South: The Galidraani Front
The wrath of the gods seemed to scour Korriban.
As the Cirihut clashed over the ledge, tectonic upheaval was both their greatest ally and worst foe. Sometimes the quakes and magma surges consumed the enemy, or cast down the positions they'd been trying to climb... but just as often it was the Mawite warriors who suffered that same fate, and there were far fewer of them than there were of the attackers. Still, if they were to die, what an auspicious omen! What a glorious sign of the Avatar's favor, to
see this world - enmeshed in the old, stagnant ways of the ancient Sith - literally burning around them, a worthy funeral pyre.
Just as they were given a time of dying, that they might know no fear until their preordained moment to pass from the galaxy, Cirihut warriors were given a death song. It was a low, rumbling sound, resonating in their chests and deep in their throats. Every last one of them sang it now, harsh and discordant, melding with the crashes of weapons and the blaster discharges and the slow collapse of the hill into some ancient abyss below. This was how they would be remembered, how the whole Honor Guard would pass into legend: the chosen few of the Dark Voice, refusing to break even as the planet did.
None would flee. None would surrender. All would die.
But first, they would make the enemy bleed for every meter they advanced... especially if the NIO soldiers were trying to club the mighty Cirihut with their blasters and entrenching tools, hardly impressive compared to the swings of vibroswords and shock maces. Such was Toraaz's goal as he closed in on the Galidraani officer, mace swinging in toward his foe. The two men were a stark contrast - one towering, hulking, and virtually unarmored, the other positively dripping with technological gadgets. Sure enough, the NIO soldier put a great many of them to use in his swift counterattack.
Toraaz was not impressed. If you needed half a dozen gizmos to stand up in a fight, your trainers should have sent a droid instead. As Aemilio jetted forward, propelled with unnatural speed by his boots, flames leapt from his gauntlet. The Cirihut warrior simply did not react, letting the fire wash over him. His eyebrows burned away, and his skin turned an ugly pink under the red-hot blast, but he showed less injury than a bare-chested man ought to when hit by a flamethrower. It was the blessing of the Heathen Priests that absorbed the worst of the heat, allowing him to endure the pain and stand strong.
Squinting against the glare of the fire, Toraaz almost didn't see the angle of the incoming strike... and if he'd turned away or tried to leap back, he surely would have been sliced open. But he had held his ground and kept his eyes open, allowing him to punch out with the long handle of his two-handed war mace and deflect the incoming blow. The handle slapped against the blade as he moved it across his body from right to left, pushing his foe's sword past his chest and left shoulder. The tip of Aemilio's blade still grazed along his abdomen, drawing first blood, but the wound was not deep.
Toraaz allowed the pain to focus him. If his foe was so eager to close with him, then let them stand toe to toe and see if the Galidraani found
that contest to his liking. He'd moved the handle of his mace from right to left for the parry, but the head of the weapon had stayed largely in place. The Cirihut warrior quickly took a single step back and brought it down, trying to slam it into the head or back of the NIO soldier. The man had lunged inside his guard to deliver his first strike, and that put him right in position to be squashed flat by the shock mace, like an elevator counterweight falling on him.
Perhaps the
shock part would disrupt some of his toys, too.
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Northwest: The Ashlan Front
Ruulaavon had nearly reached the shuttle. It did not bother him in the slightest that he was abandoning the other lugubraa to die, for he had done it before. They were young examples of the species, little more than drooling, ravenous brutes, whereas he had lived to fifty and undergone his second cognitive kickstart. He was an elder, rare and valuable among the eternally-warring species, whereas there were always more splitlings being born to replace the mercenaries lost here. Why should he die for the Mawite gods? He had no faith in them. Instead he was well-paid in credits and meat.
Perhaps the Three Avatars
were watching, and perhaps there was something to the Cirihut legend that all beings had a predetermined time of dying... or perhaps dueling Dark Side magics struck at random, reaping lives with impunity. Whatever the truth, Ruulavon was ten meters from the shuttle when the rocky ridge supporting it collapsed, spilling the craft into the excavation pit. It crashed down the side, past where The Mongrel and Gowrie were fighting, and shattered like a dropped toy against the rocky bottom. Ruulavon had little time to be disappointed, little time even to think.
A bolt of atmospheric lightning took him seconds later.
And so it was as the gods decreed: no one from the honor guard would flee. None would escape. Mongrel's Hill would be blessed with the blood of every last one of them, and of every last kill they made before the end. At the hilltop, the Legion of the Leech fought hard, though without direction now that their elder was gone. They were terrors to the NIO infantry, hulking lamprey monsters with rows after row of gnashing teeth. It was better to be ripped apart by their repeaters at range than to die screaming as you were stuffed down their gullets in a vile feeding frenzy.
But when the AFVs, the famous Galidraani heavy armor, finally managed to make their charge, it was all over. Some tanks did fall into sand pits and magma fissures, but their discipline and their technology saw most of them push through, getting a relatively open path up the shattered hillside at last. The lugubraa scattered before them, many legionnaries run down or blasted apart as NIO gunners used infrared goggles to track them through the haze of sand. All that was left now was sporadic fighting as the last of the alien mercenaries battled on, steadfastly refusing to die until shot
repeatedly.
