Entirely too many instances of one person to be safe.
Beta'd by Sesparra
Over Mara's tenure in the Army of Light, she'd seen a great many lightsaber wounds, some fatal and some not.
This one was very definitively the former, and given the way that the corpse had fallen onto its back before the head had been removed, the person had likely been backpedaling or otherwise retreating from an oncoming attacker.
The discarded husk of a personal blaster, cut in half but still recognizable as one known less for its accuracy and more for an impressive rate of fire, as well as the two streaks of carbon scoring on the walls, told Mara a story- the person had likely been either a guard or a lookout and had been expecting some sort of combat, but were likely taken by surprise by the lightsaber wielder, disarmed quickly, and then permanently removed from the figurative battlefield. She frowned, spared a moment to go through the less-decayed pouches on their belt, but found nothing aside from a handful of credit chits, which were worthless to her.
"What I wouldn't give for a holorecording," she grumbled, standing once again.
That distant galaxy tugged at her, but it passed rapidly, and she continued speaking aloud for the sake of ordering her thoughts. "So we have at least one lightsaber wielder on site, and they're either fast enough to rush a guard, stealthy enough to assassinate one, or able enough with the Force to immobilize them rapidly and take advantage."
She frowned. "Given the darkness shrouding this building I wouldn't be surprised if it was the latter, which… implies a Dark Sider of no small amount of power."
Mara disengaged her lightsaber, then closed her eyes and reached out to the Force. "Who I don't want to warn."
She found herself lamenting, as she proceeded through the dark hallway with only the Force to guide her, that she hadn't had the time to retrofit one of her utility belts into a stealth field generator- inasmuch as she could hide her presence within the Force, she'd never managed to achieve any sort of physical camouflage without relying on physical aids like the aforementioned stealth field generators.
The corridor opened up into what looked to be a guard station full of flickering lights, if the duracrete personnel funnels and overturned tables thick enough to serve as armor plate on a Star Destroyer were any indication- and one that had recently been host to a battle, too.
Even aside from the carbon scoring all but covering the blast shields, solid duracrete counters, and other pieces of cover, and the lightsaber scoring, the bodies quite naturally gave that away.
Most of the bodies were wearing the kind of uniform, semi-armored tunics that were common in higher-end private security outfits, paired with the odd pauldron, helmet, or other piece of more rigid armor, reliable blaster rifles, a handful of holdout blasters or other sidearms, and few, if any, more specialized weapons. Conventional security then, competent enough but not truly prepared for a determined attacker with resources to spare on exotic means.
Those dozen or so corpses were older than the rest… or rather, the imprints of their deaths were, and they lacked the telltale marks of lightsaber wounds, making it significantly more likely that they were killed by more conventional weapons.
Mara confirmed her guess by leaning over one poor bastard whose head had all but exploded- their eye was missing, but the skull was intact enough to reveal a lack of exit wound, which meant that it was a blaster bolt dumping all its energy into the brain that had killed this particular guard and not a lightsaber.
That done, she turned to the three other corpses scattered around the rest of the room.
They, too, had armored fabric in their clothes, albeit less high-end than the guards, and though the assortment of reinforced cloaks and tunics wasn't anything even remotely resembling uniform, that lack of uniformity was telling in and of itself, revealing that whoever these people were, they weren't half as disciplined as the people who had been guarding the facility, so how in all the Corellian hells did they manage to fight through the defenders when they'd dug in?
Mara found the answer right next to one of them, and as it turned out, the lack of specialized equipment to protect the guards from gas grenades was their undoing.
The grenade (undetonated, oddly enough), however, was in a hand lying several feet away from the body it had presumably come from, once again severed by a lightsaber. The body in question sported more lightsaber wounds, some burns that spoke to whoever had used the lightsaber seeking to disable their opponent with the maximum amount of pain and one dead center at the base of the sternum.
That spoke even more to a Dark Side adept, one catching a foe thought defeated trying to perform a mutual kill with a grenade and then reveling in their agony, before murdering them close enough to watch the light leave their eyes-
Mara tore herself away from the memory of the act, clenching her fist around her lightsaber and taking comfort in the echoes of the Jedi who once wielded it until she could pry her fingers loose.
The grenade flew out of the severed hand and clipped itself onto one of the standardized magnetic latches on her belt as she returned her lightsaber to where it normally hung at her left hip. Hopefully, she wouldn't need to use such an indiscriminate weapon, lacking any kind of proper respiratory protection in her kit, but she could probably keep away from places where she'd be breathing, and she'd long since found out that it was better to have these kinds of tools on hand than to shun them and be caught flat-footed.
A quick check of the rest of the room revealed nothing else immediately obvious, save for the fact that this wasn't the center of the dark miasma, and Mara's stomach wasn't strong enough to want to stay for however long it would take to check it any more thoroughly.
As she came to another dark corridor, she paused for a moment, then all but smacked herself for forgetting that she could manifest an aspect of her being in feline shape. She did so, then sent it padding on through the darkened corridor ahead of her, the flickering light of the few unsmashed light strips in the ceiling too dim for human eyes but not for the uncannily sharp eyes of the cat.
