"Obi-Wan?" Anakin asked his wrist above the roar and rumble of the train. He steadied his feet as they ran over a particularly bad bump on the monorail. "Obi-Wan. Do you read me?"
"Loud and clear, Anakin," came the faint, clipped Coruscanti accent over the comms. "You're not going to believe this, Anakin, but-"
"Zombies?" Anakin dryly finished.
"I was- Yes, Anakin. Zombies. Not those parasites we almost saw Luminara get infected with, either."
Anakin shifted his eyes to the ever-emotionless Luminara right beside him. "She, ah, seems to be taking the news well."
"I suspect foul play. If it wasn't a Nightsister or Sith that caused this to occur, what did?"
"Your guess is as good as mine."
"We'll keep an eye out for any datalogs on our end. You focus on clearing the base of hostages and/or zombies." There was a hint of amusement in his tone.
"Will do, master." Anakin shut off his comm and peered out the right window, beyond the elevated tracks. The irradiated brown surface of Bracca zoomed far below him, a stark contrast to the sterile white conditions of the facility, and the solid navy blue atmosphere.
The Bracca UAC Research Facility was a series of geometric tall white buildings, weathered by exposure and suspended on durasteel and permacrete pillars that reached way down to the surface of the ancient crater that this part of the center had been built in. The crater was several miles in diameter; if Anakin squinted, he could make out the edge. Prior to the base's construction, the crews must have moved all the junk out of it, but the surface far below him had gradually begun to regain its trashy look. Many areas of the base were covered in girders: still under either construction or maintenance.
There were glowing spots all over the outside of many of the base's buildings. Anakin squinted some more. What were they?
"Next stop, Packaging and Unloading," chimed a soft woman's voice in Galactic Basic.
Anakin braced himself as the train slowed down. But even as they approached the tunnel in the edge of the next main building, Anakin spotted a row of very statuesque humanoids waiting on the tunnel's exit.
"Zombies on the platform!" Anakin called, and the thirty troopers, as one, readied their DC-15s and stood at attention. The train was slowing down to a trundle, and the troopers aimed at the doors.
They opened once the train came to a complete halt, and the sound of groaning undead filled their ears. Right before the sound of blasterfire drowned it out.
The Jedi didn't even have to draw their lightsabers. Before the last trooper was out of the train and onto the platform, twenty fresh zombie corpses littered the platform.
"These things go down easier than B1s," Anakin heard Fives comment as the clone trooper prodded a corpse with his boot. "One upside of this mission."
The train platform was dark like the rest of the base, but it did have natural light filtering from the tunnel entrance behind them. Anakin could spot more devastation and evidence of a fight; lights and wires hung from the ceiling, and at least half a dozen large, crusty bloodstains were spattered over the floor. The stains punctuated old blood trails leading through the only entrance and exit: a double door, busted off its hinges and its glass smashed into dust.
"Eyes up!" Captain Rex ordered, ushering a pistol at the torn-off door leading inside. "This is still a rescue mission, and time is of the essence. If there is any sign of actual life-" Rex stopped as he spotted an unusual glint in the doorway, which Anakin spotted too.
There was movement in the doorway, a shadow amid the slightly darker black. It was hunched over, though it could have easily been of human proportions. It softly gurgled like a sewage pipe.
Rex made no movement. Whatever it was, it did not sound natural.
A ball of flame materialized in the darkness out of nowhere. One second later, it was hurled at Rex. He flung himself backwards instinctually, so it glanced off his shoulder pauldron and fizzled out on the ground. Rex stumbled as the creature leaped out of the doorway, reared up, and shrieked as loud as it could.
It was indeed the size of a normal human. But it was brown, maroon, and armored in tough leathery plates with bone-white spikes curving out of its shoulders, spine, elbows, and claws. Its eyes burned orange with deepest hate, and its gaping fanged mandibles were wet with blood.
"What is that?! Kill it! Shoot it!" shouted the clones. Even as combined blue plasma bolts seared the creature to shreds, five more emerged from the doorway, shrieking, leaping, and forming orange fireballs in their palms. The clones collectively withdrew and aimed.
One had its limbs blasted off one by one by suppressing fire. Another was cut down by an impulsive Ahsoka, who speared it through the chest with a green lightsaber when it had gotten too close for comfort. Fives dove into and clotheslined the third one, and when it slammed on its back Fives stomped on its chest and fired three pistol rounds into its freakish predatory skull.
A fourth hellish creature gave a heavy swipe at Fives, and Fives tumbled to the ground. Immediately, Echo came from behind and stomped on the back of its knee, causing it to come to the perfect height for Echo to forcefully grab and break its neck. The final one had been seized through the Force by Master Luminara, giving Cal Kestis a chance to behead the creature. Its head bounced away, and Luminara let go with a heavy gasp. The creature crumpled to the floor.
"Master? What happened?" Barriss asked, rushing to her master. The fastidious Luminara Unduli now looked quite surprised, and her hand was shaking.
"The Force…" Luminara whispered, gazing upon the dead creatures with newfound fear. "...It seemed to resist the Force."
