A/N: Hope you enjoy the chapter! Wanted to update yesterday but the scene got a bit too extended and I thought to update it together.
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I felt death.
Not a premonition. Not a vague sense of unease. It was a full-on, front-row seat to my own demise, a spoiler alert delivered a split-second before the main event.
A phantom searing heat, hot enough to make a star feel like a campfire, sliced cleanly through my neck. Simultaneously, the sickening weightlessness of my own head registered in my mind—the severing of the spinal cord, my body collapsing like a marionette with its strings cut. The sensation felt absolute. Final. A cosmic "oops, you should've ducked."
My body didn't get the memo that it was a vision. It just got the terror. A spasm of pure, Force-fueled panic hijacked my motor functions and threw me violently to the right. My neck cracked from the whiplash, a sound that was way too loud in the sudden silence.
My Hyper-Perception, which had been my personal GPS for killing, just screamed static. My radar showed empty air. I had dodged a ghost.
Then the sensory input finally caught up, buffering like a cheap holo-stream on dial-up.
The smoke shifted, a ripple in the darkness, and a split-second later something tore through the haze with the shriek of containment fields breaking atmosphere.
A crimson arc occupied the exact coordinates my neck had inhabited a microsecond ago. It was so fast the world felt like a broken holoprojector skipping frames. One moment, empty air. The next, a blade of pure energy.
My brain was still processing the visual data when the red blur defied physics. Momentum dictates that a swinging object must follow through or decelerate. This thing did neither. The blade stopped dead, instant inertia cancellation, and snapped back in a vicious backhand chop.
Animation canceling. The bastard was animation canceling in real life. What the fuck?
I threw my left arm up in a desperate, blind prayer. It was all I had time for.
CRZZZ-HISS!
The vibro-blade met the red beam.
Plasma chewed into the metal like acid through cotton candy. Sparks burst in my face, blindingly bright. The heat scorched through my gauntlet, singing the hair on my arm. My expensive, custom-tuned gear, the stuff I'd bragged about not needing to sharpen, was turning into expensive, custom slag in real-time. My HUD flashed temperature warnings in angry, scrolling text that I really, *really* didn't need right now.
Through the shower of molten metal, I saw him.
A Tusken.
His wraps looked scorched, his armor piecemeal. His face remained hidden behind the traditional mask and breathers.
But the weapon in his hand hummed with a hateful, bleeding light—red, with a sickly, dying core of green strangled deep within the plasma. And the presence...
The Force around him felt thick. Oily. It tasted like old copper and stagnant swamp water. It radiated a heaviness that made the air in my lungs feel solid, clutching at my insides with greasy fingers. This wasn't just some rogue Jedi. This was something else.
Every survival instinct I possessed, every primal scream in my DNA, was yelling at me to run, to bury myself in the sand, to be anywhere but here. I swallowed bile that tasted like cheap caf and forced my knees to lock. No running. Not now.
The red blade ground down further against my vibro-blade. My metal weapon sagged, glowing bright orange. The teeth burned out. I was holding a molten popsicle stick against a sun.
My eyes locked with the goggles of his mask.
Even without seeing his face, the intent poured off him. Intense. Intelligent. Focused. Like a laser pointer aimed right at my soul.
A'Sharad Hett.
The name barely registered before he engaged his hips and shoved.
The physical force hurt; the telekinetic chaser that followed hurt more. It was like getting hit by a speeder and then having the building it crashed into fall on me. I went flying back, my boots skidding uselessly on the sand until I slammed shoulder-first into a rock formation.
The breath left me in a rush, along with any remaining semblance of a plan.
Hett stood there, the smoke curling around his blade like a lover. He hadn't even moved his feet.
"You dare," he rasped.
His voice sounded like grinding tectonic plates.
"You enter my land. You poison my people. And you believe that scrap metal can guard you from a lightsaber."
My HUD flickered, stabilizing. My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird trying to beat its way out.
Oh, shit.
This is bad. This is really, really bad. Obi-Wan's warning echoed in my head, You are not prepared for him.
No shit, Sherlock.
