A/N: We're back!
Now we're onto the next of the seven deadly sins: feel free to guess what's next.
Anyway, without further ado, the latest chapter: read, review, and above all, enjoy!
Disclaimer: Not mine.
This time, Hulas looked distinctly pensive despite his smile. There was something clipped about the way he spoke, something almost anxious about his body language as he hunched over the holocam, pausing only to glance over his shoulder in yet another moment of private paranoia.
Of course, Tarrah couldn't guess at his emotions, much less his reasons for being so nervous, for even if he hadn't been broadcasting from presumably somewhere deep in the bowels of Ahto City, his emotions and thoughts were still hidden behind too many veils to make sense of. The Force only knew why he was afraid – after all, it wasn't Hulas who was risking his life in these missions… unless, of course, there was something he hadn't told her.
"Welcome to Tatooine, operative," he began, his voice as honeyed and pleasant as ever despite his fear. "Your target is Vorn Dasraad, a Gamorrean bounty hunter known to his fellows as the Red Tusk. As far as we know, he's not affiliated with the Bounty Hunters' Guild and is likely operating entirely freelance… and more worryingly, without any kind of oversight.
A clatter of keys later, and a mugshot of the target appeared next to him, and Tarrah could only blink in surprise at the sight: most Gamorreans stood at just under two metres tall, but this ogre of a specimen had to be at least 2.5 in total, with a barrel chest, hulking shoulders, pillar-like legs, and muscles that would have made any other Gamorrean Boar look tiny by comparison.
Beneath his heavy brow, gleaming little eyes stared out at the world with undisguised bloodlust and excitement, his tattered lips caught in what might have almost been mistaken for a mirthful grin (key word being "almost"). What little skin wasn't hidden beneath armour was dotted with battle scars, displayed as badges of honour, from the old knife-wound that had split his snout in half to the craters of old blast wounds that dotted his heavy jaw. Most distinctively of all, he was missing one tusk, the other tinted a dull rust-red, either by chemical exposure or by illness – either way, the source of his impressive alias.
"Vorn's had quite a life: according to public record and popular media programs, he made a name for himself as a successful big game hunter, stopping just short of achieving intergalactic stardom – but took up bounty hunting when he realized that preying on sentient beings was much more lucrative and entertaining."
A token montage of long-forgotten clubhouse photos whisked across the screen, each one showing a much younger Vorn standing triumphantly over an animal carcass, his unmarred face locked in a triumphant smile as he posed for the cameras alongside his fellow hunters, often with the freshly-slain corpse of some ferocious-looking beast lying at their feet, sometimes even with his enormous arms draped over his comrades' shoulders in friendship.
"Today, Vorn is one of the greatest unaffiliated bounty hunters in the galaxy, his only rival the late Calo Nord. Unfortunately, he's also one of the most sadistic killers currently operating in Republic space: many of his victims bear signs of extreme brutality, and at least one surviving witness reports Vorn delaying a clean kill for the pleasure of watching a cornered target in terror and pain. Worse still, his habit of accepting only the most difficult and dangerous contracts has meant that he's more than willing to target Republic officials and even Jedi – and it's believed that he's already killed at least one of the latter."
A gory collage of crime scene holographs appeared on the screen: victims lying in pools of their own blood, beheaded, disembowelled, impaled on metal fenceposts, bludgeoned to pulp, even dismembered by sheer manual brute force. A video clip, probably captured by a covert holocam high above the scene of the crime, had caught Vorn grabbing a target by the throat, hoisting him into the air, and swinging one anvil-like fist into the undefended skull of the target again and again and again, howling with joy as he hammered his way through his victim's skull. Another videoclip showed him gleefully carving down the limbs of a mortally wounded target as they tried to crawl away, slicing off one limb at a time until the burned and bloodied figure finally collapsed. Doubly horrific was the fact that this particular target had been wearing Jedi robes.
"The GenoHaradan can tolerate a certain degree of competition," Hulas continued, "but not from a political liability who could endanger the stability of a Republic at war and ruin the good standing of our profession. So, we'd like you to ensure that the Red Tusk's next hunt will be his last.
"We've recently tracked him to Tatooine, where we believe that he's taking a break from bounty hunting in favour of a nostalgic return to big game-hunting. Czerka Corporation records indicate that he is most likely in the Dune Sea, attempting to kill a Krayt Dragon. Tracking him down in such a vast area may be difficult, but it's possible that the Hunting Lodge may be willing to help if it means eliminating an unsporting competitor. After all, you've helped them before: perhaps they may be willing to return your kindness.
