Nexus: Heroes Will Rise

by tmb1112

Universal borders have been erased and beings from thousands of universes now live on the same world: Nexus. In the first Saga of Nexus, Awul was saved, but the mysteries of Nexus remain. Now our heroes sail across the sea to Aebrith to search for lost loved ones and save the world. MCs from DBZ, KH, Soul Eater, FT, Blue Exorcist, Bleach, 7DS, OP, Ben 10, SAO, HxH, and many more!

155. Nexus HWR 24-3 Assault

A/N Sorry for the long update time, guys! Hope you enjoy the chapter!

Disclaimer: I don't own any of the associated media sources where I got proper nouns from for this story.

Nexus HWR 24.3 Assault:

A Pelican dropship flew at a steady pace west over the farthest southwest land controlled by Resistance forces. It hovered only one thousand feet over the ground, high enough that none of the hills or plateaus of the rough landscape were tall enough to reach them, but low enough that they might be keeping off enemy radars as geographic features blocked them. None of them really expected the enemy not to be able to see them coming though. Especially considering the Summer-class Heavy Cruiser that stretched over 1,500 meters long and could not fly as low as the smaller transport craft and fighter jets.

The Summer-class cruiser looked a lot like command ships from the universe of the space marines in the Pelican dropship. Their technology was some of the Resistance's best. Their AI tech was also superior in most ways, to the point that the Terminus Invasion had failed to turn any of the space marines' AI assistants against the Resistance when most of the rest turned on them. Some of those AI fragments and their original version were on the Pelican themselves. The light-green ship flew low to the tall plateau that it just summited and appeared to camouflage a bit from an eagle's eye view looking straight down at it. The pilot got close to the surface but kept her ship steady, more-so than most other pilots in their force who did not risk getting so close to the ground.

"Four Seven Niner, ready to go." Ash responded with her callsign to the officer on the communications' relay onboard the Summer-class Heavy Cruiser. General Gray's command ship was making sure all their surrounding ships were prepared as they approached the border.

In the back, the space marines heard their pilot's voice and knew they were getting close. Roman reached up and grabbed his sniper rifle off the hooks on the wall above his head where it was resting. He grabbed his purple helmet too and pulled it down over his head as did his friend Viken on his left side farther towards the back of the ship. In between them sat Lavernius Tucker who still had his helmet off as he stared straight across the ship at the tiny man brandishing a sword that looked almost like a toy in the hands of the foot-tall creature.

Elfo got distracted for a second and bobbled his sword. When he caught it, he accidentally swung down at his side and at the leg of a woman in cyan armor who pulled her thigh away quickly enough that Elfo only cut through her seat. Carolina stood up and glared down at the elf through her visor. "Oh man, I am sorry." Elfo stood up on his seat and tugged with both hands, yanking the sharp sword back out of her seat. "I'll get that-" He pulled too hard that the momentum took him and he nearly swung it back into the head of the suit of black armor behind him. Cleo reached her hand up as fast as Carolina had moved, but she just grabbed Elfo by the wrist and stopped his swing before he could cut her head off. "Haha, sorry," Elfo chuckled nervously and apologized to the dark visor that somehow looked very angry. "Um, you're hurting my wrist- wow you are strong! Ow ow ow!"

"How did we get stuck with this idiot?" Tucker wondered in a deadpan voice. "Seriously?! We are a team of highly-trained marines-"

"Ch," Mongol scoffed.

"What?" Tucker spun towards the front of the ship where Mongol and and Mayan had each put their own helmets on. He heard Mongol scoff at him like he was not part of that group. He ignored the big man in white armor who he would rather not argue with and just said, "We are! Look at him. What is wrong with this picture?" Everyone in the ship's passenger hold looked towards the goofy-looking little green elf who pulled back from all their visor glares.

Tucker was the only one not wearing his helmet yet, so Elfo just pointed back at the one guy who he could look into the eyes of. "Hey buddy. Why are you so racist?"

"Wha-" Tucker dropped his jaw. "I'm not… hey! Don't look at me like that," Tucker snapped at the armored man on his left who gave him a sideways glance for a second. "I'm black!"

"And I'm green, laa-dee-da!" Elfo mocked the human soldier who got even more annoyed and flustered.

"I did not mean it like- I have a kid with an alien!" Tucker exclaimed. His codename, Sangheili, was as much a nod to the Elites of their universe being scary warriors, as it was in pride of his own son Junior.

"You know, 'alien,' is a pretty derogatory term," Elfo retorted matter-of-factly to the guy who pulled back in shock as he knew that already but got caught up in the moment and forgot. "Since none of us are from here, you just mean non-human. Don't you?" Elfo shook his head in a disappointed way. "I thought we were beyond this. Be better." He pointed at Tucker who quickly put his helmet on to hide his embarrassed expression from his comrades who started laughing at his expense.

Carolina was not laughing along with them, still standing up and glaring down at the elf who had stabbed her seat and nearly got her a minute ago. "Lighten up, C," Church popped out of Carolina's helmet. The small Epsilon AI stood there as a translucent form on her shoulder in a suit of white armor. "And get your head in the game. Nearing the first line."

Cleo had released Elfo's hand, but she was still glaring at the little elf figure. "I'm right, Cleo," Leonard Church popped out of Cleo's black helmet. He was a full-sized body in white armor that stood there as a translucent form in the aisle of the Pelican. The Alpha AI that the Epsilon's memory had been based off of reported, "We're picking up speed in ten seconds to First Approach Velocity. D, status?"

"Full team survival percentage is steady at 12 percent," Delta replied. The green AI popped out the helmet of Mayan, formerly Agent York, and gave his status report that no one on the team appreciated.

"Theta?"

"Shields are at full," the light purple Delta AI popped out of Roman's armor and replied. "All ships hit the acceleration point. No problems."

"Yet," Delta added.

"Delta, raise optimism settings," Mayan scolded his pessimistic-sounding AI.

"Turning realism settings down," Delta replied.

"Oh yeah?" Mayan wondered back at Delta's remark that sounded serious but was phrased in a smart-ass way. "Drop your sarcasm levels off too."

"…Turning down honesty," Delta replied after a second. Mongol snorted across from the man in a gold suit of armor who just shook his head while Delta's holographic form pulled back into his helmet. Most of the other AI went away too, though the Alpha version of Church kept looking towards the front of the ship.

Carolina had also turned and watched Mayan banter with his AI. The conversation had lightened the mood which was needed after Delta's reading of their survival percentage. She was not so quick to forget that though, and she stared at the side of Mayan's helmet with a nervous expression on her face she was glad no one could see behind her visor. The Alpha AI was called Church for a reason though. He was based on Leonard Church's identity, filled with his memories… including those of his daughter. While Carolina wondered if she would have to lose Mayan again like she had on their own world, Alpha glanced back to Cleo who nodded at the holographic figure floating outside of her armor. The two of them technically shared the same body, but Tex's, or Cleo's, AI was the combat pro and had control over it. Neither of them had their human bodies, but the parents of the space marine still felt like Carolina was their daughter anyway.

Tucker put on his helmet and grumbled about the racism comments from the elf some more. Screw this guy. Damn elves are so "efficient" that they didn't plan on any stowaways, so they don't have any space in their own forward aircraft for him. Filling every seat. Don't know why Gray even let the guy come with us. Sounded like he knew Elfo from somewhere in the past. Little guy's just gonna get his head blown off out there. Tucker shook his head and then reached for his side and pulled the handle off his belt. He took in a deep breath and rested the hilt of his turned-off energy sword over his right knee. Mongol rose his Brute Shot. Viken drew a pair of plasma pistols. Cleo and Carolina each drew their own automatic rifles. Roman pulled back the slide of his sniper rifle and made sure that he had a shot in the chamber. Tucker released his deep breath just as the ship started rumbling from the explosions going off in the air around them. "Here we go."

The Summer-class ship that Gray stood in the bridge of blocked the lasers that targeted it automatically from the enemy's first defense line. They still could not see the line of trenches in the distance, but lasers flew out of the horizon and slammed into the biggest target of the Resistance fleet. The ship's shields pulsed and blocked the shots that scattered red and yellow light against the forcefield. The gray heavy cruiser had cannons on the top, bottom, and front of it that all extended out and turned to point outwards at the targets they locked on as well.

Through the windshield at the front of the bridge, Gray could not yet see the enemy positions. A computer window popped up on the glass though that zoomed in on the enemy locations up ahead and the defenses they had already scoped out. He watched with the rest of his crew on the bridge as their own attacks were blocked by the Sith's shielding that was at least as good as their own. Giant blue spheres of translucent forcefields pulsed around the Emperor's front line.

The Emperor's forces had a deep trench dug north-to-south across a flat strip of land just past the cliffs and plateaus. The bumpy cliff-y landscape extended too far to the east and had too many ravines and valleys in it that it was more of a no-man's-land than Resistance territory, as the Resistance did not attempt to put defensive positions in it either. Instead, over the past several months it had been the main battleground between the Sith and the Resistance. Skirmishes between Resistance and Sith patrols in the gaps between plateaus below was an all-too common occurrence.

Due to Resistance activity in this area past the Emperor's "front lines" though, neither Gray nor Resistance Command had expected the Emperor's forces to have built up any infrastructure past those visible lines. Inside one of the valleys between cliff faces below the Summer-class command ship, however, Leo yelled into his communicator a warning for the other Tonta Corps ships around his own. "Evasive maneuvers! Turrets in the walls!"

Gray also had all of his men's communications active on the bridge of his command ship. Not every one of his smaller ships were connected to each other or the radio chatter would get disorienting for each individual squad or platoon. Leo was the leader of his own "Company," that being the Tonta Corps, but his company was split into many groupings as well due to the high number of Tontatta people who had joined the war effort. Screens popped up on Gray's bridge to show the view from outside the tiny Tontatta vehicles that were very quick and highly maneuverable, but still in danger from the turrets that Gray saw emerging all over the landscape that they thought was safe for approach through. "Leo! Pull out of there. You're in a kill box!"

"Kabu!" Leo ordered.

"Roger!" Kabu yelled back. He did not need his comrade and leader to explain to him what he wanted. Kabu had his own communicator also separated from the full comms of the Tonta Corps, and he ordered only the members all wearing matching yellow outfits like him. "Yellow Kabu Squad, on me!"

The doors to the smaller transport vessels opened up while the ships continued flying. Three dozen flying Tonta Corps members of the Yellow Kabu Squad flew out after their leader Kabu. As maneuverable as those small ships were, they were not close to the agility of the Tontatta people themselves who swerved around lasers when the turrets turned towards them instead. Some of the guns did not fire out beams of light but fired bullets instead. BRRRrrrrr! Br-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r!

CHHH! BRRRrrrr-rr-r-rr-bbbrrrrrr! Chain guns fired so many shots every second with tracer rounds mixed in that the lines of bullets looked like beams themselves. The white tracer rounds turned the bullets into swerving lines that chased around the darting Tontatta people who sped in front of other turrets. Some of them slashed at those cannons and turrets, while others just led the trailing beams of light and gunfire so that the turrets wound up accidentally shooting each other.

Kabu swerved to the left around a yellow beam of light. Then he ducked down under two of his comrades who crossed each other above his head. Bullets from chain guns trailing either of them hit into each other, making sparks fly over Kabu's head while ricocheting bullets bounced around. He twisted his body to the left, and a bullet the size of his stomach passed just in front of him. Kabu sucked in his gut to avoid it. "Too close," he exhaled and his gut popped back out into his usual more-rounded belly than his comrades. Kabu spun back upright and sped at the wall and another turret aiming after one of his comrades already being tracked by two others which would make it difficult to dodge another on top of that. Kabu pulled his lance back, and he sped straight past the cannon that he sliced open as it was in the middle of charging an energy beam.

Kabu did not look back. The cannon flashed with red light and then exploded in a huge fireball. The leader of the Kabu squad just swerved up and down the wall, cutting across another ten of those turrets on his own and cutting off gunfiire and beams aimed at his subordinates. "Captain Kabu!" They cheered out as their leader flew by them. Then they all turned and gave chase to their Captain, because he was flying after the rest of their ships that were all making it to the actual front lines now.

"Captain Kabu! On our right flank!" One of his soldiers yelled out while speeding up behind him.

The cliffs were getting lower on their sides as they neared the edge of the flatlands where the Sith had built their visible defenses. The cliff on their right side dipped down then got higher up again in another plateau. In that moment Kabu sped past the gap, he spotted two speeder bikes with soldiers in white armor heading to the west. "A scout patrol. Don't let them come up on the others' rear!" Kabu yelled out. He arced his body to the right and into a dive as they neared the next gap in the cliff faces, and he sped in the middle of the squad Stormtroopers just as two of the bikes were about to reach him. He slashed his lance across their speeders before the Sith's men even knew what the tiny blur was, and those bikes spun out and crashed into the ground in fiery explosions.

The other hover-speeders that already got past Kabu drifted and spun back around to aim at him. The ones that had not reached him yet fired their shots at the enemy their bikes' targeting systems could track even if they could not. Kabu may have gotten there first though, but his soldiers were not far behind him. Rising over the cliff edges and diving down at the small squad of Stormtroopers who had been on patrol in these disputed areas past their defensive lines. The swarm of little people cleared them out with ease, and then they turned back to the west and flew off to join the intensifying battle.

"We're all alright. No damage in the valley," Leo reported back to the Tontatta member on the bridge with Gray.

Wicca sighed in relief and then relayed that information back to Gray in a moment that the mage had paused between orders. Gray nodded to acknowledge he heard her, then Wicca got right back to handling different communications at her station at the computers on Gray's left side.

Tiplee sat on the right side of the young Tontatta warrior and managed comms of her own. Simultaneously the Jedi was helping with the command ship's defenses with control over their skyward weapons' systems, as in the cannons on top of the ship rather than its front, below, or on either side that other soldiers on the bridge managed. She was able to multitask and had multiple jobs on the bridge thanks to her experience on this kind of vessel, as it was not only Tucker's world's technology that the heavy cruiser was built from.

On Gray's right side and just behind him stood a younger man with spiky black hair and a belt of pokeballs around his waist. Brock was trying to keep up with all the screens popping up and then minimizing on the windshield, but he was failing at that. He was amazed at how fast Gray was giving out orders and keeping track of the status of the whole force. I wondered why we didn't bring even more people, but I guess it would have been a lot harder for Gray to coordinate in real time without relaying through a whole command structure.

Brock was only partially right. Gray was thinking about their numbers himself after part of the Tonta Corps got left behind several miles back. Kabu reported in about the squad they got distracted taking on as well. With the immediate advance of their fleet up to the front line of the Emperor's territory, the few minutes that those flying fighters would be unable to rush ahead past the shield generators he needed taken out was going to cost them. It all needed to be simultaneous. But no plan survives first contact with the enemy. "Jakku, Cleo, Baddo, after taking out your first generator don't move on to the next line. Eliminate two each!"

"Understood!"

"Taking fire!"

"They have more anti-air guns that we prepared for. The shields in our transport can't take this."

"Our shields are at fifty percent and dropping fast!"