My brain, usually a noisy marketplace of snarky commentary and tactical calculations, went dead silent. All that remained was the screaming of my survival instincts and the humongous amount of data flooding my Hyper-Perception domain.
Hett's presence felt like a gravity well of malice, sucking the light out of the air. The smoke seemed to actively avoid him, curling away from his form like frightened animals.
I pushed myself up the rock, my shoulder screaming in protest. My left arm felt heavy. I risked a glance down. The vibro-blade was a ruined, half-melted mess, the edge glowing a dull, angry orange. Great. My custom gear was turning into modern art. The blade's internal components were probably fried. It was a useless, super-heated club now.
The vibro-blades were for deflecting, not for sustained blocking. Even that was possible because of the cheap but the only available cortosis weave I had obtained in the black market of tatooine, enough to buy a millisecond of clash against an lightsaber, not hold a ballet with it.
They were supposed to be enough to buy me time to escape if I fight against an actual lightsaber, but before the fight had even begun I had lost one.
My right arm, however, still had a perfectly functional blade. It would have to be enough.
"Scrap metal?" I managed, forcing a smirk I didn't feel. "This is top-of-the-line, custom-forged, very expensive scrap metal, thank you very very much."
"Who are you?" Hett demanded, his voice a low growl that vibrated through the soles of my boots. "You are no simple soldier. That move... you have been trained."
"And you're a Tusken with a lightsaber and small dick" I shot back, my mind racing, trying to calculate angles and escape vectors. "Talk about breaking tradition. What happened? Did the Jedi gift shop have a sale?"
He didn't rise to the bait. He just took a blade's width closer. The sand itself seemed to part for him.
My Hyper-Perception flared. I saw the infinitesimal burst of force from his back leg, the tensing of his shoulder muscles. The attack was coming. A high-to-low slash, aiming to bisect me.
I pushed off the rock, channeling the Force into my legs. The world blurred. For a split second, I was moving at his speed.
The crimson beam met my right-hand vibro-blade.
ZZZZT!
The impact was still jarring, a symphony of grinding metal and sizzling energy. Even with a fresh blade, the contact was absolute poison. My entire right arm vibrated violently, the bones feeling like they were ringing like a tuning fork. The blade itself started to glow cherry-red along the edge.
Fuck me, this thing is a monster.
I used the momentum of the parry to spin away, putting a few meters of hazy smoke between us. My left arm hung uselessly, the ruined blade still dripping molten droplets onto the sand. My right arm trembled, the gauntlet hot against my skin.
Hett hadn't moved. He just watched me, his head tilted slightly.
"You use the Force," he stated, his voice devoid of its earlier rage, replaced by cold curiosity. "But you are no Jedi. Your movements are... crude. Unrefined. An animal that has learned a trick."
"Yeah, well, this animal is about to bite back," I snarled, settling into a defensive stance. I had one good blade left. Maybe two parries before it turned into slag like the other one. I had to make them count. I had to get out of this. Where the hell was Obi-Wan?
"You poison my people," Hett repeated, his voice a low growl that seemed to emanate from the smoke itself. "Why?"
My brain, still catching up from the near-decapitation, decided this was a great time for snark. "New cologne? Called 'Eau de Paralysis.' Very popular with the 'about-to-get-their-asses-kicked' demographic."
Hett didn't laugh.
He moved. Like a fucking ghost.
My Hyper-Perception screamed data at me. Leg muscles compressing. Hips shifting. Grip tightening. A storm of micro-movements that my brain had to process faster than thought itself. The prediction came—a high-to-low diagonal slash—but it arrived a fraction too late.
I threw my right vibro-blade up, the only one I had left, and triggered a desperate burst of Force-enhancement. The world stuttered into half-speed. My arm blurred upward to intercept.
CLANG-ZZZZZT!
The blades met. The screech of plasma on vibrating metal was awful, like a Rancor being castrated with a rusty saw. The impact traveled up my arm, jarring enough to make my teeth click together. My blade held, barely. A glowing red line traced its edge, a hairline fracture appearing near the hilt. The cheap cortosis weave I'd secretly been counting on? Might as well have been decorative tinfoil for all the good it was doing. One parry. That's all I got.
