Power and Betrayal: Chapter 12

The "next room", it turned out, was the central core of the Trayus Academy . . . or what was left of it.

At one time, long ago, it was probably the center of a volcano. The room was very large, almost perfectly circular, and the top was open to outside air. The topmost edge of the circular wall was jagged and uneven, not at all flat, as if it had once extended upward much higher but a substantial portion of it had collapsed and broken away.

The walls were also jagged, and covered in small ledges and outcroppings, rising at a slight angle so that it could probably be climbed by even a novice climber--if not for the planet's random seismic activity.

The "floor", if you could call it that, was about 20 meters below the entry and was made up entirely of rock and rubble that had broken off of the upper walls and fallen inside to fill in the volcanic crater below.

But the one big, unmistakable feature that grabbed everyone's attention was the assembled pieces of a large core of solidified rock--hardened by the same process that had been used elsewhere throughout the academy--that were positioned in the middle of the crater a few meters above the entry door. The core was supported by three large pieces of rock that formed a shallow-angled tripod which both supported its considerable weight and pressed it's pieces inward to hold them in place together.

The core itself had a series of claw-shaped curved pillars that ran around the outside of of it, none of which were completely intact. There were four of them in all, in an asymmetrical arrangement that suggested that there had originally been eight, but the other four had been destroyed. On top of the middle of the core, there were two smaller claw-shaped pillars, both of which were severely damaged.

At the center of it all was a red circle, perfectly intact, about 2 meters across. It was difficult to be certain just from looking at it, but using the Force it could clearly be seen to be a massive red synthetic crystal--one that contained a dark, black core.

The entire structure, suspended over the floor as it was, appeared fragile--but evidently was still solid enough to stay in place though the occasional quakes.

Galadina was the first to enter, trying to catch up to the Sith who had run directly up to the middle of the core, and immediately felt a powerful wave of nausea and despair. This place was a strong nexus of dark side energy, tightly focused by the massive red crystal, and all four of them felt the physical effects to varying degrees.

As the foursome entered and approached him, they noticed that he had evidently formed a sort of shrine at the base of the small pillar opposite from where they had entered.

There, propped up against the pillar, were the bones of some long-dead person dressed in a simple robe, set up in a kneeling position. The front of the hood fell down over the top of the skull, barely concealing that the skull itself was cracked. A skeletal hand poked out from the right sleeve, but with no corresponding left hand on the other side. A series of lightsabers, and parts of lightsabers, lay on the ground surrounding the bones--over a dozen of them in all.

And directly in front of the little shrine--in fact, it's centerpiece--was a Sith holocron.

It was active.

Above it there was an image of an old woman, wearing what appeared to be the same robe that adorned the skeleton behind her. When she spoke, it was deliberate and measured--without a trace of anger or hatred.

"...have done an old woman a great kindness by restoring this place. In return, I have restored to you the ability to wield the saber. But if others here know the name of Darth Traya, then it is time for you to learn your final lesson. If I have made you the Lord of Blades, I did so because it amused me, and not because I ever expected you to become anything more than the pitiful creature you are. So know now that I was once known as the Lord of Betrayal, and that your usefulness to me has come to an end. Good bye."

As the image faded, the Sith simply stared at it with incredulity, speechless.

"He is NOT going to be happy." Kari said. "Ten-to-one he takes it out on US."

"Guys," Dina added, "...I don't know how, but his aura . . . his anger and his power are growing. Like . . . Synzia powerful."

"Are you sure?" Kinnan asked. "Synzia is more than EIGHTEEN-THOUSAND S.P.C."

"Yeah, I see it too." Dianiss answered. "He's soaking in a lot of dark energy from this place. I think the poisons in his system were holding it back before, keeping him weak."

After a moment of staring at the holocron, he began muttering something too quiet to be heard. But as his anger rose, so did his voice. ". . . NOT A CREATURE!!!" he finally screamed out.

Dina approached him slowly and carefully. Her lightsaber was still on her belt, her arms were outstretched and her hands were open and visible. However, she was also at the ready to draw her saber and drop into a combat stance in an instant. "No. Not a creature." she agreed. "I just want to talk to you."

"You will be proven worthy." he said in a quiet, but seething voice. He bowed his head a bit, but kept his eyes locked on Dina as she continued to approach.

Dina's senses were on high alert, and instinctively she dropped into a full combat stance, pulled her lightsaber to her hand and activated one of its blades. The Sith hadn't moved at all, but one of the lightsabers from the collection behind him had flown around him in a wide arc towards her and suddenly activated in a surprise attack. She barely blocked it in time.