Anakin and Tapal turned to her, their interest piqued.
"Hold on," Cal said, gesturing. "So that thing resisted it? How? I thought…"
"It took me twice the effort to hold it in place," Luminara reported. "And something tells me if I used my normal effort, it would have broken out twice as fast. Or its power to break out of my hold would have doubled."
"But the Force is an energy field created by all living things," Cal Kestis recited from his teachings; he was still a Padawan, after all. "It surrounds us and penetrates us and binds the universe together. Life creates it and makes the Force grow."
"Then these things must not be entirely living," Tapal boldly claimed. "Zombies aren't entirely alive. These… imps, then, must be similar."
"Imps…" Anakin muttered. "Fitting name."
The newly christened imps chose that moment to promptly disintegrate into flurries of ash and smoke. Blasters were pointed at the remains, but they did nothing except evaporate into thin air.
Ahsoka shivered at the sight. "Man. You may be right, Master Tapal."
Anakin came forward. "We clearly aren't dealing with your average critter anymore," he announced to the thirty clones. "And certainly not battle droids either. Remember as we're going in, keep lights on and check every corner. Rex? Take us in."
"Right," Rex registered, and stomped to the double doors. "Melter, cover me."
Melter grunted in acknowledgment and hoisted his still-unfired Z-6 as he came right behind Rex. The Jedi, commanders, and the rest of the clones came behind, with Tapal at the rear.
The darkness of the metal hallway leading into the warehouse was inky and thick. But it was pierced by the blinding lights of the clone troopers, who could now see the extent of the hardened bloodstains all along the otherwise immaculate walls. Groans and creaks echoed from the very walls themselves.
Ahsoka's cadence of footsteps was broken by a soft tube beneath her heel that made her glance down. It was a severed arm, bloody and gnawed in three places to the bone. She hissed with disgust and surged forward, right beside Barriss.
"Ahsoka," Barriss pleaded in a very small voice. "I'm frightened."
Ahsoka could see it in her face, in the way Barriss glanced furtively around the dark and gory surroundings. Barriss seemed reluctant to say so, too.
"No one blames you," Ahsoka assured her, patting Barriss on the shoulder.
"But Master Luminara would!" Barriss hissed. "Fear leads to anger, anger leads to-"
"Then Master Luminara should shut up," Ahsoka murmured.
Barriss looked as though Ahsoka had slapped her face. "What?!"
"I know that she's your master, and I know that she's a great woman, but… Well, part of serving the Force is being honest, Barriss. That includes being honest with ourselves about what we're feeling."
Barriss pondered on that. "Even if it goes against what being a Jedi is? Jedi have no fear."
"Being scared and still pushing forward is the meaning of courage, Barriss."
Barriss stumbled over her words before feebly saying, "But Master Skywalker… He's The Hero With No Fear."
"The fear's still there," Ahsoka divulged. "Master Skywalker told me after Aargonar that what we choose to do with fear determines our character. It's that fear of what may happen to those he loves which gives him the motivation to save the day."
"Through passion I gain strength, through strength I gain power-?"
"Yeah, I know what it sounds like," Ahsoka sourly relented. "But it's working so far."
"You sure?" Barriss questioned. "There may be plenty beneath his surface we just don't see. Master Skywalker may be suffering far more than we think because of all he's chosen to bear."
"...Yeah," Ahsoka whispered as they rounded a bend and came into the open. "I've noticed that too."
The warehouse's enormous open floor had been cleared of most crates and shelves and equipment. What was left had been broken in pieces, scattered all over the floor, and caked in old blood. Embers from slow-burning fires of debris in the corners gave just a bit of light in addition to the white cones from the clone's headlamps. But the true light source was in the center of the warehouse.
It was a silhouetted totem with two uneven pincers reaching upward. Hovering between the pincers was a sphere of glowing red, casting the room in a devilish hue. A congregation of half a dozen zombies idled around the structure, and three imps stalked among them. Their attention was diverted when the clone's lights fell upon them, and the imps shrieked.
A hail of blue blasterfire lit up the room and tore through the ranks. The imps split to the sides as the zombies collapsed. They were agile little pests, but no match for the clones. Five seconds later, the last enemy was down.
Captain Rex approached the structure in a mixture of absolute shock and disgust. "Oh, kriff," he whispered.
Ahsoka saw Anakin push his way to the front, and heard him make a little growl in his throat. Ahsoka couldn't blame him; the totem had been constructed entirely out of raw red flesh. Sickening white bones and fangs stuck out everywhere, pimples in disgusting tan colors dotted the surface, and the whole thing was webbed in veins and intestines that pulsed and throbbed occasionally. Scarlet blood leaked and dribbled down it, making the structure slick and soft. The ground around it was a mishmash of more thin intestines and uneven mounds of flesh, in a pool of fetid blood.
The worst part was, Ahsoka could spot the remnants of a still intact upper skeleton in the curve of the structure. Meaning that this thing had been constructed out of fresh corpses. The blood trails from outside were the imps dragging them in here, to form this gory thing! And sinister whispers from the glowing sphere above it seemed to echo with fury, malice, and an entryway to something horrible beyond their wildest nightmares.
