ED : Chapter 34: Contact With the Enemy II

Enhancing my strength, speed, and stamina with my Matukai training even as I back-flipped to evade his follow-up low-J cut at my legs. Ventress was on me as I landed, with Karoc only a tick late in joining her to press me two on one.

...

Again from the corner of my eye, I saw Yaddle bounding and flipping all about the upper left corner of the square we found ourselves within. The Jedi Master reminding me of a hummingbird flitting unpredictably about, this way and that.

Constantly changing her angles of attack and vectors of evasion via a mastery of Ataru only Yoda could better. Preventing the droid and Dark Jedi from effectively combining forces to hem her in.

I was meanwhile working my way through a series of swift yet methodical blocks and parries while getting a sense of my opponent's capabilities.

I'd already taken an undoubtedly painful divot out of Karoc's jawbone on the right side after a late parry on his part, but now I was regretting teaching Ventress that her pressure was the only thing keeping the significantly less accomplished duelist alive.

I was wondering why Darth Bulq considered it worthwhile even sending this second-rate Makashi stylist along. His movements and cadences felt strangely incomplete, and therefore almost entirely ineffective.

The Soresu Karoc slipped into when I took his right ear was significantly better, but I was so much stronger in the Force that bulldozing his redirections with Force-assisted strength wouldn't prove too difficult in the long run.

Worse, falling back into the far more defensive Form was dramatically reducing the pressure upon me.

His zone of defense was only useful to Ventress's far more accomplished yet strange Makashi-Ataru hybrid style insofar as Karoc became a thorny hedge she could try to pin me against.

A split-second opening appeared as I blade-locked vertical to horizontal with the assassin's twin blades, so I hammered him with a Force Push before the man could shift his weight and complete his lunge.

The tattooed fighter hit the wall opposite the tunnel we'd entered by with enough strength to blast the air from his lungs, but I hadn't been given nearly enough time to put the whole of my strength into the push.

Karoc was stunned for a couple of moments, but was back on his feet by the time Asajj picked up the tempo three heartbeats later.

The switch came at no signal I could discern, but the suddenly sharper keening of the Force warned me anyways.

One second a silently hateful Ventress was trying to force me back into a slowly advancing Karoc's advance, then a back-flip and reverse somersault caused her to pass in mid-air a front-flipping Vinoc.

Her engaging Yaddle as Vinoc disengaged gave the scorched and wavering droid a much needed respite.

Whereas the instant the lean black haired man's feet hit the ground, everything on my end changed. With an effortless grace, the twins both adopted what I'd perceived as a dangerously incomplete and therefore ineffective use of Makashi. 

The holes in their dueling vanishing as if they'd never been, because they weren't holes. Each man functioned as one half of a dueling whole requiring two bodies. Their eerie synchrony allowing each man to perfectly anticipate and complement the other as they worked me from either side like deadly mirrors.

In the other corner of the room, I saw the Magna-Guard finally lose it's right arm at the elbow. That was where Yaddle's green shoto-saber had struck nearly a dozen times to get this result.

Only to have the droid switch to using it's electro-staff like a sword with it's remaining arm. Adopting a rough yet very serviceable Djem So presentation I found as disgusting as I'm sure the Jedi Master did.

Scorch marks criss-crossed the construct's breastplate. Mute testimony as to Yaddle's ongoing efforts to bring the dangerous droid down.

Every time I forced a gap in the otherwise seamless tandem-dueling of the twins, I tried to yell a warning to Yaddle. The need to warn her about the redundant backup systems in the droid's chest beat at me with an urgency so great I'd only experienced it a couple of times before.

Always when the life of another was in danger. Yet whenever I began to shout that warning, it was as if Karoc had planned two moves ahead to keep me so engaged defending myself I only had breath for the fight as two red blades assailed me right and left without a pause.

The hitch in Vinoc's footwork was almost imperceptible, but his recovery put his saber a hair off being perfectly balanced on it's horizontal to the ground high guard.

The last quarter of my saber's length came down on the tip of his with the speed of a striking viper, looped beneath, then drove up from underneath his bloodshine-blade at it's midpoint. Sending it straight up and nearly wrenching it from his grasp as I stepped in diagonally and drove a knife-hand under his adam's apple.

Vinoc lurched back and gagged as Karoc used the Force to go right over top of me. His blade clashing against mine from above as he passed and landed beside his brother to prevent me from pressing an advantage there.

That suited me right down to the ground, because Karoc could either keep me from killing his twin or shouting to Yaddle. I could see the frustration in his eyes as he realized as much, and spared him a black look that said.

