Heaving the top hatch open, Obi-Wan squinted and raised an arm against the bright light outside. To his left he saw two tanks lumbering skyward in a row. The nearest of the pair sported a sizeable black dent on its hood where the most recent missile hit. Looking to his right, he caught sight of Cody's inoperable AT-TE below, emitting a column of smoke and hanging anchored to the wall. He muttered something inaudible above the mechanical grind of machines and the howling gusts of sand, then hoisted himself the rest of the way out of the tank before anyone could stop him. With a noise somewhere between a gasp and a snarl, Ahsoka pushed and wriggled her way between the aghast clones and climbed out right after.

"You said you were just going to look!" she yelled, scaling up the tank behind him.

"Well I might have, but it seems no one's noticed we're leaving behind a fourth of our men!" He threw an arm sharply in the downed tank's direction. "Now get back inside!"

Ahsoka swelled in frustration. She was decidedly finished with both of her Masters' antics. "No way. If you're gonna try to get yourself killed out here, then I'm staying with you no matter what." The two reached the top in short order.

"Fantastic. Now I've twice the insubordinate Padawan to take care of," Obi-Wan scolded somewhat heartlessly as he stood and brushed away perhaps half a percent of the total soot taking over his armor. In response, Ahsoka's lightsaber ignited and swung just as a sniper's bolt would have cleaved through the side of Obi-Wan's head. She looked at him without humor.

"…All right, fine. You may stay," he yielded, "But if you insist on being here then I'm going to put you to work." He rubbed at the blaster wound in his chest and stepped away from the edge. "I want you to stay up top and catch the clones as I evacuate them from the tank below. It'll be a tight fit, but they'll have to be loaded into ours. And be sure to escort them in so they aren't troubled by snipers along the way."

Ahsoka was about to explain that Anakin and Majum were already in place, but just as she opened her mouth to speak, a second missile struck the tank by their side. Both Jedi were knocked clean off their feet in a blustering spray of orange. The three tanks in line rocked violently and scored the wall as their fingers slipped and clawed. All sound droned into a high-pitched ringing, and when Ahsoka regained enough of her balance to look back at the damage, she saw the next tank over beginning to peel back and away from the wall. "No!" she cried uselessly, though her own voice was mute to her ears. The very next instant, she saw the same tank stutter and quake, grinding resentfully to a tiresome halt at an impossible angle relative to the wall. The Force screamed. She clapped her hands to her head, all at once blind to anything except this disastrous cloud of pain and rot. Ahsoka strained desperately to reinforce the shields around her mind.

Equally as affected despite the distance, Anakin nearly dropped from the underside of Cody's tank. He clutched the hot metal framework tightly with a shiver that stole over his entire frame. The feeling was unmistakably the same as the one he'd shut himself out from some time ago today, only now it was back with a vengeance that stung like a thousand jagged needles stabbing in from behind his eyes. He didn't much care about the heat conducting along the metal in his cybernetic hand. It seemed vastly more appealing to let the thing short circuit and burn into his arm, rather than to divert any focus from the maintenance of his mental shields. Once he did manage to cultivate a level of shielding strong enough to bolster against the brutal onslaught of corrosion, he found this time that the terrible phenomenon came with a direction. He turned his attention toward the other three AT-TEs with a start – where previously they'd been climbing in tight formation, the center tank was now bent backwards, frozen precariously as though it was waiting to fall at any second. What was more, the tank he'd just exited was no longer as far along as it was when he'd left it; enormous rents in the canyon wall indicated how far it had slid since the last bombing. But ultimately it was the sight of the two people on top of said tank that had Anakin climbing rapidly to jump to their aid.

Obi-Wan sat slumped on his knees, holding the collapsing tank in place with one trembling arm outstretched before him. Just as miraculously, he kept himself approximately upright with the opposite arm propped against the floor. There was no strategy in this act. With Ahsoka writhing unresponsive and Anakin nowhere in view, the probability of Obi-Wan leveraging the entire tank full of clones back to safety by himself was little to none. Somewhere in the back of his ravaged mind he knew this, but trying to do so nevertheless wasn't a decision made rationally: if ever there were lives to be saved, Obi-Wan felt it was his duty to save them. And at the end of the day, so long as that goal was accomplished, it didn't really matter what personal expense he'd have to pay. The mission would always come first. The blood from his nose was pooling on the metal underneath when Anakin landed at his side with a thump that shook the whole tank. He severed Obi-Wan's trickling focus with a brusque kick to his outstretched arm, and proceeded to gather up the falling AT-TE on his own. He crumpled slightly under its weight and shifted his footing in response. With the hideous monster in the Force now vanquished, Ahsoka too was able to round up her senses. She calmed her convulsive nerves and scraped herself off the front of the tank. It was amazing how wonderful this broken, sodden pit could feel after experiencing whatever that was.

