V E R S U S
Quinn Varanin
New Kaas City
Iron-Blood Training Facility
Rain fell in sheets, drenching the Kainate troopers as they swarmed the Tionese. Trained by veterans of countless campaigns, they aimed well. Blaster bolts sizzled around the boy, one struck him in the shoulder, soaking into his armorweave with a crackle, smoke curling up in a tendril from the charred mess, another passed so close it blistered his cheek, flash-cooking the blood spatter on his face. They would cut him down before he even reached him, gunned down in the street like a dog.
Yet his movements became fluid, his speed preternatural, and before they realized it - Tydeus was among them.
They had the best training the Sith could offer, the most splendid arms and armor.
And yet hither he came, wroth made man, and felled them as a farmer reaping wheat. For all their training, they still prayed to a mortal god. Simple fools, destined only to be spitted on his pike of vengeance. He showed them the way of the Steel Hand and with it he broke them.
The stomp of the Gronda broke their base, stealing feet from ground. The Sarlacc's strikes sent them stumbling back, warping gammaplast-integrum plating, crunching cartilage, and rupturing internal organs. But the grin of the Nexu came in silver blurs of the blade, opening up one throat after the next in smiling red weals, gushing arterial.
He reveled in adrenal-soaked glory.
PAIN
A single shard of thought drove through his mind like a crystal spear, ripping at the foundations of self. He collapsed to his knees in an instant, eyes wide in terror.
So singular his focus, so fixated on revenge, perhaps he could have used that meditation to cast out Quinn's invasion of his consciousness. But what is one untethered mind before the ministrations of a master? Her technique collapsed the hallways of his intellect. A 500 kilogram bomb detonating through the roof of a hardened shelter.
An inrush of air, then a blast that brutally ripped at the fabric of his being until he let loose a shriek of co-mingled agony and fear.
Memories spun through his brain, wild slide reels flashing images of her, of them, of his family. Bringing him closer. Reminding him of their time. A time not so far away. A time before-... before.....
Before ash and sorrow. Before the flesh of his sister sloughing like melted wax in his hands. Before satellites on fire rained through the skies of Tion like burning tears and stole away every shred of normalcy from him. Leaving him with only.... with only.... suffering. Sorrow. Rage.
Pain.
The Kainate troopers around him paused for only a brief moment, perhaps waiting for Quinn to finish him off and claim the kill for herself.
They should have just pulled their triggers.
The Force Wound within Tydeus, formed from the deaths on Tion and her moons, fed off the misery screaming from his soul and the shard technique
inverted the anomaly trapped within him, like a glove turned inside out. Only more akin to flipping out a freshly skinned pelt, the exterior clean and soft, the interior naught but shredded fleshy, coagulating remnants. The air around Tydeus' kneeling form shimmered and fuzzed, a pulsing miasma of the Force.
A thread of dark clouds overhead reached out to the Tionese boy, as if beckoned by the energy below. Like called to like. Darkness to darkness. The thread became a funnel that engulfed the boy, surrounding him in a gale that howled as with a billion voices crying in anguish. Lightning crackled up and down the black surface of the spout, then ripped out to smite those nearby.
Wind picked up and hurled Kainate warriors screaming. Lightning struck, frying some where they stood.
The lightning flashed for the lone figure of the princess of Eshan as well. Do not think her immune. It is not the anger of a boy, but the wroth of worlds. The dead of Tion called out to the dead buried below, the dead of
Old Kaas City.
Behold their meeting.