"Watch!" Gray shouted to the young man at the front of his bridge. The member of Iota Squad who Gray kept on his bridge spun his head sideways and looked back at the General. Leonardo Watch's eyes were glowing bright blue and darted around faster than anyone else's. He kept track of every screen they had cameras transmitting onto, and he only made the ones that Gray needed to see pop up on the windshield for the General. Leonardo's heightened visual acuity due to his All-Seeing Eyes of the Gods, allowed him to see in near slow-motion, following things that were impossible for regular human eyes to track, and allowing him to see them in much more detail as well.

"Hold position!" Gray commanded. The second line of defenses and the third behind that were all firing cannons at their ship now. His shield generators were holding steady, but this amount of beam fire was too much for any of the other ships under his command. "First wave, go!" Gray ordered. The targets were clear. Their small fleet did not have the firepower to just overwhelm the powerful Sith shields. They needed a frontal assault to get in and deactivate the shields at the source. If they tried to just go past this front line and move forward, it would mean that they would be getting fired on from all sides and have no path to retreat if necessary.

Gray had confidence in their assault. He would not put the whole army at risk though by just bypassing the enemy defenses rather than taking them out. The mission was to take back this territory. That meant destroying the Emperor's forces, not going around them. Gray's smaller ships dove to fly just over the surface and as close as they could get to the first line of trenches, putting them low enough that only the very front line of Sith weaponry could fire on them. The second and third trenches were now blocked by the first trench's shields. Gray anxiously watched them dive and push forward as his ship came to a stop and just continued to fire back at the different shield bubbles that stretched far to their north and south along the flatlands.

Some brown grass covered the surface between the lines of trenches and in areas that the Sith's forces had not built defenses. Most was low to the ground though with no tall grass for any approaching enemies to potentially hide in. It was a hard-to-assault area due to the open terrain and deeply-entrenched positions of the enemy. If we get these positions, that's already a win in just that we'll have a strong front line they've already built up for us. Not a win! One benefit. Victory is total. Stopping the Sith here.

With such a small force though- Gray cursed internally for thinking about that again. It's not small. It's the perfect size. I agreed with the Commanders. We protect all of our borders. Some of the Elite Squads will even be conducting raids outside of the borders today. They'll ask if this is the real assault the Resistance is planning or just another diversion. Small teams are hitting farther north on the Emperor's border too as decoys. By the time they realize that this force is more than just another small group, but a Resistance army hell-bent on crushing the Sith's hold altogether, it will be too late for them to stop us.

That's the idea. Gray understood the reasoning. He could see his highly-trained and experienced soldiers rushing at the forcefields in their ships that were heavily-shielded enough that even the Sith's weaponry was not destroying them. He then reminded himself that it was still early in the fight and their shields had all been at full power to start off with, but it was a good sign that not one ship in their frontal forces had been destroyed yet by some superior Sith cannon their reconnaissance had missed. He felt confident still. Gray knew the odds but had an optimism in him forged after a month full of victories.

Yet he was still nervous. I wanted more forces. Had we brought in thousands to the staging point though, Sith scouts would have seen the build-up and prepared more defenses here. The front lines I am seeing look exactly like what we prepared for. There was a bit of a hiccup behind us in the cliffs, but they were hidden underground for a reason. The Emperor doesn't have control of that area. He must have dug underneath and installed those recently. The Yellow Kabu Squad alone managed to take them without any injuries-

"Coming up behind you now! Sending two for the infirmary," Kabu reported to Gray whose thoughts cut off at the contradiction. He had not heard any word of casualties from the Yellow Kabu Squad, but a camera angle on the back of their cruiser zoomed in as Leonardo knew that Gray would want to see the extent of those injuries. He had to really zoom the camera far considering the size and speed of the tiny Tontatta people, but their ship had sensors and was able to track them so that zooming in was easier. Even though Kabu said he was sending "two," there were four of his squad on the way to the heavy cruiser, considering the injured pair were unable to fly on their own and needed to be carried on the back of their comrades.

"Get ready, Princess," Bomba told the young blonde daughter of their chief. He and Rampo stood guard inside the door of the cruiser's infirmary, watching their Princess who had on a white doctor's outfit. She patted down her scrubs nervously again and bit on her bottom lip in worry for her own people who she just heard the report of as well.

The two vice-chiefs to the Chief of the Tontatta were not the only ones still on the ship, as Chief Gancho had sent a whole squad of bodyguards specifically to protect Mansherry on this mission. The eight of them were scattered guarding outside of the infirmary doors and patrolling the hallways nearby too. The Sith were an insidious lot, and not one of them put it past the evil space wizards to sneak up and assassinate their healer. The ten Tontatta warriors staying with Mansherry were not going to allow that to happen.

Mansherry was worried about the injured members of Kabu's squad. Yet her mind drifted from them and to another warrior of her people out there on the front lines. Leo, Mansherry thought. She closed her eyes and put her hands together in a praying position. Please be safe. I believe in you. I… I lo- Mansherry could not even think the words without blushing so hard that the vice-chiefs protecting her from inside the room got confused expressions at her sudden red face.

"Transport 6, descend now," Gray commanded. "You have smoke coming from your left engine."

"Shit- roger that. Unloading now!"

"Did the Sith see us coming?"

"They must have!" Another voice yelled out from the ship on the right of the one that started descending, causing some of the cannon fire aimed at that one to switch targets and overwhelm their shield capacities. "This is too much- damn, we've got to stop!"

"They were just this prepared already."

"This is their normal defense structure?"

"If they saw us, there would have been even more fire than this."

Gray agreed with the voice of 4-7-9. The pilot still soaring ahead of the others thanks to her better skills behind the sticks was managing to dodge a lot of the enemy fire. She was getting hit occasionally, but Gray was glad to see them getting so far ahead since he had ordered Cleo's team inside to take on a second shield generator due to the delay of the Kabus. They were not an Elite Squad, but he had watched the tapes where they failed to prove themselves to Commander Lexa and get that designation. They were close enough.

"If your shields drop below twenty-five percent, don't try advancing any further until the enemy forcefields are down. Watch, start laying down heavy fire on the second line. Everyone advance!" Gray ordered his teams forward. Several others who were trying to keep up with 4-7-9 and the Tontatta ships that were smaller and dodging Sith beams better had to descend and stop their advance straight into enemy fire. The shots coming east started thinning out a bit though, as Leonardo Watch aimed the cruiser's frontal cannons at the second line of defenses and unleashed a devastating volley that tore up the land for miles in front of the shield domes.

Not only did the second line's vision get blocked as huge clouds of smoke and dust rose up from the volley, but the third line behind them was blocked as well. Some cannons and turrets continued to track through the smoke, but heat sensors were screwed up by the heat of the cruiser's beams and the explosions they caused, while motion trackers could not target any ships fully shrouded by the billowing smoke of the assault. The smaller transports and gunships that did not land yet managed to dodge the anti-air guns up to the barriers themselves, and some of those ships flew straight above them.

Beams firing blind from the second and third line missed the ships that flew over the first trench. Other ships that reached the front line spun around with the backs of them opening up. Panels opened underneath the dropships that flew over, including Four Seven Niner's. "Whoooaaa!" Elfo yelled out and swung his arms around wildly.

The others in his Pelican dropship did not react the same way. They dropped through the crest of the shield generator that did not stop them from passing through it. And Cleo and her team unloaded on the soldiers in white armor, or their officers in gray uniforms who were unarmored, or the bronze battle droids that pointed up at them but did not react quickly enough. Mongol fired his Brute Shot around at the anti-air and most-impressive-looking turrets around him, and the extended magazine of 18 grenades launched with high precision a large number of those explosives. Nearly all of the powerful defense stations inside of the shield dome that they dropped through were exploding or heavily damaged within seconds of the team dropping inside.

Tucker spun around on the descent and dove head-first towards the generator itself that glowed blue and sparked with the color as well. He swung his right arm out to his side and ignited his Energy Sword that he slashed down into the side of the generator. Tucker grabbed onto it with his other hand and slid down the generator with his sword slicing through it like butter. He felt his sword hit something that made the whole thing shake, and he pressed his teal boots up against the cylindrical shield generator. Sangheili pushed off and crossed his arms, activating his Armor Lock. A shield of energy protected him right before the explosion. He was not able to move inside of the blast, but he flew out of the explosion and released his Armor Lock just before hitting the ground.

Tucker flipped himself over just above the ground and slammed one hand down. He skid on a foot and one knee while dragging his sword across the floor, slowing himself down enough not to slide straight into the shot of a Stormtrooper aiming at the man who just brought down their shields. The huge dome of blue light was still fading from above their trench when the Stormtrooper quicker to react than his shocked comrades started firing at Tucker. Tucker stopped shot though and pulled a sidearm with his other hand not on his sword, and he aimed and fired at the enemy trooper who was his biggest threat. Luckily, unlike that Stormtrooper who missed all of his shots, Tucker landed two straight in the center of the man's white armored chest.

"Push right! We'll hit the north generator next!" Cleo ordered her team.

"Already on it!" Carolina yelled. "Epsilon, activate speed boost!"

Church did as he was told, and Carolina sped as a blur between enemies she ignored in order to race straight down the trench and into the next barrier dome that she was the first and only Resistance soldier to get inside of. The enemies in this one were more prepared after seeing how quickly their neighboring generator to the south was dropped, and how close the one on their own north side was to being overrun by Jakku and his squad. They fired at Carolina who was unable to race straight at the generator as she had hoped, instead charging at Stormtroopers who had to stop firing or risk hitting each other. They switched to hand-to-hand combat instead, which was not the right call against Agent Carolina who sprinted from one to the next, masterfully disarming and incapacitating all of them with her martial arts skills.

"We're almost there!" Kabu yelled out. Watch passed his voice through to Cleo's helmet so that she would know that the Yellow Kabu Squad would be there to assist in a moment.

Cleo did not have a moment to spare though. "Get after her, Mayan. Roman!" Cleo yelled out from the middle of their first landing site where she was stuck fighting some Imperial Commandos who had better combat skills than the rest of the soldiers around them. The gray-armored troops had appeared out of nowhere and nearly got the drop on Tucker who had gotten cocky against his average Stormtrooper opponent for a second there. These commandos pulled out melee weapons that flashed with sparks at the clubbed ends of them, and two of them were attacking Tucker while the other eight had Cleo surrounded and were only being slowly overwhelmed by her.

Mayan spun towards the woman who he already planned on staying close to. It was hard for him to do that with Epsilon making it so easy for Carolina to run away from him. "Let's get after her then," Roman called over and swung his sniper rifle to sling it over his back. The man in purple armor pulled out his submachine gun while Theta popped up on his shoulder. Mayan sprinted at the barrier to the north as well but had to dodge back and forth as Delta appeared on his shoulder and warned him of the incoming fire. Not everyone in that next barrier was stuck focusing on Carolina, even if most of them were.

Jakku had been fast enough to get inside the forcefield north past the one Carolina was in. He sprinted ahead of his whole team after they were forced to land farther from the enemy's shield. And Leo led a small team of Tontatta warriors through the one past the one Jakku was in as well. Those two barriers were close to falling. Not all of their teams had made it to the front line though, and other than a few difficult battles going on along the front where other Tonta Corps groups had made it through, Gray could see how impossible it was for his other teams to unload from their ships even after landing farther from the shield generators than he wanted them to.

"We're pinned down back here!"

"Can't move forward like this."

"Going underground!" A member of Kappa squad called out. "We'll move inside their shields from below." Taizo Hori was underneath the ramp from his ship with several others, and he dug straight down. The man started digging and dug a hole rapidly thirty feet below the surface, then he made a right angle turn and started charging to the west with his amazed comrades following behind the man whose shovel seemed to displace the dirt but also made it disappear. Taizo had blue skin and a costume of white armor with red highlights on its chest as well as over his ears on his helmet. He had darker blue eyes than his light-blue skin tone, and those eyes narrowed on the harder ground in front of him that was difficult for even him to dig through, not that his comrades could tell, considering the amount that he slowed down was minuscule to them to the point that most did not even notice.

"47-Niner, Tontatta dropships, make a smokescreen as best you can," Tucker ordered his farthest-forward ships that started unloading their weapons on the front lines just in front of the blue forcefields. They dove to the ground and dropped bombs on the surface between the Sith's frontal positions and their own landed aircraft.

Gray could not focus his own command ship's fire on that front line as he had too many soldiers there including some that had just gone underground. His ship's cannons were too powerful and not as precise as the smaller vessels in his fleet, so he just kept focusing their fire on the second line with scattered shots on the third too.

"The incoming fire is still too much!"

"Ahh- I'm hit!"

Gray cursed and tried keeping track of all the different screens Watch was flashing up on the windshield for a second or two at a time. He heard the voices of his different team leaders yelling out. Chaos had broken loose so soon. His own soldiers were going down. We're not even past the first trench! Gray stopped.

He stopped darting his eyes around and steadied his panicked breathing. In the corner of his eyes he saw Tiplee looking over her shoulder back towards him. He saw others on the bridge waiting for him to come up with a solution for them being bogged down at the start of an operation that he had emphasized the speed of constantly over the past two days. Gray's prior insistence on how they would catch the Sith off-guard and push straight through these positions made everyone start feeling worried as his attempt to make a smokescreen did not work well enough. The first line of Imperials, unlike the second and third, just had to fire straight ahead and spray through the smoke to hit the invaders. They had enough firepower that even without targeting the Resistance forces, the spray-and-pray tactic was hitting some of the soldiers who thought the smokescreen might work and started running ahead.

Gray calmed himself down though. Fear is the path to the dark side. Remember Qui-Gon's pep talk. Calm down. Relax. Do not be afraid. Stay calm. Gray thought about the wise Jedi Master who had come to him the previous night to discuss a few things about the mission ahead. "Meditate with me, General." I appreciated his wisdom. Keep your mind clear. You are the General. They await your command. Gray took in a deep breath and then blew it out through pursed lips. "Alright," Gray announced.

He sounded like he had a plan and spoke in a tone that reassured all of those who were starting to get worried in just one word. "Knov and Jo, you're on. Switch to active mode."

He's breaking from the plan, Brock thought. It made him anxious but less so than he was a few seconds ago when it seemed like Gray had no response at all for them stalling at the front line.

I didn't want to use portals on the front line of defenses, Gray thought. And give away our tactics to the second and third lines too early. I wanted to rush the front line, then portal into the second before they had a chance to recover and while some forces from the first trench were in the middle of retreating to that one. Gray listened for the responses from his teams on the ground and kept his breathing steady and his demeanor focused for the crew on the bridge to witness. All three trenches are colloquially the "front" line of Sith defenses. But they're several kilometers away from each other. Interconnected tunnels and some thin trenches connecting them too, but minefields that we mapped out cover most of that middle ground. The Emperor's forces won't be able to retreat as fast as they want to while being careful of their own traps.

We know the width of the gaps. We know the weapons in each trench and the positions of their shield generators, as well as where the cores of those generators are and how to disable them. Gray watched with the right corner of his lips curling up as he saw two blue domes of energy shields drop down at the same time in different positions of the first trench of the front line. Everyone in our army knows the plan. If we take the first and then immediately rush the second with portals, the third line will not be prepared and might start collapsing at the sight of how quickly we're sweeping through.

"Get the engines back into forward," Gray ordered his crew. "Bring us past the front line and unload on the next two. Make sure to avoid any position where a forcefield goes down."