"I don't want to fight you. I'm a Jedi." she pleaded, and was taken by surprise that he didn't recall the saber back to himself. Instead, the crimson blade simply spun around and attacked again from the opposite side with enough speed that she realized that she would be unable to spin herself around in time to block it.

But she was not without options. Truthseeker was no ordinary lightsaber. Instead of moving her body around to block the attack, she manipulated the internal switches of her saber to divert power from the primus blade to the cordus blade at the opposite end of the hilt, instantly changing from a standard Soresu grip to a reverse-handed Shien grip--and putting that blade in position for a back-handed block.

"Please stop this. I don't want to hurt you." she again pleaded.

He remained unmoving as he responded "The others are Jedi . . . they must pay." with the same quiet intensity as before, still clutching the unactivated lightsaber in his withered right hand. Soon two more sabers--one green and one blue--came floating gracefully around each side of him to take up positions behind and to the side of her, joining the red one that held position in front of her. Together, the three surrounded Dina as if wielded by three unseen assailants.

Kari raised her hand in the air and said, "For the record, I'm actually NOT..."

"SHUSH!" Dianiss snapped.

Dina switched her saber blades back and returned to a Soresu stance. "You don't have to do this." she said, ready for the attack.

When it came, all three sabers sliced in from three different directions. She responded by using the Force to push the red saber in front directly ahead and away from herself, making enough room that she could do an acrobatic Ataru-form leap into a somersault. That flip allowed her to use the brief moment of facing behind herself while upside-down to quickly strike at the blue and green sabers when they converged on the spot where she had just been standing a moment before.

By the time she landed in a very low, knees-bent crouch, a fourth saber (this one also red, but double-bladed) came spinning at her, which she narrowly dodged by rolling over onto her back, going fully prone on the rock floor and allowing it to narrowly pass over her.

"What is she doing?" Kinnan asked with an incredulous tone.

"She's doing what she always does." Dianiss answered. "She's protecting us . . . and, in a way, him too." Dianiss used the Force to form a protective bubble around Dina before she added, "But she's going to need our help."

"We just need the holocron." Kinnan said. "If she can keep him distracted . . . ."

Dina was quickly back on her feet, using the bubble's protection to block three more rapid attacks until she could use the Force to call upon her own defenses to ward off the ones that followed.

Without missing a beat, Kari followed Dianiss' lead, tossing out a pair of miniature probes that would track Dina's movements and apply small doses of kolto to her, followed by a third probe that broke on the floor at Dina's feet and released a cloud of vaporized kolto all around her.

Suddenly Kinnan leaped in at the Sith, his lightsaber activating mid-air, ready to strike. As he brought it down, the Sith responded with nothing more than a turn of his head in Kinnan's direction and a momentary twitch of his head. At the moment of the twitch, there was an explosion of Force energy that radiated out in all directions but primarily focused at Kinnan. The blast hit him with enough strength that it completely stopped his forward momentum and pushed him backward, so that he hit the wall just behind and to the right of where they had entered.

From the way his body tumbled down the slope of the wall, it was clear that he'd been knocked unconscious.

"Is he okay?" Galadina called back to them, still dodging and weaving and--mostly--avoiding the saber attacks. The ones that she didn't avoid were limited to glancing blows that hurt but the wounds were minor.

"He will be." Dianiss answered as she used her healing abilities to stabilize him. She estimated that it would still be a few minutes before he regained consciousness.

"Okay Master Endurance..." Kari said. "Time to try it MY way." After clicking a few controls on her wrist, she disappeared.

"Dina, you're going to have to fight back." Dianiss called out.

Galadina was continuing to duck, move, and deflect his attacks with the acrobatic precision that she'd always been famous for. "I can't." she answered. "His mind is broken. It just wouldn't be right."

"I was afraid you were going to say that."

"We just need the holocron. You and I can do this."

Unfortunately, as Galadina continued to bob and weave, she also started to observe a pattern: he seemed to be learning her moves . . . and developing counter-moves.

Again and again he would return to the same arrangement of the red-bladed saber in front of her with the blue and green ones behind her forming a triangle and surrounding her. The double-bladed red saber would spin in place above her head. Again and again they would all move in unison to attack her, but the patterns were varying. Any time she tried to dodge a certain way, it would work once or twice, but soon he'd be moving the flying lightsabers in a new pattern that would counter her avoidance strategy.