"What is that?" Barriss squeaked from beside Ahsoka. In the spare light, Ahsoka could see how stiff the Mirialan really was, how wide her eyes were, and how quick her breathing was. "I-it's just oozing with the Dark Side. It's… hungry. Evil!"
"It's disgusting," Commander Gree snarled, and he aimed his DC-15 rifle right at the gory mishmash. He did not fire just yet, though. "Remember what I said about worse than Separatists? I think we're looking at it."
Anakin, radiating revulsion, moved to the gory thing while drawing his lightsaber. The glowing red sphere was slowly forming a cycling humanoid shape within. It was an imp, halfway in development like an embryo.
With a bshrrr, a humming three-foot bar of radiant sky-blue plasma sang to life in Anakin's mechanical right fist. Half of Anakin was painted blue, and the other half was a deep red. Ahsoka felt chills run over her body. Light and dark inside him in equal measures.
Anakin angled the blade at the sphere and thrusted. But it stopped right before piercing the glowing portal. Anakin pushed, and the blade wavered, but did not go further. There was some kind of invisible field in the portal preventing the blade from piercing the imp inside. The gory nest– for that's what it seemed to most resemble– hissed in succession a few times, as if snickering at Anakin.
Anakin perceived it too, and his scowl grew deeper. His eyes scanned the nest itself and located a particularly large pustule. It was thin enough that something could be seen inside: a pulsing organ resembling a heart.
With no further preamble, Anakin swirled his humming blade once and impaled the gore nest's heart.
Immediately, the gore nest let loose a high piercing scream of agony that sounded eerily human. The sphere of energy flickered in and out of existence. And the nest erupted in a burst of flesh and blood that dirtied Anakin's boots and robes. Anakin scooted back and kicked some of the bloody flesh bits away.
His attention was drawn to the sudden flashes appearing all over the room and up in the rafters, though. The clones and Jedi immediately readied their weapons and ignited their lightsabers. The flashes died down to reveal a dozen imps, shrieking once before scampering all over the room. And more were on the way already.
Anakin split an imp in half, shot to another, and cleaved it down the middle too. Coordinated blasterfire began to take care of most of the rest of the imps on the ground. Fireballs flew through the arena. Clones fell back from the fireball's range. More imps replaced the fallen ones.
One imp got too close for comfort to Commander Keen. Keen managed to keep the imp's snapping jaws at bay by shoving his DC-15 horizontally between his fangs. This gave him the needed leverage to then twist and slam the imp onto his back, freeing the blaster. Commander Keen stomped on the imp's head so hard, a snapping crunch accompanied the break of his skill.
Ahsoka spotted Cal Kestis wall-jump and climb up to one of the lower rafters. Once there, he reignited his sapphire lightsaber and bisected another imp. Barriss Offee had fallen back to protect the clones in the rear, while Jaro Tapal ignited the sapphire blades from both ends of his lightsaber and cut apart three imps. Eager to get in the battle, Ahsoka flipped over the head of Commander Gree and impaled two imps through their foreheads with both of her suddenly-ignited lightsabers.
Three brighter flashes drew Ahsoka's attention, and over the noise of battle, she yelled, "Master! More of them!"
Anakin turned in time to register the newcomers. Three towering humanoid brutes, easily as tall as Master Tapal, had appeared in the center of the warehouse floor. Their sunken eyes landed upon the clones, whose blasterfire was stinging against their chitinous armor. They simultaneously roared and, in a move that startled the Republic forces, began to sprint and leap towards them much higher and faster than they expected. Each footstep rumbled the floor beneath them.
"Keep your distance!" Barriss encouraged, moving further backwards, and almost tripped over a groaning zombie's feet. Barriss yelped and spun around, severing the zombie's arm, and hacked at the zombie's chest until it fell apart.
Sure enough, a layer of zombies had spawned behind the Republic forces, sandwiching them between the zombies and the brutish new monsters that were now almost on top of the front lines. The clones noticed this and began to take care of the zombies, but the new monsters demanded the attention of the Jedi.
As one of the white-and-violet monsters leaped into the air, about to smash into a group of clones, Ahsoka couldn't help but feel like these hellish beasts were almost as numerous and deadly as the Jedi knights were. They could certainly serve as front-line soldiers. Knights of Hell itself.
Luminara used the Force to blow back the clones that were right where the first Hell Knight was about to land, which he did with a heavy shockwave. The clones rolled to their feet and began to hose the Knight down with blasterfire from three different angles. The lasers stung him and chipped off armor bits, but the thing was tough.
The Knight swiped while lunging, and two screaming clones were hurled to the floor. Luminara lunged too, cutting the Knight's knee and reversing her emerald lightsaber so it pierced the Knight through the back.
The Knight bellowed and swiveled so fast Luminara was flung off her feet and rolled to a halt right before hitting the right-most wall. And Luminara's lightsaber was still embedded in the Knight, who was now painfully trudging over to the fallen Jedi.
