As Ben and nelani stood their speechless he noticed something with his peripheral vision and looked just in time to make eye contact with Jason. Jason had apparently been stopped a few yards away from the house by some sort of soldiers in white blast armor.
"Ben! Trouble headed your way!" He yelled deflecting blaster bolts from a squad of the soldiers. Ben glanced down to see the top of the last white helmeted soldier disappear from view. They were infiltrating the mansion, trapping them inside!
Ben paused, slowed down his thoughts, and focused to help Jason for a moment. He stretched his hand forward and used the force to turned the weapon of one of the soldiers just in time for him to shoot another soldier to the right. Both he and Jason were shocked to see a flurry of sparks spew from the soldiers chest while collapsing.
"Their droids dressed in armor?" Ben thought under his breath. But, there was no time to worry about that now. He could hear the thud of boots coming up the stairs towards their floor.
"Ben!" Nelani yelled. He barely had enough time to catch the blaster rifle Nelani tossed him. She must have ran into one of the rooms while he was preoccupied and grabbed it. Funny, he hadn't noticed that part of the tour earlier, but oh well. It worked.
Ben's rifle began spraying bolts as the first soldier clamored up the stairs. He strafed to the side and put his back against the wall as the droid soldier behind the one who had fallen had returned fire. At least
they weren't trying to come up the stairs now. He could hear Nelani firing a smaller blaster down the other staircase.
"I'm keeping them at bay." He yelled down the hall to her. "Good." She said back, not bothering to turn her head and look away. Apparently, she was trying to locate another target. "I'm headed that way." Jason crackled over the comm.
Snake was just getting the feel of zero gravity again, one hop at a time further and further into the cavern when he heard the familiar sound of blaster fire echoing off the asteroid walls. Instinctivly he crouched, and levelled his own blaster towards the opening he had been heading for only to see nothing. Well, apparently, one stray blaster bolt had landed on the floor at the opening, but he could tell it wasn't meant for him.
He was still a good distance away, but the opening was at an angle and he had no clue what was going on around that corner. After a few seconds, he quickly began hopping that way again to get a closer look.
Whomp! Jason's lightsaber cut a swath into the two soldiers at the back of their squad as sparks spewed, bouncing off the ceiling and walls, and rained down around him. He quickly glanced to his left noticing the other squad who was now noticing him as well, from up the hall, and so Jason force lept up the stairs. Ben almost shot him.
"Whoa!" He gasped aloud. "what?! I told youI was headed your way!" Jason yelled excitedly, a mischevious grin on his face, and they burst into laughter.
"Last one."
They both looked just in time to see Nelani blowing a trail of smoke off her blaster barrel. "Thanks for distracting them." She smiled.
"Your welcome."
She approached them, but before she could say anything more they all heard a blaster sound off further away from the mansion. C4 was twirtling, trying to scurry away from two soldiers outside with him. Jason had left him back at the cart for cover, but there must have been a few soldiers he hadn'ta ccounted for, or they had come from another area.
Strange enough, one soldier droid was laying on the floor, as if it had been already felled. Ben felt helpless. He wasn't close enough to shoot without the risk of accidentally hitting C4, their astromech droid. "Dangit! They're going to get him." He complained.
Just then things got even stranger: A blaster bolt erupted from out of nowhere catching the first soldier in the chest. The other looked as if it were trying to get a lock on whatever the source of the bolt was, but another bolt burst, seemingly out of thin air, and dropped him as well.
They all stood there unsure, silently trying to figure out what had happened, or see where the bolts had came from when through the curtain of smoke from the droid soldiers the silhouette of what seemed like an invisible armored figure began to move towards the mining cart.
Snake had noticed the soldier droids were going to pick on the little astromech droid, and couldn't help but pity him. He partially was concerned about the owner's droid getting smashed anyway, since it might make things pretty inconvenient, if that was the only one they had. This was a backside kinda part of the galaxy, after all.
It felt like someone was watching him, and Snake looked up to the second floor window where his spectators were standing. "# $! they spotted me. Time to go." He thought and made for the mining cart.
Ben lept through the broken window and dampened his descent with the force to flat foot the asteroid stone floor as he sprinted that way. "Ben! Stop!" Jason tried to stop his apprentice. He lept down also and ran. By now the figure had cleared the swirls of smoke, and was no longer visible, although his direction was somewhat inferable.
"Ben, I said…" Jason began.
Caswish! The mining cart began to take off back up it's track.
The noise had spooked Ben a little, as he wasn't sure what to expect next. He hadn't thought ahead to when the figure would leave the smoke and be invisible again.
Just before Ben had stopped, he heard some weight clamor onto the cart, whoever it was had fired a few warning shots to slow him down. They were obviously only intended to deter him from getting to the mining cart first.
It looked like whoever it was had gotten away, and Jason sighed a breath of belief… That is, until Ben began to monkey around with what appeared to be an oxygen tank. Ben straddled the tank, squeezed his legs together holding it and wrenched the valve open.
"What are you-?" Was all Jason could say before being drowned out by a violent "swoosh!"
The further they had gotten away from the mansion the weaker the artificial gravity was. Ben rocketed up the cavern in the dark! He could tell though that he was coming up fast behind the mining cart, from it's lights, and was about to overtake it.
He began cutting off the oxygen flow by tightening the valve back down until just the momentum carried him. His little oxygen rocket ride began to slow, and he used the force to guide it down at the loading platform.
The cart had been left in it's normal place and Ben hurried to the elevator to see what floor number would pop up at the top of the screen. He waited, but it wasn't doing anything. "What?" He whispered to himself. "I know he couldn't have gotten here that fast." He held his lightsaber in hand and punched the button to summon the elevator back. The door slid open. It must have not went up to another floor yet. As Ben carefully watched the inside of the lift for any movement suddenly, from his immediate left he saw a flash and everything went dark. He felt numb, like he was in some sort of limbo state, and swore he heard someone say, "rookie."
Snake had rode the back seat of the mining cart so he could face behind it, where the boy who had tried to catch him was. They had disappeared, but after a few moments of riding in the mostly dark he heard yelling and couldn't believe what he saw: The boy was riding some kind of rocket or something after him! Thanks to his lead, Snake did have time to hop off of the cart when it arrived at the platform, but he knew that he wouldn't have time to get on the elevator. So, he waited beside the elevator in the shadows. Since it was just the boy who followed, he set the blaster for stun.
"He rode a tank?" Snake asked himself as he continued to watch and wait. It was probably either oxygen or helium inside.
While the boy reached forward to push the elevator button, Snake squeezed the trigger of his blaster while he was momentarily distracted.
Snake smiled smugly to himself. "Rookie." He muttered out loud as he stepped onto the lift and hit the button to go back up. As the lift zoomed past the bottom floors he spoke into the helmet mic, "Spetlana, prepare to leave."