Granted, Dina had a lot of moves and was well-trained at fighting multiple opponents at once. But he was quickly learning her fighting style and adapting with frightening intelligence for someone whose 'mind is broken'. The glancing blows were becoming more common, and the occasional stab that made contact with her body was becoming more frequent. Without Dianiss' healing to keep her going, this fight would have already been over.

In the mean time, Kari had been using her stealth generator to slowly make her way over to the holocron, being careful to skirt around the outside edge of the rocky core where the Sith and Galadina were fighting. Now, approaching the holocron, she was forced to get much closer to the Sith than she liked.

With the generator turned up to its highest setting, she quietly sneaked up behind him--shotgun in hand and pointed at his back--until she was close enough to the holocron to bend down and grab it.

But touching the holocron turned out to be a mistake.

Instantly two more lightsabers, both with yellow blades, sprung up off the ground and activated right next to her. The unexpected movement startled her--enough that she reflexively squeezed the trigger on her shotgun and blasted the Sith with two shells' worth of shrapnel across his left shoulder and lower back.

Unable to muffle the shotgun's BOOM nor mask the muzzle flash from being visible, the stealth field generator overheated itself while trying, and immediately shut itself off to cool down.

Kari had been startled by the lightsabers, but she had startled the Sith just as much with the sudden shrapnel wounds, and it made him hesitate for just the moment she needed to escape by leaping forward into a quick roll toward the edge of the core.

...and over it.

Kari barely got out the word "Annie!" when she felt her downward momentum towards the rocky floor below get abruptly diverted sideways and back upward toward the entrance. With the skill that comes from years of practice, she spun her body upright and gracefully landed on her feet next to Dianiss.

"Thanks."

But the relief of the escape was short-lived, since those two yellow sabers were slowly following the path of Kari's fall and rise, set at obtuse angles from each other as if held by some unseen wielder in a two-weapon attack stance.

--

"WHAT . . . is THAT???" Major Mereana asked, pointing into the next room at one of the creatures standing inside. It was unclear whether or not they were even conscious.

"Aren't those . . . those primitive tribal things from Tython?" Colonel Corvioch responded.

"You mean Twi'leks? Nah, these things are much better looking." Captain Jer'ell said while looking over at Mereana--the only Twi'lek in the squad.

"I'm sorry..." she quickly shot back, "...I know you're trying to twist my lekku, but I'm just relieved to know that I'm not your 'type'."

The brass had insisted that this op would be easy, yet it was important enough that a SpecForce unit like Havoc Squad should be the ones to go in. All they had to do was secure a corporate office and its adjacent research laboratories where a renegade executive and his security staff were refusing to surrender--and rescue the civilian staff trapped inside. It would have been a a job for the police, really, except for those pesky adjacent research laboratories.

Those labs were the reason the Republic was trying to seize control of the facility. Czerka Corporation had been caught red-handed doing numerous illegal biological experiments, and the initial intel on the site confirmed that some of them were genuinely dangerous. 'There's bound to be a few surprises, so I want my best team on this one.' General Garza had said.

And surprises there were. Already they had been forced into firefights with heavily-armed security staff backed up by military-grade droids--one of which was a giant assault droid nearly ten meters tall that made effective use of electricity as a weapon. What THAT was doing inside an office building was anybody's guess.

The facility's Chief of Security had also made a stand inside a makeshift armory, using anything he could grab inside (from incendiary probes, to freeze grenades, to high-explosive rockets) to stop them.

But now, approaching the laboratories for the first time, it was starting to go from merely dangerous to dangerous and weird.

This particular lab had four of these creatures in it, two in some sort of isolation capsule and two others standing there in a daze, looking like they were waiting for something, but having no idea WHAT they were waiting for.

"Flesh Raiders aren't REALLY from Tython..." Major Kendsel explained, "...but this IS the first time I've seen one anywhere else." As a former Jedi, Kendsel had seen more Flesh Raiders than he could count--and certainly enough to see that there was something off about these four, both to the naked eye and to his Force senses. After a moment, he added "Ordinarily, I'd say they're not even a threat . . . but there's something not right about these four."

"All right, move in and neutralize. Non-lethal ordinance." Colonel Corvioch ordered. "But if you have to, . . . put 'em down."

With their usual military precision, the two Vanguard troopers--Jer'ell and Mereana--entered the room first. The two Commando troopers followed and flanked left and right, at which point Colonel Corvioch gave the order to engage at the same time he did.

"Firing...."

The weapons fire evidently set off some kind of alarm, which sealed the emergency doors behind them, trapping them all in the room with the now very awake and very hostile Flesh Raiders. Immediately, the two creatures started spewing some sort of slimy, acidic liquid all over the room. That acid spray did serious damage the squad's armor and weapons, causing immediate malfunctions.