Working together, Anakin and Ahsoka had the doomed tank back on its feet and moving once more. They each felt the same pulse of celebration radiating from inside. To their dismay, however, they weren't afforded the same moment of respite. Ahsoka drew both her sabers against the bolts flying their way. Three Jedi in one place made a priority target indeed. While she stood in defense, Anakin knelt where Obi-Wan laid twitching on his side. He called his name, shook his arm and rolled him onto his back, but after everything, the most he could elicit from Obi-Wan was a disjointed laugh cut short by the blood welling up in his throat.

"I–" he began with a startled choke that seemed to wake him up a bit, "–I was wondering– where you went."

Anakin leaned forward in pointed disbelief. Not wanting to force his Master to talk (nor wanting to sift through his insufferable understatement), he looked back to Ahsoka. "Would you mind telling me why the Sith Obi-Wan is out here?!"

She didn't take her attention from the empty field as she called back. "Hey! It wasn't my fault! He just sort of– Came out here!" She swatted away another bolt.

"Oh, right, and I'm supposed to believe he was too fast for you to stop him?!"

"Don't be impolite, Anakin," croaked Obi-Wan with a weak finger in his direction. "Our Padawan has done very well with the situation she's been–" he paused to cough, "–presented."

"You're supposed to be asleep!"

"I'm not sure that 'sleeping' is the correct word for it."

"Oh would you just–!" Giving up, he turned again to Ahsoka. "Get him back in the tank. And both of you, stay there!"

"I don't recall giving you that kind of authority," Obi-Wan quipped, yet again. Somehow through his battered, bleeding form, he managed a smile.

"I DON'T CARE!" Anakin shouted down at him with zero patience.

He rolled his eyes. "Now isn't that the truth."

Ahsoka broke their inopportune bantering with a distinctly fearful tone. "Master…?!" She called to them both, disengaging her lightsabers and taking a slow, backward step toward the wall. Anakin traced her wide gaze to a point on the horizon where a single dot was on rapid approach, trailing behind a steady stream of smoke. His comm lit up in the next second. "General Skywalker! If you're still out there I am ordering you to get inside! We have a visual on another missile heading our way!"

"Roger that, Cody," he finally agreed, "What's the ETA?"

"Less than we have to sit here discussing it, sir! Now get moving!"

Anakin drew back from his wrist with an eyebrow raised. Obi-Wan chortled. "Good man, Cody."

"Obi-Wan. Can you stand?" he asked seriously, electing to ignore Obi-Wan's satisfaction.

"I'll give it a go," he offered in return. With Anakin's hand at his back, he rose by the waist about halfway before slapping a hand to his mouth and retching forth an appreciable amount of blood.

"Okay, no," Anakin surmised for him, barely containing a flutter of panic.

"Let's just– Let's use the Force to float him down into the hatch!" chirped Ahsoka in much the same state.

"But that'll take forever!"

"Then I'll go down first so I can pull him inside!"

"What if you get hit?! Which tank is this thing gonna land on, anyway?!"

"I don't know!"

Obi-Wan latched onto them both. Taking Anakin's shoulder in one hand and Ahsoka's wrist in the other, he jerked them onto the floor before the next missile hit. "Get DOWN!"

A swirling sheet of flame washed over their heads while the tank thrashed wildly underneath. The three were tossed this way and that, scrambling for purchase at the smooth metal whenever they could, being sent airborne at any interval they weren't sliding around. A dense cover of smog flowed over them all the while, affirming that it was in fact their tank which had received the shot this time. The quake seemed to last for hours. It shook every person in and on the AT-TE even after it began to peter out. Anakin, always the first to react, was on his feet before his feet were truly prepared to be stood upon. His body felt like one continuous bruise.

"Ahsoka! Obi-Wan! Are you okay?!" To his frustration, he found himself deaf. Visually at least, Ahsoka made her status known through the grit: off to the side and further away than before, she dragged her head off the tank for a second time and planted her arms in a wobbling position to push herself up. Obi-Wan, conversely, didn't dare move at all. He landed somewhere nearer the wall and curled in on himself, wondering just how far the Force would go to torture him before it finally let him die. He thought he might've been able to find out, when he felt the rough palm of Anakin's metal hand rap against the less bloodied side of his face. He groaned petulantly and tried to turn away. The patting wouldn't stop, though, so he gave in at last and opened his eyes to the blurry shapes of his former Padawan, hanging over him and blocking out the sun. His mouth moved – no sound came out. The prospect of telepathy, as a substitute, was way beyond hope. The only remaining form of communication between them would be the haptic or signal-based languages, Obi-Wan considered, though he was quite certain that Anakin hadn't studied them since the day he passed the class some eight or ten years ago. Still, he was also certain that his usefulness at this point didn't extend far beyond communication, and so he caught the hand lingering anxiously beside his face and tapped into it a simple message.

Even if Anakin had been keeping up with his studies in unpopular languages, he wouldn't have had time to decode while the tank serving as their platform started tilting into an angle that would soon have them plummeting toward the desert floor. They abandoned the message at the same time and managed to communicate perfectly with mirrored expressions of alarm.