"Sniper! Sniper on you!"
"Blast it!"
"Thermal detonator, DOWN! DOWN!"
"For the Mandalore!"
"For the Mandalore!"
Gunfire, explosions, and shouts echoed one after another, finally disturbing Blake Shepard from his deep sleep into a state of semi-consciousness.
"Who's the idiot watching TV with the volume cranked up."
"Hold up—this is Concord Dawn?! A battlefield?!
And I'm—Max Vizsla?!"
He took a deep breath, and Blake Shepard opened his eyes, waking up with a jolt.
Rubble and wreckage, severed limbs, outside the helmet visor, a broken world was burning—incredibly real, even too real. Was this called a lucid dream, or a dream within a dream? Blake Shepard had no idea what was going on.
While he was still dazed, a figure flickered at the edge of his vision.
Biu~ Biu~ Biu~
Faster than thought, Blake's Westar-35 blaster pistols fired, and Max Vizla's warrior instincts or rather muscle memory made the correct judgment in an instant.
What... what did I just do? The thought wasn't a question, but a raw, horrified realization. *I fired a blaster. I... I killed someone.
A cold, sickening dread started in his chest, turning into a terror that ran through him, leaving him bewildered.
"Good job, Max!" an excited shout came through the helmet's built-in comms, "Are you alright?"
"I…" Blake Shepard paused, "just took an rocket hit, got stunned. My armor held up, I'm fine."
"Death Watch retreated, we won!"
"Dank farrik, those bastards don't deserve to be Mandalorians!"
After a perfunctory reply, Blake no longer participated in the discussion in the comms channel. He fell into a long silence. Clearly, in a short time, he still couldn't accept the absurd fact of having transmigrated after a nap and then killing someone.
Searching through the current body's memories, Max Vizla, 13-year-old Mandalorian youth, was either fighting or on his way to fight all his life.
Is that it?! Is this still a highly developed interstellar civilization? Is that truly all? One would think they'd slipped back into a bronze-age backwater world.
Blake sighed deeply, tilting his head back in frustration. Looking up, the sky above the battlefield was bleak with gloomy clouds, dark and without light.
What was that? A faint dark speck was rapidly approaching from afar. When the flying object reappeared, Blake Shepard's hair instantly stood on end. He shouted hoarsely:
"Take cover! kom'rk-class inbound! Find cover quickly!"