It was raining. It always was. But Gardulla the Hutt's palace had a covered landing spot, and though rainwater covered it, no rain actually rippled on it. It did ripple as the slowly incoming Jedi shuttle settled down, however.
As the two figures emerged from their bulbous shuttle, they both wrapped their cloaks more tightly around themselves. The air was green, warm, and humid, and smelled disgusting. Each step splashed water around their feet as they strode.
Obi-Wan hated the rain. Especially when it was perpetual. He'd had enough of it on Kamino.
The two Jedi reached the vaulting entrance to Gardulla's palace and examined it.
"Something seems off, don't you think?" Obi-Wan dryly remarked.
For there was an enormous terrible hole torn in the center, roughly hewn and jagged. Obi-Wan couldn't see far inside, but the Force was screaming at him, and it curdled his stomach.
"We may have been compromised," the other Jedi darkly muttered, and he drew back his hood. The dreadlocks and yellow face stripe of Quinlan Vos was now exposed as he grimaced at the wreckage. His hand reached out, ignited his emerald lightsaber, and cut away the more protruding jagged edges of the door.
Obi-Wan went first, and Quinlan followed. The interior was heavy in the air too, smelling of blood and fire and dust. Obi-Wan strode deeper into Gardulla's dark halls and ignited his own sapphire lightsaber for light too.
Particles of dust floated in the thick air, and Obi-Wan could see in the blue and green lights the bodies. By far, the majority of them hadn't been killed by blaster bolts. Instead…
Obi-Wan spotted a Trandoshan body slumped against a wall with a spatter and trail of blood on the wall connecting to him. Obi-Wan couldn't go more than five feet without encountering a new bloody body part, piece of carnage, or other evidence of destruction. Most of the carnage in the Clone Wars so far had been bloodless, so this situation was somewhat new for Obi-Wan.
"Even Grievous isn't this bloody," Quinlan sourly noted, nudging a Nikto's upper half with his boot. "Kenobi, we must be prepared for the possibility that the Hutts may have been slain."
Obi-Wan nodded, his lips tightly pursed. On the one hand, the Hutts were repulsive– slimy in surface properties and moral character. But they were also the Republic's allies, thanks to the deal with Jabba's son early in the war. If the remaining Hutts discovered what had happened here and thought the Republic was behind it, their trade routes would shut down, and the Republic would be bottlenecked!
"I don't doubt it," Obi-Wan reluctantly agreed. His boot crinkled on a shattered Gamorrean guard's axe blade. "Whoever did this must have been strong."
They reached the doorway leading to the main Hutt council room. It was heavily dented and torn in many places, making the doors unable to completely open. So Obi-Wan and Quinlan joined together in cutting an arch wide enough to walk through. They slid the plug out of the doorway and set it aside with a metallic clink, then walked in the main chamber.
It was catastrophic, apocalyptic. Wreckage was strewn all about the filthy floor, and a few residual flames were flickering on the debris pieces. Droids had been torn apart and scattered, lying in pools of blood and sprawled with their wiry guts exposed. A DJ station way in the corner had been completely destroyed as well. The main council table way against the back wall had been shattered and tossed in half a dozen pieces all across the ground. And so had the Hutts themselves.
The shocked expression of Ziro the Hutt was still on his face, even after decapitation. His enormous head was resting on the ground, like a pile of gelatin, staring at Kenobi as he entered. Ziro's limp body was not far off, his severed neck staying out of sight. Kenobi stared back at the gelatinous corpse part, feeling a wave of nausea hit him in the chest and make it hard to breathe for a second.
Quinlan Vos grimaced as he entered behind Kenobi and came beside him. "Well," Quinlan succinctly put it. "More beautiful in death than he was in life."
"He was a lead!" Obi-Wan growled. "And now he's dead, along with all the rest of the Hutt council."
For there were things like tail ends, severed arms, and other gibbets of flesh littered all about the room that were unmistakably Hutt. Enormous Hutt bodies were slumped against the wall, staining both themselves and the wall deep red. Gardulla the Hutt in particular was slumped on the ground on her side, with a terrible hole in her chest where her heart should be. White bone was exposed through her thick skin. A deep pool of blood had seeped into the crater she had been slammed in. There were drips leading away from her body, and Obi-wan followed the drips with his eyes.
The drips of blood led him to the opposite wall, which had the symbol of the Hutts scratched out. Instead, another enormous symbol had been painted on the wall. Painted with the blood of the Hutts.
It was a curved cross of some kind, crossed straight at the top and again at an angle near the bottom. The red symbol was runny from the painting material and had four little mini-symbols at its four square corners. Just looking at the mark made Kenobi's blood run cold.
And three words were painted right below the symbol– unmistakable, blunt, and fearsome.