"Understood!"

"On it."

Jo ran down the line of landed Resistance ships that soldiers were hiding underneath or behind in order to use the ships' shields for protection. The purple-haired teenager swung her hands at groups of her comrades who were relieved to see her. They readied themselves, and then they charged straight through her glowing pink portals into the trenches up ahead.

The fire coming from the anti-personnel weapons inside the domes got less frequent. It started to thin out, and faster members of the Resistance forces did not wait for Jo to reach them when the lasers stopped firing their way. Hundreds of soldiers rushed at the forcefields. Portals appeared to their sides or in front of many of them as they ran, and they charged inside and unloaded on the enemy forces stunned to see Resistance troops suddenly appearing before their eyes.

"You're doing awesome, Jo!" Kid Cosmic called out as he flew just behind her. "Let's speed it up though!" He dove down and grabbed her under her armpits. Jo yelped and glared up at him for a moment but then focused back down after seeing Kid's own determined look. He flew her much faster than Jo herself had been running. Kid Cosmic wore a green costume that had a green glow like the ring on his right hand. The blond boy flew Jo straight over the gap between where the Resistance ships were forced to land, and those forcefields that were getting shut down one after the other.

Knov stepped forward and dropped into a black portal on the ground with a glowing gray outline around it. He fell through the floor and then straight up out of the floor in the first line next to a bunch of destroyed heavy equipment. His Captain was ripping his scythe-like arms out of a tank that's cannon was already sliced into eight pieces scattered around him. "Captain-"

"Took you too long! Make me a path to the next line! We're going to be first."

Knov sighed before taking in a deep breath to steady his own nerves. He nodded at Jakku and then moved his arms in a circular pattern and created another portal on the floor next to his Captain. You're supposed to be sticking with me for my protection, Knov thought. A bead of sweat slid down his face as Jakku just jumped straight into the portal. A second later explosions started going off in the second line of trenches that were pretty far away but close enough that Knov could see them.

Knov was annoyed at his own captain who he knew he had to chase after into the insane battle he was sure Jakku just started. He felt more frustration though at a younger man he glanced up towards as the shadow of the Resistance's heavy cruiser cast down over him. It's early. Captain Jakku understands that. That's why he moved on so quickly to the next one, but we screwed up your timing. "Whatever," he muttered under his breath. He had responded affirmatively to their General and just did what Gray said, as he was not going to question orders while in the middle of the battlefield.

"The Yellow Kabu's are still lagging behind," Gray muttered while tapping his fingers on his side impatiently. Every second is vital here. It's good they managed to take out a patrol that would have come up behind us, but only Jakku has moved to the second line. "Listen up! We need to get to the second and third trenches quicker. Push ahead! Once the shields are down, we can clear out anyone you leave behind once you've teleported into the next line."

"Keep track of friendlies' signatures in the first trench and start dropping bunker busters once they move on. Monitor Taizo's progress as well so you don't accidentally hit them," Tiplee reminded her comrades on the weapons' systems.

Changing up the plan in the middle of the fight? Jo wondered nervously. She had reacted right away just like Knov, but she was second-guessing herself as they flew over their own lines and neared the outer edge of their landing area.

"Let's do it!" Kid Cosmic yelled down at his friend's head. Jo had been flying to the left of where her ship landed. They were already very far south, so going any farther in this direction would bring them up to the Great Wall. It was not yet visible, but they knew the defenses closer to the Wall were more spread out and harder to defend, but also on rougher terrain to advance through. They chose their landing site for a lot of reasons. By attacking this close to the Great Wall, they avoided the possibility of a large flanking maneuver to their south. As crazy as the Emperor was, they doubted he would risk drawing the Wizard King into this by intruding on his territory.

Jo saw a few more of their forces up ahead, but Kid Mulligan was right. Their comrades were close enough to the forcefields already that they would reach and push through on their own without needing to be teleported. So Jo turned instead to one of the forcefields that was still up, and she glanced up once more to meet Kid's gaze. The kid smiled wide back at her and gave Jo a nod. "Alright! Let's go, Kid!" Jo created a portal that they flew through and appeared inside of the blue energy dome she had just looked towards.

The same Stormtroopers who were just firing out at this kid and teenager spun in panic as they appeared directly above them. Kid dropped Jo who fell towards a pair of Stormtroopers. The soldiers were getting off of a round dish-shaped turret system and grabbing their weapons. They aimed their rifles up at the girl who stuck her legs out like she was going to kick them in their faces. A horizontal portal appeared below her as she fell though, and a vertical portal appeared behind her targets. She teleported behind the pair who she kicked in the backs instead of their faces while she was still moving at that falling velocity but sideways now.

"Alpha. Alpha report," Gray ordered.

Church popped up out of the computer closest to Gray on his left side. "We've nearly got our two areas cleared out-"

"Then move to the next line already," Gray ordered.

"Hey! You're the one who suddenly gave us twice the load-" The AI started arguing back. Gray glared at the holographic form that pulled its armored head back and then just nodded it quickly at the young mage. "Sure thing, whatever. We'll move on." Church sucked back into the computer and then transmitted himself over to Cleo's helmet again.

The Alpha AI was the AI-In-Command for the mission. Gray was uncertain about bringing in any artificial intelligence due to Terminus' relationship with the Sith, but despite their attitudes, he was glad to hear Church passing on the orders to his own fragments. Their world did everything better. This ship. The Pelicans. Overshields and active camo. And the AI they created were stronger than most everyone else's. These ones were unique, Gray thought. Aside from their character traits, they're unique in that Terminus failed once before to take them over. Just like Ritsu of Class 3-E.

Their world's tech is so amazing, Gray glanced out the right corners of his eyes and at his younger friend with spiky hair. He thought of another spiky-haired teen who also had a lot of Pokémon. But Sora destroyed the Covenant fleet. All with one Pokémon at his disposal. And sure, Sora said that Arceus is considered the "God" of Pokémon… but that just makes it even more insane that he can summon a God. Gray shook his head around. Sora's not here! Would be nice if he was, but he ran off too. I couldn't have brought him along anyway. Not with Brock and the others bringing their own Pokémon into battle with them.

Gray thought of a conversation between himself, Natsu, and Sora. Natsu had mentioned to him how infrequently he saw Gray use his one Legendary catch. "I barely ever see you use that Pokemon of yours. You brought it out that day you showed up in Port Royal, but you never used it once in the Underworld bases or even in Metropolis." Natsu was just curious. But that look on Sora's face…

"Pokemon aren't weapons to 'use.' If you catch any you'll know. Pokemon, don't like fighting people."

I nearly didn't call any of them in after seeing that. The Resistance fights for the side of good, and Sora nearly convinced me. I trust Brock though. And the others have trained their Pokémon too. They treat them as friends and fight together, not as weapons. Sora knows that Pokémon are smart enough to make decisions like that on their own. Gray narrowed his eyes at the windshield and the zoomed-in second line of trenches that some forcefields finally started going down on. Then, he even lost his dark look at the sight of an explosion out in the third line of trenches through a thinning smokescreen that their flagship stopped firing on with any of its cannons once friendly signatures appeared inside it. Nice, Jakku!

Knov had not teleported ahead with his squad leader. He only sent Jakku ahead before teleporting back to the first line himself to transport others into the second line's forcefields. Jakku was too fast and sped ahead of everyone to the point that he was at the third line of trenches while most everyone else was still in the first line, and some had not even reached that yet. Now that the first trench had nearly been cleared of shielding though, the anti-air fire had been stopped as well. Resistance fighters battled it out with the Sith's forces in the trenches, and even where the battles were ongoing, the Imperial soldiers in those trenches had to focus on the closer threats and so left their anti-air turrets to fight at close quarters instead.

Now that the front lines' anti-air fire had been stopped, and the second trench was under assault too with new teleports every second and heavy fire raining down from the heavy cruiser above, the pilots who had been forced to land their smaller vessels at first were able to lift back off. Landing and fighter aircraft that had been worried about their shield levels flew back into the air and started firing their own weapons towards the second line while soaring over the first.

"Aghh!"

"Captain Leo! Help!"

Leo spun from the pair of Stormtroopers falling away from his blade. He looked back across the middle of the trench towards two of his friends who were in midair swiping at the enemy who had already taken three of them out. This trooper had on pitch black armor that was shinier than the others. She also had on a black cape that flapped behind her in front of the two Tonta Corps members who slashed their lances at her. Captain Phasma had her back to the pair, but she spun around and slashed the sparking metal staff with a club at the end of it. The speedy little people were in midair and could not readjust, only managing to pull their lances back for some kind of protection.

When the steel of her staff connected with their weapons though, the charge electrifying it transferred into the Tontatta people who screamed out and then fell backwards with smoke coming off their bodies. "No!" Leo yelled. The speedy little man in a green outfit shot towards Phasma.

She darted her eyes back and forth and snapped her head side to side to follow the zig-zagging pattern of the Tonta Corps commander. "Fast one, aren't you?" She reached her right hand behind her back to her belt and pulled a small round object off it. Captain Phasma pressed the red button on her thermal detonator and then swung in front of her. She tossed the grenade towards the small man who bent his legs and kicked off the ground for an extra burst of speed.

Phasma leaned backwards and started turning her head to the side in shock. A trail of dust was still rising up between her legs, and she heard a high-pitched voice passing underneath her call out, "Soru!" Leo was fast as it was. Using Shave, he became less than a blur that Phasma's visor could not even track. She was good enough to realize that he was behind her and started spinning around, but then she felt the slashes on her calves. He had cut back and forth while running past her, and when she tried to turn to face him, she collapsed down to both knees. Leo had his back to the woman, but he spun around and slashed as she dropped to her knees, cutting through the front of her armor with his rapier coated in black Armament Haki. Blood splashed from the Captain of the Sith's forces in this section of the trenches, and she finally collapsed forward onto her visor that cracked when her head hit the ground.

"Get the wounded evacuated. Everyone else," Leo turned and pointed his rapier dripping with blood off to the west. "Onwards!" Leo sprinted to the other side of the trench and up the wall. He ran into the minefield and leapt up in the air, coming down so lightly on each hop that the ground's pressure panels were not able to feel him. Other Tonta members shot down the narrow trenches or up into the minefields themselves, darting over the ground that they knew would not explode with such light touches. The Sith did not want stray birds or small rodents to accidentally set off their defenses all the time, and so the Tontatta zipped over the fields without setting off any of the traps left for human-sized enemies.

"We're right here with you, Leo!" Kabu called over to his left at the small green blur he saw arcing him to his level. The Yellow Kabus had caught up during the fighting on the front line enough that Kabu and his squad were now flying towards the second trench with Leo's central squad that had made it through the trench first of all the Tontatta.

Gray's fleet of smaller vessels dove down as they passed over the first trench if their comrades had already moved past it. Bombs dropped from dropship hatches and hit empty turrets that the Resistance wanted fully deactivated in case they got pushed back later on. Knov stopped holding up his palm for the gunship above to wait, and he held up a circle made with his thumb and index fingers with his other three pointed up: the multiversal sign for "ok." He dropped into his portal after the rest of the squad he just got out of there, and the pilot above dove down on a strafing run of the trench where some enemies were still moving about but no longer had a forcefield protecting them.

Knov dropped into a portal while picturing the line ahead and its exact dimensions. He had seen the eagle-eye images. He had seen it with his own eyes. The white-haired thirty-seven year old man looked much older than he really was. His Nen ability of Hide-And-Seek he trained in his old world had not been strong enough, and it led him into a situation where he found himself at such high risk of death that his hair had turned white in fear. On Nexus though where powers were far more common, he had been able to train his ability to a superior form that made him an indispensable part of the invasion force.

Knov was so indispensable, that he he could only watch as the people he dropped into the portal with ran ahead in the parallel corridor world he dropped them into and opened a different portal at the end of for them. Knov did not run with them, instead cursing his captain in his head. I should have warned General Gray. He thought Jakku was just frustrated and would still follow the order to stay with me. Should I be the one sticking with Jakku? Is it on me to be by his side? I am needed elsewhere though. I cannot just stay with Jakku…

Gray was actually appreciative that Jakku had gone off script to rush ahead and hit the third trench while everyone else got caught up. He did not know if Jakku was improvising and chose to ditch Knov because of their initially slow start, or if Jakku was always going to leave him behind at the first opportunity, but his plan for Jakku to guard Knov had gone out the window- and Gray was glad Jakku had made that decision. He's the only one disrupting the third line as of yet. I need to get the flagship over the second trench quickly, even if there's still anti-air fire all along it.

Fewer shots were coming up from the second line, but although many battles had started in the third and second trenches, some were still occurring back on the first below Gray's slow-flying heavy cruiser. It was a slow start, but we're picking up the pace! We can break the first line! He felt hope. It wasn't exactly according to plan, but the plan had worked well enough so far that it seemed like they might break through all three trenches of the "front line." We can do this. I knew it. We're going to break through-

Down the first line of the front lines of defenses, far enough to the port side of the passing ship that it was not underneath the vessel at all, one more blue forcefield dropped down. It was the last one before the jagged southern cliffs that they decided not to fly over as they were too tall, meaning their vehicles would have been more visible to distant enemy sensors. Landing parties would have been at different elevations too and would have found it more difficult to assist one another if some were down at the base and others up top. The enemy defenses at the top of the cliff were not as strong, but they did not need to be since the Sith understood the weaknesses of trying to advance in the narrow corridor between the flatlands and the Great Wall and did not expect an assault to come there.

Of course, the Sith did not plan for any point on their lines to be weak. The mountainous terrain was harder to advance over and so had fewer defenses, but the flatlands with stronger defense lines were also meant not to be optimal for invasion. Huge amounts of defensive high-tech weapons and permanent stations for soldiers were costly to establish and upkeep. In one of those fortified positions at the edge of the trench line, apparently one of the most-fortified probably due to its position on the flank, the kid who just punched a hole through the generator flew out of the other side and then did a barrel-roll in midair to dodge the lasers and the crossing punching fists of two commando droids.

The battle droids with jetpacks spun and rose their pistols in their hands they did not just try to punch Kid Cosmic with. They aimed, but the kid vanished through a bright pink portal and then appeared behind the robots. He spun a kick into one's head, then he flew around the other while the first fired its pistol at him despite its head being kicked around the wrong way. It was a strong enough and smart enough droid to be able to shoot even as it was being deactivated, but because it could not see what Kid Cosmic was doing, it just fired at the boy without realizing its comrade was now between it and Kid.

Two explosions went off in the air that shattered the brown droids and blew out their glowing white eyes. Kid engulfed in a green light emanating from his ring. He soared down over the line of Stormtroopers firing at Jo who protected herself with eight circular forcefields. Their lasers went in the portal and shot back out at the soldiers who ducked their own attacks, only to be plowed into by the fast-moving preteen who decked them full force and lifted ten of them off the ground.

The eleven year old dropped the platoon of Stormtroopers and then dove back the other way, punching a fist into a turret and then jumping away after bending its barrel. He dodged the slashing machete of another commando droid that snuck up and nearly got him. Kid flew into the pink portal Jo made for him, and he kicked straight out the other side into the back of the droid. The commando droid stumbled forward but bent its arm at a weird angle that would break a human bone, and it jabbed backwards at Kid's gut. Kid Cosmic just smirked though, and the stabbing sword went through the pink portal that appeared in front of his chest. The machete appeared in full-thrust on the left side of the droid's head, and it stabbed itself through the skull.