Thinking quickly, Ahsoka hurled her smaller and yellower shoto. It spun end over end before sticking emitter-deep in the back of the Hell Knight's head. The Knight stopped in place, teetering from its momentum. Ahsoka willed the lightsaber back to her hand, and the brain-burned monster toppled to the floor.
The second Hell Knight had staggered in place and was on one knee as a result of continuous sustained fire from Melter, who was laughing maniacally at the chance to hold nothing back. Blue blasterfire chewed into the Hell Knight's chest until the lasers emerged from the Knight's back and scorched the floor; there was now a hole in the demon wide enough to put a fist through it. But it still did not go limp until Anakin came from behind and buried his lightsaber into the Knight's temple.
The final Hell Knight was trying to punch at Jaro Tapal's twin-bladed lightsaber, which had given him long sizzling cuts along his enormous arms. Tapal wheeled the blue weapon around the Knight's blows with expert fluidity. As the Knight leaped into the air to smash him, Tapal used a burst of speed to evade just in time. Before the Knight could turn, Tapal lashed the Knight along his thighs and brought him down to size. On his knees, the Knight whirled around and knocked Tapal in the chest with a fist, skidding him back.
The Knight suddenly felt a spear of blue plasma going through his skull and out of his chin. Cal Kestis had leaped from the rafters and was now standing on the Knight's shoulders, his lightsaber as deep as it could go.
After a moment the Knight keeled forward, and Cal tumbled off and de-ignited his lightsaber. He looked up at his master before turning aside. "Sorry, it looked like you were in trouble."
"You did well, boy," Tapal congratulated, and stood straighter. He winced and clutched his ribs. "Those beasts hit hard."
The firefight ended; once the final imps had been shot down, the zombies had been easy pickings. The two clones who had been swatted aside were groaning and helped to their feet by others. Fives and Commanders Gree and Keen were overseeing their men's well-being.
"Sir?" Anakin heard, and Anakin saw Bookworm come over to him. Bookworm took off his dark green helmet to look at his datapad better. "I've been making a record of the monsters and atmosphere we've faced so far. Did you want to take a look and familiarize yourself?"
Bookworm showed his datapad, which had a growing bullet-point list on it. Anakin spotted the terms Zombie, Imp, Hell Knight, and Gore Nest, which each had a small paragraph of information beside them.
"Thank you," Anakin said. He squinted at the pad. "Come up with those names yourself?"
"Your Padawan's contributed some," Bookworm admitted. "She's quite imaginative."
And Bookworm tapered off to go show Master Luminara the list.
Rex sidled to Anakin once Bookworm was gone. His helmet, too, was off. "Sir," Rex quietly said. "What in the galaxy have we gotten ourselves into?"
Anakin sighed from effort. "Not sure, Rex. But it's only going to get worse."
"That's… what I was afraid of," Rex confided. His hand grazed his twin pistol grips. "Sir, I don't know if the men can handle it. Especially if there are survivors in here."
"Shall we send them back, then?" Anakin rhetorically asked.
"Well, no," Rex admitted. "It's just, well, we don't have any intel or a sitrep. If we're going to go forward, it's… gonna be messy."
Anakin pulled his face and folded his arms. "I refuse to let it come to that."
"Sir, you can't save everyone," Rex told him. "And I know you already know that, but we were lucky none of us went down here, and we can't guarantee every time."
Anakin was silent. Instead of responding to Rex, he simply nodded, went to his comlink, and chimed it to life. "Obi-Wan. We've got additional hostiles, different categories."
"What did you find?"
Anakin explained everything from the imps to the gore nest to the Hell Knights. Obi-Wan was silent through it all until Anakin ended.
"We've managed to avoid the brunt of what you've experienced. None of these 'Gore nests,' or 'Hell Knights' so far. We're trying to figure out what exactly happened in the base, but without power, we can't access the base's records, even if we got to a terminal that wasn't smashed to bits. For now, all we have is context clues."
"We're on our way to the power plant now. What have you found so far?" Anakin asked.
"A great many men died in combat or were cannibalized in some fashion. We've spotted plenty of bodies and parts, and I can still feel the lingering fear these men had. Whatever happened in here, the base wasn't breached by some outside force. Perhaps a good section of men were given experimental injections that turned them into zombies, but that doesn't explain the imps or Hell Knights. And this Gore Nest is a completely alien concept. From what you've told me, I think they may be portals or tethers that can summon the creatures en masse."
"Do you think it may actually be Hell we're talking about here?" Anakin asked, a little lower than before. "Like the Corellian religious Hell?"
"I'm not entirely sure," Obi-Wan admitted. "It's a long shot. If it is, we're in for a fight. If not, and it's simply an alien race, we may need to open negotiations with its leader-"
"No," Anakin shut down. "We are not entertaining the notion of compromise here, Master! Thousands of people have been killed. The Dark Side stinks off the demons, and not just in an, 'oh, you were angry or sad one time' way that you and the rest of the council-"
"Anakin, this isn't about you! If there is a way to resolve this without further bloodshed, wouldn't we want to go with that? Jedi keep the peace."
Anakin grimaced. "But there is no way, Master. If we want to live, we're going to have to fight our way outta here."
"You do that, then. I'll continue to see to the why before we go about thinking of how."
