The wooden staff met mine with a sharp crack that echoed in the pre-dawn chill. Ben was pressing the attack, as usual. His movements were economical, precise, and utterly infuriating. Every strike was exactly where it needed to be, forcing me to give ground.
I parried a high strike aimed at my head, the impact vibrating unpleasantly down through my armored gloves, and shuffled back, my boots kicking up dust. He flowed into a low sweep, and I had to hop back, barely avoiding the hit.
He was herding me, cutting off my angles. Another quick series of thrusts forced my staff into a defensive, vertical block. He was too close.
Now.
I forced the resonance, and pushed my muscles. The world didn't so much blur as it jumped. I was aiming for his flank, three feet to the left. I ended up ten feet away and almost stumbled over my own generator. My control was still shit.
I spun, bringing the staff back into a guard position, breathing a little harder through the helmet's filtration system.
Obi-Wan didn't pursue. He just stood there, resting his own stick on his shoulder, that "disappointed teacher" look firmly in place.
"Still fighting the current, I see," he called out, his voice calm.
"Got me where I wanted to go, didn't it?" I retorted, settling my stance.
"You overshot by five meters and nearly fell." He began to advance slowly, his robes perfectly still. "You are reacting, I advise again to let your mind go. The Force offers guidance, Ezra. A stream to follow. Why do you seem to continue to build a dam against it?"
This again. I sidestepped as he advanced. "I keep telling you, the stream's not talking to me. I'm having to eyeball the fluid dynamics."
He parried my exploratory jab with a simple turn of his wrist. Clack. "Absurd. To move as you do, to process information at that speed, without the Force guiding your hand... it should be impossible."
"And yet," I grunted, blocking a series of rapid strikes that rained down on my staff, "it still falls short of an old man with a stick."
"Strange, isn't it?" Obi-Wan mused, his pace quickening. His stick became a blur, forcing me back, parry after parry. "The Force grants you knowledge that should be impossible, a history sheet to the galaxy..."
I ducked under a wide swing, the wind of it ruffling the small cape I'd pointlessly attached to my armor.
"...yet in the simplest, most fundamental aspect of combat, you claim it remains silent."
"Maybe that's the price," I said, pushing back with a two-handed shove that he absorbed without moving an inch. "Payment for services rendered sort of thing."
He just shook his head, and then he was in. He'd feinted a lunge, I'd bought it, and in the split-second I was overextended, his stick was driving straight for my ribs.
There was no time to dash, no time to block.
A thwip noise cut the air. A high-tensile wire shot from my left wrist gauntlet, biting into the sand-packed earth ten feet away. I thumbed the button, and the winch engaged, yanking my entire torso out of the path of the strike.
Obi-Wan's stick passed through the empty air where my chest had been.
I landed, rolling to my feet and reeling the grappler back in with a soft whirr.
Obi-Wan lowered his stick, sighing. "Small tricks."
"They work," I said, while giving my arms a shrug. The grappler still has quite much jerk to use.
"They are a crutch. They will not save you when you face a true enemy, because your mind is not clear." He took a step back, regarding me.
But I still nearly ate two more attacks had I not accelerated my body by forcing resonance.
"It is... distracted."
He hit the nerve. He always knew how to hit the goddamn nerve. I took a slow breath, feeling the familiar, cold ache in my chest.
"Perhaps it is," I said, my voice quieter. "Love tinged with longing... it tends to do that."
"You have yet to balance those emotions, Padawan," he said, his tone softening slightly, but the lecture was still there. "Until you can release these attachments, you will remain unprepared. Your mind will be divided. Your strength will be incomplete."
I stared at him for a long moment. He was right, but he was also wrong.
"I'm still contemplating that whole 'emotional constipation' philosophy, Ben," I said. I reached for the latch at the center of my staff and twisted.
Click-hiss.
The staff split into two shorter, balanced sticks. I settled into a new, lower stance, one in each hand.
"But in the meantime," I continued, "do not underestimate the ingenuity of men."
The sand at my feet stirred. It wasn't the wind. It rose in swirling, particulate clouds, coalescing into dozens of grapefruit-sized spheres that hung in the air around me like angry hornets.