"Words," Hett grunted, not disengaging. Instead, he flowed his motion into a vicious backhand slash aimed at my neck. "You hide behind words like a coward."
My Hyper-Perception fed me the next sequence. The backhand wasn't a feint. It was real. And my blade wouldn't survive another block.
I didn't have a choice.
I channeled another desperate burst of Force, not into a block, but into a frantic sidestep, trying to dodge entirely.
I was too slow.
The crimson beam met my blade again.
The vibro-blade just shattered like it didn't cost me a two thousand bucks.
A shower of glowing, superheated metal fragments exploded outward. The hilt, now a useless piece of slag, remained in my trembling hand. The world seemed to pause for a microsecond as I stared at the empty space where my weapon had been.
Then Hett's follow-through slammed into my chest.
It wasn't the lightsaber. It was his fist, propelled by the Force and the momentum of his swing. Felt like a pile-driver level impact.
The air exploded from my lungs. My feet left the ground. I flew backward, crashed through a makeshift table laden with... well, I didn't want to know. Splinters and something sticky went everywhere.
I lay there half a second, vision swimming. My ribs screamed.
it felt like author had decided that the 'saber fight' part was officially over and this was transitioning to the 'brutal beatdown' phase.
Fantastic for character development I say.
I struggled to my feet, every breath a fresh wave of fire in my chest. The world swam in and out of focus, my HUD a mess of static and red warning symbols. Hett just stood there, his crimson blade casting long, dancing shadows in the smoke. He looked like a fucking painting from the dark side's art collection.
"So this is the great Jedi General A'Sharad Hett," I spat, a glob of blood landing on the sand at my feet. "Defender of the Republic, hero of the Clone Wars. Bet they didn't put this part in your holocron biography, did they? 'Chapter Seven: Got Sand in His Ass and Started Torturing Twi'leks for Fun.'"
He lunged.
I figured that would happen atleast, always happened when you tried to reason with the villains. Afterall if you could convince them with words alone, then stories wouldn't have action tag.
I brought my useless hilt up in a pathetic attempt at a block, but he batted it aside, the impact sending a fresh wave of numbness up my arm. Then his fist—wrapped in a sand-blasted gauntlet—slammed into my helmet.
CRACK!
My head snapped back. The HUD flickered, a spiderweb of cracks spreading across the visor. I stumbled, dazed, the world tilting on its axis.
"You speak of justice?" he roared, the calm veneer finally cracking to reveal the raw fury underneath. "This is not cruelty! This is consequence! This is the price your people pay for the sins of their ancestors!"
"The hell it is!" I shot back, spitting more blood onto the sand. "You're not reclaiming shit. You're just throwing a tantrum because the galaxy didn't kiss your feet when you came home!"
He was in my face again, his breath hot against my helmet's filters. How the fuck did he move so fast?
"You use the Force," he said, his voice a low growl right next to my ear. "But you are no Jedi. You are a plague. A noisy, insolent plague that has infested my home."
Another punch caught me in the gut before I could even think to dodge. I doubled over, gagging, the taste of bile mixing with the blood in my mouth.
He kicked my legs out from under me. I went down hard, my back slamming into the packed sand. The useless hilt flew from my grasp, skittering away into the smoke.
I looked up, my vision swimming.
The red blade hovered above my throat, its heat searing through the fabric of my undersuit. The stench of scorched synthweave filled the air, mixing with the copper tang of blood in my mouth.
"You think this is a game?" he rasped.
I wanted to say the game was actually called 'Star Wars: Jedi Survivor,' and I was pretty sure this wasn't one of the side quests, but all that came out was a wet, gurgling cough of blood.
Damn. Fucker hit hard.
"You think you can waltz into my lands, into my war, and leave with your life?" The saber's hum dropped an octave, sounding hungry. "You will beg for the sweet release of death before I am done with you."