"Apart from his sadism and challenge-seeking behaviour, the psychological profile we have been able to assemble also indicates that Vorn is unusually solitary by Gamorrean standards: he has no desire to team up with other hunters and actively shuns fellow Gamorreans. His only backup is a custom-made assault droid, a treasured companion ever since it gave him an advantage over his one Jedi target. However, if you have any skill in slicing, this droid may be your one advantage."
Hulas helpfully added a quick succession of blueprints and snapshots of the assault droid to the images now lining the side of the screen, identifying primary and secondary weapons systems, potential vulnerabilities in the armour plating, access to the droid's main computer port, and many more.
"A word of warning," Hulas added, darkly. "Vorn is not only the strongest and the most violent target you've been assigned to date, but he's also unusually intelligent for a Gamorrean, so don't assume he'll fall for any of the tricks you've used so far.
"Once you have eliminated him, the Overseers have requested that you retrieve a portable comms unit from Vorn's speeder. It is believed that this encoded commlink is Vorn's means of covertly acquiring contracts and payment, no doubt part of a network of fellow freelancers. The GenoHaradan would be grateful if you would do your part in eliminating this web of unwelcome competitors from our profession. Just leave the commlink with me on Manaan, and I'll do the rest."
Hulas took a deep breath, his usual affability fading suddenly as the gravity of the task ahead became impossible to ignore. "This will be the first time you'll be pitted against a fellow bounty hunter, operative," he said solemnly. "Be ready for anything: your life depends on it."
It was Canderous who'd given her the all-important excuse for being on Tatooine again.
Tarrah had not expected to meet anyone from the Mandalorian's past at any point; after all, judging by the pattern of Canderous' typically bloody war stories, few had survived long enough to be considered a veteran of any of the battles he'd been involved in, and those who had usually ended up dead in all the other battles that had followed. But then Jagi the Mandalorian had turned up, demanding justice in a duel to the death out in the Dune Sea, and suddenly they had the perfect excuse for returning to Tatooine… though, of course, once she was finished helping Canderous to eliminate Jagi and his bodyguards, she was forced to send them back to the Ebon Hawk to preserve the secrecy of the operation.
It was strange, when she thought about it: how much of these seemingly coincidental meetings were the work of the Force? The Jedi encouraged her to treat the Force not as a God, but as a semi-quiescent power that allowed sentient beings to use it as they pleased, allowing it to work its infinitely subtle will through them in return – guiding the wise and subtle when they needed it, exposing the greedy and wrathful to the consequences of their actions in repayment for their excesses. One or two unorthodox souls had even suggested that it wasn't that at all, but simply energy without motive or intellect, and that any guidance or corruption that its wielders experienced was simply the effects of their own will. But despite her best efforts to keep an open mind, it was hard not to imagine the Force as a mad, whimsical god, putting people together like the pieces of some vast, galaxy-spanning puzzle, with no way of telling if its intentions were benevolent or malevolent.
And stranger still, Tarrah got the strangest feeling that someone had tried to share this very point of view with her before. If she strained her memory to its very limits, she could imagine a very old woman pondering the notion of a malevolent Force controlling the universe, a woman blind, bitter, apathetic, even cruel in her own detached way, but wise in spite of all her flaws. What was her name? Who had she been? From the cold affection and obsession that the old woman had lavished on her, Tarrah could almost imagine her as a rather unpleasant grandmother, but she couldn't recall anyone older than her own mother being involved with her life before she turned to smuggling. So who the hell was she?
Once again, Tarrah had no choice but to shake off those lingering questions in order to get some actual work done.
Thankfully, Hulas' suggestions had been as accurate as ever: a few members of the Hunting Lodge had seen a notably brawny Gamorrean bounty hunter headed in the direction of the Dune Sea, and were willing to provide information on his equipment, weaponry, and vehicle. All of them had been insulted by his unwillingness to cooperate with them, and all of them would have been happy to see him pay for his violations of the Hunting Lodge's rules, but alas, none of the hunters had gotten the precise location of the dreaded Red Tusk – which was a bit of a problem, given that the Dune Sea was one of the biggest regions on the entire planet.