On my back, the armored plates covering my shoulders shifted. With a series of satisfying clicks and shings, they unfolded, rising up to frame my helmet. Two compact blaster cannons, their muzzles glowing faintly.
My pupils darted to Obi-Wan's left shoulder. The helmet's internal display confirmed the lock.
The fight was on.
I dashed forward, cannons firing. Not to hit him, but to herd him. Red bolts screamed past his robes, forcing him to weave. The sand-spheres shot forward, a cloud of granular buckshot.
He was a whirlwind. His stick deflected bolts back into the sand, batted the sand-spheres aside like flies, and met my twin-stick assault all at the same time. It was beautiful, and it was terrifying. He wasn't even breaking a sweat.
He lunged. I blocked with my right stick, and my left cannon fired at point-blank range. He ducked, the bolt searing the air over his head, and his stick snaked up, twisting my right-hand stick clean out of my armored glove.
I countered with my left, but his other hand was already moving. He slapped my left hand, a simple, open-palmed strike that numbed my arm and sent the second stick tumbling.
It was over. Before I could even think about the grappler, the tip of his stick was resting gently against the armored plating of my throat.
I froze. The cannons whined, their targeting systems still locked on his head, but they didn't fire. I knew even if they did, chances of hitting were close to none.
"You lost," Obi-Wan stated.
I let out a long breath, forcing the cannons to power down and retract. The sand-spheres dissolved, falling back to the ground.
"Yeah, well. It's only been a couple of months. I ain't a genius. But—" I deliberately let my armored neck fall forward onto the stick he was holding.
Instead of the expected impact, the wood gave way with a soft crunch, disintegrating into a pile of splinters against my gorget. I straightened up, brushing dust from my shoulder plates.
"See? I did that at least."
Obi-Wan lowered the broken handle, his expression unreadable. "Had that been a lightsaber, you wouldn't have a head left to quip with, Padawan."
"Then I'll find a better trick," I said, retrieving my fallen sticks from the sand.
He watched me, that familiar mix of exasperation and something like pride in his eyes. "Your ingenuity serves you well, but tricks alone won't carry you through a real battle."
"I know," I admitted, reattaching the two sticks into a single staff. "Against overwhelming power, fancy tricks just get you killed faster."
Obi-Wan nodded slowly. "Your skills with the forms are improving, at least. Your Ataru with dual weapons shows remarkable progress for someone with your limited training time."
"But?" I could always hear the "but" coming.
"But your Form I with the staff... it feels hesitant at times. As if you're trying to remember movements from a class long ago, rather than letting them flow naturally. Its tainting the essence of Shii Cho."
That was my opening. "That's probably because I am. Took a few self-defense classes back on Lothal. They taught us the basics with staffs. Guess I'm trying to unlearn bad habits."
He seemed to accept that. "Then we will build new habits. Form I is the foundation. It is simple, direct. It teaches you control before you can earn complexity. Trying to merge two arts shouldn't be done unless experienced in both. Now continue practicing."
Small progress, but I knew it wasn't enough. My progress was still too slow, too patchwork. I was compensating with gadgets and sand tricks because I couldn't access the Force the way a proper Jedi could. The real skill I was gleaning from my phantom trials had to stay hidden, buried under a mountain of mundane lies.
Before disappearing inside, Obi-Wan paused. "Perhaps if you used an actual lightsaber, you might find it easier to listen to the Force's guidance. A lightsaber is more than just a weapon; it is a focus for the wielder's intent."
I mimicked his words in a low voice, having heard them so many times before. "A lightsaber is an extension of the self. The moment your emotions control your attack, you create a hole in your defense..."
He shot me a look over his shoulder. "Mockery is the weapon of the insecure, Ezra."
"Just repeating the lesson, Master," I said with a grin he couldn't see through my helmet.
As he disappeared into the cave's darkness, I stood alone in the Tatooine dawn, my two modified wood replica of lightsaber feeling both familiar and foreign in my hands.
He was right through. Tricks wouldn't save me.
