in their brief time together. "We share our perspectives on the loss of life – that much is clear to me."

Kyra was highly suspicious of what Shuu'Lin was saying. "Somehow, I doubt that." she said, her tone venomous. "You're a member of the Hand, and from what I've seen of them, all of them are bloodthirsty, save your brother."

Shuu'Lin narrowed his eyes at Kyra. "Has the thought ever occurred to you that I am the only dead member of the Hand you have encountered?" he asked, and Kyra was a little surprised by the admission, which Shuu'Lin quickly picked up on. "The Nexus is an infinite well of possibilities – communicating with the dead is barely scratching the surface of what it is capable of." Shuu'Lin explained, before shaking his head and getting back on topic. "Regardless, I, too, hated the loss of life. I found that war was often little more than senseless violence that served only to destroy, and time and time again I have been proven correct, both by the skirmishes that have happened on the surface of these rings, and by the orbital battles of the past."

Kyra raised an eyebrow, still mistrusting of Shuu'Lin. "So, if you thought war was pointless, why did you-" she started, before she was cut off by Shuu'Lin.

"Fight for Dantinian?" he finished for her. "I fought for him because I believed he was right – our species has been perpetually on the brink of extinction since the fall of the Infinite Empire, and while Virgilius and his associates had their hearts in the right place, we've stagnated here, watching as the wider galaxy showed up on our doorstep to die, time and time again, while we sat here in silence, constantly being told that it was not yet time to return to the galactic community. Dantinian offered a chance to break that stagnation and spread our species among the stars once more."

"So you followed him even as he killed your own species?" Kyra bitterly remarked.

"No." Shuu'Lin bluntly replied, his look souring. "The slaughter of our own kin was not something I could abide. It was never part of his plan, but something in him changed, and with it, he became a tyrant, executing his opposition in numbers. The atrocities at Wargate in particular were the breaking point, and Dantinian had me killed." Shuu'Lin recanted sadly, and Kyra, though still mistrusting of Shuu'Lin, at least seemed to be listening. Suddenly, Shuu'Lin glanced upward, and then focused on Kyra. "Our time together grows short, so I must make this brief, Dreamer. You have almost certainly been told that Dantinian killed Virgilius. Though this is likely true to some extent, I should make it clear that in the cycles I have been in this realm, not once have I come across Virgilius." Shuu'Lin revealed.

"You… mean Virgilius isn't dead?" Kyra questioned, confused by how that would be possible. Still, she took his claim with a heavy grain of salt.

"I know not for certain, but it's a possibility. The polar control centers likely hold your answer – that is, after all, where Dantinian and Virgilius had their last confrontation." he responded, before looking behind him. "More to what you're concerned about, however..." he trailed, before stepping aside to reveal a mostly corporeal Nax, standing up but lurched forward slightly.

If he was here, then that meant…

"No..." Kyra said in a quiet tone, her voice cracking, her eyes going wide, and her mouth hanging open slightly. "No, no, no, you can't be-" she said to herself, before moving closer to Nax.

"He is not dead." Shuu'Lin quickly interrupted, preventing Kyra from breaking down for the most part. "But he grows weaker by the day, as he suffers abuse at the hands of Dantinian's supporters. If nothing is done to save him, then he is not long for this galaxy." Shuu'Lin elaborated, before looking thoughtful. "He has one foot in the grave already, so to speak."

Kyra got up close to see the damage done to Nax. The scarring and damage she had expected, but he had clearly lost most of his muscle, and was on his way to becoming skin and bones. What Kyra didn't expect was that, under his matted, bloodied black hair, was that his eyes were empty sockets, his throat had a surgical scar going across it, and his tongue had been cut out. Kyra took a horrified look at Shuu'Lin. "Is this… how he is? Right now?" she questioned in shock. "Why are you showing me this?"

"More or less, yes." Shuu'Lin answered, looking at Nax. "I'm showing you this because I believed you would have wanted to say something to your lover. He is, after all, partially conscious in this realm." he said, maintaining his composure. "Do not be fooled by his damaged appearance – this is not his physical body – the damage has little meaning here."

Slowly, Kyra turned back to Nax, holding his head slightly. "...Nax? Can you… can you hear me?" she asked, hoping that Shuu'Lin wasn't lying and that Nax could talk to her.

Nax animated for a moment, and he let out a pained moan. "...Kyra? Where have you..." he quietly replied. Just hearing Nax's voice again unleashed a flow of tears from Kyra, and she immediately hugged him as tight as she could. "...Where are we…?" he questioned, looking around. "...Why can I talk?" Nax asked after realizing that he was no longer mute.

"It's complicated, and I don't have much time, but it's got something to to with the Force." Kyra replied, giving him the most halfhearted explanation she could. "...Nax, I-" she started, before stopping herself, not sure what to say since she didn't really prepare for this. "...I want you to know that I'm sorry for being the reason you're even in this position in the first place. You don't deserve any of this, and..." she continued, before noticing the fog thickening around her, so she grabbed hold of Nax's hand, squeezing on as tight as she could. "...and I'm still coming for you. I still love you, so don't you dare die on me!" she quickly got out as the fog enveloped them both, Kyra still clinging to Nax for as long as she could. "...Please, don't die." she pleaded, tightening her grip.

Eventually, the feeling of his hand disappeared, and the air around Kyra was quickly replaced by water. In a panic and at immediate risk of drowning since her helmet had somehow come off, Kyra immediately swam for the surface of the river, doing her best with what little oxygen she had. Her vision blackening and fading as the light shining from the surface seemed to dim, Kyra felt something boost her up under the water, giving her enough speed to breach the surface. Kyra immediately started coughing and hacking, spitting out water as she did so, managing to get some air into her lungs as her vision cleared. Once she was relatively stable, she swam across the much gentler current to get up onto land, where she took a minute to spit the rest of the water out and get her breathing under control.

Kyra turned back over, and caught a faint glimpse of Shuu'Lin, giving her some sort of gesture of respect, before he disappeared. She'd clearly been out for longer than just a few minutes – it was broad daylight out, and she had no idea where she was. More importantly – where the hell did her helmet go?

Kyra collapsed into the grass as she collected her thoughts on what she had experienced with Shuu'Lin, and then a thought occurred to her. She had been drifting in that river for hours, which would have given the Hand plenty of time to catch up to her. She needed to move, and now.

Quickly checking her equipment and finding all of it still on her person, save for the helmet, Kyra chose to head back downspin to return to the frontlines as quickly as possible.

---

And that's that chapter done.

I had been wanting to do a character inspired by the Sorrow from MGS3, and wasn't sure when or how to implement him, until I saw Far From Home and was inspired by the scene where Mysterio and Spider-Man are fighting in that big construction site, and Mysterio is fucking with Spider-Man's head and it's just a really cool setpiece, so I figured I would combine the two, and that's how Shuu'Lin was born. By the way, I've come up with how the naming scheme works, it's [Family name]'[Given name], so Shuu'Tao and Shuu'Lin's family name is Shuu. This is a caste-specific thing that's essentially limited to the Hand.

I just want to say – I had to look through the entire story so far to count up Kyra's kills for the spirit walk thing, since, again, Shuu'Lin's main inspiration was The Sorrow, and I've gotta say – I had forgotten how bad my writing really was back then. I knew Tatooine's writing sucked and needed major revisions, but I had completely forgotten about Coruscant's writing being disjointed and chaotic. I guarantee you that a post-Alderaan Tweak will look back at this and say the exact same shit about this arc. A creator is never pleased with their work.

Anyways, 'till next time!

-Tweak