The cat slunk out of the corridor into the next room, all tawny fur and sinuous, threatening grace, preceding Mara just long enough to ensure that there wasn't anything worth pouncing on before it found a nice dark corner to curl up in and watch.
Mara, on the other hand, took one look around the room, taking in the myriads of (mostly broken) screens and panels all but lining the room's duracrete walls, and beelined for a cluster of three intact screens, distinguishable from the others by the screensaver image of Alderaani mountains instead of static.
There was a password required to get into the machine, of course, but it was a relatively simple one, and only a moment's concentration allowed Mara to type it in, opening up the interface to a fairly high-end security system from some Kuati company. This wasn't one that she'd had the chance to encounter before, but she knew there was a limited number of logical places they could put the camera control, and that was where she went first.
The distant galaxy's gravity pulled on her, but not enough to interrupt her search through the cameras, and the more she flicked through, the more her concern grew.
Many of the interior cameras had been destroyed, and very few of them were labeled with anything helpful (most having long strings of aureshnumeric gibberish labeling them), but she could see a row of cylinders, big enough to fit a Wookiee into with room to spare, long enough that it went past what that camera could see in either direction. Inside those cylinders… well, some were empty, some had been smashed and contained some sort of gunk or, more worryingly, bloodstains, and some had people inside them. The most common were young Sephi women, looking worryingly similar, but all sorts of humanoid species, spread through all developmental stages, were included, from Aleena to Zeltrons, with even a couple of non-humanoids like tuk'ata curled up in tanks.
She couldn't find any more cameras that opened into that room, unfortunately, but even that number of organisms would be a problem to handle, and if this was a cloning facility as she suspected it to be, what with how… unnatural the tuk'ata appeared and how many of the same diminutive blonde woman were in cylinders down there, that would be disastrous either in the Emperor's hands or out of it.
That said, he likely had others that he could take advantage of, so destroying this facility was secondary to Mara actually figuring out what the hell was going on in here so she could better assess the risks of the situa-
The Force screamed a warning in Mara's ear and she threw herself sideways, narrowly managing to avoid being sliced in half by a descending lightsaber blade.
She rolled to her feet, her own lightsaber flying off her belt to her hand and igniting as she spun to face the person who attacked her.
He was a human, pale enough to seem almost corpselike if not for the blood vessels that glowed a lurid red under his skin, which was exposed thanks to him wearing a set of robes whose sleeves had clearly been torn off after having been made, based on the dangling threads, and both the point of his brownish red lightsaber and Sith-yellow eyes were fixated on her.
"Intruder," he snarled, his voice echoing throughout the room and inside Mara's head like she was sitting within a massive bell that had just been struck. "I, Freedoon Nadd, will strike you down in the name of our order of Siith Lords!"
Something about that statement struck Mara as odd, but seeing as how he lunged forwards, lightsaber tracing out a horizontal arc aimed directly for her head, she didn't have nearly enough time to muse on it.
Mara ducked under his attack and snapped her own blade up to sever his arm. The blur of violet light slammed directly into his elbow and stopped, tutaminis stronger than any she'd ever felt before interfering with the energy of her weapon, and as he raised his forearm to bring his blade scything down again, her blade went skittering up it, and she only barely managed to disengage from the strike she'd overcommitted to and interpose her own lightsaber between his and her skull in a high Soresu guard.
The lightsaber struck her like a rancor high on all the combat stims on Nar Shaddaa, cracking the duracrete, but she managed to hold the block firm, and with him off balance from the strength of his blow being wasted into stone, she managed to send his blade off to the left before flicking hers up at his eyes.
It didn't do any damage, but it did get the man to growl and rub his at his face, blocking his view of her, and she leveraged that moment of inattention to the hilt.
By the time he lowered his arm to glare at her, she'd already primed the gas grenade and gotten it halfway to his own utility belt, and a feint with her own lightsaber occupied both his attention and his blade long enough that, by the time he noticed the click as the grenade magnetized to his belt, it was already too late for him, and the gas hissed out.
A single telekinetic thrust smashed his nose flat, and as he opened his mouth to roar in pain, he breathed in a sizable amount of the gas, and welts were already starting to emerge on his face.
Mara leapt back, clearing distance just in case he was powerful enough to fight through the pain and attack her again as much as to escape the gas, but she needn't have bothered, and he collapsed in the center of the cloud of gas before it detonated thanks to the heat of his lightsaber.
She remained on her guard for a moment longer, making sure that no one else was about to make a dynamic entry, before extinguishing her lightsaber and gesturing at the corpse.
It flipped over onto its back, hateful eyes glaring up at nothing, and after studying its features for a moment and failing to recognize it, Mara clenched her fist and the embers merrily flickering away at his robes flared up into a veritable pyre, swiftly reducing the corpse, as well as the lightsaber still clutched within dead fingers, to ash.
She moved to return to the screen she'd been watching, but stopped when she saw the gaping rent in the panel underneath it and the gradually increasing number of glitches covering the camera feeds.
Mara wasn't quite petty enough to kick the pile of ashes that had formerly been her attacker, but she gave it more thought than she would admit.
And that's that!
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