Being in a cloning tube isn't great but it's better ergonomics than being tied to a rock.
Beta'd by Sesparra
Killing the first tuk'ata was easy. It was more focused on the other pods full of stirring, dazed beings who were much easier meals than a battle-ready relic of the Army of Light, and as such it didn't see Mara's lightsaber coming until the blade was halfway through its throat.
Of course, the glowing energy weapon spinning back towards her was a good marker of her position, and by the time the hilt smacked into her hand, there were more than a few slavering jaws pointed in her direction.
A flourish of Mara's off hand produced a swirling vortex of fire, roiling just above her fingers, and though the tuk'ata gave it a wary look, they most certainly did not let it stop them from pouncing, forcing her to first detonate the vortex in a wash of flame to obscure her exact location and then bisect two different tuk'ata to escape their attack.
A moment's focus compressed the pile of confused tuk'ata, living and dead, down to a single point for the space of two heartbeats, and when it passed, nothing identifiable was left oozing across the duracrete floor.
That done, she turned back to the row of pods and-
Shoved off from the ground, leaping over the spinning blade that she ignited telekinetically from where it had been on her belt, then deflected a sweeping blow from the other lightsaber before landing on the tilted surface inside of one of the pods that had been empty, boots sinking slightly into the pad-like mattress inside.
The red-bladed lightsaber was wielded by a human man, his face a shade too gaunt to be aristocratic and his sneer only just more deranged than arrogant, and the purple-bladed one was held by a Weequay, whose whipcord-thin body gave the impression of strength and also restraint, which was at odds with the deranged look in his eyes. Both wore only pants, and though they lacked the dripping slime that came from being in a bacta-filled environment, they bore the reddish cast to their flesh that spoke to prolonged exposure to the stuff.
"Join me," said the man, in a voice that sounded halfway between someone who had been gargling with tibanna and an aristocrat who had just woken up, "and you will be richly rewarded when I return to Telos."
"Be silent, failed apprentice," snarled the Weequay. "You don't deserve to wield even a Sith's lightsaber, let alone to make offers to my new student."
"You assume," said Mara, igniting her own blade, "that I would become the student to one who is as deeply controlled by the Dark Side as either of you. I am a warrior of the Army of Light, and greater darknesses than you have tried to sway me from this path- you shall not move me."
"Then on your own head be it," said the Weequay.
The human struck first, a predictable Ataru offense combined with a clumsy attempt to exert his will over all within his sight. The latter merely washed over Mara's senses like a wave passing over a jetty, and the former lacked the speed to make it truly dangerous, especially when combined with how overcommitted he was to his leaping swoop. Three distinct motions had the clone dead on the floor, his lightsaber landing neatly in Mara's other hand without extinguishing itself just in time for her to interpose it between the Weequay's blade and her leg.
In contrast to the human's mild wave, the Weequay's offense was like a rockslide, just close enough to Juyo to throw her off with where it differed, and still carrying with it the oppressive pressure in the Force that the Seventh Form had long been known for.
Fortunately enough, Niman was all but built in counterpoint to Juyo, and as she extended her own awareness beyond her body, the psychic assault that accompanied his physical offensive had less and less of an effect on her.
"Diplomat," the Weequay snarled. "Your foolish pacifism will be your undoing at the hands of Soora Bulq!"
"I said I was part of the Army of Light," replied Mara, smoothly matching his relentless offense with the almost brazen confidence of one communing deeply with the Force. "What part of that would imply that I'm a pacifist?"
"You are a Jedi," he spat. "That is enough for me!"
"I don't think you quite understand what I mean by Army of Light. I predate the Ruusan Reformations-" she took a guess at his rank within the Order- "-Knight Bulq. I come from a time when the Jedi Order is unafraid to wage war against the Sith, and indeed some of us felt called to do so in the name of the Force."
He stepped back, the oppressive psychic pressure seeming to weaken. "Impossible!"
"The Force is a powerful ally," Mara said, shifting into an aggressive variant of a Niman guard as he backed away. "Many things that even we Jedi think impossible, it is more than capable of doing."