Kid and Jo were a great team. Their combo attacks were overwhelming for the regular troops and battle droids even in the heavily-packed defensive position at the edge of the trench. Most of the aerial vehicles had stopped around the middle of the line too and advanced over the central positions that fell first. They were over mostly underneath Gray's Summer-class cruiser, with a few out in front as a vanguard against the third trench while the other fighter jets kept taking on the second trench. Kid glanced ahead towards the second trench where lasers and tracer rounds kept firing from straight to their west to a more central part of the second line. "We need to get up there!" Kid called over to Jo.

Jo nodded in agreement, but she added, "Then let's finish this quickly!" Jo pointed towards more defensive positions in their area where the turrets were finished turning towards them rather than off to the east where there were no more Resistance members approaching from. The turrets aimed north up the trench at the pair who raced towards them. Jo jumped through one of her own portals, appeared out of another off to her left, then out another to her right, each time getting closer and closer to the troopers who panicked as the distance closed rapidly and too fast for them to pull the turrets back and forth.

Kid Cosmic also flew through her portals and appeared all over in a serpentine pattern through the sky. They targeted the kid and fired at him, and then Jo appeared behind one of the turret squads and fired her stun gun into their backs. Her pistol fired circular rings of purple energy that knocked the soldiers off their feet and paralyzed them. Although most in the Resistance accepted the need to kill their enemies in this war, they also accepted the fact that some in the Resistance were so against killing that they needed different kinds of weapons. Jo and Kid Cosmic had those types of blasters different from some of the hardened space marines and clone troopers who had rushed through the middle with no mercy for the Stormtroopers and other Sith personnel.

The inaccurate laser fire coming from the turret positions at the edge of the fortified trench edge halved. Kid stopped swerving around as much and made a bee-line for the bunker one last turret was shooting out of, and he yelled out, "Straight on to the next-" A purple portal opened in front of Kid. It had a pink-ish shade to it, but his eyebrows did rise slightly as a feeling of mild confusion hit him. The shade of the portal was not exactly the same as the others he had been flying into.

If Jo was making him a portal though, Kid was going to fly through it. He figured the bunker's turret was not adjusted yet to his flight path that another portal was unnecessary, but he trusted Jo not to doubt it. Had he felt any doubt in her, he might have hesitated to fly straight at the portal that Jo caught sight of in the corner of her eyes in utter confusion. "That's not-" Her voice caught in her throat. Her jaw dropped and she tried to scream, but all the air sucked out of her lungs that same moment it was forced out of Kid's.

A glowing red lightsaber stabbed out of that purple forcefield while Kid was flying full-speed towards it. He did not even have a chance to try and put on the brakes. Kid Cosmic only managed to stop, once the blade had already passed through his back. He did not stop moving forward until the base of the lightsaber was partially dug into his small sternum. All the air was forced violently from Kid's chest while he was in mid-yell about going to the next trench, as he already knew he was about to defeat the forces in this bunker with little difficulty. After the air pushed out of his lungs though, he coughed again, and the blood that was filling his lungs splashed out instead.

"K-KID!" Jo screamed, finally finding her voice and wailing at the top of her lungs at the horrific sight she was seeing. Fifty pink portals appeared all around them. Her whole body flared wildly with hot pink aura, but then a gun pointed out of that purple portal in the air and aimed down at the floor in front of her feet. There was a steel hand gripped on the hilt of that strange-looking gun, and the metal hand pulled the trigger to fire a purple beam at the girl who jumped backwards into one of her own portals. As she was jumping back into it and appearing above the dark figure who floated out of the first purple portal, she saw another portal appearing under where she was just standing that red blaster fire shot out of.

Tears spilled from the corners of Jo's eyes. She dove from the portal above the Sith Lord who held Kid Cosmic impaled on his lightsaber. The boy lifted his flickering green hands towards the hilt the Sith still had stuck partially in his chest. The Sith Lord pulled back though and dislodged the weapon from the kid. He did not do so gently or cleanly, cutting a deep gash sideways across Kid before slashing up at Jo who made another portal between them. The Sith stopped swinging his weapon before cutting himself in half, as his lightsaber emerged from another portal behind him. Then he sped up his swing anyway, because another portal appeared right next to Jo's.

She noticed the slightly darker shade of the portal in between hers and the dark figure in a black cape though. She saw the burst of purple light fly behind her and open up another portal as a gun stuck out of the one just created behind him. Jo twisted her body and snapped her head back, dodging the red blade of the lightsaber when it was about to hit her. She reached a hand down towards Kid's falling body, calling out his name again… The Sith's free hand not on his lightsaber hilt pushed forward with an open palm, and Jo felt a force slam into it so powerfully that it was like gravity multiplied by five.

Jo plummeted at the surface and clenched her eyes shut as she was about to slam into it. A portal appeared on the floor half a second before she would have broken her back against it, and she flew back out of another vertical portal close to the ground. She landed on her feet and threw her arms out to the sides to keep her balance as she skid away on a cement surface inside the trench. Jo managed to catch herself, but the tears fell even faster as she watched Kid's limp body hit the wall of a bunker and bounce off like a limp ragdoll. A smear of blood dripped down from that bunker wall below the Sith Lord who finally dropped down himself. He fell at a normal speed but slowed right before hitting the ground, then lightly touched down one foot before the other.

"Get away from him!" Jo screamed. She reached her right hand to the side and into a portal, but she had to yank that arm back as the Sith swiped at her the second she grabbed at Kid's unmoving body. She may have pulled her own arm back quickly enough, but she gagged when the Sith who missed her arm continued his swing down into the body of the boy behind him. He did not even look back, but he cut deep through Kid Cosmic's body, and yet the kid did not flail or scream when it happened.

Jo's crying eyes bulged in horror at the realization of why Kid would not react at all to being cut like that. He's… he's already-

"He is dead," the Sith Lord told the girl filling with despair before his eyes. His voice sounded mechanical. It was deep but semi-robotic, and Jo heard it not from his mouth but from a voicebox at the top of his chest. The dark figure had a hood over his head, but when he lifted his gaze and glared into Jo's soul, she got a good look at his face.

The figure was not human. He may have been humanoid with two arms and two legs, but an abnormally large head with a line splitting the middle of the skull that held its large brain. The Bith species had hairless smooth heads with many flaps on the bottom of their face hiding a mouth and nose, and their eyes were dark and glassy orbs. The suns cast some light on that face, but the red glow from his lightsaber soon tinted it a dark red shade as he rose up the blade in front of the center of his body. "Do not worry," he told her in a deep reassuring tone. "You will be joining him soon."

Darth Tenebrous held out his right hand not on his hilt and curled his fingers in. Jo flew towards him as the Force Pull yanked her his direction. She created a portal in front of her, but then a purple beam fired from above and stopped short in the air just in front of where Jo was about to fly. Her eyes darted up and she spotted the strange portal gun from before, only now the one who was using it was visible outside of another closing purple portal.

A white robot that looked nothing like any of the battle droids or other Sith robots they had been briefed on was floating there. It had a circular white body with a glowing red eye in the center of a black panel centered on it. Two arms stuck off the sides of the robot which was an Artificial Intelligence and part of the Terminus forces which were allied with the Sith. GLaDOS spoke to the girl she saw look up and meet the gaze of her glowing red eye, "Do not worry. This will not hurt a bit." Jo flew through the portal that GLaDOS had fired with her portal gun, and then the robot finished, "It will hurt a lot."

Darth Tenebrous was already slashing behind him where GLaDOS fired first before shooting a second portal in the way of Jo and her own portal. The robot lifted her finger off the trigger only when the flying shot was in midair behind him. The advanced portal mechanics of the gun created the portal in midair rather than when it hit the surface due to her releasing her hold on the trigger early. Jo started getting yanked through the portal, and she appeared directly over Kid Cosmic's body with multiple stab wounds on it that made Jo flinch, eliminating any chance of her creating her own portal to escape through or one to block the Sith's stab.

The Force worked in many ways though. Tenebrous stopped his own slash rather than finish and cut through the girl, because he had a mental flash of his bones shattering against the steel of a baseball bat. He Force Leapt thirty feet in the air and in a backflip, and he threw his Lightsaber in such a way that it spun around and around at Jo anyway, forcing the man who was rushing at Tenebrous not to give chase to the Sith's new position, and to dive at Jo instead and tackle her away from there. Metal Bat moved so fast that Jo did not even see him coming, and she flinched from what she thought might be getting stabbed, only to realize that she was in a pair of muscular arms that had still somehow caught her very gently.

"Another organic," GLaDOS commented in blatant disdain for their ilk.

Metal Bat said nothing to ask Jo if she was alright. He could already tell that she was not. His eyes burned with fiery rage as he turned his gaze from Kid Cosmic's unmoving body in a puddle of blood, over to the Sith Lord responsible for such a brutal act. He let go of Jo who dropped to her knees at his side, and then he stuck his right arm out with the end of his bat pointing straight at the Sith. It was a heavy metal bat that did not wobble at all the way Baddo held it like it weighed as much as a pencil. "You're going to pay for that," Metal Bat informed the enemy. He's a monster. Monsters get no mercy from me.

Everyone on the bridge of Gray's heavy cruiser had horrified looks on their faces. Gray stared at the window that Leonardo Watch made appear on the windshield. He stared at the body of the kid who he brought with him on this invasion. A moment before he had been filling with hope at the thought of breaking through this front line, but he stared at the scene going on to the south and lost all the hope in place of dread. Metal Bat had arrived in time to save Jo who was vital to their mission, but Gray felt no relief. He did feel confusion. Why is a Sith Lord here? What was he doing on the front line? Why did he take that long to appear then?! Is it that portal technology? I don't recognize the robot! It must be Terminus. Or a new type of Sith weapon. I don't know. Too many unknowns! Kid…

"I've been in a hundred battles! Don't treat me like I'm a kid. Wha- no! That's just my name! You'll see. I've been in harder fights than this one."

"He's right. I've seen Kid do some really amazing things. Don't worry, General. We can handle ourselves." Gray heard the voice of the teenage girl who he knew had to be feeling even worse than he was right now after vouching that Kid would be alright out there.

Gray dragged a hand down his face and then turned and glared out the front windshield again. "Keep moving forward," he ordered his comrades. "Metal Bat will handle the Sith and get Jo out of there."

"Yes sir."

"Yeah, understood."

Brock wiped his forearm across his eyes fast and then hardened his expression afterwards when he noticed Gray glance back towards him. Brock shook his head, and Gray nodded. It's not the time, Gray thought. Whatever victory we get now, it won't be much cause for celebration. He took down some of the generators. You did good, Kid Cosmic. You were a hero. "Fire lasers between the second and third lines and blow paths through the minefields. Gunships give fire support to Cleo's squad!" Gray called out his orders and pushed the thought of the fallen hero from his mind. It would be something to haunt him, later. But not right now. Not when the invasion needed to continue.

Brock blinked away the last of the water in his eyes and refocused as well on the task at hand. Their enemies in the first trench were almost fully defeated, and now their ship had passed fully over it too. Their weapons fired continuously down on enemy positions, and now their smaller aircraft were advancing too with the best pilots advancing on the third trench already.

Behind the majority of Gray's forces, Metal Bat stepped in front of Jo and continued to point his bat straight out at the Sith whose face was partly shadowed over by his black hood. He saw the metal tubes that stuck out of the gill-like appendages instead of a mouth that the Sith had on the bottom half of his face. Metal Bat's eyes examined the figure closely. He pivoted his feet and kept a close watch on the figure who had started circling him and Jo from a range of forty feet. The hero's eyes also darted towards the robot that stayed in place with its red eye just watching Metal Bat… though he noticed the red eye's focus was more on the kneeling form behind him than on himself.

"Kid," Jo whispered. Her eyes were full of tears. Her head was bowed and her face held in her hands. She reached down though and stuck her arm through a portal, and GLaDOS' red eye charged up powerfully. Tenebrous Force Sprinted forward at the same moment that GLaDOS started to glow brightly like that.

"Fwaauuhhh," Metal Bat exhaled a strong breath that became visible out of his mouth from how hard he blew it out. Tenebrous stopped short and swung his right hand out at the hero whose upper body snapped backwards. Metal Bat's left leg lifted up- then he slammed it down and swung his bat into the ground at his feet so hard that the entire section of the trench they were in split in half. A crack ripped through it that chunks of broken generator fell into, while bunkers broke apart and collapsed, and bodies of unconscious or groaning Stormtroopers who Kid Cosmic had not killed fell into those cracks and got crushed by rubble.

When Metal Bat's bat hit the ground, he twisted his arms over the hilt of his bat and kicked his legs out in front of him. He swung with such force and used the momentum to throw himself over the bat that he spun around while parallel over the ground. GLaDOS was aiming at the purple portal that Jo just opened next to Kid's body. Jo reached through and grabbed him, though her eyes darted over at the robot that she just saw about to attack her… only for Metal Bat's blurring spinning body to smash through the robot twenty times with his baseball bat. Shards of metal went flying everywhere as the red light puffed out into a small blast that Baddo ignored to just keep smashing the Terminus robot apart.

He finished with one extra hard swing and twisted his body to aim the last of the debris. He followed-through towards where Tenebrous had jumped to in order to dodge the crack through the trench that had gone directly under his feet. The Sith Lord held up a palm though and stopped all the debris, then sent it flying back at Metal Bat who swung left and right to shatter the small pieces into even tinier bits before they could impale him. There were too many small pieces to smash them all apart though. Blood splashed away from his left arm, then his right leg, and a line cut through the left side of his face too just under his eye.

"Metal Bat!" Jo called out at the man who she saw the blood splash from.

He stopped swinging his bat as he landed down on his feet with his legs bending under the impact. He exhaled again a thick steam of air while lifting his gaze up towards the Sith. Tenebrous lowered his own palm and then lifted his red lightsaber to cast that dark red glow over his face again. The Sith's deep mechanical voice informed Metal Bat, "You may have destroyed GLaDOS' body, but I am certain she was backed up somewhere else. Your effort is meaningless."

Tenebrous started circling around again, and Metal Bat ground his teeth but jumped over and got between Tenebrous and Jo again. Her eyes widened as she looked back up from Kid's body she just stared down at in sorrow again. Jo knew Metal Bat well enough to question for a second why he did not just charge at the enemy to go beat him to a bloody mess. I'm still needed? They, need me to keep fighting? Jo turned her head and looked off to the northwest and up at the command ship. Her eyes clenched shut again. I can't! Kid… I need to help him- he's dead. Dead! "Ahhh- AHhhhhh…" Jo tried to bite her tongue and hold back her grief, but it was not so easy for her to just continue the mission.

"Maybe she's not dead," Metal Bat remarked, sarcastically using the gendered term for the robot that the Sith had used. "But it's not here to help you anymore. You won't be escaping with your life." Metal Bat's tone was dark. The strange appearance to this Sith did not make it easier to consider him to be no more than a monster. He knew the Sith was humanoid. But he was about to bash the man's brains in with his bat, and with Kid's body in his peripheral vision, he did not even feel any regret over what he was about to do.