Something creaked. It took me a second to realize it was my own bones, groaning under the telekinetic grip that was tightening around my throat like a phantom garrote.
"You know nothing of what was taken from us," he snarled, his voice dripping with a venomous self-pity that was almost more nauseating than the pain.
"Oh, I know plenty," I wheezed, each word sending a fresh jolt of agony through my ribs. "I know you're butchering people in a fucking sand pit like it's a sport. I know you've got kids in cages, Hett. I saw the cages. I know you're not some noble warrior avenging his people—you're just a bully with a lightsaber and a god complex who gets off on power because he's too weak to handle his own grief."
"God complex?" His voice dropped to something worse than a shout—a cold, measured hatred that felt like ice water in my veins. "I am the shield that protects the Tuskens from extinction! I am the blade that carves justice from this wretched sand! Your people made us animals! I made us predators!"
He punctuated his little speech by slamming me back into the sand with a telekinetic shove that felt like a starship landing on my chest. The world went white for a second, then faded back to a hazy, smoke-filled red.
He leaned down, close enough that I could see the gold creeping into his eyes behind the goggles. Close enough to smell the ozone from his saber and something else. Rot. Moral decay dressed up as righteousness.
"Those 'kids in cages'?" he snarled, his voice a low, dangerous rumble. "Their parents slaughtered Tusken younglings for target practice. Their merchants sold Tusken pelts as trophies. Tell me, child—where was your bleeding heart when moisture farmers mounted our heads on their walls?"
"Two wrongs don't make a right, you psychotic—"
His fist caught me across the jaw before I finished. The world strobed white and black, a flickering corrupted file. My head bounced off the packed sand, the impact rattling my teeth and making my vision swim in a sea of static.
"Wrong?" He straightened, towering over me like a monolith of hate. The red blade hummed its hungry song, a low thrum that vibrated through my broken ribs. "There is no wrong in survival. There is no wrong in retribution. You speak of morality as if you've earned the right. As if your hands are clean."
I spat a mouthful of blood. It mixed with the sand, dark and wet. "At least I'm not—"
He kicked me in the ribs.
The crack was audible even over the sounds of distant chaos. Pain exploded through my chest like a thermal detonator going off inside me. I curled around the injury, gasping, each breath a fresh slice of agony, my lungs refusing to inflate properly.
"You poison my warriors like vermin," he continued, circling me now like a krayt dragon sizing up wounded prey. "You attack in the night like a coward. You hide behind technology and trickery. And you dare lecture me about honor?"
Another kick. This one to my shoulder. Something popped. My arm went limp, a dead weight of useless meat and bone.
"The Jedi taught restraint," he said, his voice taking on a mocking lilt, a twisted echo of a thousand lessons in a Jedi temple. "Compassion. Peace." The last word came out like a curse. "And where did it get them? Slaughtered. Scattered. Hunted to extinction by the very Republic they served."
He grabbed my hair—what wasn't matted with blood and sand—and wrenched my head up. My neck screamed in protest, a fresh wave of dizziness washing over me.
"I learned a better lesson," he hissed, his masked face inches from mine. "Power is the only truth. Strength is the only law. The weak suffer what they must, and the strong do what they will. Your precious Jedi Order is dead because they were too weak to survive. My people will survive, no matter how many of yours I have to break to ensure it."
"You're... insane..." I croaked, the word scraping its way out of my throat.
"No." He released my hair, letting my head drop back to the sand with a meaty thud that sent another shockwave of pain through my skull. "I'm awake. Finally, truly awake. The Dark Side isn't corruption—it's clarity. It's seeing the galaxy for what it really is: a pit of violence where only the ruthless thrive."
He raised his boot.
"And you, little poisoner, are about to learn that lesson personally."
The boot came down.
Not on my head—he wanted me conscious for this—but on my already broken ribs.
The scream that tore out of me was involuntary, primal. White-hot agony consumed every thought, every sensation. My body convulsed, trying to curl away, but there was nowhere to go. The world narrowed to a single point of unbearable pain.
He stepped back, watching me writhe. Savoring it. Fucking sadist.
