He was done. It was over.
The Spider Mastermind, Olivia Pierce, was nothing more than a titanic bloodied brain sloughed out of its cyborg confines, its mechanical legs splayed all over the slick obsidian floor. A deep trough ran through its length, courtesy of the smoking green BFG-9000 in the victor's hand.
The Doomslayer, the Unchained Predator, the Hellwalker, allowed a deep breath to escape him, and he slumped in place. Finally. Sensing that the monster would not rise again, he deposited the weapon of mass destruction in the unlimited hammerspace his Praetor Suit allowed.
And the tether activated.
A swirl of blue, a flash of light, a cacophony of voices. The image of the Spider Mastermind's corpse disappeared, and the Doomslayer was yanked out of the dimension of Hell, into a blinding white abyss.
Vision slowly faded back to him.
He was floating in place, not unlike in a tank of water. He was in a small pad, surrounded by swirls of blue energy. He looked up. He was at the end of a metal walkway. He was back on the facility on Mars.
And approaching him out of the mists and darkness was the cyborg, Samuel Hayden.
"You've won. It's over. You stopped the invasion and closed the portal." Hayden's gravelly robotic voice made the statement matter-of-factly. "But it's come at a price. Argent. VEGA. This entire operation."
The Doomslayer had a bad feeling come on the back of his neck.
Hayden leaned in, towering over the Slayer's already-impressive height. "You see, I've watched you work. Come to understand your motivation." He motioned in the air. "You think the only way is to kill them all. Leave nothing behind. And you may be right. But we can't just shut it all down! Without Argent Energy it will be worse. I don't expect you to agree."
Hayden reached. Something detached from the Slayer and flew into Hayden's hand. Helpless in the tethering station, the Slayer could not make a move. He just stared with fury at his betrayer, holding a dark power.
"But with this!" Hayden exclaimed, holding aloft the bony, thorned Demonic Crucible, crackling with red lightning. "We can continue our work!"
The Slayer could do nothing. He just fixed Hayden with a look containing all the fury his soul could conjure. How Hayden didn't burst into flames on the spot, the Slayer didn't know.
Evidently sensing the Slayer's hate, Hayden managed to look remorseful, for a robot. "I am not the villain in this story. I do what I do because there is no choice."
"Rerouting tether coordinates, complete," the polite female announcer said overhead.
"Our time is up," Hayden stated, looking the Slayer dead in the eyes. "I can't kill you. But I won't have you standing in our way."
With a flick of his wrist, the Crucible ignited. Solid red Argent plasma materialized into a massive flat sword with runes going up its length and twin red horns curving from the tip. Lightning spat from its length and fizzled out.
The Slayer's fists curled so tight, a diamond could be crushed in his palms. Where was Hayden sending him?! To think he could just walk away with it made the Slayer more furious than the notion of being catapulted across the universe.
"Until we see each other again," Hayden gravely bid.
He turned and walked away, showing the Slayer only his back and the Crucible's blade in his hand. Text on his Heads-Up Display appeared: Tether Activation. And the Slayer was seized by the Tether's teleportation system, where once again his vision turned white.
The Slayer was hurled into the universe's vast expanse.
It was not five minutes into the late-night Jedi Council session when each of them felt it.
Master Eeth Koth winced and touched the horns on his Zabrak head. Stass Allie gasped and doubled over. Kit Fisto's mass of green tentacles twitched anxiously, and his eyebrows furrowed. Shaak Ti, who was attending via hologram, let out a cry of pain and fondled her pairs of Force-sensitive patterned lekku on her head. Plo Koon let out a deep grumble and drew his masked head up, as if to get a better reception of the signal. Aayla Secura scrunched up and examined her own solid-colored lekku, as if they were defective.
Obi-Wan Kenobi made a hurt noise and put a hand to his head. So did Ki-Adi Mundi beside him, though his was more severe due to his twin brains. Mace Windu's face contorted in discomfort and distrust. And Grand Master Yoda's long green leathery ears twitched up, and he let out a deep, thoughtful grunt.
"The Force," Yoda intoned. "Disturbed, it has become."
"But to this extent?" Mace Windu asked rhetorically. "What could throw a wrench into the Force's presence like this?"
"Presence?" Stass Allie asked, face pulled from the aftershock. "So something new has entered the galaxy?"
"If this is true, then it would be more like… a new element which has been added to the will of the Force," Ki-Adi Mundi intuited. He let out a pained exhale and rubbed his scalp again.