"Who is escap-" Metal Bat sprung off the ground as Tenebrous was responding. The interrupted Sith slashed at Metal Bat who ducked his own head and swung an uppercut with his bat towards the Sith who leaned his body sideways and dodged it. Metal Bat felt like he was faster than the enemy, but he grit his teeth in frustration over the predictive power of the Force. He gripped his bat with both hands even tighter and stopped the momentum of his uppercut short, making wind blow off away from him hard from how fast it was moving and how short he stopped it. Then he slashed back down towards the left shoulder of the Sith that he was going to break into a million tiny pieces.

Tenebrous flicked his fingers though as Metal Bat was slamming down. He removed one hand from his lightsaber and used the Force on Metal Bat's left elbow, bending his arm slightly off-course and making the trajectory of his bat swing suffer from it. Metal Bat slammed the head of his bat into the ground at Tenebrous' side while the Sith slashed his own red lightsaber at the middle of Metal Bat's body. Metal Bat's eyes darted to the red blade coming closer and closer to him, and then he gripped his bat and kicked his legs up in the air, flinging his whole body upwards so he was doing a handstand on the butt of his weapon. Then while his arms were fully extended over the top of his bat, he pushed down on the hilt and did a hop up in the air so the lightsaber passed below the end of his own weapon. Then he did a full windmill swing of his bat up over his head and down at the top of Tenebrous' skull.

His bat connected with the hood of the cloak over Tenebrous. Then he just did a confused spin in the air as his bat connected with nothing solid under the hood. Metal Bat darted his eyes around and then snapped them open huge as he saw Tenebrous sprinting low to the ground and straight towards Jo as she cried while cradling Kid Cosmic's body. Metal Bat twisted in midair while still off-balanced from his momentum, and he wound up his bat and threw it like a javelin at the Sith who had slid right out of his cloak to charge at Jo. Tenebrous flung his own lightsaber before jumping to his right to dodge the bat-javelin he sensed flying at him.

Metal Bat threw with enough power though that Jo fell from her kneeling position when his bat hit the ground just past where Tenebrous had been sprinting. The red lightsaber flew just over her head, and she gasped out in terror as she felt the heat passing over her neck. Her hair singed at the ends, and then she turned her head left and stared at the weapon that did not keep flying after passing over her. It instead curved back like a boomerang, and it descended a few feet to better hit her. "Jo!" Metal Bat yelled.

A purple portal opened below Jo and Kid. She dropped them through and they fell right behind where Metal Bat was sprinting himself. He breathed out a short exhale of relief and then grabbed his bat grip sticking out of the concrete floor that had cracked all around the impact. Metal Bat ripped the weapon back out and spun to glare at Tenebrous who caught his lightsaber when it returned to him. Then Tenebrous started to circle once more.

If Jo didn't save herself, I wouldn't have been able to, Metal Bat realized. He did not charge right in a second time. His lips furled in frustration and rage, and his muscles bulged more into his tight shirt as he glared furiously at the Sith circling him.

"It was your bad luck to run into me here," Tenebrous informed his enemies. "I am Darth Tenebrous. Know the name of the one who will kill you."

Metal Bat leaned his head back and gathered up some bloody snot-spit in his throat, and he hocked a loogie on the floor between them in disrespect to the Sith's name. That was his only response to learning it. Tenebrous continued to circle him without losing composure though while Metal Bat continued grinding his teeth in anger. Metal Bat's eyes also darted around the Sith who was too calm, too prepared for any attack the enraged hero might rush at him with, and it made even the headstrong hero cautious of his next move.

"Two of the Sith your Resistance know of are my pupils. I am the master of Darth Venamis. And, I was once the master of Darth Plagueis… though, Plagueis' true master was another," Tenebrous spoke knowingly and cryptically in a deep voice that sent shivers down Jo's spine.

Plagueis and Venamis? The General said something about Venamis at least, but did we know anything about the other- who cares?! Metal Bat shook his head around. Don't get distracted! "You Sith like to talk," Metal Bat growled. "Try to get in our heads-"

"Like Darth Bane was able to get in Gray Fullbuster's?" Tenebrous wondered.

Jo and Metal Bat both tensed up. "The General killed Darth Bane," Metal Bat snarled back.

"Is that what he told you?" Tenebrous questioned.

His tone was knowing. It sounded like he was smirking at the pair who could not tell if he was or not because of his lack of human lips. But they started doubting their General. They doubted whether he had killed Darth Bane or not. They wondered what the Sith meant by Bane getting into Gray's head. Was their General leading them into a trap? Had he been corrupted by the Sith?!

"Do you really think you can defeat the Emperor?" Tenebrous questioned amusedly at the pair who were thrown off so easily. "His machinations are far beyond your understanding. Beyond my own," Tenebrous added in a lower voice, sounding more like he was just speaking to himself under his breath rather than at them. I did not see him coming because of the Rule of 2, which I myself was breaking by training Venamis as well. I did not realize in having two pupils that one of those two also had 2 masters, and I would realize it too late.

Plagueis failed when his own disciple betrayed him, but that was all part of Plagueis' true master's plan. Tenebrous reached the point in circling around Metal Bat that he was now in the east looking west at Metal Bat, which also gave him a view farther west towards their Order. He did not take his eyes off the extremely powerful enemy, but he did think of those beyond him, Sidious himself did not know of Plagueis' true master's existence, so he never suspected that he was still the apprentice himself even after his betrayal…

"Enough out of you," Metal Bat growled. "Every word is like poison. I'm done ingesting it."

"You say that, but you remain still. Waiting, as if time were on your side," Tenebrous commented. His words were a reminder to Metal Bat of their timeline, but it again unnerved him that Tenebrous seemed to be hinting at something more. "I was only here to meet with Professor Chaos on the border just to our south," Tenebrous stated. "But does not my arrival feel like an omen of what is soon to come?"

Metal Bat's breathing picked up pace. He had not decided whether to charge at Tenebrous yet without a clear weak point to aim at where he would not be predicted or pushed aside again. Time felt shorter than ever though. Jo was still back here with him. The rest of the force only had Knov helping them skip the gaps, which meant most of their force was likely running across the connecting trenches and tunnels, or over the minefields themselves. Some of the smaller aircraft were landing in the second trench and re-loading some passengers to try and fly to the third trench and drop them into it while their heavy cruiser continued to lay down covering fire. They had not yet taken that third trench, and even the second was still disputed, but they were out of time.

"Sir!" Leonardo Watch yelled out. "Something's coming out of Jump!"

Jump?! "Shields!" Gray yelled.

A second shadow cast over the battlefield. Gray's command ship pulled to a halt to avoid flying forward and underneath the enormous Star Destroyer slightly larger than his own cruiser. Nearly two kilometers in length, the Star Destroyer had a triangular shape with a pointed front rather than the more rounded and cylindrical style of Gray's Summer-class cruiser.

Beams immediately fired out of the Star Destroyer as it appeared in the sky high above them. The beams did not fly straight at Gray's flagship though, instead shooting down between the second and third lines of trenches as soon as the starship appeared. "Evasive maneuvers!" Tiplee warned in a yell into her communicator.

"Fire back at them!" Gray yelled to the weapons systems' operators.

They had redirected much of their power to shields, but they still had enough energy to aim and fire their weapons at half-power. Even as Gray's cannons turned to aim upwards instead of down at the surface, a bright red shield bubble pulsed around the Imperial Star Destroyer that protected it from all their attacks.

"Where did that come- ASH!" Tucker yelled towards their Pelican dropship that he saw get hit by a huge beam of red light that fired out from above.

"AHH-" 4-7-9's voice cut off. The Pelican exploded in a ball of fire, and Carolina screamed out her friend's name too only to get tackled to the ground by Mayan a second later.

Former Freelancer York covered Carolina with his body as an explosion went off just ahead of them in the trench, blowing apart several Stormtroopers they had been firing at in the gap between the second and third trenches. "Are they crazy?! They're hitting their own guys!" Mayan yelled out.

"You two have a three percent chance of surviving this bombardment," Delta said. The small green AI popped up next to Mayan's helmet. "It has been an honor serving with you."

"Stop giving me the odds!" Mayan yelled back at his helmet AI, wishing Delta was being more helpful.

"Come on," Carolina pushed Mayan off and then dragged him towards some cover in the trench to at least try and protect themselves from the world-shaking bombardment coming from the Star Destroyer.

The quick-moving Tontatta people were not even quick enough to dodge, because the Star Destroyer's attacks had such wide spread that the explosions' splash damage caught them up in it. "Get to cover!" Leo yelled at his people around him in the third trench. "Into the other shields!" They had just taken down a shield generator, but if they got into the next bubble down on this trench, they could use the Sith's own defenses against the aerial reinforcements.

"Scorch everything," Moff Gideon ordered the crew on the bridge of his Star Destroyer. A few of the Imperial officers looked to him with horrified looks, but no one spoke out directly against the Moff. "Only those who allowed their shields to be taken down will be in danger from our bombardment. They failed. Fire!"

The Star Destroyer unloaded everywhere below them. Wherever the shield generators had been taken down were locations that the Resistance forces would be, and so despite their own troops' presence in those areas, they rained energy beams down on the surface.

"A Star Destroyer. It's Moff Gideon's," Tiplee told the young General who nodded and then ran his hand up through his hair once to calm his nerves. "What are your orders?" Tiplee asked the mage.

Gray nodded to acknowledge that he heard her question, but he took another second. They were supposed to send fighters first. Tie Fighters to scout and test us first before risking one of these on the front line. The Sith only have 4 such vessels in their fleet. Say it aloud. "The Sith only have four of these to rely on. Including Darth Sidious' command ship, the Super Star Destroyer. It's to our benefit that they sent only one at a time, even if its arrival is earlier than expected. It just shows that the plan is working, and the Sith aren't responding with their full force at once. We'll take this one down, and we'll be one step closer!"

"Their hangar bays are opening!"

"Enemy fighters are coming out of their shields. Do we target?"

"Should we keep the shields up? They aren't firing on us yet, so-"

"Keep the shields at half. But keep fire down on the trenches where the shields are still up, and make it possible for our troops to keep moving. We need to portal straight into the forcefields though! Jo?! Can you move up? Jo do you copy?" Gray called to the girl who he needed to get back into this fight already. "Knov! Pick up the pace! And Jack, go guard him."

"Sir! We're under too heavy fire!"

"We can't move!"

"I'm hit!"

Another gunship came crashing down in a minefield, and it skid over the surface and straight into some mines that blew up in a huge explosion that caused other mines to explode too, catching some of the Tontatta up in it.

"Fighters intercept theirs," Haldir ordered his comrades. Sleek elven jets shot up into the air and zipped around the Tie Fighters and other Imperial jets that flew down from Gideon's command ship.

"Gideon is the eastern moff, the governor of the border region with the Resistance," Watch reminded or informed everyone on the bridge. His voice also carried into some of their smaller vessels as well that were flying up towards the Star Destroyer as he spoke. "His aircraft carrier should hold no fewer than 60 and no more than 100 fighter aircraft inside it."

"We can't advance!"

"AHH!"

"Another bombardment coming down! Everyone duck and cover-"

"Ahhhhh… ah?" Elfo was shielding his face and cowering back behind Tucker who cleared his throat and coughed a few times after screaming in a similar way to the elf a second ago. They both just stared up over their heads at the huge beam of red light that had stopped moving before it could slam into them and incinerate the duo.

All over the battlefield, Sith and Resistance soldiers looked up at dozens of thick red beams of light that had all just stopped moving in midair. Moff Gideon's smug expression as he had watched the exploding landscape for the past few seconds wiped from his face. He stepped closer to the windshield of his command ship's bridge and looked back and forth at the different angles he could see showing him all their attacks freezing in midair. "Keep firing," he ordered, only to watch as more of the red beams froze just after passing through their own shield barrier.

His attention shifted towards a pair of figures floating forward over the second line of trenches so they were between the front of Gray's ship that was lower to the surface and the front of Gideon's higher up. A black-haired woman and blond-haired boy each held their hands up in the sky. The espers stopped every one of the Star Destroyer's attacks in place, though the lack of matter inside those beams was making it more difficult and causing Fubuki's arms to shake a bit.

"Hope you don't mind- us stepping in, General," Teru reported. He also paused while speaking, as it was difficult to make that comment while also putting his focus on stopping the enemy bombardment. He was grinning with all his teeth showing, but his teeth were grinding a bit as he had to catch another beam, and another after that one. Teru bent his elbows and then pushed up all at once, and then he swung his left arm back down and flicked it up as well while Fubuki pushed her arms up, and he helped her send back all of the attacks that she had caught as well. Dozens of red beams slammed back at the Star Destroyer at once.

Gideon stumbled around on his bridge while his command crew grabbed onto their stations to steady themselves. Some fell out of their chairs, but one of the officers called out, "Shields holding."

Moff Gideon grabbed onto his own station and stopped wobbling around as much, narrowing his focus on the psychics who flew above the main forces of the enemy. "They struggled with that," he remarked. "Continue firing. Make sure to keep the shields fully powered as well." Gideon stepped behind his station and tapped a few buttons on his console, before reaching over and tapping on a blinking yellow one. A hologram popped up over his controls and showed a blue figure in a white uniform unlike Gideon's black one. The blue-skinned Imperial officer who contacted Moff Gideon had slicked-back silver hair and a pair of deep crimson eyes that looked to glow even through the hologram. "Report, Moff Gideon."

"Admiral," Gideon responded. His voice was on the verge of condescending though not entirely lacking the respect he laced his tone with in order to keep up appearances. "Everything is fine. The Resistance force is even smaller than expected. And it appears even their strongest, are espers who cannot affect this Star Destroyer past our shields."

Gideon was not incorrect on that matter. He had seen the flashing of their red shield past when the beams they fired had been blasted back at them. Fubuki and Teru had curled their fingers in to attempt to break the steel and tear apart the Star Destroyer, but the barrier surrounding the ship was not so weak that they could just ignore it and affect matter on the inside. Those two had just reported in as much to their own General who started firing heavy cannons back up at Gideon's Star Destroyer in order to add to the damage their espers were doing to its shields.

"Do not underestimate your enemies, Moff," Admiral Thrawn warned. He returned only the same tone that Gideon spoke to him in. Their positions were separate. Moff was a governor, and while in control of his own military force, he was outside of the military rankings that Admiral Thrawn was the highest rank of. "Jedi will be sneaking on board your ship before long. Have your men ready for the infiltration, or your shields will mean nothing as you are taken down from the inside."

"My men are already prepared for just that," Gideon scoffed back at the idea that he would be unprepared for such an event. Not that they will be able to board my ship so easily, he added to himself afterwards in a more smug way. I do not underestimate them. You overestimate these Resistance fools. The technology of the Emperor is superior to the Organization, to Arachne or the Fire Nation, to all who would face us. Their shields fall weaker by the second while the limitless energy of our Star Destroyer protects us and maintains our shields at full power! "Annihilate them all. Put pressure on the espers and force past their defenses!"