However, the real victory of the visit had been the unexpected appearance of Tannis Venn, of all people: having been effectively out of work thanks to his divorce and mechanical incompetence, he'd had little else to do but get drunk, visit the Lodge, and cruise around the Dune Sea in a rented swoop bike in the dim hope that he could find a target sitting still long enough to be sniped despite Venn's notoriously poor aim… and by sheer dumb luck, he'd seen Vorn staking out a makeshift camp to the east of Sand People territory and had been willing to point Tarrah in the right direction in return for a few credits and a beer. Tarrah had obliged, if only because Venn was already pissed as a newt and probably wouldn't try to flirt with her before he passed out.
He'd still been his usual brash self, waving his shots around and spilling most of them in the process, boasting about how he'd "bring down that Gamorrean schutta" and avenge the honour of the lodge. "Just you wait," he'd slurred. "Just you wait, babe. I'll show you. I'm still in the hunting game: ol' Tannis ain't out for the count yet. I've still got what it takes; gonna show 'em all and make a fortune, just you wait."
Of course, it was doubtful that he had the talent to try on his own, much less the willingness: after all, Venn had spent most of his career hunting with droids that he'd never been able to program or repair without his wife's assistance, and he'd chickened out the moment he'd realized that his wife had left him with an explosive divorce message. The chances of him avenging anything was next to zero.
Once she was certain that the failed hunter was unconscious and had nothing else to report, she'd left him to sleep it off in a beery puddle across the bar and prepared herself for yet another journey into the Dune Sea.
Thankfully, this would take much less preparation than Ithorak had: this time, nobody would ask questions if the target was killed with a lightsabre, in part because there was no chance of any near-omniscient local authority penalizing the Republic for it.
But that still left Vorn himself, and by the sounds of things, he was a formidable opponent. Hopefully, the power of the Force and a little technical trickery would even the odds… key word being "hopefully."
So, pausing only to fill her canteen, she made her way towards Anchorhead's gates, fully supplied for the journey into the Dune Sea, ready for anything.
Or so she thought.
When it came to hunting, there was one universal truth that remained sacrosanct no matter the prey or the circumstances: anyone could defeat the beast.
Anyone could kill a beast, trap it, tranquilize it, or just cripple it in battle and prevent it from fighting back ever again. When pushed, the average sapient being might even have the will to flay, disembowel, and debone the animal for meat and skin and trophies. But if you wanted to make sure that neither predator nor prey dared challenge the hunt, you needed a very rare and special kind of hunter.
You needed someone who wasn't afraid to get their hands dirty, not just to profit from the animal's bloody disassembly, but to cow the rest of the herd into submission and smother the ambitions of any fellow hunter who dared think of stealing your prey.
You needed a butcher.
Vorn Dasraad knew that truth all too well. From the moment he'd been old enough to walk, he'd been taught by those who understood that same truth and lived by it, though few had ever known that he was learning by example. After all, nobody expected cunning from a Gamorrean, not even other Gamorreans.
Gamorr had always been a violent planet. From the rolling grasslands to the deepest forests, the ruling boars raged and clashed head-on in brutal inter-clan warfare: in one year, a warlord could easily crush his most hated enemy, slay a rival clan head in single combat, reduce the enemy clan to slavery, even claim all its resources as his own if he was ruthless enough… only to end up on the receiving end of the very same annihilation the next year in the first of the summer skirmishes. Every Gamorrean old enough to hold a weapon was part of these unending clashes for supremacy, the only exceptions being the sows who owned the land… and the slaves and mercenaries that were the planet's main exports.
Vorn didn't belong to either of them.
Nor did he belong to any clan of Gamorr that still drew breath; he'd never known firsthand the rites of adulthood, the life of a Tusker, the opportunity to become a Clan Boar, or even the chance to wed a Clan Matron and become a Warlord. He'd never been taught the role of honour, or the importance of not becoming too clever, and he'd never learned the art of the arg'garok – not that he could have, if only because the traditional war axe had been meant for more normal-sized boars with a lower centre of gravity. From the day he'd turned four, the traditions of his fellow Gamorreans had been a closed book to him.
At three-and-four-months, Vorn had barely started his training when a rival clan had annihilated his clan, taking his father, uncle, brothers, and cousins along with it. None were spared the slaughter, not even the matrons or the feeders still at their mothers' teats. Even the other clans frowned in disgust at the dishonour in such a slaughter; annihilation to the last child was too cold, too cunning, too un-Gamorrean. Few did anything about it, though; few would ever admit that they were too afraid to dare.
