The Mongrel never got the chance to learn that his dread blade, weakened by the gas weapon, would not have done what he'd expected - that being pierce and roast the Kainate soldier like a puffer pig on a spit. The woman was a veteran soldier, and that meant she knew the most important role of hand-to-hand grappling: when you have the advantage, never let up, not even for a second. She shifted her weight atop him, and his kick - aimed for the knee - instead skittered ineffectually off of her armored shin. Then, before he could bring his too-long blade to bear, she seized his wrist.
He should've stuck with the knife.
Agonizing pain flared through the marauder's
other arm as the elite trooper squeezed, grinding bones together until they fractured... and then beyond that. If not for the numbing effect of the nysillin already in his bloodstream, and an iron will forged both by faith and a long history of enduring traumatic injuries, the screaming of his nerve endings would surely have been enough to send him into unconsciousness. He tried to grit his teeth so that the sound ripping its way out of him was a hiss, but it steadily became a full-throated scream, taking on a life of its own and escaping his control.
The dread blade toppled from numb fingers at the end of that ruined arm, leaving him weaponless again... but not before his third tactic, the most desperate of them all, landed and made its mark. Blood and phlegm splattered over his foe's helmet, only worsening when she tried to wipe it away. He might be quite literally disarmed, but at least
she was fighting blind now. A cry of wrath to match his own fury boiled out of her, and she lashed out with her wrist blade, slamming it again and again into his chestplate. Momentum, gravity, armor servos, and rage all lent terrible weight to each strike.
The Mongel's chestplate, a veteran of nearly as many battles as the man himself, could not possibly survive such a determined assault. The metal bent and deformed, and the blade sank several inches into it with every strike - a distance greater than its thickness, greater than the protection it could offer. Any ordinary man would have been killed, his ribs shattered, his organs pierced... but not The Mongrel, not like this. He had a second layer of armor, a grisly reminder of the last time blows to his chest had brought him this close to death. And though the flesh and muscle of his chest bled freely...
The durasteel that bound his ribs together held.
In a battle that already felt a lifetime ago, long before Csilla, when the Brotherhood was only another band of petty warlords bent on carving out their niche in the savage Unknown Regions, The Mongrel had faced the fearsome Gundanbard of Mar'Zambul. He had led the charge against
Aldrouk Grandaun
's dark citadel, and stood face to face with the hulking, savage champions of his enemies.
Once such champion had, with a single swing of his mighty mace, shattered the marauder's ribs, nearly killing him with a single blow. It had taken
agonizing hours for the Heathen Priests to piece him back together.
His chest had become more metal than bone.
Beneath his ruined chestplate, The Mongrel's torso was a bloodied mess of punctures and lacerations... but the Kainate trooper's powerful strikes were slowed enough by the deformed armor that they only skittered across that durasteel ribcage. Had she been able to direct them better, had she been able to see well enough to strike the same spot over and over, such protection would not have held against four strikes; it probably would not have held against even two. But the marauder's thrashing and the trooper's blind rage ensured that each blow fell in a different place, and he survived... for now.
Still, his situation was desperate. He was still beneath the frenzied trooper, still without use of either arm... and the blindness he'd inflicted would not last forever. He was certain that her armor was too advanced for that, and if she stopped to take off her helmet, she wouldn't even need technology to see him and finish him off.
I need armor like that, some delirious part of him thought, drawing a painful gasp of mad laughter up from bloodied lungs. The Mongrel recognized that he'd lost this fight, just like the one he'd lost on Batuu, his first battle. And just like then, all he could do was stay alive.
But how? How could he possibly survive?
It was then that, through the blood rushing in his ears, he began to hear another sound - the whine of incoming repulsorlift engines. A savage grin spread across his cracked, blood-flecked lips; he had delayed his foe long enough. The Maw shuttles and light freighters were coming in, eager to seize what they could from the depot before they retreated. Some of them were empty, having carried the initial force of raiders and bogaranths. Others were not. The Brotherhood had anticipated the possibility that they might not be able to seize the landing pads fully with their initial force, so they had a Plan Besh.
As they glided in, able to fly low since the perimeter defenses had been knocked out with the grenade launchers, the shuttles and freighters opened their bay doors... and writhing, feral
Moon Children dropped out, falling eight meters to the duracrete ground. The first wave broke the fall for the others, who began to swarm over the compound in a blind fury born of knowing only pain. They attacked
everything they could reach, including marauders or Force-zombies who got too close... but the bulk of them fell upon their intended targets, biting with sharpened teeth and lashing out with attached blades.
Replenishing the Maw's actual
soldiers after Csilla and Ilum was still proving slow and difficult, but the Moon Children were a different story. They could be vat grown in the dungeons of Holy Gehinnom in less than two weeks, huge batches of them, worthless except for their numbers and their savagery. These were troops the Brotherhood could simply drop on the enemy, literally and figuratively, without worrying about how to recover them. Easily replaceable, they would wreak havoc on the depot's defenders and then be left behind, abandoned to the Sith cleanup crews that would soon sweep through.
That was The Mongrel's chance to vanish, and perhaps survive this battle, if the Avatars willed it. As the forth strike slammed into his chestplate, punching into his right pectoral, the marauder wrapped his left arm around his foe's armored forearm and let her pull him up slightly as she pulled back to strike again. Then, with a grunt of pain and effort, he pushed off with both feet, wriggling like an eel. His own sweat, blood, and spit lubricated his passage, dampening his clothes - and ruined arm - so that they slid across the enemy trooper's polished armor. It was his one advantage.
He couldn't buck her weight, only slip past it.
Panting and desperate, the marauder managed to slide out of the grapple, scrambling backwards and slightly sideways - between the trunklike legs of the lumber droid he'd fallen against. In its inactive state, the droid was hunched over, too low to pass beneath while standing.
UX-0626
would have to get on all fours and crawl to follow... and with any luck, she wouldn't be able to see where he'd gone for a few seconds yet. Rolling over onto his stomach, The Mongrel dragged himself the rest of the way out from under the droid, doing his best to keep his useless right arm from dragging painfully.
He had to use the cover of the Moon Children's advance to get away, to reach one of the shuttles and escape this wretched place... and he had to do it before they found and cannibalized him instead. The mad clones knew no loyalty. They might hold the Kainate trooper back - their teeth and blades couldn't possibly penetrate her armor, but a swarm of them might bear her to the ground and break her bones through sheer weight of numbers - or they might find his ruined body and pounce on him. He was in no condition to put up much of a fight. But he had to keep trying, fighting with everything he had.
That will to survive was his most powerful asset.
Kyrel Ren
Halketh
's call, drawing on the dark essence that lingered on the dead world. "Fate is inescapable, and there is only one fate." She spat, careful to move away from the undead Ren's blade as she caught on to the ploy being enacted under her very nose.