"Who sent you?" he asked, calm again. Clinical. "Jabba? The Empire? Some vengeful merchant consortium?"
I sort of wanted to say 'Your Mother' but I couldn't answer. Couldn't breathe. Couldn't think past the fire eating through my torso. My vision was tunneling, the edges going dark.
"No matter." He deactivated his lightsaber with a snap-hiss that sounded almost disappointed. "I'll pry the truth from your broken mind after I've softened you up properly."
The Sith aren't beating the allegations with this monologue, that's for sure. I'd make a note of it, but I think my internal memo system just got a broken rib shoved through it.
His hand flexed.
Force lightning? No, worse—a telekinetic grip that seized my entire body and lifted me off the ground like a ragdoll. My limbs hung limp, useless. Blood dripped from my mouth, pattering onto the sand below, each drop a tiny, damning testament to how thoroughly I was getting my ass kicked.
"My people will enjoy watching you beg," Hett said, turning toward the clearing where the fires still burned. Where the cages waited. "It's been too long since we had a live one to make an example of. Usually they break too quickly during the raids."
Oh.
Oh no.
This wasn't just a beating.
He was going to make me the evening's entertainment. The main event. Fuck me.
My brain, running on fumes and pure, unadulterated spite, managed one coherent thought through the haze of pain:
Obi-Wan, if you're going to do your dramatic hero entrance thing, now would be a really, REALLY good time. Like, right now. Before he decides to see if my insides match the color of his lightsaber.
"The boy has a point, though."
The voice cut through the smoke and chaos like a blade through silk—calm, measured, and carrying the weight of a man who'd negotiated with Separatist leaders while actively being shot at.
Hett froze mid-step. His telekinetic grip on me wavered, and I dropped half a meter before he caught me again, dangling like a particularly pathetic Christmas ornament that had seen better days. Much, much better days.
The smoke shifted.
And there he was.
Obi-Wan Kenobi walked out of the haze like he was strolling through the Temple gardens, not a war zone. His robes were dusty, sure, and there was Tusken blood on his boots, but his posture? Relaxed. His expression? Mildly disappointed, like he'd just discovered his favorite tea shop was closed for the day.
The breather hung loose around his neck. His lightsaber wasn't even ignited yet—just clipped to his belt, one hand resting casually near it.
"A'Sharad," Obi-Wan said, and his tone carried the kind of gentle reproach usually reserved for Padawans who'd 'accidentally' blown up a training droid. "This is beneath you."
Hett's entire body went rigid. The gold in his eyes flared brighter.
"Kenobi."
The name came out strangled, disbelieving. His masked face snapped toward Obi-Wan, and even through the goggles and wrappings, I could practically feel the shock radiating off him. It was so thick you could've bottled it and sold it as a Force-sensitive energy drink.
"You're... you're alive?" Hett's voice cracked on the last word. The telekinetic grip on me tightened painfully, a reminder that I was still very much a hostage in this fucked-up office reunion. "The Purge—Order 66—you should be dead!"
"Reports of my demise were greatly exaggerated," Obi-Wan replied dryly.
This man never loses his jokes, does he?
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A/N: I just noticed that we are lagging so much in the rankings, like nearly at the lower end of it. Can't have that, can we? Vote with your stones.
And while the week is nearly gone and it's going to be less impacting to the rankings, but they really makes me feel your love toward the story.
How about we make an blasting entry next week? In the celebration of the upcoming month gonna be packed with action and updates?
I will update on Sunday and if you guys vote enough to bring us to top 20 for the day, I will update with a bonus chapter.
And I am happy to say, but I finally have begun to have bonus chapters up on patreon! You can find the continuation of the above chapter (it was supposed to be one chapter again, but it had become too big again so I had to split it a bit) right now as well as the next chapter in just an hour or two.
Link: patreon.com/AbstractoX
Edit: Added 1 mini chapter (Duel of Masters) and 2 full chapters (Calculus Of Life I and II) to patreon, available to all tiers.
Also checkout my author page if you haven't. it less of an author page and more like an supplementary site for the story but who cares about the details.