The adrenaline from the spar had faded, and the familiar, anxiety seeped back in to take its place.
I've been getting more and more impatient lately.
I trudged back toward my tent, and dropped the sticks by the entrance, wiped the sand off my gloves, and tried to shake the itch under my ribs. My helmet tucked under my other arm. Sweat already beaded under the collar seals. Another day, another bucket of sand to swallow.
Inside, the portable tent was ten degrees cooler. Ten whole degrees. Luxury.
I dropped the helmet in its corner, plates clanking as I peeled off the chest-piece. The shoulder cannons folded back into their dormant back armor mode with a tired whirr. Everything felt heavy today.
It had been growing for weeks now: a daily "hurry the hell up" that never shut off.
Vasha had been gone four months, two weeks, six days and 16 hours... Not that I was counting. Much.
Every sunrise reminded me Vasha was still somewhere I couldn't reach.
Every sunset asked if I was already too late.I had no answer to that but an childish hope that Empire had no shortage of Slave Labour, but skilled technicians was something that lacked, especially for a construction as big as Death Star.
Each night I felt the urge to carjack-shipjack(?) a spacecraft and jump into Scariff but I feared getting captured and losing even the final chance of Vasha gaining freedom.
So I filled the gaps.
My days had become a frantic race against an invisible clock. Every moment was filled with something—running, fighting, meditating, tinkering with my gear. There was no wasted time. Even my nights weren't for rest. They were for the fights with Steve in my force-induced dreams. I'd fight him in that mental arena, dying and repeating, pushing my mind until it was so exhausted it would just shut down on its own. But even then, there was no peace. No true rest.
I knelt by the water jug, splashed my face, and the memory hit again. Same one that kept ambushing me during meditation. Same one that had me waking up at 0300 with my throat raw and my eyes wet.
---
It started a few months ago. I woke up in the dark, my heart pounding, not with fear, but with... longing. It was a suffocating, overwhelming ache, so strong and so sudden that I almost cried. It was a physical need, a desperate, hollow yearning for... something. For Vasha.
I'd had an experience like this before, right before she was taken. I'd woken up in a cold sweat, terrified, feeling like I was drowning in a cold ocean, scrambling to find her. That had been raw terror. A premonition of danger.
But this? This was different. Why the longing? What the hell was that supposed to be a premonition of? There were no clues, no images, just this crushing, sorrowful need.
Since that night, it happens at random, usually when I'm at my most vulnerable: during meditation.
This time there was no bunk to crawl to. Just cave wall, sand, and the knowledge that every second I spent crying was a second I wasn't getting stronger.
I wiped my face on my sleeve, hard. "Get a grip, Bridger. Emo minutes cost reps."
---
The mantra hadn't stopped the random ambushes. Mid-meditation, boom—eyes leaking like faulty hydraulics. No trigger, no warning. Just a wave of sorrow slamming into me like a bulkhead door. I'd gotten good at snapping back to breathing patterns, but the after-taste lingered. Fog in the brain. Distracted was the polite word. Kenobi's word.
I unstrapped the wrist gauntlet, checked the grappler spool. Line looked frayed. Sand got into everything. But they weren't really a problem for me, as each single grain that had seeped inside the spool saw itself out of the door.
I had a knack in controlling tiny things such as sand, something I found during one of the many attempt to increase my raw telekinetic output.
It had quite a lot of potential, and I was thinking of an rudimentary nanobot like tech to bring that out. Through Tatooine was the last place I could get the tech to create something like that.
The weekly trip to the Anchorhead had already shown me that hoping for anything better than junk was as good as devil praying to God. Ordering manufacturing instrument from offworld? I'd be lucky to have a screw left with how much Tuskens has been raiding and slaughtering convoys and settlements nearby.
Master Kenobi himself had to experince more than half a dozen attacks when coming back from his work, work that I had offered he had no need to do, for I had fund enough to survive a hundred year on this cheap ass dustball, but pride was something everyone had I guess.
God I have begun to get such a strong dislike for them that I'd end the species myself if not for my vaguely left sense of morality.
