Location: Argovia, Argovas City
Nearby:
Shai Maji
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Tegan Starfall
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Sisserith |
Vulcan Krayt
Engaging:
Kragr Krayt
Well, Kralmus hadn't seen
that one coming.
Kragr's hammer had already shown that it was powerful when it'd cracked the pavement and let out an impressive sonic shockwave, but this was on a whole different level. Knocking down half a house with a
single blow? Most
earthquakes didn't cause this level of destruction. Each wall in the average single-level house of this size weighed about
nine thousand kilograms, the equivalent of two cargo-laden speeder-trucks. How could a human man, no matter his size and muscle mass, hold in his hands something that exerted enough force to throw that around like it was
nothing? How did the recoil of such a blow not tear his fleshy body to ribbons like it had done to the duracrete?
But physics was far from Kralmus's mind as he was hurled back from the shattered wall and slammed against the far side of the house. He blacked out for a few seconds on impact, just long enough that he missed the
half the roof falling in on top of him. When consciousness returned an instant later, along with a thousand screaming aches and pains from the brutal series of impacts, the cannibal found himself buried in rubble. He could move his arms and upper torso, but his legs were trapped under heavy chunks of ceiling. His axe was gone, lost somewhere in the chaos. He could just manage to reach his belt, quickly working his blaster and a lone grenade free.
"What, no more jokes?" Kragr's titanic outline appeared amid the dust cloud as the giant warrior stalked forward, that building-shattering hammer still in hand. Kralmus pushed against the rubble pinning him, exerting all the strength he could from his seated position slumped against the intact far wall, but couldn't budge the pile of duracrete and rebar. Everything hurt, and hurt all the more when he pushed; he suspected several bones were broken. He'd held out against an Enclave supercommando force aboard the
Avatar of War with a broken arm, even survived a duel with their warmaster, but he hadn't been
trapped.
"Come on, tell me a joke, funny man."
"Okay," Kralmus said, a cold grin on his face.
"Here's a funny one. 'Enclave protection'."
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Jonas Dondavi - Jojo to his mother and sister - was seven years old today.
His family didn't have much; making the rent payments on their house had been tough on his mom, who waited tables at the Runty Ronto cantina a few blocks over. But they'd done everything they could to make the day special anyway. His big sister Luna, twelve years old now and so grown up, had baked him a cake while mom was at work - chocolate with cloudberry jam between the layers, his favorite. It was a little lopsided, but it tasted really good anyway. Mom had scraped together the money she could and bought him the toy he'd had his eye on for a
whole year: a miniature lightsaber, perfectly fitted to his small hands. It was scuffed and secondhand, but he didn't care.
Mom worked nights, so they'd done his party in the afternoon, when she woke up from the five hours' sleep she could steal in the morning. The cake had been delicious. He loved his lightsaber, and had immediately run around the house with it on a cake-sugar high, swinging the colored tube of light through imaginary Sith. But the best part was the part they'd done every single year, even longer than he could remember. They'd taken an adhesive decal of a star and stuck it on the ceiling, right above the couch. Twelve pink stars for Luna, and now seven blue stars for him. It made him feel
seen. It made him feel like this house was
home, a stable place in this chaotic frontier town.
But lightsaber or not, Jojo Dondavi wasn't a Jedi.
So when his seven stars fell from the sky, he couldn't hold them up.
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Kralmus grinned, his teeth bloodied by some internal injury, as he pointed at the mother and her children. Huge chunks of ceiling had collapsed on the little boy, smashing his legs like twigs. The woman screamed and wailed, bloodying her hands with her frantic efforts to dig her son free, while the little girl froze in panic at her side.
"Turns out that collapsing a house with civilians inside has some consequences," the cannibal said, laughing nastily... though his laugh trailed off into a cough that hacked up more blood.
"Little boys tend not to have beskar armor, ya see. A thousand kilograms of duracrete to the legs tends to mean they don't do much walking anymore."
Kralmus shrugged dramatically, slightly shifting the mound of rubble that trapped him in place.
"Oops! This is what happens when our people try to help. 'Mandalorian Protectors'... what an oxymoron. We're conquerors, big guy. Our history is soaked in blood." The dust cloud was starting to settle now, and between that and his words, it was about to be obvious to Kragr exactly where Kralmus was. So he held up the grenade he'd snatched from his belt - a thermal detonator on a dead man's switch. If he stopped holding it,
boom. Would it kill Kragr? Probably not, the guy was a
tank, and he had an energy shield. But it'd finish bringing the house down on them all.
And that would
certainly kill the family that was still trapped inside.
"Tell ya what," Kralmus said, raising his blaster with the other hand - and pointing it
directly at little Jojo's tearstained face.
"I can erase your little mistake. People die in war. 'Collateral damage', and all that. I'll just shoot them, put them out of their misery, and then you can tell everyone they were 'victims of the Maw'." His visor swiveled to look
directly at Kragr, though his gun hand never wavered.
"The only people who need to know the truth are you and me. Just you, after you finish me off. And the truth is this: we're Mandalorians. We don't care about anything but glorious war. We crave conquest, and we don't care who gets hurt along the way."
The cannibal chuckled again, blood on his lips.
"So how about it, big guy?"
"Ditch the Enclave propaganda. Live like a real Mando."
"Finish turning this little house into a morgue."