"I thought the Jedi sent new Padawans out against these things." Corvioch shouted over the alarm sounds.

"The ones on Tython don't do THIS." Kendsel shouted back.

As the squad medic, Corvioch was doing an admirable job of providing supplemental power to his squad's armor auto-repair combat support systems, and of applying kolto to everyone to heal up the acid burns. But he quickly realized that this was a losing battle, especially since the Flesh Raiders themselves were demonstrating some sort of resistance to the squad's weapons.

"Jer: Keep 'em busy! Mer: Break off and get the doors open! Ken: We need an exploitable weakness . . . NOW."

All three nodded acknowledgement, and went to work. Mereana disengaged and started examining the doors for a way to get them open--whether that meant slicing the electronics or blowing them open with brute force. Jer'ell fired off a brutal electrical attack on the both of them to ensure that neither one would attack anyone but him--allowing them all to do their jobs uninterrupted and allowing the Colonel to focus his med-support on just one trooper.

Kendsel stopped firing, and closed his eyes to concentrate.

Kendsel had been a Jedi once--and technically still was. But while there had been a time when he showed great promise as a student with remarkable sensitivity to the Force, he ultimately never was able to truly master his abilities. The only thing he ever really became GOOD at was sensitivity to seeing what the Jedi Masters called shatterpoints: weaknesses in objects that could be used to break them with the most minimal amount of effort; or special moments in time where the most minimal of actions held the possibility of resulting in the most profound consequences.

That innate ability to know where to shoot something for maximum damage--and when to act to avoid disaster--made him an excellent marksman and tactician. It was also why Colonel Corvioch, who'd had extensive experience in working with the Jedi, had made a point of adopting this Jedi wash-out into HIS squad--that, and the recommendation of Kendsel's former Padawan Master, Master Annanya.

Through all the chaos and noise and painful acid burns, Kendsel struggled to clear his mind and to see the world around him exclusively in the Force. He was trying hard to walk that emotional line between worry and urgency on one side, and calm detachment on the other.

It seemed strange to him that--normally--in situations of dire threat and emergency, he would see a vision of it in advance, along with a glimpse of all the possible things that could happen after some key moment that would stand out with special clarity. He had no such vision related to these Flesh Raiders.

On the other hand, these two creatures seemed to have no weakness that he could discern in the Force.

It was unusual for both of these situations to occur at the same time for him.

The fact that it was happening NOW meant that he was missing something--and something fundamental.

--

Kari drew her pistol and started firing intently at the approaching yellow lightsabers. To her surprise, it was working. The sabers halted their approach and held position while they deflected her blaster fire away. Kari kept firing.

"NOT HELPING!" she suddenly heard from Galadina up in the center of the room. In all the excitement of seeing that shooting at the sabers had stopped them, Kari failed to notice that her blaster fire was being deflected up to the middle of the room at Galadina--and she was having to dodge and/or use her own saber to reflect that same blaster fire away from herself.

Dina did, however, manage to direct a few shots in the Sith's direction, and one of them struck him hard in the right shoulder.

"ENOUGH . . . INTER...FERENCE!" the Sith shouted out. "Just the LITTLE one!"

Dina appreciated the few seconds of rest that his shouting granted her, and decided to try to extend it by keeping him talking. "I guess by 'Little One' you mean me. But we don't..."

Dianiss and Kari never heard how Dina's sentence ended. As she spoke, a giant cyan-purple ball of pure Force appeared and enveloped the entire central rock core, with Galadina and the Sith inside. It had a certain electrical quality to it that made it slightly transparent but still difficult to see through to the inside--and it created a kind of rumbling sound like thunder that one had to shout over to be heard.

Kari breathed a sigh of relief as the approaching yellow lightsabers deactivated and simply fell to the ground. But when she looked over to Dianiss, she was shocked at the look of pure horror on her Jedi friend's face.

"She's gone." Dianiss said.

"She's right THERE!" Kari said in an are-you-crazy? tone of voice, pointing inside to where Galadina's blurry shape was semi-visible.

"No no." Dianiss responded. "I can't FEEL her. It's like she doesn't exist. That barrier is blocking the Force itself. I can't penetrate it to heal her now."

Kari looked down at the hand-held controller for her healing probes and saw that it had completely lost connection with them.

"But..." Dianiss continued as her hands started to shake, "...that's not even our biggest problem. Dina WAS holding Kallig back...and now she isn't. I can feel him waking up."

Continue to Chapter 13 . . . .