Fubuki and Teru adapted to the difficulty of blocking Gideon's bombardment however. Gray had to accept their involvement this soon, despite wanting them to hold back for longer. Since the Sith had thrown in a Star Destroyer this early though, they all accepted the need for them to stop holding back. The pair of "tanks" for the Resistance kept their focus on the sky so that the rest of the army could keep advancing below without worrying about the Star Destroyer. Those two did not even focus on the smaller fighters that flew out of Gideon's starship, only keeping their focus on the energy beam bombardment Gideon fired down on them. They just allowed the other fighter jets and gunships to take on the enemies released from the Star Destroyer's hangars.

In order to take the pressure off of their esper abilities, Teru had been the first to swing an arm up from down at his side with his fingers curled towards an empty chunk of the surface between two trench lines. He ripped huge chunks of earth out of the ground, and he threw one of them up straight into the path of a red beam shooting down at his comrades below. The chunk was large enough that it blocked the beam completely and set it off early up in the sky, and so Teru started carving out smaller chunks to make each one even lighter. He tested with smaller and smaller pieces until he used one too small and had to mentally stop the majority of the beam that just incinerated it and kept pushing straight through. Fubuki saw what he was doing and started matching the size of his rubble interceptors, using their abilities on easier-to-manipulate matter, rather than stopping the energy beams with their psychic powers which caused more of a strain.

"Alternate power of the bombardment," Moff Gideon ordered. The next attacks that fired down near Teru and Fubuki got past the pair who had just gotten used to the pattern and knew what size they needed to make their interceptors. They snapped their heads down in shock and then anger as the beams they failed to stop with too-small chunks of interceptors hit the ground and caught some of their comrades.

Even though some of the following beams that Gideon's ship fired were much smaller than the ones they had just been blocking, Teru and Fubuki now had to use larger chunks every time just in case one of the beams that fired was an excessively large one. The portions of earth they were flinging up moved slower because of their larger size, and the benefit to them to not just freezing the beams themselves diminished as intercepting became harder. "Someone needs to take down the Star Destroyer," Teru warned their General through his comms. "We can't do this forever."

The spiky-haired psychic curled his fingers more like he was digging his nails into the forcefield that glowed even brighter when he tried it. Not going to work. Teru stopped exerting the extra pressure and instead took in a deep breath. His eyebrows narrowed down and he offered, "Request to take it down myself? I'll fly through and rip it up from the inside."

"Request denied," Gray rejected him without thinking twice about it. "Stay on the defensive for now. Just protect the ground forces from the ship's bombardment."

Hanazawa frowned deeper that Gray would not consider his offer when he meant it to come off very serious. He accepted the General's denial though, and Gray was glad not to hear any argument from his soldier afterwards. I can't risk either of you for a solo mission into an enemy ship that could be hosting powerful warriors ready to counter you. It's too dangerous. I'd rather have you slowly lose power by fending them off… is that really better? Well, at least it will prevent more Sith reinforcements from getting alerted to our true strength too early.

It'll be worth it if we can keep just the one Star Destroyer out here at the border. Hopefully we won't have to face any others until we've already started pushing over open ground towards Rivendell. Gray scratched his chin and darted his eyes around trying to find an alternative to their problem if he was not going to let his espers take care of it. I can't just let them lose strength either. We need to start taking it down-

"Sir. I can teleport people up," a girl's voice offered over their comms.

Leonardo Watch made a screen appear on the windshield of the bridge. "Jo," Gray began. He stopped for a second as he watched her fighting on the second line of trenches. She opened a portal up and sent through a group of elves up to the third line who had been stuck back here due to the heavy fire coming from those trenches onto their positions. Gray's cruiser was giving less covering fire down from above which made it all the harder for anyone to advance without the help from one of their portal users.

Gray looked to another screen and saw Metal Bat still in their rear fighting against a Sith Lord. Jo had heard the screams from her comrades for help that Watch had channeled into her headset, and it finally got her back to her feet and into the fight. Metal Bat had assured her that he could handle the Sith and told her to go on ahead without him. Leonardo still felt like crap even though his plan worked, for doing such a thing to a girl in mourning. We needed her though, Watch thought.

Jo may have sent the elves ahead, but she stayed on the second line to go teleport more forces stuck in the trenches due to the heavy enemy fire. As she ran, she nearly missed seeing a few Stormtroopers come out of a damaged bunker that aimed towards her. She spun at the last second and held up her hands, creating portals that made more portals appear behind those soldiers. Their own blaster shots went through the purple circles and hit the men in their backs, killing all three of them. Jo just glared at the Stormtroopers for a few seconds after they fell before spinning and continuing to run to the next part of the line where she saw a group of space marines pinned down by enemy turret cannons. "General?!" Jo yelled out again, wanting to receive an answer for what she should do.

"No, Jo." Gray replied to her. "Just focus on clearing the trenches. Get everyone up to the third line."

Gray ran a hand up through his hair and then stumbled to his left as the ship got hit by a large blast from the enemy destroyer. "Sorry!" Teru yelled out. Moff Gideon had changed the intensity of their blasts again out of nowhere after luring him and Fubuki into a pattern of weaker blasts for a time. Gray's ship still had a lot of power diverted to the shields though, which was preventing them from putting as much fire support down on the Sith's ground forces, but it did keep the ship from receiving damage even as it shook from the assault.

"We need to take care of that Star Destroyer," Tiplee warned back to the young man leading them.

"Jakku," Gray ordered. Watch patched his voice through solely to Kappa's leader. "Jo is distracted, and she no longer has Kid to protect her. Knov can take care of himself. He'll have to. Get back there and guard her. Now!"

Jakku grumbled in annoyance but responded, "Fine." He had only just got back to checking on Knov who he barely stayed near during the first part of the battle anyway. Knov sweatdropped too as Watch sent that last message through to Knov's earpiece as well to let him know why Jakku was running off, as for a second Knov just thought it was his squad leader being irresponsible again.

"Hey General." Church's voice spoke up. A white hologram of an AI figure appeared out of Gray's console for a moment. "We can't take down this shield generator with the fire they're putting on their own defenses. The second we knock it out, those blasts are going to blow us all up. Got any ideas?"

"Any chance you guys can, like, hack their ship?" Brock wondered to the artificial intelligence who was part of a team of them. Alpha was the leader and apparently the strongest, so Brock had hope that the AI would be able to just jump into the Heavy Cruiser and turn it off.

"Oh yeah. I didn't think of that," Alpha retorted at the teenager who sweatdropped at the sarcastic tone Church took with him. He also looked hesitant like he did not know if Church was actually serious and had not thought about it, because the Alpha AI always sounded sarcastic in the first place. "No! We can't do that." Alpha snapped after seeing that Brock still was not sure if he could. "If we were on the ship and on their bridge, then maybe that would be possible. But that's imagining that the Sith don't have firewalls that would take me a while to crack. And it's imagining that there isn't some Terminus AI already in their system, ready to rip us apart the second we try it. You want to take that risk?"

"Just focus on the shield generators-" Gray started.

"I'm telling you, we can't take it down while Gideon's dropping fire on his own men!" Alpha snapped back.

"Teru and Fubuki will stop the bombardment. You'll just have to dodge any of the attacks making it through. Now do it!" Gray commanded the AIC that ground his teeth inside his metaphysical helmet then disappeared back into Gray's console. Church transmitted himself through their comms line and into Cleo's helmet again to report their 'stupid' orders.

"I'm hit!" a voice yelled out and came through on the bridge.

Gray snapped his head up and looked above their ship to where fighter jets were facing off against Tie Fighters. One of their own jets was smoking on its right wing. "Jimmy. Try to land on-" Watch stopped speaking and his glowing eyes bulged wide as the black fighter jet exploded in a ball of fire after getting hit by another laser shot.

"Jimmy!" Steven Hiller yelled. His jet did a barrel roll in the air as he curved around and laid fire on the two Tie Fighters that had been chasing Jimmy Wilder. They exploded, but Hiller's own jet got clipped on the left wing while he was focused on avenging his best friend, and his black jet started going down as well. Both of the top pilots of the Black Knights squad of Gray's limited airforce were going down already.

"Eject, Captain Hiller!"

Hiller shot out of his jet and started parachuting down. "Covering him," Maverick reported in, sweeping through the air close to Hiller but not too close to mess up his chute. He circled around Hiller as their fellow pilot descended, drawing his own sidearm to get ready for once he landed down on the battlefield.

"On your six!" Mav looked over his shoulder and watched an enemy fighter explode. He chuckled as the man in the jet flying past his rear added, "Owe me one, Mav."

"I'll knock one off your tab, Goose," Maverick replied. "So now you only owe me eight."

"Heh, is it that much?" Goose wondered with a laugh. "I swear you aren't bailing me out that often."

Blaster shots flew by the right side of Goose's cockpit and he pulled back away from it. The first shots were inaccurate, but they got closer, and his right wing was singed… right before the chasing enemy jet exploded. "We're all bailing you out, Goose. Watch your back!"

"Ah, yeah. Thanks, Commander Rawlings," Goose responded. He just flew after their commander who was a famous war hero from World War 1 back on their own world.

The two of them shot back up and joined the dogfights above. They were too late to rescue another of their comrades being tailed up there though, and Rawlings called out, "Porkins!"

"Ahhhh!" The heavyset fighter pilot screamed out right before the fireball of his ship finally engulfed him. The rest of the ship's fuel ignited and the explosion made his approaching allies wince at the sight.

"Not Porkins! NOOO!"

"We're outnumbered up there," Tiplee started. She spun on her chair in the cruiser's bridge and pushed down on the armrests. "Let me go join-"

"No, Tiplee. I need you here more," Gray countered her.

The Jedi was a trained star pilot. All Jedi were. She frowned at Gray's reply, especially because her fellow Jedi were not up there either. Some of their best pilots were kept from their fighter jets in order to lead teams on the ground. They were all pilots, but they were mostly all Generals as well in their own war against the Sith back in their universe. Leading teams in a ground invasion against the Emperor's defenses was the more necessary position for them. And having one of the Jedi on his bridge was vital as well.

Gray bit down. He did not want to say it, but he knew he needed to. Luckily, he did not have to give the order himself. "I've got it," Brock told his friend who did not turn to look at him but just bit down harder as Brock already knew. Brock spun and lifted a hand to his ear, tapping on his earpiece and connecting to a team other trainers who had prepared their Pokémon for battle. "Move for the hangar bay. We're moving in."

The Poké Squad should even the tides up there a bit. The metal doors at the back of the bridge opened outwards with a swooshing noise. "Be careful," Gray said. His voice was low but loud enough that Brock heard him at the exit. The dark-skinned teen with narrow eyes did not look back but did pause for a moment and smile, and he nodded in a serious way before continuing and picking up his pace to jog for the hangar.

Brock jogged through the halls. He wiped his sweaty palms on his pant legs and then moved to the edge of the hall to get around two other soldiers who were running the opposite way back towards the bridge themselves. He passed an intersection in the hallway, and then two teenage girls who had been running towards this hall spun and chased behind their team leader. They reached the hangar where the remaining two others in their squad were already prepared at the opened hangar doors.

Their blue shield barrier kept flashing just outside to show how occasional beams continued getting past their espers who were most focused on guarding the ground forces. Brock pulled off one of his pokeballs and pointed it in front of him. A red light flashed out, "Aerodactyl!"

"Pidgeot!"

"Pidgeotto!"

"Togekiss. I choose you!"

"Come on out, Pelipper."

Brock climbed onto his rock-flying type Pokémon then turned to face his comrades. "We have to support the pilots above. Take some of the fire off them and take down as many enemy fighters as possible. Let's move!"

Brock pushed his hands forward on the neck of his Aerodactyl that responded by running forwards and taking off. His comrades flew after him straight out of the hangar bay. They flew towards the shields ahead of them that did not stop the organic beings from flying straight out like they prevented beam attacks from getting in. The Poké Squad arced upwards and then all started yanking side to side to avoid enemy fire as some of the Sith's jets diverted to focus down on them.

"AHH!" A girl's voice screamed in agony. Not two seconds after they flew out of their barrier, did the Pidgeotto on Brock's right side and down below him get hit by a beam the trainer did not react to quickly enough.

The Pidgeotto spun out looking ripped nearly in half. The screaming trainer who was also bloody and missing her right leg slowed down and did not slam into the ground though. Fubuki moved a hand for a second and caught her, only to wince again herself as she failed to stop more beams that Moff Gideon's ship fired while she was distracted by saving that comrade from plummeting to her death.

"Wing Attack!"

"Gust!"

"Hyper Beam!"

On the bridge, Gray's remaining command team were arguing with each other in front of the silent General. "We still need to take down the Destroyer somehow."

"In terms of firepower, they have us beat. Sir, please have Jo send someone up there. A whole team if you don't want to risk there being a strong stationed force onboard."

"We can't finish taking this front line until the Star Destroyer is out of the picture! We need a plan."

Gray pinched his forehead with his eyes closed while he listened to them all. It's too early. I can't risk the manpower though. If it's between sending men up there into a potential kill box, or using it? Is there really anything to think about? Gray dragged his hand down from over his eyes and glared straight through his windshield and up at the target.

Inside the Star Destroyer, Moff Gideon ordered his tactical officers, "Increase the rate of fire. Their espers cannot withstand the full might of this starship."

"Careful not to overplay your hand, Moff Gideon," Admiral Thrawn warned. The holographic image of the Admiral had turned and was staring at Gideon when the Moff marched away from his station.

Gideon paused and tried to keep his lips from twitching or curling down, though he failed. "Enough of our shots are making it through already. Their own cruiser's cannons continue to fire because we have not forced them to direct full power to their shields. This bombardment will eliminate both their most powerful warriors and their strongest air support simultaneously."

"Your own shields will suffer from the increase in fire," Thrawn mentioned for Gideon's consideration.

Gideon bit down. "I know," he remarked snidely. "But that is a calculated risk that I have decided on. You do not have authority over my ship, Admiral."

"Enough." Another voice spoke in the background of the hologram. Gideon froze and his eyes opened wide. He spun and watched as another figure stepped into the hologram so that they appeared as a glowing blue form in front of Thrawn. Thrawn did not smirk, but Gideon still felt there was a smug look on the bastard's blue face when the gray-haired thin man stepped into frame and glared out at Gideon. "Do not get carried away with your advantage, Moff Gideon. If the risk is negligible, then carry on at your own discretion. But do not let your ego cloud your judgement."

"…Understood, Grand Moff Tarkin," Gideon replied. He straightened up confidently and turned with a glare towards one of his tactical officers who was hesitating while looking back at him. "The order stands. Increase fire to 80%."

The staff officer turned and relayed the orders over to the weapons' systems operators who pulled back on two levers before pushing up on others to increase the fire output.

Fubuki and Teru flinched and hunched over in the air as they tried catching the next round of attacks. Each burst was larger, and the bursts came out faster and in greater clusters. "Gray! SHIELDS!" Teru warned in a scream, right before beams he was holding back slipped through his grasp. He had to focus on beams that came shooting down straight at him, and he could not stop other bright red attacks that went flying by either side of him and slamming into the pulsing blue shield around Gray's ship.

The heavy fire from Gray's cruiser onto the surface vanished as he put full power back into his shields. Dust and smoke started settling down, and then more red beams flew down from the Star Destroyer and into positions that the Resistance just knocked down shield generators of.