"No, no, no, you lie!" He shoved out at Mara, sending her skidding back perhaps six inches, but instead of pressing the offense, he dashed to one of the weakly moving Sephi women in the pods and closed his fist around her throat. Her neck broke with a snap, and Mara could feel as the incomplete connection she had with the Force drained into him.
Mara timed her leap forward just so to take advantage of the pulling of the gravity from that other galaxy, bounding out of the way of Bulq's crackling stream of lightning and planting her feet quite firmly on the skull of a tuk'ata that thought it was sneaking up on her as she did so.
She pushed off, slamming its head to the floor with a spike of raw force, just barely ahead of the lightning crackling forth from his hands, contorted into a clawlike shape as they were.
This time, the lightning was noticeably brighter, forcing her to look away and very nearly fouling her landing with how she raised one hand to rub at her stinging eyes, and by the time that she'd managed to turn her gaze back to him, he'd already ended two more instances of the Sephi woman, each paler than the last, and his eyes were starting to glow with how much power he'd managed to tear out of them.
"You could have been heir to the Sith," snarled Bulq, an odd reverberation in his voice as the hellish glow of his eyes grew brighter, "but your slavish devotion to a dead order has ensured your own death!" His eyes flashed like twin suns sent into his face and-
It was like someone was pulling every atom in her body, trying to rend them apart through raw hatred, and Mara was only distantly conscious of the way that both the lightsabers in her hands fell to the floor, such was the focus she required to draw on the Force to resist this new attack of Bulq's.
The flensing pain of the technique decreased after a moment, the Weequay likely unable to maintain the hatred that it took to fuel such a powerful, draining expression of the Force, but not enough that Mara could afford to devote anything less than her full focus to opposing his fell attack. He faltered again, and Mara pushed harder, but that only triggered a redoubling of his hatred, the world starting to leach red around her. Then, it stopped, almost as if he hadn't turned such a baleful power on her in the first place.
It took a moment for Mara to return her focus to the material world, and her gaze cleared just in time for the Sephi woman's head to fall to the ground next to Bulq's severed arm, cut halfway between elbow and shoulder.
The red-bladed lightsaber winking out in her hand was a dead giveaway for what had happened- she called the blade to her while Bulq was distracted and attempted to exploit the man's single-minded focus, which succeeded in sparing Mara his attack but only assured her own death. As frail as she looked even in the half-light of the too-long hall full of pods, jaundiced and almost skeleton-thin, she wouldn't have been able to survive his attention even if she'd been wearing a full suit of beskar instead of the almost flimsi-thin hospital robes that all the female denizens of this room had been wearing.
Still, she'd bought Mara time, and she didn't have any intention of wasting such a well-timed gift, not with how much it had cost.
By the time Bulq had looked back to Mara, her lightsaber was already halfway across the distance separating them, and though he managed to interpose his own blade, it occupied his attention sufficiently that he didn't see the bloodred lightsaber reigniting itself and scything across, severing his legs an inch or two above the knee. The brief moment of focus that Mara took to set her lightsaber rebounding off his blade, completing a full circle and searing through flesh and bone alike to send half of his skull spinning off to the side as he fell, was probably overkill, but at the same time, given the legends of how some of the Sith of Revan's time could survive mortal injuries through hatred alone… well, best to be sure.
After Mara reattached the two other lightsabers to her belt, she took a moment to survey the room. Most of the pods had emptied themselves, and those that hadn't were… well, Mara'd never been entirely sure whether Sith chrysalides and other creatures really needed to eat, biologically speaking, but they were more than capable of doing so.
Every here and there, one of the humanoids that had been in the tubes had managed to put up a fight, tearing a tuk'ata or vornskr apart with their bare hands, but by and large, they were all but completely feral, not a hint of rational thought that Mara could sense through the overwhelming haze of rage that she could all but taste, filling the air with its bitter flavor, and having given into their baser feelings, they were soon to be preyed upon by the prowling beasts, skulking around just outside their line of sight.