RIP AND TEAR
"...Do you… recognize this symbol, Quinlan?" Obi-Wan asked, gesturing at it with his lightsaber. "This slogan?"
Quinlan Vos squinted at it in the light from their two sabers. He soon responded, "No. It could be a rival gang of some kind."
"That could waltz in here and execute the entire Hutt council?" Kenobi rhetorically refuted. "I think not. This is the most well-protected criminal syndicate in the galaxy."
He turned to Ziro the Hutt's head again, and noted that the cutoff for his head was far too smooth. Obi-Wan used the Force to levitate Ziro's head off the ground and rotate it. And sure enough, the wound was cauterized.
"Lightsaber cut," Quinlan confirmed. "Coulda been Grievous after all."
"If the Separatists wanted to take Nal Hutta, they would be blockading the planet right now. We would have seen battle droids all the way in here. But it seems like it was all done by… one man." He turned to Quinlan with concern. "But who else could have done this?"
"I wanna know the same thing," a deep synthesized drawl from behind them answered.
Obi-Wan and Quinlan Vos turned in surprise and caution– they knew that voice.
Indeed, Cad Bane was standing in the cut-open entryway, his wide-brimmed hat over his eyes. He lifted his deep blue head to squint at them with those solid red eyes, and his hands were resting on his blaster grips.
"Thanks for cutting a way in," Bane dryly acknowledged. "Lightsabers must come in real handy."
"What are you doing here, Bane?" Obi-Wan demanded.
"Scum hanging around a scum planet, Obi-Wan," Quinlan reminded him. "Isn't it obvious? Looking for his contractors."
"Yes and no," Bane replied in his slow, deliberate cadence. He strolled casually in, kicking a severed arm on the ground aside. "Shame, really. Their payments were on time."
"How long ago did this happen?" Obi-Wan asked, staying in his guarding stance.
Cad Bane shrugged. "About a day before you Jedi arrived. Word in the scum bowl travels fast, especially to cantinas on Nar Shaddaa. Everyone and their mothers were packed in the booths, talking about the death of the Hutts. I doubt you'll find a dry glass in the entire system."
"And no one saw who did this?" Quinlan gestured his lightsaber around nearly nonchalantly.
"We just know that it wasn't a Republic or Separatist. The Hutts were all cozy with you, so you wouldn't dare jeopardize your precious trade routes. And the Separatists rely on numbers. They don't have anyone that can do the carnage you see here without getting killed too."
"That doesn't give us a lot of options, then," Obi-Wan remarked, glancing at one of the bloodsoaked Hutt bodies lying against the wall. The Hutt had been torn in half from the mouth down, and it wasn't cauterized like a lightsaber wound; the line was shredded, uneven, and bloody. Kenobi could see the slimy yellow fat and shriveled internal organs under the Hutt's skin rotting away in the open air.
Bane followed Kenobi's gaze and scowled at the carnage. He sighed, turned back to Obi-Wan, and pointed a finger. "...Kenobi, the only reason I'm not trying to take your head right now is because there are bigger things out there. If whoever did this goes to other bounty posters, I'm outta business. And I bet his bounty's bigger than twenty Jedi all together."
"Well, that's a coincidence," Quinlan proposed. "We've got an interest in finding this guy too."
Cad Bane glanced from Quinlan to Obi-Wan, then back again. "You're not serious."
"Master Vos is one of the best trackers the Order has," Obi-Wan insisted, quickly playing along with Quinlan's plan. "I bet that together, you could accomplish far more than you could alone."
Cad Bane just squinted at Quinlan, and Quinlan squinted back. Cad Bane's record against the Jedi order was common knowledge to most people paying attention to the war. And for a while, all that could be heard in the carnage-strewn hall was the hum of the two lightsabers.
Obi-Wan sighed. "We would be… willing to erase most of your past criminal record, Bane."
"Yeah, I'd just fill it back up again real soon," Bane muttered. "I work for money, Kenobi, not party favors."
"If the Pykes, Black Sun, and Concord Dawn follow the Hutt's example, you'll be low on employers," Quinlan reasoned. "You said it yourself. And then you'd just be on the run from the Republic– unless your record was wiped out."
Bane grimaced. It looked like there was something he wanted to say, but simply couldn't.
"...Do you know what psychometry is?" Quinlan followed up with Bane. "It lets me see the past by touching an object with history. I can use it to track our prey."
Bane folded his arms and put a toothpick between his teeth. "Show me."
Quinlan's eyes darted over the place before resting on a severed droid head, lying in a stagnant puddle of fetid blood. He used the Force to lift it and slowly call it over to his hand.
Once it made contact, Quinlan's eyes went milky white, and a subdued boom thumped from Quinlan's body.