That aside, I had arrived here to learn the art of lightsaber fighting from Obi Wan, but as it turned out, this universe always puts an boulder in my fucking way, no matter what I try.
The force simply refused to give any guidance to me, or any instinctive foresight or perception. Nothing.
I'd read about it back on Earth—how Force-sensitives fight by constantly looking slightly into the future. My daily lessons on Force had enlightened me more.
It wasn't exactly seeing the future, but more of an intuitive sense fighters develop—knowing how an attack would be received, whether it was dangerous to move forward or if one should step back.
He told me it wasn't a concrete thing; some said it was reading the flow of the Force in battle, others claimed an invisible hand guided their movements. And most frustratingly, it was supposed to be one of the most basic and innate abilities any Force-sensitive has.
Even using Hyper-Perception on him during battle yielded no results. It was a application of the resonance effect that was sure, something I had to bring forth by concentration... but to him, during battles, it seemed to occur by itself momentarily during fights, and his body would move before my attack even began.
I couldn't find the logic behind it. Observing the ambient cosmic Force gave me no answers. So I was left with my sheer processing speed, honed by years of observing every single speck in my domain, trying to manually emulate those ultra-instincts. I could feel his muscles move before his body did, so I'd move my body to counteract it.
But he moved at speeds my body couldn't naturally match. By forcing near-resonance, I could speed up my movements and reflexes.
But using it to jump was one thing; to control a blade? That was like asking an elephant to drive a speeder bike—possible in theory, but likely to end in disaster.
It was another day of playing catch-up with a system I didn't understand, all while racing against a clock I couldn't see.
The sand outside was already starting to heat up, promising another day of sweat and sore muscles.
And I'd take it. Every painful moment. Because somewhere out there, Vasha was waiting, and I'd need more than tricks and half-understood abilities to bring her home.
---
---
The twin suns of Tatooine were relentless, bleaching the color and sanity from everything they touched. Inside the dim, raucous cantina, the air was thick with the smell of cheap spotchka, stale sweat, and desperation.
I sat at a small, sticky table, a half-empty glass of something vaguely blue and entirely unappealing in front of me. My helmet, a permanent fixture, was sealed in place, the overcoat draped over my armor doing little to make me look less like a highly suspicious, heavily armed hermit.
This wasn't Anchorhead. The tale I'd spun for Master Ben was a simple one: a quick resupply run for tech components. A two-hour trip on a cargo landspeeder, in and out.
He'd dropped me off at the edge of the settlement before heading to his own day of manual labor, none the wiser. Bringing my own rustbucket was out of the question; leaving a speeder unattended in Anchorhead was a charitable donation to the local scum, and the hundred-plus kilometer trek through the Jundland Wastes to Mos Eisley had become a suicide run.
The ambience out there had shifted from hostile to outright predatory. The Tusken clans, united under some self-proclaimed warlord with a vision of a Tusken-only planet, were waging a vicious war on everything else.
They were sniping travelers from kilometers away and swarming survivors like a pack of anoobas. I'd had a few close calls myself.
Their brutality, evidenced by the mutilated corpses they left in the dunes, was chipping away at my vaguely liberal sensibilities. I knew not all tribes were like this, but the more I saw and heard, the less sympathy I had to spare.
Settlements near Anchorhead were being hit hard, leaving behind only blood and stories. It was strange—no mention of this in the Obi-Wan miniseries.
But then again, this was the real Tatooine, a grinder of cyclic hatred that had been turning for centuries. There was nothing I could do but slip a few creds to the refugees. Until one side was thoroughly broken, the cycle would just continue, fed by the sands.
But I wasn't here to philosophize about planetary sociology. The junkyards here were somehow even more depressing than Lothal's.
I was here for gossip. Rumors.
Specifically, whispers of a Jedi who had helped a saloon owner.
It was a thin lead, but enough for a meta aware self insert to begin his work with.
And wasn't it just my luck? A figure sat at the next table over, face shrouded by a hood, doing a terrible job of looking inconspicuous. Well, I was doing the same, so that made two hoods.
As a fellow practitioner of the art of "don't-look-at-me," I supposed it was only polite to greet him.