Part of Mara wanted to step in, to protect them from the ravening chrysalides, but she couldn't feel a mind that wouldn't try and make her bleed for that, except for-
Every here and there, one of the humanoids that had been in the tubes had managed to put up a fight, tearing a tuk'ata or vornskr apart with their bare hands, but by and large, they were all but completely feral, not a hint of rational thought that Mara could sense through the overwhelming haze of rage that she could all but taste, and having given into their baser feelings, they were soon to be preyed upon by the prowling chrysalides, skulking around just outside their line of sight.
Part of Mara wanted to step in, to protect them from the ravening chrysalides, but she couldn't feel a mind that wouldn't try and make her bleed for that, except for-
Every here and there, one of the humanoids that had been in the tubes had managed to put up a fight, tearing a tuk'ata or vornskr apart with their bare hands, but by and large, they were all but completely feral, not a hint of rational thought that Mara could sense through the overwhelming haze of rage that she could all but taste, and having given into their baser feelings, they were soon to be preyed upon by the prowling chrysalides, skulking around just outside their line of sight.
Part of Mara wanted to step in, to protect them from the ravening chrysalides, but she couldn't feel a mind that wouldn't try and make her bleed for that, except for-
The mental loop broke under the weight of another galaxy's gravity dragging a new system into its orbit, an icy world all but glowing in the Force as the power of the magic it carried with it infused Mara. For a moment she could almost feel a crystalline shell growing around her, before it drained into her spirit, glimmers of light refracted off of phantom facets remaining for just a moment as she felt the idea of gemstones, of crystals and facets, imprinted on her on a level too deep for mere words to convey.
This time, when the subtle psychic intrusion came, she let it pass through herself, refracting through her but not changing her, and now she could see the group of three half-dead-looking women inching away from the melee as quietly as they could.
Unfortunately, Mara wasn't the only one who managed to push through the compulsion, and she only just managed to land from the desperate leap she made, decapitating a vornskr that was actively lunging at the three women with a backhanded stroke that was definitely not a desperate flail as she sought to solidify her balance. This, in turn, caused whatever technique they were using to conceal their presence to shatter and every unoccupied creature to turn its head to the easy prey that had just revealed itself.
One of them, whose sunken eyes had already been closed, let out one last gasp before collapsing, body vanishing before it hit the floor. The others slumped, one falling almost bonelessly to the tile and the other barely managing to remain standing by grabbing hold of Mara's left hand.
"Careful, don't set off the lanvarok," she said, shifting to brandish her lightsaber at a tuk'ata that was getting a little bit too close to comfort-
The woman clinging to her gasped, a wet-sounding noise, and her grip weakened to the point where she was already falling to the ground by the time Mara had turned to separate the vornskr whose claws had perforated her lungs from its head. A brief effort of will had the tuk'ata that had taken her shifting focus as an opening and lunged at the less bloody woman at her feet hurtling upwards to break against the ceiling, then another moment's focus brought the still-breathing corpse back down to land on another tuk'ata that thought it was being clever by sneaking up behind Mara.
As stalwart as she stood, she wasn't sure that she'd be able to achieve what she'd come over here to do. Already, she'd lost two of the people she'd tried to save, the one the vornskr had caught having already faded into complete insubstantiality, and the third seeming moments away from following them into the Force was… it rankled at her.
She cast about for some way to try and save her and came up short, save for one idea.
In her mind's eye, she could see the crystalline structure, bound up with enough energy to crack a planet in half, refracting endlessly through infinite facets grown from a core of platinum.
The Force grew heavy, the weight of the decision of whether to create this material or not swelling until it was all that Mara could sense… and then she made her choice.
And that's that!
Perks earned:
Gemavic (Gemcraft-Frostborn Wrath, 400 CP): This perk allows you to summon gems made of different materials using gemcraft, including materials from other jumps. This only works if the material is a transparent or translucent crystal, unfortunately. Most materials are much worse for conducting magic than crystalized mana, but perhaps you can find a use for a diamond the size of a living room? Non-Magical gems are exceptionally cheap to create you know, since they're essentially sparkly paperweights. Feel free to be creative with shapes.
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