No new chapters this next week. I've got a lot of work, and I'm also more heavily invested in my Harry Potter fic right now, so expect more of that, but if y'all review Harry Potter, I'll pump out a chapter for this for each review till I hit 10.
Hermit47 P@treon
...
The corridors of the Resolute shook before Anakin Skywalker reached them.
Not from another impact against the hull. Not from the cannons outside or the dying echoes of boarding pods punching through the ship's armor. This tremor came from inside, traveling through the walls, the deck plating, the broken light fixtures, and the torn conduits hanging from the ceiling like the ship itself understood that something terrible was moving through it.
Anakin marched alone.
The emergency lights washed over his black armor in violent pulses of red. His cape moved behind him in long, heavy sweeps, dragging through smoke and ash and streaks of blood that had not yet dried. The mask hid his face, but it did not hide what he had become in that moment. Every step carried rage. Every breath behind the mask seemed to deepen the pressure around him. The dark side clung to him so thickly that the air felt hotter where he passed, as though the corridor had become too small to contain him.
Clones looked up as he went by.
Some were wounded, propped against the walls with armor cracked open and blood leaking through the seams. Some were being dragged toward med stations by brothers too exhausted to speak. Some were dead, lined where triage had failed and the living had been forced to keep moving. The sight of them fed the storm inside him. Each red-marked helmet, each orange-marked shoulder plate, each green-and-cream stripe of the 119th Pathfinder Legion, each face beneath a cracked visor became another coal dropped into the furnace.
A 501st trooper, one arm hanging uselessly at his side, tried to sit straighter as Anakin passed.
"General," he rasped.
Anakin did not stop.
The trooper did not seem offended. His helmet tilted back against the wall, and through the pain in his voice came something dangerously close to relief.
"He's going down there," the clone whispered to the medic beside him.
Farther on, a pair of 212th troopers stared at Anakin with open unease. They had heard stories. Every clone in the Grand Army had heard stories about Skywalker. They knew the 501st spoke of him like a commander, a brother, a storm, and sometimes something more than all of those combined. But hearing stories and seeing him walk through a dying ship with the walls trembling around him were different things.
One of them tightened his grip on his rifle.
The other swallowed hard.
Neither spoke.
Neither moved to stop him.
Deep down, beneath the fear, both understood the same thing.
Whatever General Skywalker was about to unleash, they needed it.
The ship needed it.
The Republic needed it.
The invaders had come into his flagship and butchered his men. They had killed Jedi. They had killed Qui-Gon Jinn.
Now Anakin was going to answer.
Ahead, blasterfire thundered from a corridor junction.
The scene changed in a burst of red bolts, smoke, and shouted voices.
A mixed squad of clones held a defensive line behind a set of overturned cargo sleds, broken wall panels, and two portable barricades that had already taken more punishment than they were built to survive. Five of them wore red-marked ARC armor, the kind issued to the elite of the 501st, but their familiarity with one another went deeper than the armor.
Domino Squad had been together since the beginning.
Echo crouched at the center of the line, calling corrections and watching everyone's angles even while he fired. Fives fought beside him, sharper and more aggressive, his rifle snapping from target to target as if each shot personally offended him by needing to be fired. Droidbait had taken the left side with a rifle braced against the barricade. Cutup was on the right, talking too much because that was what Cutup did when death got too close. Hevy stood near the middle with the heavy weapon that had earned him his name long before the war had given any of them real scars.
With them were Waxer and Boil of the 212th, their orange-marked armor scorched and dented from fighting their way through half the ship. Two troopers of the 119th Pathfinder Legion held the rear angle and upper line: Trail, a scout with extra sensor gear mounted along his helmet and chest plate, and Flint, a compact heavy trooper with a repeater that looked slightly too large for the corridor until he started using it.
The Vong pushed against them like a tide of armored nightmares.
They came through the smoke in living crab armor, carrying snake-weapons that snapped, hissed, and hardened into blades. The clones had learned enough by now to aim for seams, armpits, throats, and joints, but the learning did not make the killing easy. Every enemy took concentrated fire. Every few meters of corridor had to be purchased with ammunition and blood.
Droidbait hollered over the sound of blasterfire, "I am officially requesting droids again!"
Fives fired over his shoulder. "You hate droids!"
"Yeah, but at least they have the decency to fall apart when you shoot them!"
Cutup ducked as an amphistaff blade carved through the top of his cover. "I don't know, I always thought commandos were supposed to get the exciting assignments."
Echo shot twice into the exposed underside of a Vong's arm and dropped him before answering, "Cutup, if this is your idea of exciting, I'm requesting a new squad."
"You'd miss me."
"Not right away."
Waxer leaned out, fired three controlled bursts, and ducked back as a living projectile splashed against the wall where his helmet had been. "Boil, next time someone says they need volunteers, remind me to suddenly have a medical condition."