Anakin nodded, then remembered Obi-Wan couldn't see that. "Roger, Master. Over and out."
Obi-Wan frowned as the comlink chimed off. Anakin had sounded hardened in that conversation. Zombies and imps and Hell Knights would do that to you, but Anakin had been like this for a long time, and Obi-Wan suspected this experience would simply exacerbate his problem.
Obi-Wan was kneeling beside a small hole in the metal wall, allowing natural light to pour into the Resource Operations main lobby. Obi-Wan, Kit Fisto, and their team of ten clones each had arrived by tram not long before Anakin had called them.
"Let's move, " Fisto encouraged, coming to Obi-Wan from behind. "The men are anxious."
Obi-Wan agreed; he could feel it in the thick, smelly air. The clones were all in one body, pointing their weapons and headlamps into the corners of the dark lobby, and their steps were slow and cautious. They crunched broken glass beneath their heels and squished in puddles of rancid blood. Obi-Wan spotted evidence of fighting everywhere. Streaks of soot marked in the furniture, tears in the metal walls and gouges in the floor, bloodstains over… well, everything.
A flowerpot in the corner had been shattered, its dark soil scattered on the floor and its tall plant dried out. A once-luxurious couch had been upturned, split in half, and collapsed. Obi-Wan spotted a pair of legs beneath the couch's remains, lying in a small puddle of blood. Paintings on the wall and lying facedown on the ground had been torn by a terrible pair of claws. Consoles had been smashed, the stairs had scorch marks and snapped steps, and runes had been painted with blood on available spaces wherever they could fit. A 333rd Battalion clone trooper was scanning some of them for entry into their database.
Cody had gone on ahead with three other clones to press their position forward. Two more of the 212th clones, Waxer and Boil, were peeking over the destroyed entry desk, rustling around.
"Found some papers," called Waxer after a few seconds. "And even some datapads. The auxiliary power must have kept them charged."
Obi-Wan and Kit strolled over to Waxer, who handed them off and pointed his blinding headlamps on the papers. The papers were crumpled and some were singed at the edges and stained, but enough was there for Obi-Wan to read.
"Development updates… records of visitors… power usage reports," Obi-Wan muttered, shifting the papers and datapads. He scanned his eyes down the paper, till they landed on an anomaly. "Here, near the end of the records, power levels went up dramatically in the… Nihilus Labs."
Kit Fisto scowled at the name. Upon seeing it, Waxer gestured with surprise at the usually-cheery Nautolan Master. "...Sir? Is there something I should know?"
"Nihilus was the name of a Sith Lord who lived thousand of years ago," Kit Fisto solemnly informed. "I shouldn't say lived, though, since he wasn't truly alive. He had devolved into a mass of dark spirit energy, held together only by his hunger and desire to consume the universe."
"Sounds… like trouble," Waxer succinctly put. He leaned over Obi-Wan's shoulder at the records with renewed interest. "Why would the scientists name a lab after a guy like that?"
"That's the question, isn't it?" Obi-Wan rhetorically asked. He raised his voice and directed it at the railings on the second floor, accessible by twin staircases behind the reception desk. "Cody, any word from the recon team?"
"So far so good, General," Cody crisply called from the second floor. "We should have no trouble clearing this place out before proceeding to the records hall."
"Wait," Boil said from behind the reception desk. He bent beneath the desk and jiggled one of the locks on one of the cabinets. He exasperatedly shot the lock at a vertical angle, then pulled the cabinet out and began shuffling through old files. "There may be more here… Pens… Cards… Ooh, some Donpilier candies. Almonds, nougat. Anyone? Ah, suit yourself... Got some year-old reports, not gonna do us any good… batteries… Ooh, a clone trooper action figure. ARF trooper, with his little pistol and macrobinoculars. Isn't it cute? Obsidian Edition and everything! But aside from that… Huh. Nothing."
"Nothing?" Waxer repeated, coming to his closest friend. "Not even a sticky note?"
"Yeah. Seems like the guys here wanted their ops to be secret," Boil commented. He pocketed the ARF trooper toy and tossed the batteries back into the desk with three metallic impacts.
"Let's move," Obi-Wan ordered, indicating the twin stairs behind the lobby desk. "We'll find our answers in the records hall. It should be just a quick jaunt to the next building, but we'll have to go outside."
The 333rd and 212th troopers gradually moved up the stairs as a collective unit. Then they spread out in groups of four clones each to secure the second floor of the Res Ops center, peering around corners and peeking into shadows of even minor things like flowerpots. There were, of course, zombies, but from far away, shambling slowly, they made easy pickings. Occasional sounds of blasterfire accompanied Obi-Wan's gradual push.
Obi-Wan found himself ahead of the other clones, plodding on alone in the echoey halls. He rounded a corner and started backwards a step, a hand to his chest. Obi-Wan had nearly instantly kissed the completely red upper half of a body stuck in the wall.
It was once a young Republic officer, his dead mouth open and his arm missing at the shoulder. Around his neck was a red keycard, even before the blood soaked into it. Obi-Wan sighed heavily, then used the Force to levitate the keycard around his head and up in the air. Obi-Wan grimaced at the rancid, disgusting sight, but he needed the keycard just in case.