Bane's hand instantly went to his holster, but he did not draw his blaster pistol yet. Quinlan was silent and still for a good three seconds. Then the color instantly came back to his eyes, and Quinlan sighed and bowed his head. "...I see."
"What was it?" Obi-Wan asked.
"...A blur. This droid was a drink-carrier. It spotted an enormous figure barge inside, just tearing through the door like paper. It ripped through the Gamorrean guards like a wind. It didn't even draw out a lightsaber. Then it tore off the droid's head."
"Do we know what happened once it was done wreaking havoc?" Obi-Wan asked.
Quinlan hummed in thought, then strolled to Ziro the Hutt's head and placed a reluctant hand on it. Once again, his eyes turned milky, and a dull thump echoed from him.
Quinlan took his hand off the corpse part and took a shaky breath. "I could only see Ziro's face, but I did hear… a droid. Or at least, something synthetic, but not clearly so. It wasn't Grievous. This voice asked Ziro about… a holodiary's location. Ziro answered, snivelly and shaking. It was on Teth, near his father's grave. Then a lightsaber ignited, and there was a flash of green."
Obi-Wan and Cad Bane turned to each other, then back to Quinlan.
"So this mystery hunter wanted to go after the Hutts. He has a green lightsaber and works alone. He may have a droid companion or may be a droid himself," Obi-Wan summarized.
"Not many in the galaxy fit that description," Cad Bane muttered. "Could be… Durge."
"Maybe," Obi-Wan answered, but he didn't sound certain. Obi-Wan strode over to a severed arm with shattered glass shards stuck in it and turned it over with his boot. "Durge hasn't been seen for months now. That doesn't mean he's dead, but he should have turned up some time ago. He's always wanted a shot at me again, ever since Muunilist at the beginning of the war– even before Christophsis."
"If this truly is Durge, we'll take him out for good this time," Quinlan Vos affirmed. He spread his arms allowingly "Look, Bane, we can forward twenty-five thousand credits to your account. And after you help us hunt this shadow, we can consider your debt to the Republic fulfilled. You did say you can do any job for the right price."
Bane's lips twisted in a grimace, and his eyes narrowed in thought. Obi-Wan could clearly see the gears turning under his wide-brimmed hat. On the one hand, Cad Bane had always worked against the Republic– they weren't the type to outsource the dirty jobs to bounty hunters, and they were fat targets. But on the other hand, Bane needed the long game. And what was better than taking money from your enemies to do something that you wanted to do anyway?
"...Fifty thousand. No less," Bane decided.
"Thirty-five," Quinlan Vos replied, his expression dim. "And I do suggest you take it."
Bane and Quinlan grimaced at each other for a good long moment. Obi-Wan's grip on his lightsaber tightened involuntarily.
Cad Bane's hand on his blasters fell, and he gave a stiff nod. "If we're gonna be tracking him, we need to get our hands dirty."
"Trust me, I know what that's like," Quinlan confided. He jutted his lightsaber at the far wall. "And so does our prey. He wrote this with his bare hands. Bane, I assume you don't know what this symbol is?"
Cad Bane flicked his bright red eyes to the mark, and the words in sloppy Aurebesh beneath it.
"Rip and tear," Cad Bane slowly drawled. "...No, I don't. New to me. But no upstart young gang could take down the Hutt council. It looks more like a beast was set loose in here, and that's just his personal mark. I can show it to my contacts and let them know this is going around."
"I have a contact that can help us too. Even if she doesn't know it yet."
Cad Bane looked over to Quinlan. "Oh?"
Quinlan nodded. "Something tells me… she'll be on this case too. And she'll need our help."
"And is she gonna be helpful in turn, or will it just be sentiment driving you?"
"Trust me, Bane. She'll be an asset. And we'll find her on Teth."
Bane huffed. "Trust is an inflated commodity. And what tells you all this? The Force?
Quinlan Vos grinned.
Cad Bane grumbled. "The instant this job's done…"
"...I'll make holorecordings of this place and send them in my report to the Jedi council," Obi-Wan stated in the silence, moving back into the center of the room and examining the carnage broadly. "Master Vos, you and Bane just do what you need to."
"We can start by examining the records of the ships that entered the system," Bane stated. "We know the general time frame, and we just need to narrow it down. The security cameras in this place were trashed, but we can still look at the tapes, too."
"I'll keep deducing different angles of the attack," Quinlan said, picking up a squashed metal cup in his hand. "Get in the more personal side of it. And once we're done here, we'll head to Teth and see if our prey left any evidence behind there. We've got it from here. You can go back to your boring job as general, Kenobi."
"I most gratefully will. And, Quinlan?" Obi-Wan turned to the tracker. "Do try to not do anything rash."
Quinlan Vos grinned. "Now where's the fun in that?"