Perhaps that was why his mother had opted not to throw herself at the mercy of the Council of Matrons; nothing else could have possibly explained her decision to leave the planet with her only surviving son in tow. But then, his mother had always been doubted and disrespected for being unusually clever by Gamorrean standards, and Vorn had inherited her cunning – enough to recognize his first lesson in the universal truth, even as they'd fled Gamorr, never to return.
They'd settled, as so many other refugees had and always would, on Nar Shaddaa. For three years, Vorn's mother worked hard to provide for her son by fair means or foul, often paying off exorbitant debts to one crime syndicate after another, and even killing other young mothers for food and credits… until at last, Vorn was old enough to work – for at six, he would have been considered an adolescent and almost fully-taught in the ways of war. Of course, he'd received a completely different kind of education on the streets of Nar Shaddaa, and most of it involved him fighting dirty.
At age six, he was almost as tall as a full-grown Gamorrean, and he was already receiving employment offers from street gangs, the Exchange, and even the Hutts, all of whom saw great potential as an enforcer. Vorn preferred to freelance, though: after all, he'd felt no attachment to any group since the slaughter of his clan. So, he shopped himself around, sometimes serving as the muscle in street brawls, sometimes breaking the legs of debtors, sometimes flinging the occasional traitor off a building. Unsurprisingly, he was good at it. Doubly unsurprisingly, he enjoyed it, especially when he was up against a foe brave enough to fight back in his final moments.
Unfortunately, as Vorn had lurched towards adulthood, growing steadily taller and stronger with every passing month, the syndicates looked upon the giant mercenary with growing concern. They could not tolerate such a weapon being casually passed from gang to gang without heeding the damage he might do to their interests while in the service of their rivals, so they tried time and again to recruit him on a full-time basis. The twelve-year-old Vorn had no overwhelming desire to end up hitched to a single employer, so he made every excuse possible to refuse the bribes, the flattery, the warnings, and finally, the threats, believing that his growing strength made him immune to repercussions.
It wasn't until he came home one evening to find his mother lying dead on her doorstep that he realized that he'd been wrong. Vorn dimly recalled that he'd been overcome with grief, wailing and sobbing like a piglet, hammering his face with his fists in a crude display of self-loathing and penance, as if inflicting enough pain on himself could bring her back from the grave. Looking back on that day, the memory seemed so strange to him: all that grief and pain and attachment was long-gone and had not been felt for many decades. Perhaps the day of his mother's death had been the last time he'd ever felt such things.
Once he was finished killing the hitman responsible and paying a princely ransom to have his mother's body buried on Gamorr, Vorn had given the last of his money to a freighter captain, ordered the baffled Duros to drop him off on the deadliest and most isolated planet they could possibly find, and thrown his fate to the winds. He'd no idea where he'd end up, no way of guaranteeing if the captain wouldn't hand him over to his former employers among the Exchange or just sell him into slavery, and at the time, he hadn't really cared.
To his surprise, the Duros captain kept his word and, after searching a number of obscure star systems along his route, dropped Vorn off on the very worst planet he could possibly find – nearly crash-landing on it in the process. It was a world of curling mists, cloying bogs, and strange, spidery trees, but more importantly, it was infested with monsters: coiling black dragons that ate even droids, gigantic slugs that consumed everything in the path of their gargantuan maws, bioluminescent horrors that infested the darker waterways, and even corpse-pale spiders the size of a starfighter that eventually grew into the trees that clustered the swampy landscape.
It was such a hellish place that the captain actually tried to talk Vorn out of leaving the ship, and when Vorn had refused, he'd insisted on at least giving the young Gamorrean a distress beacon before he flew away, if only to give him a fighting chance of leaving the world alive.
One year later, Vorn had finally tired of the place and activated the beacon. By sheer luck, a smuggler ship had been travelling through the star system in a desperate attempt to avoid getting caught by Republic security amassing on the route to Coruscant, and not only heard Vorn's broadcast but was able to rescue him.
What a sight he must have made! A giant with a broken tusk, armed with an axe made from scrap metal and weighed down by a cluster of bloody trophies taken from animals no civilized being had ever seen… it was a wonder the smugglers hadn't shot him. Somehow, he'd convinced them to let him aboard, and they'd departed in short order, never to return – for no matter how many times they'd tried to find it, they'd never been able to locate that strange, terrifying planet ever again.