The bloodied holopad this young worker was dangling over chimed to life upon detecting Obi-Wan's movement. A young, well-dressed Republic officer fizzled into existence, and he spoke with the relentless fake, cheery optimism of fancy corporate talk. "Remember: At the UAC, you're not just a number! You're also a data point in our upcoming soul sacrifice projections. Thank you for keeping those margins far above demand."
Obi-Wan raised an eyebrow at those words. As the blue hologram faded out of existence, Obi-Wan found his mind racing. Soul sacrifice. The UAC was doing something absolutely terrible, but the only method Obi-Wan suspected of soul sacrifice belonged to the Sith. Their power over the Dark Side could lead to many abilities that Obi-Wan considered unnatural. The existence of the Nihilus Labs only strengthened his hypothesis.
And words came to his mind. A deep, oiled, regal bass interrogating him on Geonosis.
What if I told you the Republic was under the control of a Dark Lord of the Sith?
Dooku had most likely been toying with his mind, but suddenly, that phrase jumped out at him. Who else could have the access to these Republic laboratories? Who else could do something so evil, so unnaturally?
Once more, the holopad fizzled to life. "Dismemberment rates may have skyrocketed. But so has our taxpayer funding! Remember: If you lose a limb, you are now 25% more energy-efficient."
Obi-Wan sighed, shook his head, and turned away.
The Res Ops center was soon cleared out entirely, and Obi-Wan gathered all the available troopers to the closest exit to the records hall. Obi-Wan organized the men in rows of five men, then scanned the red keycard, hit the controls, and the door shot into the ceiling with a hiss. The outside skies were still navy blue and thick with smoke and rain in the distance.
But none of that mattered in that instant.
A bloodied, shrieking imp was waiting for them on the walkway, which hurled a fireball. Obi-Wan, fast as lightning, ignited his saber and deflected it, sending the fireball back into the imp's chest. It staggered in place, giving Commander Nyx time to headshot it.
His heart hammering from the surprise, Obi-Wan scanned for more hostiles. Anakin had mentioned that where one imp was, there were usually more.
And indeed, four more imps from further down the walkway began running up, all forming fireballs in their hands.
Kit Fisto swiped his hand out, and the imps all staggered from the blast wave, with one falling off the side entirely. Coordinated blasterfire took care of the rest.
The outside walkway leading into the records hall had waist-high guardrails, and was thick and well-reinforced with durasteel, but was also suspended high across a gaping chasm by buttresses and support beams beneath it. Wind blasted Obi-Wan's face and made his hair bounce. If Obi-Wan turned to the side, he could see a deep gorge running underneath the bridge. Every step Obi-Wan and the troopers made on the walkway made a metal clank.
Obi-Wan cast his eyes about more as they advanced. The walkway had been a battleground, scorched and dented in many places. Dead troopers and Republic personnel littered the bridge in piles of meat, metal, and blood. Flies hovered around some of them, crawling between the cracks in the trooper's armor and feasting openly on the flesh of Republic officers.
Boil made a strangled noise beside Obi-Wan as he saw a dead trooper's exposed face, skinless and shriveled and rotting. He scooted away from it as he passed by, nearly slipping on a bloodstain. He snarled and kicked the stain, then readjusted his stance and hoisted his rifle.
"Sir," Commander Cody muttered, leaning in close to Obi-Wan's ear as they traversed the bridge. "I couldn't help but overhear your talk with General Skywalker on the comm. Is it true that we're dealing with, er, demons? And not simply aliens and science experiments?"
"It's within the realm of possibility," Obi-Wan cautiously answered, avoiding stepping on a sprawled, half-eaten arm beneath him. He wrinkled his nose at the smell they were wading through. "Although how it happened, as well as the operative difference between the two, I can't say."
"Demons. From Hell. A religious Hell. Demons! I'm just… gah, trying to get a read on the situation," Cody admitted with no small amount of frustration. "I can't guarantee all the boys will make it out alive. There's only ten troopers per battalion down here for now. We need to reestablish contact with the base to gain reinforcements and discern if there are survivors."
"Then that shall be our priority after finding out what happened in the records hall," Obi-Wan said.
Cody nodded, satisfied.
The group was halfway across the wide bridge when a deep rumble vibrated through the bottom of their soles, and a gasping, screeching, choking chorus began to rise. Every trooper hoisted their guns, pointing in every direction, but no enemies were airborne. Obi-Wan squinted into the air, then closed his eyes and reached out with the Force. Doing so let him sense the life signatures of everything around him.
Something was wrong. There was a tremendous movement beneath the bridge, slithering up the buttresses and the support beams. But Obi-Wan couldn't discern anyone down there with the Force. It was as if there was an enormous hole in his Force depth perception.
And that let him know, instantly, what it was.
"They're under the bridge!" he cried out, igniting his sapphire lightsaber. Kit Fisto ignited his own emerald saber too, near the rear of the platoon. The troopers between the two Jedi quickly adjusted their rifles, and as the first enemies began emerging from the edges of the bridge, the troopers began firing.