"You know you're only prolonging the inevitable, right?"

Before I shouted loud and clear "It has a backup processor in the center of it's chest-plate, Master! The thing will keep fighting even through a decapitation, if that processor's intact!" The sudden recovery of Vinoc allowed the brothers to circle me once more.

Forcing me to call on every bit of speed I possessed to catch up to Karoc's lunge with an left-to-right swipe meant to force his red 'saber off its line in time to beat Vinoc's descending cut aimed at the middle of my forehead.

The crackling hiss of our blades coming together was an angry hornet's nest in a sack sound. I gave ground during the blade-lock. Allowing Vinoc's blade to creep closer to my skull as his brother smoothly pivoted and tried to cut me in half at the waist.

I dropped suddenly, and both brothers leaped up and back in anticipation of a cut at their legs. Which meant Karoc was caught out as he continued to drop from his leap when I rolled over onto my back and hurled my spinning lightsaber at his ankles just as he landed.

He barely got his blade down in time to stop momentum from carrying the active energy shroud all the way through, but I could see I'd cleanly severed the tibia and heard the much thinner fibula crrk as his weight came down on his savaged left foot with an anguished groan.

Which left me rolling again and again to avoid the cuts and stabs coming at me from Vinoc. Who was suddenly jerked up and sideways, before being shook HARD in mid-air by what could only be Yaddle's telekinetic grip.

Karoc tried to lurch and hop forward to threaten me enough to prevent my recovery, but the lightsaber I knew as well as my own hand had already been called back to me.

It felt a little unsporting, but I didn't hesitate to reactivate my 'saber and decapitate the disoriented Dark Acolyte as he dropped chest-first toward the ground. I don't think I considered individuals who felt like such pollution in the Force people in that moment.

At least I didn't until Karoc screamed as his brother's headless corpse hit the floor with a meaty thwud.

I could feel his grief and rage as intensely as if they were my own, but the feel of his telekinetic grip about my throat blotted out such considerations.

Denying any emotional or ethical considerations, as my air being cut off by that ever-increasing pressure forced my mind down a kill-or-be-killed channel.

In a just universe, what happened next would have been difficult. Not something requiring little more than the crystallization of my will into one momentary point of my mind set on survival.

Crrnnch-shllmp-plloop-oop. Karoc's body hit the wall with more force than I'd used to hurl a half-ton hssiss with bones thicker and denser than the largest of saltwater crocodiles into a stone wall like a line-drive baseball.

People used the phrase "Broke every bone in his/her body", but they had no idea what their quaint little idiom would actually look like.

What had been a human body left a long red streak on the wall to the left of where we'd come in as it slowly slid to the floor.

Leaving thick streaks of viscera, and cottage cheese-like clumps of brain matter dripping and failing to stick in bits from a place high on the gray wall's upper third portion.

It made my gorge rise to see the result of all my strength brought to bear, but there'd simply been no time for a more moderated response. The deep burning soreness, my persistent coughing, and the pulses of pain caused by those coughs made clear to me just how close the dead man had come to crushing my windpipe.

I heard a yelp of pain I recognized as Yaddle's and forced my head up.

The diminutive Jedi's last slash-and-stab had finally finished the suspiciously durable Magna-Guard, but I'd looked up just in time to see Asajj back-flip and launch an upward cut of her left-hand saber as she did so.

An inch-long corner of Yaddle's left ear had been amputated as she barely got her shoto up in time to redirect the cut from splitting her skull chin-to-crown.

Landing near the tunnel mouth that would have been on our left as we'd come in to this chamber, the assassin dashed into the tunnel before I could muster the focus through my ongoing hacking to stop her.

Only then did I hear the beep-beep-beee, BOOM that put the lights out, and rained stone down on us.

Edit/Author's Note: I want to preemptively point this out for those going "WTF! The Jedi Master took so long to kill ONE LOUSY MAGNA-GUARD, she only got one assist aside from putting the droid down?"

These three IG-100s were sheathed entirely in a phrik-cortosis alloy everywhere but at the joints, and even there a rice-paper thin layer was present.

The stuff allows for almost no heat transfer, so these were basically three hyper-expensive droids good for precisely one six hour functional window before critical components began to melt.

Had they not possessed ion grenades, Anakin saving Yaddle on Mawan might've gone for naught right here. Put in perspective, it would take Mace Windu or Yoda to solo those three all but lightsaber-proof droids.

...

Hey guys can you throw some power stones to Elevate the ranking.

=========================

if you want to read ahead of the public release you can go to p@treon :

 p@treon.com/Rage_moon