"Oh, get in line, you rotting
sack..." The Parliament hissed in dark glee her flesh distorting as she took his burst of Dark Side energy, greedily absorbing it due to a now near unshakable connection to the Bogan, anchored to it. It caused a most exquisite pain to her spirit that she
also fed off of, though it still left a heavy burned scar on her stomach when it hit. Cosmetic damage. In the old days it would have done much worse.
This was
not the old days.
With a practiced, ease, her Makashi training, allowed her to twirl dodge
Omon Kaa / Darth Diem
's knife attack, while
Percival Io
launched a literal
SHORYUKEN! at Empyrean, only to be interfered with by
Nupax nurin .
The Parliament fed off the death of each slain Sith, and their suffering, a black beacon in the Dark Side. She sneered openly as
Srina Talon
forced her little inferno back into the pit, then smiled.
Sucker...
A blink of the eye, her flesh shuddered as her enchanted flame, forced back into the pit, seeped instead into the very stone Srina Talon 's will frosted over as she walked. Deadly molecules fused to the stone by the Dark Side, concentrated at the edges of the chamber, where the battle lines were under
savage attack from the Nuetralizers, cutting loose with every weapon in their built in chassis, even as the storm by his red staff was conjured she used her hate to stay in place, launching a powerful bolt of Force Lightning at him and Omon.
House Io were veterans as well, fighting in the most vicious battles of the Third Imperial Civil War, The Bryn'adul War, and a constant Blood Feud with the Jedi Order that persisted to this day.
They had fought outnumbered, out gunned a dozen times
over. No less than
four major powers wanted them dead, including the vicious Sith of the Maw, who the House considered it a national sport to torture or kill.
She had been forced to continually adapt, as had her house, to rapidly changing battlefield conditions. She had taught guerillas, Assassins, Droids. She had been forced to take a personal hand in designing some of the most devastating weapons and ships in their arsenal.
She had been tutored and mentored,
cultivated, by those she considered among the most evil Sith in the Galaxy, who believed that the Dark Side should be taught to even the lowliest in society. That all society should choose it and only it for wisdom. Sith who sneered at a tired old corpse trying to make
yet another empire. One that resembled the previous one in how it would stagnate.
She had, with the help of that Cult's Grandmaster, inflicted fatal damage on the reactor of the Super Weapon sent to destroy Csilla. A failure, save in the sense that the Maw had been without a superweapon a significant time after. That same Cult had appealed to the most Ancient spirits of Korriban to ravage the surface, which they had, killing almost countless personnel from those who had come to destroy it. Sarka, Danuta, Tython, inflicting the will of The Dark on those who foolishly sought the death of life and the Force.
They had helped inflict near total Genocide on The Bryn'adul.
Know Your Place Empyrean had sneered at her. The Parliament did.
Her place was to spread the glory of The Dark Side, to wash every willing heart in its all knowing, all cleansing
poison...
...and
decidedly at the expense and consternation of Sith like
Darth Empyrean
,
Saryn Zambrano
,
Darth Carnifex
, and Srina Talon .
Fools! Fools trying to fight the previous war all over again as
she had once been guilty of. Not realizing the game had changed. Not realizing the time for all their mouthings of subtlety and
dignity were just that...
mouthings...and that the time for them had passed.
The Galaxy was
tired of their kind of Sith, who were forever obsessed with a large empire and armies of slaves, with mindless centralized control of a System and scheming the same tired schemes that their enemies now knew by
rote.
Even if the evening
had gone according to plan, she still would have decided to go full Starscream on 'em. Except she wouldn't have Starscream's awesome voice. Or the ability to turn into a Jet. And The Parliament's Narrator couldn't decide whether Empyrean or Carnifex was Megatron in this scenario. (What the hell did that make Srina? Devastator?)
Her targeted Force Scream answered that question right away. (Sound Wave! She's Sound Wave!)
The scream traveled, and four of the Nuetralizers, who
just happened to be using the bodies of dead Sith as Shields, managed to get them in front of the scream itself, which
demolished the bodies they were holding and significantly damaging them but leaving otherwise at significant operational capacity. Three however, were not so lucky, two being immediately destroyed, and one having his chassis crumpled.
But these Droids didn't fear death or shut down. Their brains had been fully backed up. They fought with a vicious focus, The Battalion whispering an ancient spell that covered the remaining Model 1's still in play in strange shadows that allowed them to escape the barrier generated by
Iasha Rha
, to move outward, through they lost a fourth when he did not notice the portal opening beneath him. Three left, forced to pay closer attention to the floor beneath them and dodge the portals conjured by Srina as they opened.
Meanwhile, The chain reaction started by The Parliament at last triggered, the edge of the chamber erupting in firey explosions from beneath that savaged the battle lines made in haste by the Sith, though a large number that survived did so by a desperate use of telekinesis to shield themselves from what was basically a landmine strength series of blasts that created severe holes not just for the surviving Nuetralizers to exploit, but Darth Strelok herself, who hurled telekinetic shrapnel at deadly speeds at the battle lines in the precious few seconds of chaos before Srina opened the rifts.
Strelok, was very fast, as Srina had surmised, but she too had changed, from the ill bounty hunter who had a carefree approach to battle to someone well aware of how deadly their prey was.
Her honed senses detected the portal beneath her feet and her mastery of Telekinesis ripped rubble from the floor to stand on, maneuvering with the large piece of floor like a surfboard through the rifts she threw in her way, though she did get injured, as Srina
was very clever about the frequency and pattern in which she opened them. It would have killed the old Maple, or crippled the old Maple for life if she had tried to just use agility to navigate or dodge. Instead, one of Strelok's ribs and a shoulder tasted the edge of one of the rifts, resulting in a large amount of bleeding. Strelok snarled, wrapping herself in the Dark Side, calling on her intense hatred of how her life had ended up, forced to channel a power she hated on a constant basis just to stave off a humiliating and lonely end from her degenerative schizophrenia.
The frustration, the
rage at not belonging, not being
able to belong anywhere near people who were not completely fethed up like she was, sealed those wounds, stopped the bleeding, but not the pain as she landed some distance from
Srina Talon
, her rage reinforcing her hatred into a laser focus on the Sith, hand clenching in an attempt to Force choke her as she fired another round at her...
Meanwhile, The Battalion's whispered spell had caused enough distraction that she was not able to "fully" get out of the way of Carnifex's Noob-Saibot type strategy. That little shadow thingy managed to cut the shadow of her arm and out leaked white blood in large rivulets from her arm, eliciting a metallic sounding screech from her as she flung the large amount of blood, not at him, but at his feet, cursing her blood with the High Sith language to enhance it's already terrible strength.
Her blood was acidic, a particularly insidious mutation given her by the Dark Side. Powerful enough to
possibly burn even though Alchemized Materials (Her own stuff was immune to this effect). The trade off was that her blood could not harm living Organic tissue. Only processed materials
The large splotches of blood splashed on the floor beneath Carnifex, beginning to rapidly spread and eat though the floor beneath him, while she surged forward with Force Flight, focusing her
very considerable might in the Dark Side to channel that darkness through her blade, getting a gash on her side as Carnifex's Saibot managed to land another blow, thrown off only by the rapidly shifting position of the shadow made by her blade, the darkness focused in its red energy to have a good chance of cutting through the barrier he generated...
Percival Io