Imps comprised most of it. They were as athletic as monkeys, swinging up from the sides and pulling themselves up with the help of the guardrails. Just as quickly as they appeared, they were shot off. It never took more than two or three shots to take one down.
But they just kept coming. And the imps emerging from further down the bridge were shrieking and leaping at them, fireballs forming in their hands. While Kit Fisto was busy taking care of the imps at the rear of their forces, Obi-Wan spun his saber in a defensive flurry before blasting small clusters of imps with little balls of Force that sent them flying in all directions.
Cries and shouts of alarm came from the clones, and the angles of their blaster shots began angling upward. "They fly now!" cried some of the clones. "Watch out for their spit! Spread out! Take them out! NOW!"
Obi-Wan turned to get these flying variants into his vision. These new types of demons resembled imps in concept, but were tan instead of maroon, with leathery, torn wings erupting from their backs, long black blades in place of claws, and an arcing, neon green acid spit that burned small holes into the durasteel bridge. They resembled, to Obi-Wan, haunting gargoyles on ancient temples.
Three of the six in view had been shot down already, but that meant the endless imps had more of a chance to rush over the edge and into melee with the clones. But the imp's greatest strength lay in its ranged fireball attacks, and as ferocious as their claws were, the clone's armor could withstand it, and they took initiative. One 212th trooper staggered an imp by shooting its leg, then snatched it by the head and wrung it with a wet snap. A 333rd trooper opted to charge an imp head-on, feint a chop with his gun, and deck the imp in the face to stagger it. The trooper finished him by stamping on its talons, grabbing it by the arm, and hurling it back off the bridge.
Commander Cody's blaster was almost on full auto, unloading sizzling blue blasterfire into a lump of imps that had appeared on on edge of the bridge. His back was turned, leaving a small opening that an imp on the other side of the bridge used to leap at Cody from behind.
Hearing the scream of the flying imp made Cody spin on his heel and smack it aside with his blaster, making it thud hard to the ground. Cody reached for the imp, snatched it by his leg and arm, and hoisted the thing up just in time to block a spray of green acid a Gargoyle spat at him. The acid glob sizzled into the imp's midsection instead, dissolving it before Cody's eyes and making the imp shriek in pain.
That also made it easier for Cody to tear the imp in two with a meaty rip at the ruined midsection. Cody hurled the bottom ruined half at a mess of imps on the edge of the guard rails, and slammed the other half of the barely-alive imp into the bridge hard enough to break his arm off. Cody stamped on his head to make sure, spattering it into a mess of gore, then picked up his blaster again and resumed firing at the Gargoyles.
Obi-Wan was busy taking care of most of the imps from further down the bridge about to make it into melee range of the clones, flurrying his lightsaber to chop limbs off and throwing imps with the Force. It was a stressful ordeal, but was nothing Obi-Wan couldn't handle.
And then a sizzling, glowing orange rune appeared on the bridge just ahead of the group, and Obi-Wan turned to face it. His heart sank as a flash of light appeared from the rune and solidified.
So that was the Hell Knight Anakin had been talking about.
It charged at Obi-Wan with reckless abandon, swiping an imp aside and off the bridge before leaping into the air, its knees bent and its fists raised high to prepare for impact.
Obi-Wan focused on the midair Hell Knight's knee. In a single instant, he grabbed it through the Force and, extending his hand, straightened the Knight's leg and forced it at a bad angle.
When the Hell Knight landed on its stiff leg, the sheer kinetic energy traveled through the length of its stiff leg at precisely the wrong angle. That snapped it with a cracking report like a slugthrower, forcing the wailing demon into a kneeling position.
Perfect for Obi-Wan to swirl his blade and pierce him through the thick skull covering most of his head.
Oddly enough, it felt to Obi-Wan that he needed to use twice the amount of effort to pierce the Hell Knight's body than usual. And with a lightsaber, that meant something.
At the rear of the column, Kit Fisto was enduring a battle with a Hell Knight of his own. The Knight was already covered in long, deep black lashes from Fisto's emerald lightsaber. The abomination roared and punched, overextending his tough and muscled arm.
Which Fisto sheared off with a downward cut. The heavy appendage hit the bridge with a dull thump.
As the Knight roared, in pain this time, Fisto ducked under a swipe from his other arm that ruffled the green tentacles on his head, then spun and thrust, hard, into the Hell Knight's chest. He ripped the saber out, cutting up as he did, and the Knight collapsed. Fisto swirled his blade once and plunged it deep into the Hell Knight's skull, to be sure.
Each of the gargoyles had been shot down by now, and the last of the wounded imps were being finished off. Obi-Wan watched as Boil repeatedly fired into the skull of one particular imp, even once he was dead.
"Easy, trooper," Commander Cody advised Boil, a hand coming to his shoulder. "You're wasting heat."
"Yeah, I know," Boil sourly conceded, but he still took a moment before lowering his DC-15. "That one got Waxer with a glancing fireball." He kicked the imp's body coldly, and it slid to the edge of the bridge and fell off.