The beasts of that unknown world had taught Vorn much, and the abyssal darkness lurking deep within it had taught him more. There had been caverns on that world where the shadows gathered so thickly that they seemed to coalesce and take physical form, arising as figures from the past, or as living dreams, or as the ghosts of dashed futures. And in the nightmare of those caves, Vorn had attained his first glimpse of the universal truth. He'd arrived on that nameless world a child, knowing nothing, desiring nothing.
He'd left a man, wiser and stronger than any Gamorrean Tusker, blessed with a cold fury and a need for brutality that was more fearsome and yet more calculating than any of his kind. The latter was without the immediacy and crudeness so often demanded by other boars, and the former was not a pressure that built up in him until it exploded – but a capacitor that stored as much as was needed, bottomless until the time came to unleash it.
But as strong and wise as he was, it took some time for Vorn to work out what he really wanted in life: he still enjoyed the violence and bloodshed of his younger days, but he knew that simple gangland warfare would not suffice any longer. So, having gotten used to hunting for food and living rough in the wilderness, he sought out other hunts.
Despite the technological conveniences of the civilized galaxy, there were still those who sought to hunt alone on frontier worlds with as little tech as possible, some of them born on worlds where hunting was still a way of life, some of them dissatisfied Core-worlders seeking a glorious return to the past and to nature… and a few who just liked killing. Whatever they were, they formed their own exclusive clubs across the galaxy, sharing locations for entertaining hunts and exciting prey, granting cash bounties for trophies brought back from past hunts, and even offering small fortunes as the winning prize in grant hunts on the harshest planets in the Outer Rim. With his trophies, it hadn't taken much effort for Vorn to join the likes of the Carnelian Venator Lodge, and there, he'd accepted every challenge that came his way, sometimes joining a team, but more often than not pursuing the prey alone.
The planets of the Yavin system were great hunting grounds. Placid Dantooine had some interesting locations if you were prepared to look carefully. Ocean worlds like Aquilaris and Manaan were among the most challenging, though they'd required him to commission a dive suit that could accommodate his frame, not to mention a means of smuggling himself off Manaan before the Selkath could notice what he'd been doing on the seabed. Perhaps the greatest and most enjoyable challenges had been on Kashyyyk and Dxun, for down in the hungry jungle of Onderon's ravenous moon or in the lightless belly of the Shadowlands, Vorn truly found creatures equal to the monsters he'd met on that unknown world. In them, he found release from his boredom and the cold, ghostly rage that still haunted him.
One way or another, he'd taken great satisfaction in every kill and brought back enough trophies to make his fortune a dozen times over, even on the occasions when he wasn't taking part in a contest. In the process, he gained the respect of his fellows, the title of the Great Huntsmaster of the Carnelian Venator Lodge, and even a measure of fame among the lesser sentients who enjoyed observing hunts without ever participating in them; true, few people on the Core Worlds ever watched that show before it was taken off the air, but it gave Vorn a faint thrill of mingled pride and amusement to know he'd gotten this far.
He'd even acquired a second job in lean times, allowing him to serve as a guide to rubber-spined plutocrats in search of a trophy to make themselves feel potent again.
But it wasn't enough.
It was never enough.
No matter how often Vorn hunted, no matter how challenging the prey, he was ultimately being pitted against animals… and regardless of how rare or how vicious or how mighty they were, animals were frustratingly predictable. By the end of his career as a hunter, it had been almost a year since he'd been in serious danger, and two full years since he'd been injured on a hunt. And he was beginning to yearn for a different kind of excitement, the kind he hadn't felt since his early years on Nar Shaddaa, the kind amplified by his time in the darkness of the unknown planet.
So, after roughly fifteen years as a professional hunter, Vorn retired and took up bounty hunting. In hindsight, it was so obvious, but the idea had only occurred to him after seeing a holonews report on the Bounty Hunters' Guild latest round of controversies, and belatedly realized that not all such bounties needed to be brought back alive.
He'd made some inquiries with the Guild, only to give up on them after less than a month. He'd tolerated being a member of a hunting lodge because its members had shared his passion for hunting and killing. Being a member of a Guild meant being surrounded by incorrigible bores who were in it for the money and nothing else: amateurs, posers, jobsworths, bland professionals, and the rare few who were thick-headed enough to tolerate the Guild's tiresome rules and membership. Instead, Vorn went freelance and never looked back.