"Are we in trouble?" Aayla Secura wondered. "The disturbance did not feel… negative. Simply overwhelming."
"I do not sense any mistrust around me on Kamino," Shaak Ti reported.
"What could it be, Master Yoda?" Obi-Wan asked, leaning forward to get a better view of him. "The power behind this was surely great. We can't ignore it."
"A disturbance… from many things it can come. If neither negative or positive this was, then meet it in time, we shall. Amoral, power is. A tremendous tool in the right hands, it may become. A terrible weapon, in the wrong one. Seek it we must. Such is the will of the Force."
"How many other Jedi do we suspect have felt this disturbance?" Plo Koon rumbled deeply, steepling his fingers.
"It's highly likely we all have," Ki-Adi Mundi reasoned, as implacable as ever. "Not just Jedi, but other Force-sensitives, like the Nightsisters. And the Sith."
"Dooku," Eeth Koth clarified darkly. He took a meaningful glance out of the window at the Coruscant landscape. "He'll try to get his hands on this new power."
"It may or may not be a new form of power," Mace Windu reminded them, leaning forward intently. "It may simply be a momentous decision an individual made."
"Physical objects have caused ruptures in the Force before," Stass Allie reminded the council. "The Mass Shadow Generator, for instance, caused death on a mass scale."
"Let's assume this was a new weapon or person," Kit Fisto said. "How would one go about finding it? The galaxy is a vast place."
"If the Force wills it," Yoda said, "find it, we shall. Unmistakable, this presence must be. In time, clear it will become." Yoda hummed again. "Change, I feel. For good or ill, a disruption in nature may be. Remain strong, we must. If unprepared we are, in this shift in the galaxy's course… to our doom, we will go."
Chancellor Palpatine's face twitched, and he opened his eyes with sudden concern.
He was thankfully alone in his office. The endless nighttime city skyline of the planet Coruscant's hustle-and-bustle lay just outside the ceiling-tall window behind him. Palpatine's gloomy opulent office was as dark as a Sarlacc's gullet and far emptier. And not just in terms of light, either; the entire room subtly sang with the Dark Side of the Force.
And for a few shocking moments, that Force had quivered.
Noticeably, too; the room had actually shaken slightly, making the smaller expensive sculptures in his office rattle and his glass of water ripple. The Dark Side recoiled, like a curl of smoke. Palpatine felt a pressure on his chest that left him short of breath temporarily, and his eyes shot to every corner of the room. Nothing there.
Palpatine's fingers were trembling as he scanned the room again. Never mind that it had come out of nowhere; never mind, even, that nothing like that had ever happened before in the Force. Palpatine could sense, not just with the Force, but with his own wizened intuition, that this disturbance was groundbreaking. And opportunistic.
After regaining his senses, Palpatine looked down to see his desk's holoprojector beep with an incoming message. There could be only one person who would so readily contact him, was strong in the Force, and who actually knew the private channel it was on.
Palpatine's face became obscured by shadow as he pressed the Recieve button. A spray of shimmering blue solidified into the kneeling form of Darth Tyrannus, halfway across the galaxy.
"You have felt it," Darth Sidious croaked to the hologram. It was not a question.
"A tremor in the Force." Tyrannus spoke with Count Dooku's precise Coruscanti accent and elegant oiled baritone. "And undoubtedly the Jedi have felt it too. It was not your doing, was it, master?"
"No," Sidious denied, steepling his fingers. "And I doubt it was of the Jedi either. The fools aren't strong enough to make such tremors willy-nilly. Even Skywalker's footprint is far different from this new one."
"Shall I discover the source of this disturbance then, master?"
Sidious paused for only a moment. "This disturbance can be a choice, an object, or a person. And the galaxy is far too vast to search with nothing else to go on. It is true that something of this magnitude cannot be ignored. Stay as the Separatist Supreme Commander, however. Something this important will come to us instead. I will investigate on my end."
"Of course." Tyrannus bowed his aging head, bending his trimmed white goatee in the process. "Anything else?"
"Be mindful, apprentice. If an enemy truly is out there, it will seek to destroy us. We may at this very moment be on the precipice of doom."
Dooku nodded, and the hologram faded into a hazy blur, and disappeared.
Chancellor Palpatine scowled. It wasn't often that it happened, but Darth Sidious was unprepared.
He had a very bad feeling about this.