"Is he all right?" Obi-Wan asked, approaching the wounded trooper. "Is everyone all right?"
Nobody was dead, which Obi-Wan thanked his lucky stars for. That could have easily gone bad. But one 333rd trooper's calf had been grazed by a gargoyle's acid, and Waxer's shoulder armor had been singed into a melted mess. He let out a heavy exhale as he rotated his shoulder. Two other troopers were wincing as they moved, which indicated bruising beneath their armor.
Clone trooper armor was designed to deflect shrapnel and absorb energy shots; usually, troopers could survive a cheap blaster bolt to their armor plating, though the bruising underneath would be tough to deal with. These fireballs the imps used seemed to be rather low-damage and low-energy, but it was unlike anything Obi-Wan had seen before.
"That's the last of them?" Commander Nyx grouchily asked, holstering both of his twin blaster pistols.
Kit Fisto outstretched his hand and took a second to search through the Force. "...That's it. I can't sense them beneath the bridge."
"I can't sense them at all," Obi-Wan commented.
"Neither can I," Fisto admitted. He smiled. "I sense the holes in the Force where they should be."
"If they truly are demons, Master Fisto, then that would explain it. It would explain quite a bit." Obi-Wan glanced at the bodies littering the bridge, both old and fresh. "The runes, the monsters, the imagery. What else could it be?"
"Well, if nothing else, it narrows down which religion to believe in now," Nyx sourly commented, overhearing the conversation and coming over. "Just follow whichever one opposes this. That's one good thing about this whole mess."
"The question is, why would Hell show up here?" Kit Fisto wondered, hooking his lightsaber back on his belt. "What in the name of the Force has the UAC been researching?"
Obi-Wan was almost scared to find out.
No other demons appeared on the walkway, but Obi-Wan kept furtively glancing about anyway. It felt odd, to consider that relying on eyesight worked as well as the Force when it came to these demons.
Demons. From Hell. Goodness gracious, was that truly what they were?
Upon reaching the end of the walkway spanning the canyon, Cody held a hand out to stop Obi-Wan. "That man up there. Stay back."
Obi-Wan silently agreed. A humanoid, bloated and overgrown and fat, was simply standing there on the end of the weather-worn bridge, blocking their entrance into the records hall. As Obi-Wan examined him closer, he could tell that he wasn't alive. And that tibanna gas canisters and rhydonium capsules were embedded into his flesh, prominently sticking out like tacks.
He also made no reaction to their movements.
Obi-Wan slowly pushed Cody's hand down and approached the unnatural zombie. The zombie made no sound, no acknowledgement of his approach. Obi-Wan slowly came up the steps of the bridge to the little round abomination taking up the space on the walkway leading to the records hall.
Obi-Wan waved his hand in front of the little ball of flesh. The zombie made no movement. He just drooled sticky, dark red blood from his gaping mouth.
Obi-Wan stepped gingerly around the zombie. The rhydonium and tibanna canisters embedded in him made the zombie highly lethal and explosive if not handled delicately. But he was also unresponsive, making the ball of tortured zombie little more than an environmental hazard.
Obi-Wan gestured at the rest of his troops. "All clear! Just step around him! I'll get the door open!"
He turned to the nearby door and used the Force to unlock and swish the door clean open.
A tall, muscular Hell Knight was waiting on the other side, who snarled and turned his head to Obi-Wan the instant the door swished open.
Obi-Wan's blood froze the instant this happened, but his mouth moved involuntarily. "Hello."
The Knight bellowed and leaped at Obi-Wan.
Obi-Wan dashed backwards, nearly hitting the zombie-cueball-thing. As the Hell Knight pounded into the metal walkway with a squeal, Obi-Wan turned to the explosive zombie, who had still not responded to the Hell Knight's impacts. Thinking quickly, he seized the zombie through the Force and hurled it at the Hell Knight, who was getting back to a standing position.
The zombie exploded in a ball of gorgeous blue-and-rainbow flame that incinerated the Hell Knight, tore a deep hole in the walkway, and bent the frames of the door, keeping it wide open. Obi-Wan staggered back on the angled walkway, his cloaked arm up to his face to protect from shrapnel.
"General!" Cody cried, rushing to his side and patting his shoulder. "Are you all right?"
"I'm fine," Obi-Wan insisted, taking his sleeve down. "But I think we just discovered a kind of zombie we'd be actually happy to meet." He glanced at the gaping hole the explosion had caused in the metal walkway. "Although we'll need to be careful in how we use it. Fisto and I'll get you and the troopers across the gap. It's not too far, but I'd rather not risk it."
"You think any records will still be intact in there, sir?" Cody asked as Obi-Wan picked him up with the Force. "Wah! Uh, The demons would have made a mess of it."
"We'd better inspect quickly, then, won't we?" Obi-Wan asked, setting him down on the other end of the walkway.
Cody took a deep breath and leaned on the guardrail. "Sounds wise, General. I hope General Skywalker and the others manage to get the power back on."
"I sure hope so too, Cody," Obi-Wan confessed. He patted Boil's back as he came up next, then levitated him over as well- the beginning of many.