He'd always remember the day he claimed his first bounty – a rebellious gang lieutenant on Nal Hutta. As it happened, the Hutt chieftain who'd posted the bounty was offering the same price dead or alive, so long as the victim's corpse was brought to him in its entirety. The silly fat bastard had clearly thought this meant "in one piece," and had been a bit taken aback when Vorn had deposited the target's head, arms, torso, and legs in a neat little pile at the foot of his dais. As he'd later explained, the victim hadn't died until Vorn had ripped out his throat with his remaining tusk… and just like that, the name had stuck.
After that, whenever there was a Wanted Dead bounty on the market, Vorn would race to claim it as swiftly and brutally as possible, and though he used all possible methods at his disposal – from a simple blaster shot to the skull to immolation in the engines of his starship – his preference would always be for an up-close and personal execution with his axe… or his bare hands. Before long, certain underworld figures were hiring him to eliminate debtors, traitors, and even rival crime lords in the most gruesomely spectacular ways possible, the better to frighten the rest of the herd into submission. And so, recognizing the universal truth that they abided by, Vorn gleefully obliged, indulging in every second of butchery, and all the joy and release it brought him.
Sentient beings offered greater thrills than dumb animals, in no small part because they were so unpredictable: they could plan, they could run, they could try to fight back, they could beg for mercy, and they could even try to take their killers with them. Best of all were the times when targets surprised you with a dying shift in their nature: brave soldiers broke down in tears and begged for mercy, crying out for gods or mothers who weren't there to help them; cowards suddenly unlocked hidden reservoirs of courage and attacked head on, biting, punching, clawing, gouging, stabbing as if possessed. It was that unpredictability that made his hunts so rapturous – and it was for this very reason that, unlike with animals, Vorn liked to take his time.
The money itself meant very little to him: most of it was spent on maintaining his weaponry and equipment, occasionally upgrading it when technology improved. After all, he had no fixed address and lived exclusively aboard his ship, the Wrathhunter, a squat red brick of an assault craft that hadn't been furnished since he'd bought the damn thing. The most expensive thing he'd bought in the last decade, other than new torpedoes, were the upgrades to XK-000, his sole companion these last few years.
Normally, he'd never have partnered up with anyone, least of all a droid: after all, Vorn was quite unlike most Gamorreans, but that didn't mean he liked artificial life-forms any better than organic ones. He'd only ended up with the old droid because it had been aboard the Wrathhunter on the day he'd claimed it, and only started taking it along on hunts after it had helped soften up a particularly memorable target, perhaps eight years ago if memory served.
And how memorable it had been! It was his two-hundred-and-fiftieth confirmed kill, one that neither the Republic nor the Jedi would admit ever existed: a fallen Jedi apprentice on Nar Shaddaa, killing his way through city's underbelly in a self-righteous purge of all he saw as touched by the Dark Side, making no distinction between civilian and criminal. Hired by an alliance of the Hutt Clans, Vorn had hunted the bastard down right in the middle of one of his massacres and fought him to a standstill, using every method at his disposal to even the odds: flash grenades, sonic mines, deafening blasts of sand from the area's public address systems, even a little lachrymal gas.
But even with all those advantages on his side, plus his newly forged cortosis-weave axe for the job, Vorn and this Jedi had been too evenly matched. For nearly half an hour, they'd fought back and forth across the ruins of the slums, until Vorn's joy in the fight began to fade as his anger demanded satisfaction for time spent. Eventually, they frenzied battle brought the all the way back to the docking pad where the Wrathhunter was waiting – whereupon XK-000 had tottered out on poorly-repaired legs and surprised the Jedi with a blast of its flamethrower.
And while the Jedi had been furiously shrugging out of his burning robe, getting ready to advance on the droid, Vorn had darted in from the side and hacked off both the Jedi's arms. His next move had been to break the Jedi's neck – not violently enough to cause fatal damage to the brainstem, but comprehensively enough to leave the victim paralysed.
And after that, Vorn had once again took his time.
When he'd returned to the Wrathhunter, there was a transmission waiting for him on the communications console. The ghostly figure who'd appeared before him that night had been impossible to identify that day, for their face and voice had been concealed by an incredibly sophisticated broadcast scrambler.
This mystery contact had a proposition for him that night – a proposition that he gleefully accepted.