Three huge red beams were about to slam down into one part of the third trench where a shield generator just got knocked out. It was like the Star Destroyer knew it was coming and waited for the exact second the generator came down, before the Resistance could move into the protection of another shield. The team of Jedi and clones snapped their heads up, only to let out gasps of relief as the three red beams slammed into a bright purple forcefield that pulsed over their heads. A trickle of blood dripped down from Fubuki's left nostril, but she protected the team inside her barrier who started sprinting for the next generator shield to get inside of to relieve Fubuki.

"My air superiority will soon give us full control of the situation. They cannot compete," Moff Gideon bragged. The fire on his own command ship had stopped, and the Resistance's fighter jets were struggling against the amount of his own fighter aircraft that flew out against them. The Resistance advance slowed down and now was too afraid to knock out shield generators and risk getting blown up immediately after. So confident was he in the strategy that caused Gray's heavy cruiser to pause and the Resistance advance to slow to a trickle, that he boldly claimed, "They have already been defeated."

The entire Summer Class heavy cruiser shook. "Shields?" Gray shouted to his right.

"Holding!"

"Diverting more power for defenses- and stabilizers!" Leonardo Watch grabbed onto his console to keep his chair from falling over as the whole bridge shook around.

If he's got this much of his power diverted to the weapons, Gray's eyebrows narrowed down. His conviction set in, and he yelled out, "Get me Commander Kid on the line!"

"Understood."

Gray looked back to the windshield that he could not see past due to all the explosions going off on the shields outside his window. The screens on the inside of the windshield showed him the battle going on below though from the different helmet cameras of many of his soldiers wearing them. Some others without helmets on also just had pinned micro-cameras to their chests to give the bridge of the command ship a view of what was going on below.

"These barracks go down deeper than we thought. Can you still hear us up there?"

"Radio signals are penetrating. We hear you loud and clear."

"Breaking through to the third line in four, three…" Taizo Hori reported. The member of Kappa Squad had his weapon lifted up pointed at the wall in front of him. The drill shot out into the wall and dug through it, straight into an underground bunker full of stormtroopers and imperial officers who spun to the wall on the east side in shock.

The Imperials were preparing for the Resistance to attempt to break through from above, and some of them were running for an exit to get up top and start fighting in the trenches. One of the officers quickly reached to his waist and grabbed his blaster, only for Taizo to spin to him and fire his drill, piercing through the stomach of the light-skinned man who gasped out and looked down in horror at the drill inside him. Sticking off the drill was a long white tube though that went back to the handle in Taizo's hands.

Taizo bent down and dropped the start of his weapon that turned into a pump on the ground. He pumped his hands up and down three times in rapid succession, forcing air down the tube to the drill. The Imperial puffed up three times in size and then popped. Other Resistance members who just sprinted into the room on either side of the digger, and the Sith's soldiers who all started turning to counterattack, froze and stared in horror instead at the absolutely brutal way that Mr. Digger just obliterated their Commander.

"Surrender now," Taizo ordered the base. His weapon retracted and he aimed the drill at the next officer who had chunks of the first one all over his previously nice clean gray uniform.

The officer who got aimed at started nodding his head, but another farther away in the room knew what the punishment for surrender would be if the Sith caught them. "Fire!" He shouted instead, dooming his fellow officer who Taizo attacked, but causing the bunker to break out in blaster fire and screams as the Resistance and Sith forces clashed.

"They will not escape from these lines," Moff Gideon relayed calmly to his superior who remained on the hologram in his bridge. Grand Moff Tarkin hummed, and Gideon elaborated in a confident tone, "I have reinforced the first line of defenses here in only the past three weeks. The third line of trenches they currently fight in are much deeper than any of their surveillance would have told them. They may have quickly stormed past the first two trenches, but those first lines were never meant to hold off an assault. Only break up their advance into smaller parties, as it succeeded in doing."

"We have over a third of the fortified positions under our control! We have to leave some of the shield generators up, but we have the ground!" Leo called out for the command to hear. A chorus of cheers shouted out from Tontatta warriors with him who conquered their section of the trenches and were safe from Gideon's ship inside their shield generator. There was a clear disconnect in how the Resistance members felt they were doing and how Gideon was describing it himself.

"We'll have the rest of the line in no time," Captain Rex added confidently in his own report. "We just need to get closer for landing. Mav! Keep their fire off our transport!"

"Trying here! They're on my tail, you have to evade on your own- Shit!" Maverick had to dive out of the way of several ships that fired at him at once, pulling him farther from Rex who now had an enemy right on his tail.

"Captain Rex! Behind you!"

Rex spun and looked out the side window of his gunship that ten different clones were inside of. Cody turned behind him just slower than his comrade, while Hunter and the others in the Bad Batch just kept facing forward and holding onto the bar over their heads to stay steady. Rex looked back at the warning shout and saw a Tie Fighter dropping behind them. The cannons on that fighter glowed bright red- and then a beam of yellow light shot up from the third line of trenches that they were in the middle of flying towards.

Rex and Cody spun back forward and looked out towards the shield generator ahead of them that they thought the Sith still had control of. "I've got you, Rex," a woman's voice assured them in their helmets.

Rex let out a sigh of relief and then grinned wide at the sound of Ahsoka's voice. The Jedi Master had taken over that section of the line without destroying all the turrets inside it. She knew how they worked. Ahsoka knew that she was protected from Gideon's fire from above as long as she kept the shield generator up, and yet her turrets would have no problem firing out of the shield to give cover for their aircraft. With Gideon's ship focusing fire mainly on Gray's cruiser now, there was less support coming from either of the command ships, but now the smaller vessels of the Resistance had ground support on their side too.

Moff Gideon noticed the fire from one of the shield generators shooting up into the air battle between his destroyer and the Resistance's cruiser. He frowned deeply, and deeper still when a few other beams shot from that forcefield and others near it, showing that the Resistance were taking over those shields and using them against him. "The Jedi are not sneaking onto my ship," Gideon remarked, darting a glare at Thrawn who he still saw watching via the hologram that Tarkin was on.

Thrawn had not said anything, but Gideon felt like the Admiral was thinking about what he had warned earlier. "They are revealing themselves amidst the ground forces. Used as nothing more than pawns. Not that they would be the secret weapons the Resistance thinks them to be, considering the new-and-improved Dark Troopers on-board this vessel. They would have been met with swift elimination."

"As you say," Thrawn replied.

Gideon bit down frustratedly. There was a tone in the Admiral's voice that sounded dismissive despite how he had been wrong about what he said would be coming. "This battle is in my hands," Gideon declared.

"Sir! Their primary shields are decreasing in power! 90 seconds and they will fall!"

"Make it sixty, and up the pressure before they can adapt," Gideon ordered his staff officer in reply.

They were not being hit by any anti-air fire now. The heavy cruiser of the enemy was fully focused on shielding itself. The ground forces that were firing in the sky were aiming at the fighter fleet from the Star Destroyer in order to protect their own aircraft and flying Pokémon trainers.

Neither Tarkin nor Thrawn said anything this time as Gideon diverted even more power to the offensive power of his ship.

"Are you sure?" A response came over the Resistance's secure channel that had taken a minute to establish in the middle of this warzone. They could not risk the enemies overhearing the message that Gray needed to relay to Resistance Headquarters. Death the Kid stood in the control room at the top of the Headquarters, in the comparatively small aboveground portion of the HQ. "You've only just passed the border," Kid added.

"I'm sure," Gray responded on his secure channel. "Fire on those exact coordinates. Can you get it locked onto their Star Destroyer?"

Death the Kid looked to his right and past Patty who spun that way as well. They looked to a technician behind the controls who was sweating badly but turned back and nodded once in an intense way to the Commander. Commander Kid pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment but then responded, "Give the order."

It was up to Gray. Death the Kid gave the General his responsibility, and Gray took in a deep breath on the bridge of his ship. One of his officers just yelled about the time remaining on their shields if Gideon's intensified barrage kept up. Gray saw another of his fighter jets get shot out of the sky. His troops were moving too slow on the ground without his support. This is the right call, Gray thought.

"Fire the MPC," Gray Fullbuster commanded.

The MPC was fully charged already. It was pointed to the west and aimed at their battlefield before Gray contacted them. The Mega Pulse Cannon was reserved for his use during this mission, and the whole of the Resistance knew it. No matter who attacked what section of the Resistance's borders while the invasion took place, Gray Fullbuster had priority over the MPC's use today. It was important for everyone to know that too, as the MPC did have a long recharge time. That was the one downside of using it so soon, and everyone knew it. If General Gray was making the call though, they had to believe that this was the only way and needed to be done for them to keep advancing.

"Firing!"

"Brace yourselves!"

Szchm… szchm… Szchm… SZchm… SZCHM-SZCHM SZCHMMMMMM! The MPC extended its cannon that glowed bright light blue. Energy stored up inside it moved from potential to kinetic. The energy activated. It forced its way upwards and forwards through the cannon but did not fire yet. It all piled up right at the edge of the weapon. The brighter it glowed the more condensed it became, almost like a coil squeezing smaller and smaller. The light grew brighter but more condensed on the single point at the end of the cannon that became too bright for anyone near Resistance Headquarters to look at. The top floors of the exterior of Resistance HQ started to tremble, and due to opsec (operational security), most people in HQ had no idea what was going on.

Then the condensed light shot out of the cannon. It fired west. The whole sky pulsed bright blue. And thousands of miles to their west, only a second and a half later, Moff Gideon lifted his gaze up from the ship of his enemy that was covered in explosions. The enemy's Summer Class cruiser was shaking violently. Its shields were barely holding on. The Resistance were doomed!

…Gideon rose his gaze and noticed the sky to his east looked very bright all of a sudden-

BA-KABOOOM! CHHHHRSHHSSSsss! BOOM! PAH- POWW-

Explosions inside of the Star Destroyer set off explosives, broke apart fuel storage points that when breached exploded even more. Gideon only had a brief moment to say, "Oh-" before the bridge of his Star Destroyer filled up with bright blue light, then a fiery explosion that engulfed the rest of the ship. Explosions ripped apart the turrets and sent fireballs blasting through the hull of the ship that was already ripping in half longways due to the sheer force of the MPC's blast.

Everyone else on the battlefield or in the air above it stared in complete awe for a moment or two at the immediate destruction of the Star Destroyer. The explosions around Gray's heavy cruiser made it difficult to even see, but the flash of blue shone through the smoke that then all got blown away by the force that finally caught up to the beam that cut through the air. All that displaced air the MPC's beam cut through pulled back into the empty space, sending some fighter jets careening away from each other due to the changing air pressure. Some of the white clouds in the sky even got darker and bunched together into more cumulonimbus clouds.

"Changing the God damned weather," Church muttered in disbelief from where his AI body hovered next to Tucker.

"Holy crap-balls," Elfo agreed at the insanity of it. Church and Tucker just glanced down between them and sweatdropped at the sight of the elf whose sword was dripping in stormtrooper blood.

Everyone had paused for that moment after the explosion cut off most of the heavy fire going on at the battlefield. Moff Gideon's Star Destroyer was making the most noise, and after it exploded, it was oddly quiet other than the sounds of smaller jets flying about. And then, the sounds of the Resistance's cheers became much louder than everything else. They even cheered louder than the sound of the Destroyer crashing to the ground.

All over the battleground, roars rang out as the Resistance charged forward and celebrated how one of the Sith's Star Destroyers was taken out. "Divert power back to weapons systems and resume support!" Gray called out after wiping the huge smile from his face. "Everyone else, take the lines! Push forward and take them now! We're moving on to Rivendell!"

The cheers from the elves were even louder this time. Many had been more composed after the MPC's blast, but even Haldir and some of his elven commanders pumped fists and swords in the air and cheered at the sound of that shout.

It was the MPC or reinforcements, and I don't know what the reinforcements would have done, Gray sat back in his captain's chair. He watched different screens anxiously but hardly suppressing his smirk as he watched more of the remaining enemy positions fall. Commander Klaus gave me Zapp back in Sector 345 to use with his team of elite fighters. They're raring to go just behind us, but I'd rather keep them in reserve to as a potential rearguard for any retreat we need to make under fire. Retreat? We're doing this!

No. No! No, be cautious. Don't get conceited, Gray warned himself, because he could feel the cockiness growing inside him. In case of a retreat, they'll protect the wounded and keep us from taking heavy losses until we can withdraw to a safe position. I suppose that position would be these trenches at the moment. "Order Zapp and his team to hold at the first trench and then move to the third once we're on our way to Rivendell," Gray ordered over to Tiplee who nodded and got right on that.

"Enemy forces are pulling away from the third trench!"

"Fire on them," Gray ordered.

Leonardo moved his hands to the console but froze with his fingers over the buttons to carry out Gray's orders. "Sir…" he began. The boy with glowing blue eyes glanced sideways and back at Gray who frowned deeply despite the success they just had.

Gray looked to the glass window across the front of his bridge. He saw Stormtroopers running out of the third line's shield generators and sprinting to the west. The General shook his head and said in a low voice, "The second they reach the next line of defense they'll turn around. Bolstering the enemy's strength. We need to take advantage. Do it."

Leonardo Watch bowed his head but spun back and typed quickly into his console to maneuver their cannons to aim after those retreating troops who had left their shields to run away after losing the air support. Cannons on top of Gray's ship started firing at the enemy fighter jets as well that just lost their hangar and command structure. The jets of the Resistance outnumbered their enemies in no time, and Pokémon trainers flying up there with them fired blasts of ice and fire and wind that cut apart enemy ships.

Explosions blew up past the western edge of the third line of trenches. Some of the Imperial forces about to run after the others who first fled just froze and pulled back in shock after seeing the explosions outside of the forcefield annihilate their retreating allies. They spun back around though only to see Jedi and space marines sprinting towards them through across their trench.

"We surrender!"

"Fight on!"

"Don't give up!"

"Throw your weapons down!"

Some of the Imperial officers yelled at their men to keep fighting. One yelled, "Did you just see them kill your retreating brothers? They won't show you any mercy!"

That shout echoed into the bridge of Gray's command ship and made the General hesitate. That's one reason to always take prisoners. They surrender quicker when they think we won't hurt them. Those men weren't surrendering though, they were regrouping. That's different!

"We're taking control of the lines, sir."

"60 prisoners in our bunker. Disarming and electro-binding them."

"We need transports to move the prisoners up to the cruiser. No one should stay back here."

"We'll need to watch the prisoners-"

"Zapp will take care of the prisoners," Gray announced in an authoritative tone. "Captain Leo, leave a platoon of your Tonta Corps to watch them while we advance until Zapp arrives. Squad leaders report on your injured…" Gray felt confident. The smaller enemy ships remaining above were being taken out by their own flying fighters. The remaining enemies at this line of defense were falling rapidly in what amounted now to no more than mopping-up operations. He stared past the explosions on the ground past the third line of trenches. His focus moved onto the mountains in the far distance that he could only see because his ship was high off the ground giving him a longer horizon line. He imagined even past those mountains though and to the Order of the Sith beyond. Emperor, I'm coming for you. Just you wait…

---

Thousands of Miles Northwest of Gray Fullbuster…

Deep inside the Emperor's territory, a truck sat barely camouflaged outside of a giant pyramid temple structure. A blond boy sitting behind a computer typed into it quickly while watching the code scroll past on his screen that told him what was happening inside that temple. Jeremy darted his attention from the code of Paradis to the screens on his other monitor though that just dinged to let him know that he had broken through the firewall he had been hitting for minutes now.