Reed's tanks were the first to the top, but Torayga was not far behind, despite having to fight through on foot as Korriban's hungry sands swallowed his tank. The tip of the NIO spear looked down into the excavation... and found it hollow in more ways than one. The Mawite freighters and shuttles had been crushed by rocks or dropped into the pit, and it was clear that the entire dig was beginning to fall apart, bracing beams shattering as earthquakes shook the ground. The only occupants now were cringing slave gangs, crying out to the NIO soldiers in terror as the world crumbled...
... and two distant figures on the eastern inner slope.
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The Excavation
The bottom of the excavation pit, where lay the shattered tombs the Brotherhood's slaves had worked so hard to unearth, rippled like the sea. The rock walls all around it shook, sending pebbles and boulders alike tumbling down their sides to smash at the base. Between the thunder of the smoothbores and the countless dueling sorceries that were ripping into the planet, there was little that was
stable on Mongrel's Hill. Even scaffolding bolted deep into the bedrock had torn loose as fissures opened and the very earth shifted. And amid the emerging ravines, magma had begun to rise.
The excavation hill had
looked like a volcano from the beginning, a mountain with a hollow center where the Mawites had ripped away the earth in a descending spiral, but now it might truly become one. Wounds in the earth bled freely, and the gore was molten rock, devouring all that it touched. Nothing could stand in its path, not even the ancient heritage of the Sith. The lost Temple-Tomb of Lord Kanopt, an ancient heretic denied burial
within the Valley of the Dark Lords, was lost again - this time forever. It had survived millennia, taken years for Sith archeologists to locate and months to uncover...
But it took only minutes to melt into unidentifiable slag.
The Mongrel hardly noticed that the excavation, one of the last relic caches the Sith Eternal had hoped to extract from the plundered world, had literally gone up in smoke. It seemed poetic, letting literal fires consume the failures of the past, a sign of the Maw's renewal for a galaxy that had been stagnant for too long. The warleader's only concern was the baking heat now rising from the bottom of the pit, leaving him sweating in seconds despite the barren tomb world's normal chill. Above him, sand swirled and lightning crackled. Below, lava bubbled and spat. It was a vision of hell.
A fitting backdrop to the one duel that mattered to him.
The Mongrel's efforts to keep Gowrie on the defensive had failed, so this time he let his opponent come to him. He had not yet seen what the Lord-Colonel could do when
he had the initiative, and the marauder found himself curious. The Galidraani officer came in with his rapier pointed high, as if to skewer a tall man standing just behind The Mongrel, whispering in his ear. Of course, it was all a clever ploy. The rapier was a far more refined weapon than the Mawite's heavy warblade, and even a mere flick of its razor-sharp tip could end a man's life... as it nearly did in this charge.
The Mongrel stumbled back as the rapier's point scraped across the base of his durasteel mask, a stroke that would surely have opened his throat had he not ducked his chin and taken it on the armor. His answering swing was messy, off-balance after Gowrie's impact, but it
did serve to drive the other man back as it whistled past his head. Both of them knelt on the gravel track as they caught their breath and restored their balance. The heat was growing even more oppressive, and sweat dripped from the marauder's hairline, stinging his scalp where Gowrie's headbutt had broken the skin.
"Not the throat if you want to kill me," The Mongrel chided,
tsk-ing like a disappointed schoolteacher - though the effect was oddly altered when his mask speakers turned each of the little sounds into a distorted, metallic echo.
"They've put me back together too many times now, Gowrie. My arms are metal." He slammed his left fist against his right shoulder.
Clank.
"My face is metal." He slapped the spot where his cranial plating met his mask.
Clank.
"My chest is metal." He slammed a hand into his breastplate, sending vibrations down to his durasteel replacement ribs.
Clank.
The marauder pulled his billowing outer jacket aside and pointed just below the base of his ribcage.
"Pierce me through the kidney if you want to end me, or shatter the left side of my skull. Sever my femoral artery, and let me remember what it feels like to really bleed. But remember: I'm not as fragile as you." With that he charged, blade held out at his side, as if to try a horizontal slash. But he knew now that Gowrie and his weapon were too fast for him to win in an exchange. He needed to catch the man off-guard, or he would never be able to pierce his defenses.
So The Mongrel fell back on the passata soto, better known as the "night thrust". Normally it was a defensive technique, ducking beneath a charging opponent's blade to strike low at his midsection - and let him impale himself. But that was not the only way the technique could be used. As he closed the last meter of distance between them, The Mongrel made the night thrust an attack instead, dropping into a lunge so low that his off-hand had to brace him against the ground. His heavy warblade flew forward, questing toward the Lord-Colonel's midsection in a full extension of arm, back, and leg.
The Mongrel could only hope that his sudden attack would either wound Gowrie or drive him back, because it left his entire back exposed to an attack from above. His only defense would be to try to roll sideways and get his blade back up, and that would leave him on the ground, a situation the quick Lord-Colonel would surely exploit. But the marauder was eager to test himself fully, to disregard his own limits and toss away convention, to fight without fear... and that meant taking risks. How could these two warriors truly take one another's measure if they merely played it safe?
How would they find out who was the better?
