The Sorceress watched as
Darth Nefaron
reacted to her attempt to injure his apprentice and identified a potential vulnerability. He wanted the boy alive. Reason enough to kill him...
He finally displayed a sign he was more than a simple culture in his own display of blood Sorcery, turning her skies against her. But while Nefaron had the horrors of his unknown space to guide him in turning the skies blue, Magdalena had the inertial weight of
millennia to draw from.
When the converted lightning came down, Magdalena didn't let it touch her. She redirected the heavy, severe blast into the ground. Her palm opened up and she fired a stream of glowing green blood into the air, chanting the old forbidden Alkahest spells. The clouds, roiled, and raged, switching between the sickly blue of the Dark Side and the strange green of the light.
He wouldn't be rid of her that easily.
"This is not my first rodeo. And you are not the first rotting
dog I've put down..." Magdalena said as the skies fought back against Nefaron's Sorcery, burning away at the seething evil even if it had to cut it out on a spiritual level, making the clouds become violent with green and blue lightning, with the green starting to slowly but surely overtake the blue in the clouds, though blue lightning strikes still happened frequently, but strongly. The spells she hissed next didn't didn't sound normal, but even at the distance he was, Nefaron's corrupted ears would have registered her words almost like you register the noise of TV static, or like a super high pitch frequency in the inner ear that's difficult to shake off. He would have felt the sudden, though invisible warping of reality as the bonds of the darkness, slowly started to be poisoned. The Corpse Legion, already driven to madness, began to be driven to incoherent frenzy as the spell began to dissolve them en masse, killing more who thought to harm the villagers, allowing more to escape. The spell was like an invisible acid to the corruption present, targeting any Dark Sided being in the immediate area, in a way Nefaron couldn't simply yank his apprentice away from. It was mostly heavily localized, but the ancient magic was spreading outwards like a poison, but only for the darkness. It chewed into the corruption, ripped it out, and it even threatened to weaken the effects of the spells he had already cast by using the spilling of blood. If you were a dark aligned being, the spell she had spoken in her unnatural syntax would, quite possibly, just feel
wrong on a fundamental level watching it spread through the Darkness, breaking it down by force.
Then Magdalena breathed a blast of light sides fire at
Darth Nefaron
, a solid gout of eerie green flame that didn't seem to touch or harm the civilians, even if bits of it came into direct contact, but was potentially extremely harmful to someone so steeped in the Darkness as Nefaron was. But he still had a good shot of resisting it. One of Magdalena's weaknesses was that in her elderly state, while she was very difficult to affect with the Dark Side, her offensive abilities, while not at all lacking against someone like Nefaron, they simply were not as powerful as they would have been were she in a more youthful state (However, had she been young for this fight, she would not
quite have been able to tank Nefaron's Force attacks
nearly as well as she had so far. The elderly state was also why her cleansing spell was so strong and efficient. Her face had fully healed
But she had visibly aged a full month expending the energy she had...
This attack was very powerful, but the older she got, the less powerful her offense magic and powers got...
...and the stronger her
defensive magic and powers became.
Defensive magics like the one cleansing the area of the darkness, threatening to weaken Nefaron's magic as long as he was in this particular area.
Meanwhile....
As twin sorceries raged for control of the skies, the destructive blasts emitted from both would fell both sides as they fought.
The
Ghost Sniper Squads had chosen to split up, and operate in teams of three, one armed with a
DC-15N , the other armed with a
Battle Scout Rifle, their spotter was a self produced version of a
D-13 Assassin Droid.
Where a Ghost Squad went with their self built turrets and elite scout capabilities, death followed. Their specialty was in killing Force Users. Force users armed with
Lightsabers. And they could do it with nearly any kind of fire arm you could envision.
GS-45, like all members of the Ghost Army fighting savagely on the surface of this world, locked in savage combat with seemingly endless hordes of corpse legion, Sith and other interlopers, kept in the fight only by superior discipline and having essentially turned the combat zone into a potential death trap for invaders weeks before, was a high grade Fett Clone, programmed from birth--
(Cutaway of Hux getting shot)
--to rip, and to tear, until it was done.
And tear, he did, expert aiming, timing, and tactics allowing him to snipe a Sith from four kilometers out with his Rifle. He had picked an excellent spot on a small mountain overlooking some villages with lots of cover, where his squad would be difficult to target with aerial bombardment or even direct artillery strikes. If someone wanted them, they would be all but forced to directly send someone out to get them, like a combat shuttle.