He'd tried many times to learn the true identities of his newfound partners over the course of the years that followed, but so far, he'd only managed to learn, by means of a never-repeated slip of the tongue, that one of them was from a place called Sh'shuun, and even that didn't explain much. After all, no record existed of such a planet or station anywhere in the known galaxy, and there was no way of telling if this Sh'shuun was real or fabrication.
So far, the only identity he'd learned for sure was that of his contact and predecessor, and that didn't mean much to him, because he'd only learned that on the same day they'd died. But in truth, the identities of his allies didn't matter much, so long as his needs were met in their service.
Whenever they gave him a commission, he was given carte blanche to be as monstrous as possible, to torture and torment and brutalize for as long as he desired, so long as the victim's friends and business partners witnessed what happened. His new partners understood the universal truth: to keep their future victims in line and prevent their competitors from getting any ideas, they needed a butcher. They needed him.
Of course, there were other duties to attend to, but those were so easy they were barely worth thinking of; after all, most of them required him to delegate. And occasionally, those other duties grew onerous and dull, hence his current sabbatical on Tatooine: he could vent his anger and longing for excitement in all the myriad ways he pleased, but he could not control nostalgia. He'd heard that there were legendary beasts roaming the wastes of the obscure little desert planet, ferocious dragons the size of battleships with precious stones lining their bellies; perhaps, if there was one monster in this galaxy he had not yet fought, it might be worth returning to his old joys… just for a little while.
However, less than a week into his sojourn into the desert, new matters had arisen to complicate his nostalgia. A new message had arrived on his personal datapad, and though he hadn't been able to identify the sender, he had to assume that it was one of his partners. After all, if they'd managed to contact a datapad firewalled against anyone who wasn't using the codes that he and his partners had shared, the safest bet was that one of his partners was trying to send him a secret message. So, he read carefully:
The guild is restless. GenoHaradan agents are hunting. Soon they will come for me – and possibly for you. When they do, I plan to be ready.
Vorn had considered this.
Then, he'd made sure his axe was sharp and ready, double-checked his armour for any signs of disrepair he might have missed, and even checked XK-000's systems just to make sure they were battle ready. Then, he gunned the engines on his speeder, and went right back to surveying the dunes.
He'd been a hunter since he was twelve years old, the champion of his lodge by age twenty-two, a professional bounty hunter at twenty-seven. And now, at the age of forty-three – older than any Gamorrean male he'd ever known – he was the great butcher of the galaxy, the living incarnation of terror and dread that his partners used to command both prey and predator alike.
He would not run from a fight, least of all from a GenoHaradan agent. After all, he'd killed more GenoHaradan agents than anyone else in the galaxy, knew how they fought and how they died… but then, even if he didn't, what kind of hunter would dare refuse a fellow hunter's call to battle? No, he would wait for the assassins to come to him… and when the time came, he would let his rage strange his opponent in its coils.
And if that didn't satisfy him, there was still a Krayt Dragon to be slain.
In fact…
His ears twitched ever-so-slightly, as he picked up the distinctive sound of a badly maintained repulsorlift engine trundling across the dunes somewhere behind him. Long before his landspeeder sounded the proximity alert, he'd already recognized the incoming vehicle as a swoop bike and picked up the distinctive scent of badly distilled spirits on the breeze: his pursuer was drunk, hence the clumsy steering and the slurred expletives.
Vorn grinned. This was no GenoHaradan agent… but until one arrived, this drunken fool would be sufficient entertainment.
He swung the landspeeder around to face the oncoming swoop bike, gunned the engines, and charged.
Behind the controls of the bike, his pursuer's face turned white with terror as the rapidly sobering human belatedly realized that he wasn't going to win this battle; he tried to turn the bike around and accelerate away, to draw his blaster, to call for help, to do anything that might save him – but with alcohol still fogging his instincts, he was too slow and too late to save himself.
Crossing the remaining ten metres between them in one final burst of speed, Vorn stood up in the driver's seat and launched at the swoop bike driver. The drunk had just enough time to let out a piercing shriek of terror before Vorn grabbed him by the shoulder and tackled him into the dunes.
There was a loud crack of shattering bones, more screaming, a confused grapple for a fallen blaster pistol, and then another crack as the drunk's blaster went flying, breaking several of his fingers as it skated away across the sand.
And then Vorn Dasraad took his time.
A/N: Up next - the battle with Wrath!