"Nice! I did it. I broke through," Jeremy Belpois remarked. "Now let's see where all this energy is going. Hold on… what?" Jeremy stared at the screen in confusion. He looked to another window that showed him a map that had pulsing glowing wires that shot underground away from Paradise Temple. "Tifa!" Jeremy shouted. The other teenage boy sitting behind Jeremy at a different station jumped from the sound of that loud shout and spun his head in surprise.

Tifa and Barret were in the front of the truck talking to each other in low voices about the ongoing mission that they could not see. Neither of them understood enough about coding to follow what Jeremy was saying when he described what he could see going on inside despite seemingly only staring at numbers on his screens. Tifa turned her head and then shrugged at Barret before jogging to the back of the truck. "What is it, kid?"

"Look at this! I found where all the energy being produced by the temple is going. It's not powering cities at the coast though like I thought. Look," Jeremy pointed at the wires. "It's going past the cities. The energy doesn't stop at the coastline."

Barret came marching back right behind Tifa while the other three leaned in closer to see the screen, blocking it from the larger man's view. He grumbled to himself then snapped, "What does that even mean? They're pumping energy straight into the Great Ocean?"

"That doesn't make any sense," Tifa countered. She shook her head, but she did it slowly because she believed that the kid knew what he was doing and that he was showing her what he had discovered. "Why would they do that?"

"I don't know, but the energy going that way has been surging for the past few minutes," Jeremy replied anxiously. "I've hacked into footage from security cameras in the closest coastal city to where the power is funneling. Look," Jeremy typed quickly on his keyboard and made security footage pop up on screen.

"Yeah. It's the ocean," Barret said in a deadpan tone. They stared at the screen and out over the water beyond the coast.

Nothing was happening, but Jeremy's eyes grew wider and wider as he saw the readings for the energy pumping into the ocean spiking like crazy. Those readings started to flash on his screen, and the other teenage hacker back there with him spun around as his computer beeped loudly and then set off some sort of alarm. "What is happening?!" Tifa snapped at the pair of boys who each looked panicked at the readings and sensors.

"I don't know! All the energy readings just surged off the charts! Something out there is drawing in all the energy- wait! Look at the water!" Jeremy yelled and leaned back in towards his screen.

Tifa grabbed him by the head and pulled it aside so she could see past him, "Move your-" Her hand flinched and fell off his hair at what she was seeing. "That's not…" Her voice came out soft. It cracked in tone while her whole body tensed up. Barret's jaw dropped while the two programmers were sweating buckets. "The Sith aren't supposed to have that much firepower. They're only supposed to have four in total in their whole fleet," Tifa whispered.

Rising out of the ocean were ships so massive that the water displacement started sucking in huge amounts of water and then causing enormous waves to form. The engines on the backs of each of the ships were glowing brighter and brighter blue as they rose higher off the surface. The waves the emerging ships created slammed down into the coast and shattered docks in the city that Jeremy had hacked the cameras of, and the security camera they were watching from got blown apart by a giant wave that made them lose the feed. They had seen it before the camera was destroyed though. "A dozen of them," Jeremy whispered. "A dozen Star Destroyers- wait! Why were they rising?!"

Tifa looked down at Jeremy's face and then snapped her head so hard that her neck hurt. She realized it though as she remembered what else was going on at this exact moment. "Oh no," Tifa whispered.

"We need to warn them!" The other boy in the back of the truck yelled. "I'll communicate-"

"No! You'll give away our position and we'll be fucked," Tifa snapped back.

The kid she snapped at stared at her in horror. She shook her head though and cursed under her breath. "It wouldn't make a difference. With how fast those ships move…" Tifa bowed her head and then growled in a pained voice, "They're probably already there."

---

Several Thousand Miles Southeast of Paradis Temple

"Sir!" Leonardo screamed as a panel on his console lit up bright red. His glowing eyes darted to the screen and showed him what just caused that, and he yelled to a bridge of overconfident Resistance members who were slowly turning his way, "We have anomalies coming out of Jump! Seven- no ten?! IT'S-"

SWOOOSH An Imperial Star Destroyer dropped out of Jump four miles ahead of the bow of Gray's ship. It dropped out of Jump farther than Moff Gideon's had been…

SW-SW-SW-SWSH-SWOO-SWOOSH! SWSH!

Gray's heart fell. They aren't supposed to have that many.

"General!" Tiplee yelled and spun to the young mage whose shoulders slouched while his face pulled back in shocked horror. She turned and yelled over at Watch instead, "FULL POWER BACK IN SHIELDS!"

It was too late. The command ship that had just redirected power back into its offensive capabilities did not react quickly enough to the fleet of Star Destroyers that just appeared ahead of them. The fact that Sidious' Super Star Destroyer was not even in the mix, and yet they had this many in some hidden reserve, was not lost on the General whose eyes darted around the sky in search of a sign of Darth Sidious. He was not there though. Instead, twelve Star Destroyers dropped out of Jump just far enough past the front of Gray's heavy cruiser that they did not slam into the aerial-battlefield of fighter jets and Pokémon that some of their own men were still in the mix of.

"Annihilate them all," Grand Moff Tarkin ordered his fleet.

"Fire!" Thrawn relayed. Then he leaned back from his microphone that connected him to the rest of their ships. "It was exactly as you predicted," Thrawn said. There was a hint of admiration and respect in his tone for the Grand Moff who humphed and crossed his arms at the side of Thrawn's Admiral chair where he stood.

Tarkin watched the explosions ripple across the Summer-class cruiser the Resistance had brought with them. Only after seeing one of its engines explode and the cruiser start listing from the heavy barrage of beams blowing it up, did he allow the right corner of his lips to lift up the smallest amount. His eyes narrowed down from the aerial battlefield past their lasers to the burning remains of Gideon's Star Destroyer that were still raging in a giant inferno on the ground. "An unfortunate sacrifice," Tarkin said, though he sounded to have no love lost for his fellow Moff who had just incinerated in that ship. "The Emperor knew that they would fire the MPC early if pressed hard enough."

Thrawn glanced up and rose an eyebrow wondering if Tarkin had not questioned Gideon earlier in order to egg their fallen comrade on. They each knew of Gideon's ego. Greater than he was, Thrawn thought to himself while refacing the battle outside their windshield. Many officers in the bridge flinched, though not Thrawn or Tarkin, as two fighter jets buzzed their bridge on either side and fired into them only to hit shields and nothing else.

"Looks like they will not go down without a fight," Tarkin mused.

"I assume their ground forces will be the same," Thrawn agreed.

"Sir- Sirs… Should we commence bombardment of their ground positions?" A weapons' officer questioned the two men at the head of their fleet.

Tarkin scoffed at the question which confused the lower officer and some of the others who thought that would be the next move. "And destroy our own positions? Those are our defenses they have commandeered," Tarkin declared.

"We'll be taking them back," Thrawn stated. He typed on his console then spoke into his microphone again, "Landing parties prepare for battle. The terrorists believe they have taken over our border. None of them will survive the day. Board your dropships."

Tie Fighters lifted off in half the hangars around the Imperial side of the airspace. Other fighter jets more similar to some of the Resistance ones that Mav and Goose were flying in shot out of the shielded openings in the sides of the ships and gave chase to their counterparts. Those Resistance jets trying to draw some fire off their command ship and to help the espers screaming as they used their full powers too had to maneuver to evade the growing numbers of Imperial fighters chasing them.

"General Fullbuster! We have to evacuate!"

"We're going down!"

"Come on, Leonardo. I got you," Gray picked up the younger man and put his one arm under Watch's shoulders to help him move. "Let's go, everyone! Kah-ack, get ready for a rough landing!" Gray stomped hard on the ground and a line of ice shot from his foot to the wall behind Tiplee and Wicca, and the two of them spun around just in time to see an explosion get blocked by a thick ice barrier that protected them. "Move it!" Gray yelled.

He ran towards the doors out of the bridge and shouted into his communicator, "Teru! Go right ahead and rampage! Fubuki protect! Jakku get on Jo already! We have to hold the ground positions until the MPC recharges! Zapp! Move in!" The panicked screaming he had heard over his comms quieted down. They listened to their General who many thought had died as explosions surrounded the Resistance command ship. The Resistance had designed their ships so that any explosions would shoot outwards though, protecting compartments inside of the ship better, though even that was not foolproof.

"We have not lost this battle! Prepare yourselves!" Gray yelled. He cursed himself for the hopelessness he had let himself feel for a moment when the fleet of Star Destroyers emerged out of Jump. If I falter, we'll all be killed! I need to believe. I have to! We can do this! "We will find a way! Get inside the shield generators on the ground and hold the trenches…"

"Pull back and land with the others!" Brock yelled over to one of his fellow trainers after just watching their comrade get blown apart by a three flying Imperial fighters. He and the other two remaining Pokémon trainers up there curved on their mounts and shot back towards the third line of defense. Brock spun though and his narrow eyes actually widened before clenching shut in pain at the fireball he saw engulfing a falling Resistance fighter jet.

"Mav! MAV! Help mee- ahhcggghhGAHhhh!"

"GOOSE!" Maverick screamed, spinning around and speeding towards his wingman. He unloaded on the three Tie Fighters behind Goose, blowing each of them up in rapid succession, but it did not change the fact that Goose's ship had just exploded in a horrific fireball the pilot burned up inside of. "Goose, no- GAH!" Mav screamed himself, as even a pilot of his caliber got distracted by the loss of loved one. His fireball did not slowly engulf him from one wing to the rest of his ship though, instead just obliterating his fighter jet in a single second. Boom!

Steven Hiller looked up and gasped out, "Mav." The pilot who had protected him while he parachuted down from his own jet went up in flames, and Hiller cursed under his breath. He reached behind his waistband and pulled out a pistol, then he ran for the nearest shield generator to join the ground forces.

"Pull back!" Brock shouted again, this time not just yelling it for his fellow trainers but for the rest of their aerial fighters who were getting killed faster than ever.

As the airspace fell to the Emperor's forces, the dropships inside those Destroyers got relayed their orders to lift off and head to the battlefield. A bald-headed woman with two hilts on her waistband glanced to her right side and then over her shoulder. She looked to the short boy who had paused while staring ahead at the ship he was supposed to board. Everyone was running around the hangar in a hurry. Clusters of droids were picked up by hooks underneath hovering ships that closed their bottom hatches up and then flew for the hangar doors. Stormtroopers and Imperial officers ran onto their own gunships. The short boy in a red poof-ball hat that was missing the top half of the poof-ball stood still though as he stared towards their heavily armored dropship made specifically for Sith like himself.

"Move it, Darth Marsh," Ventress ordered the boy behind her who had followed her to the hangar. She used a sarcastic tone on his name, though she just glared harshly at him when he glared back into her eyes. "You're in my landing party. I'll be watching you down there," she informed him, and Stan grit his teeth but continued marching forward himself. "Now we'll see if you really have what it takes to be one of us."

"I have nothing to prove to you," Stan said in an uncaring voice as he walked up to the woman and then towards the ramp leading into their vessel. Other Sith already inside turned towards the pair about to enter, and Stan lifted up his black cloak's hood to shadow over his face. He needed to do so to hide his expression better and keep any of these Sith from noticing how nervous he was.

I came to the Sith to grow stronger, not to fight in their war against the Resistance. What am I doing here? Stan walked right onto the dropship. The doubt in his mind was not matched by hesitation in his movements, as he was surrounded by mystical space wizards who would easily be able to notice that from him. He was concerned that even the doubt he currently felt could be sensed by these men and women around him, but he was a twelve year old entering a warzone, he figured they would chalk it up to nerves.

Stan Marsh lowered his left hand in its skin sleeve to the hilt at his side. His prosthetic curled around the red lightsaber wished on by the Wizard King to be stronger, strong enough that Stan had used it to slice through an opponent's lightsaber in his recent initiation into the Order of the Sith. Stan's fingers tightened around the weapon he stared down at. The ramp to the ship closed and dropped the passenger space into darkness that then illuminated with a red glow from lights on the ceiling. He felt their ship lift off the hangar floor, and he let out a long exhale. There's no going back now.

I just hope none of you are down there. A group of people appeared in Stan's mind. A distraction from his goal, but a distraction that was not so easy to rid himself of. "You too, Stan! One month. You can join us and I'll help you go after Ichimaru Gin. We all will!" Sora. Ben. Dash. Everyone… I am sorry. But this is my path. This is the way of the Sith! Stan's eyes rose up from his lightsaber and stared straight ahead while shadowed over by the front of his hood. Even tinted in the red light cast down on his face, his eyes glowed a dim yellow in the shadows.

This is my destiny.

---

A/N Hope you enjoyed! Stan's here? Gray's ship is going down! The war against the Sith has started off, and things already look rough for the Resistance. The Sith had far more Star Destroyers hidden away than their intelligence told them. We see those ships lifting out of the ocean as we flash over to a different team of Resistance members over at Paradise Temple... But we'll see more of them in another arc ;). Let me know what you thought of the battle so far and how you think it will continue! Comments, predictions, questions are all welcome. No review responses today, sorry. I'll make a quick list of characters below, but don't have too much time. I finish grad school next week. I have a ton of finals to do this weekend and am procrastinating pretty hard right now. Wish me luck! And thanks for reading!

Star Wars: Moff Gideon, Admiral Thrawn, Grand Moff Tarkin, Captain Phasma, Darth Tenebrous, Asajj Ventress, Sidious, Plagueis, Venamis, Star Destroyers, Porkins, Tiplee, Qui-Gon, Darth Bane, Bith... and probably a bunch of others. Lots of Star Wars stuff in these chapters!

Top Gun: Maverick and Goose

Independence Day: Steven Hiller, Jimmy Wilder

Flyboys: Rawlings

Pokémon: Brock, Pidgeotto, Pidgeot, Aerodactyl, Pelipper, Togekiss, Arceus

Fairy Tail: Gray, Natsu

Kingdom Hearts: Sora

One Punch Man: Metal Bat, Fubuki

Mob Psycho 100: Teru/Hanazawa

One Piece: Wicca, Mansherry, Leo, Rampo, Bomba, Kabu, Chief Gancho

Portal: GLaDOS

Kid Cosmic: Jo, Kid ;(

Red vs Blue: Carolina, Tucker, Mayan (York), Roman (North Dakota), Mongol (Maine), Cleo (Tex), Church/Alpha, Epsilon, Theta, Delta, Ash (479)

Disenchantment: Elfo

Lord of the Rings: Haldir

Kekkai Sensen: Leonardo Watch, Zapp, Klaus

Soul Eater: Death the Kid, Patty

Final Fantasy 7: Tifa, Barret

Code Lyoko: Jeremy

Assassination Classroom: Ritsu

Dig Dug: Taizo Hori (my favorite arcade-style game as a kid that they had on PS2)

Black Clover: Jakku Za Ripper

Hunter x Hunter: Knov

-I think that's everyone, but if you saw another character and didn't know where they were from, ask me in a review and I'll let you know! Thanks for reading everyone. Hope you enjoyed the new chapter. And 'til next time!