It was a perfect place to snipe. A great view of invading forces. He killed anything he spotted holding a red lightsaber, the vicious ambush sprung by the clones having sent the invading forces reeling but they were quickly gaining back the momentum, pressing hard on the Defenders, entrenched and stubborn and as equally relentless and fierce. Every dead Sith or Dark Jedi was a Dark Force User who couldn't kill his brothers, who couldn't help pillage this world. He called in attacks from the
Clone Siege Troopers, who responded either with
Impeding Assault Tanks moving underground to create great sinkholes that collapsed underneath enemy forces, leading to them getting bombarded by Offense Troopers
Saber Tanks, half of whom seemed used specifically to bombard these huge sinkholes that formed and not only obstructed on foot enemy movement (Though it was hit and miss with enemy vehicles) but also attempted to funnel their movements into certain paths, though the enemy numbers were still quite massive and it was all they could do just to slow their movements down; Clone positions closest to the front lines in the trenches were now in constant danger of being overrun. Clone LAAT shuttles strafed the ground with fire from their composite-beam laser turrets, shredding into legionnaires by the dozens even as a few of them got shot down themselves. Say what you will about their odds, but they had come in with a
strong air and ground game despite being significantly outnumbered. The ground units had on only crappy Phase 1 armor which was
very easy for modern enemy weapons. But the clone blasters still worked, and they shot so straight, even when firing from the hip, that had it been an online PVP match in a shooter game, it would have been very tempting to accuse them of having some sort of aimbot turned on. What they lacked in overall defenses they made up for in sharp tactical maneuvers and using the local terrain to provide more cover, and this was allowing them to survive many swarms they otherwise shouldn't have, even as the assault became equally fanatical and relentless for both sides, Clones desperately buying time for civilians to flee into the deep tunnels. Neferon believed that down there, they would be easy pickings for the toxin he had attacked New Cov with, but House Bloodscrawl had learned from New Cov. The tunnels had been built with filtration systems designed to filter out chemical and biological weapons and wherever those systems could not be placed, the few witches that operated here had prepared blood spells tailored to attack that kind of toxin, or any toxin in its general chemical ball park. It wasn't fool proof, and there were gaps that could be found, but the Defense Troopers had been
very thorough in designing those areas to resist chemical weapons, and were the most heavily booby-trapped of any area on this world, and Magdalena had something special in mind once they had gotten as many civilians into the tunnels as possible...
GS-45 gunned down another Sith at long range when their Assassin Droid spotted a Sith combat shuttle heading to them. Finally. It would take a few minutes before it was in range.
The D-13 Droid transmitted the shuttle's position, ordering guns to swivel and fire on fixed points along the shuttle's path ahead of it. Tank bolts and rockets flooded the path the shuttle was taking. It was downed in seconds.
GIE/LN fighters swept the ground with strafing fire, chewing into the Legionnaires sent by Nefaron, making a special point to shoot down enemy transports trying to deposit more troops, modern jamming and camouflage systems making them extremely difficult to track and target, their gravity based engines making it potentially slightly more difficult to track with missiles, but the now only partly corrupted lightning in the sky had done damage, destroying a quarter of the GIE's deployed so far, and they had lost twenty percent of their tank force already...
He knew the situation was bad. But they had to stick to the plan. The point was not to defeat the enemy. They were just fighting like hell to make the enemy think they were
trying to win.
The real point was to save as many civilians as they could. Killing the enemy, making them waste resources, manpower, and, more importantly,
time, was simply a bonus. But the overwhelming priority was buying time for Civilians to escape. Magdalena had no intention of making Vassek a hill for her forces to die on pointlessly. She had learned since Tython. Her first priority was the civilians, always, acting as a gadfly to Nefaron, constantly forcing him to deal with her, never letting up on the pressure no matter
what he tried to pull, was only a distant secondary objective to the goal of preserving innocent life any way she or The Ghost Army could.
A heavily corrupted lightning strike destroyed the top of the mountain, stunning the squad. It was time to go. Time to move deeper into the mountain access route. GS-45 and his squad packed up and fled, temporarily unable to continue sniping duties and needing to relocate lower....
Meanwhile, in space, two squadrons of fully stealthed
Emperor's Shuttle Replicas left the great battle cruiser
Cup of Thirst, it's 800-strong Fusion Accelerator Cannons ripping deadly, powerful bolts in space, targeting only the heaviest vessels, even as it was itself bombarded. But the
Z-95 Aftermarket Fighters, all piloted by Clones specifically grown to resist G-forces, were able to execute more extreme maneuvers in their basic fighters, catching admittedly more modern fighters off guard and allowing the determined pilots to punch above their weight, their TIE Avenger-using aces, using the Z-95's to help lure in enemy fighters for assault to shoot down, though they were still greatly outnumbered
But the Cup Of Thirst was an ancient beast of the void. The fancy bells and weapons of the Devastator, while devastating, and rightly inflicting strain on the Cup's shields and hull with each successful hit, was fired back just as hard by its 800-strong fusion Accelerator Cannons, which were strong enough to pose a serious threat to the Harrowers and the Terminus vessels especially. But it was still outnumbered. But it wasn't alone. Accompanying it were the very latest high tech corvettes built by House Bloodscrawl, the flying wing-meets-pancake-like
Percival-Class ships, equally adept at engaging capital ships or starfighters. They would focus on the Terminus class ships in particular, firing their plasma railguns at close range on approach, then, when fleeing, launch one of its seismic energy torpedoes at a Terminus Hull, leaving the Cup more free to engage the devastator and the Clone pilots free to focus more on taking on enemy starfighters while the Terminus class ships were instead harrassed by
swarms of Drone
TIE-M1's (Tie Drones fitted with Turbolasers) and
TIE-M4's (Basically giant bombs with TIE Engines) from Drone controllers on
ETR-3 Transports.
The space above the world lit up, a single ancient beast from Star filled shadows up against the crushing weight of imperial technology and tactics, flocked by its own batch of vultures in comparison to the sith whales trailing a modern imperial leviathan...
Darth Imperius
Jenn Kryze
Veradun Sharr
Lirka Ka
Serina Calis
Itzhal Volkihar
defended. Lirka’s massive form looming as an icon of Imperial evil, machete blazing in her hand with its electro-plasma filament activated. The servos of her powersuit whirring with each step she took as she advanced on the hapless farmers.