I shifted my weight, the chair groaning in protest under my armored bulk. I leaned slightly towards his table, my voice modulated to a casual, even tone by the helmet's vocoder.
"Hello there, Nari. Knight of the Jedi Order. Pleasure making the acquaintance of an extinct species!"
The effect was immediate, but not the frantic terror I might have expected from a softer target.
The figure—Nari, apparently—jumped so hard he almost upset his table. His drink sloshed over the rim, and his head whipped around, before his hand, resting on the table, slipped down to his waist by instinct before noticing my relaxed visage of drinking a dogshit caf through my straw port of helmet.
Yes ofcourse my helmet had an straw port, who wouldnt?
The fear was in his eyes through, buried under years of survival, quickly hardening into a defensive readiness.
"Who are you?" he asked, his voice a low, dangerous whisper that cut through the cantina's din. "An Inquisitor's hound, sent to toy with your food?"
"See? That right there is why you're still breathing," I replied, my modulated tone staying even. "But no. If I were, we wouldn't be talking. We'd be dancing, and it would be a very short, very messy dance."
I leaned forward, the table creaking under my armored weight. "I'm a passerby with a morbid interest in endangered species. And I'm here to tell you that the hunters are closing in. Their ship will be in orbit within the day. They know a Jedi helped the cantina owner. They know you're here."
Nari's gaze was unwavering, searching the blank visor of my helmet for a lie. "The Force would have warned me."
"Would it?" I countered softly. "Or has living in a galaxy drowning in fear and bloodshed made its voice harder to hear? You followed the Code. You saved an innocent. It was a noble act. It was also a beacon. You lit a signal fire on this dustball, and the Empire is very, very good at seeing smoke."
A flicker of defiance crossed his face. "Then let them come. I will not run forever. We must stand and fight! We must find others, like Master Ken—"
"Like who?" I cut him off, my voice dropping to an even lower, more insistent whisper. "The ghosts you're chasing are just that. Ghosts. The time for a grand stand of Jedi Knights is over. It died in the Temple. What comes next is different. Messier."
He looked at me, the defiance warring with a desperate hope. "What, then? Hiding until we die of old age?"
"No. Organizing." I slid a small, crude data cylinder across the table, its surface scarred and unremarkable. It was a one-way subspace transmitter, set to a specific, encrypted frequency. "There are others. Not Jedi. Smugglers, pilots, senators, soldiers. They're scattered, building something in the shadows. It doesn't have a name yet. It will, in a few years. If you can be patient."
Nari stared at the cylinder as if it were a venomous snake. "You expect me to trust a anonymous, armored stranger with a fable?"
"I expect you to want to live," I said flatly, leaning back. "I'm not asking for your trust. I'm giving you a warning and an option. Your current path leads to a red blade in your gut, or a cell on Nur. The transmitter is a lifeline to a different future. Take it, get off-world, go to ground. When the time is right—and it will be—that will chime. Then you can fight the Empire on terms that aren't suicide."
I stood up, the motion fluid despite the armor. The conversation was over. I had what I came for—confirmation that the gears of the Kenobi series were beginning to turn. Saving Nari was a secondary objective, a gesture of goodwill to a man who, unlike me, still genuinely believed in the Light. But I wasn't going to beg him.
"The next speeder off this rock leaves in an hour," I said, turning to leave. "I'd be on it. The choice, Knight Nari, is yours."
I didn't look back as I walked out of the cantina, melting back into the chaotic flow of Mos Eisley's streets. Behind me, a Jedi was left with a warning, a choice, and a tiny sliver of hope where there had been none. My part was done. Now, it was time to focus on my own, much more personal, war.
[Image]
---
A/N: Its seems to be an heavenly fate for me to not update on correct time apparently.
And also apologies for not updating this yesterday, as per my claim. It kinda makes me think that in future, perhaps I should not say definite statements.
Half the reason for the delay was my intention of wanting to end the training arc in this chapter itself, so even through I had 2k words ready by yesterday update time, the rest 2k words took this whole day to complete (A surprise treat by fellow student for getting intern placement may also have been the reason)
Hope you enjoyed the chapter!