Between Mercy and the beasts, the air was thick with mindless roars. Claws and gnashing teeth took no pause, and their terrible bodies leapt from the niches concealed by the darkness.
Ishida’d been like a breath, a vapour of speed, plasma and steel.A flurry of motion, precariously darting, dodging, weaving, slicing, cutting, stabbing. Up, down, up, down, left, right, left, right, both the blades and their wielder were untraceable; like a cat, leaping from shoulders to the ground and back again. Mutilation after mutilation felled from deft, precise incisions, stabs, cuts, carves and slices. As far as Ishida was concerned, she was an extension of her blades — not the other way around. The Force was a weapon,
she was a weapon.
And she gloried in it.
Until!!?? Suddenly! She was caught mid-air by something that outweighed her by a milli-ton. They crashed down together, bloody and powerful. Its claws gored into her shoulders, and even though she kicked and made futile stabbing motions, her body was slow to respond to the rapid-fire demands of her brain. Stalled by the immense pressure of the creature that opened its jaws wide to devour her.
Pain raced through her torso, blood-drenched through her garments and she propped herself up to her elbows. White-hot torment seared through her arms and her heartbeat pounded loud in her ears.
Whatever expression she’d been about to die with, hastily darkened to a scowl. It was humiliating to hear the
Sith asking about her wellbeing, and
worse, that The Sith had prolonged her wellbeing.
Her grunt passed as
fine.
Distantly, she heard the echoes of Genichiro Ashina clawing at the corners of her mind. She squeezed her eyes shut and forced them out.
She needed to remain present.
But she couldn’t manage it. A
Sith had saved her. For what purpose?
Ashina the Invincible’s words insisted again, and again, elbowing through the coils of her brain and siphoning attention to his words from her focus:
A formidable enemy who can pose a threat to my life. I would welcome that man as a dear friend.
And then Bernard’s counter came:
If we look at the Light and only see what it can burn away, what it can destroy, then we blind ourselves to what separates it from the Dark. Its capacity for healing, for compassion, and forgiveness.
Encouraged by Inosuke’s:
Preoccupied with just one leaf, you'll miss the tree. Concerned with only one tree, you won't see the forest.
And refined by Sardun’s:
There can be no doubt in your heart. Steel yourself. This duty of ours is difficult, but we do what we must, so others do not have to shoulder it.
Somewhere, those four voices intersected and revealed the path Ishida would take.
"We thinned the herd. Gotta move now, or we dun survive this."
Silvery eyes snapped back open. She looked past Mercy, the void of shadows layered on shadows in her perception, and to the place in the wall where the mutant collided. There was a vacancy where the vongthing slid to unconsciousness, but around it, she saw the Shatterpoint she’d been seeking. It’d been weakened further by one of its own. Her eyes narrowed, sharp as knives.
In a swift but excruciating motion, Ishida resheathed her katana and saber and pressed both hands to the soft yet unyielding surface. Mercy identified the opportunity and fragile moment of pause in the cavern as
thinning. Perfect.
Tremours overtook the alcove. Stability became a thing of yore. Silt and slime dribbled from the ceiling. Whatever the ground was made of started to split.
Confused growling sounds rivalled the moans of dirt and stone.
Then Ishida stood, stomped, and unravelled the composition of the nest entirely. The Vong reacted not to The Force, but their own exposed weaknesses, physically unravelled.
Before the cavern caught the two blood knights in its collapse, Ishida planted her feet as a foundation to kickstart her launch. Her arms wrapped around Mercy’s waist like a tackle, and raced her out from the nest that actively relegated itself from an is to a was.
They just made it through the hole they'd created before it too was consumed by the deconstruction and no longer existed.
But the layers, and layers, and layers of earth and half-hazardly dug tunnels did. Somewhere in between, Ishida released Mercy, but kept up her own speed until she was back at the initial crashpoint of the engine that was still a smoking ball of flame.
It was that massive burning obstacle which Ishida gripped with The Force and wedged between herself and the Sith.
When the deed was done, and her adrenaline slipped away, Ishida dropped to a knee and gasped. Her shoulders oozed blood through their plating and her mind throbbed with conflict, ricocheting between certainty and doubt.
ALLIES | NEW JEDI ORDER | GALACTIC ALLIANCE |
FOES | BROTHERHOOD OF THE MAW |
Mercy