Boil reloaded with irritated precision. "You'd volunteer anyway."
"I would, but I'd complain with medical authority."
Trail's helmet sensor pinged sharply. "Movement behind the front line. More of them."
Flint shifted his repeater and opened up, red bolts hammering into the smoke. "Then they can wait their turn."
Hevy's heavy cannon barked, driving a pair of Vong back, but one of them kept coming even with armor smoking and one arm hanging nearly useless.
"Stubborn ugly piece of—"
"Hevy!" Echo shouted.
Hevy adjusted and poured sustained fire under the creature's raised weapon arm. The armor there finally failed. The Vong went down hard and did not rise again.
Fives glanced down at his dwindling power indicator. "We're running low."
"We're running out of corridor too," Waxer said.
Another surge came.
The Vong hit harder this time, three warriors pushing through the storm of blasterfire while others behind them hurled organic projectiles that burst against the barricades in wet, burning splashes. One of the portable barriers buckled. Flint staggered as a shard cut across his shoulder plate. Trail grabbed him and yanked him back before a second strike could take his head.
Echo saw the line failing.
"Fall back by pairs!" he shouted. "Droidbait, Hevy, keep them pinned!"
Droidbait laughed once, breathless and furious. "That I can do!"
Hevy planted his boots and fired until the corridor ahead disappeared beneath red light.
It still was not enough.
The Vong came through.
Then red lightning tore past the clones.
The blast filled the corridor with crimson light so bright that every visor darkened automatically. The lightning struck the advancing Vong and spread through them like living wrath. Armor cracked and blackened. Muscles locked. Weapons fell from twitching hands. The lead warriors burned where they stood, and those behind them were thrown backward into the smoke with their bodies convulsing beneath the force of it.
The firing stopped.
For a moment, the only sound in the corridor was the crackle of burned armor and the hard breathing of the clones behind the barricade.
Slowly, they turned.
General Skywalker marched toward them through the smoke.
He held only one lightsaber this time, the black-cored blade edged in red. Its glow painted the walls around him in a dark, bloody light. His free hand was still lifted slightly from the lightning he had unleashed, fingers curled as though the power had not finished leaving him.
The clones moved aside without being ordered.
Anakin passed them without a word.
Cutup leaned closer to Fives, his voice much quieter than usual. "So… he's angry."
Fives did not laugh.
"I've seen the General angry," he said. "I've seen him furious."
His helmet followed Anakin's back as the masked Jedi moved toward the remaining Vong.
"I've never seen him like this."
Waxer looked from Anakin to the corridor ahead. "Should we follow him?"
Echo checked his rifle, then stood. "If we want to live, probably."
Fives nodded once, snapping himself back into command. "Domino, on me. Waxer, Boil, you two with us. Trail, Flint, watch our rear and call anything that moves."
Trail's reply came instantly. "Already scanning."
Flint lifted his repeater. "I'm watching. Don't make me run too fast."
Droidbait slapped the side of his rifle. "Just follow the trail of dead monsters. Should be easy."
They moved after Anakin.
What they saw in the next corridor silenced even Droidbait.
The Vong rushed him in a tight cluster, perhaps thinking numbers would do what strength had not. Anakin did not reach for them through the Force directly. He had already learned that these creatures were empty to that touch, dead spaces where living beings should have blazed. So he used the ship.
A section of wall ripped free with a shriek of torn metal and slammed sideways into the first warrior hard enough to crush him against the opposite bulkhead. An exposed cable whipped down from the ceiling, wrapped around another Vong's throat, and yanked him upward until his armored boots kicked uselessly above the deck. A maintenance panel tore itself apart into jagged pieces and shot forward like a volley of knives, punching through joints, throats, and the softer places beneath living armor.
One Vong tried to leap through the storm and bring his amphistaff down on Anakin's head.
Anakin cut off the weapon, then the hand, then the head, all in one smooth motion that never slowed his stride.
The clones followed behind him in stunned formation.
They fired when anything still moved. They covered corners. They checked vents and doorways. But more and more, they found themselves walking through the aftermath of violence that did not need them.
The corridor became a nightmare display of what Anakin could do when he stopped restraining himself.
Wires and tubing hung from the ceiling with dead Vong tangled in them like trophies left by the ship itself. Bodies were pinned to walls by sharpened lengths of durasteel, impaled through armor and flesh by debris that had been torn from the surroundings and turned into weapons. In one hallway, Anakin ripped apart a broken loader unit, folded pieces of it around a sparking power core, and sent the crude, jerking construct smashing into a group of Vong as a distraction while he cut through them from the side. It moved only for a few seconds before collapsing, but those seconds were enough.
Trail stared at the shattered machine as they passed. "Does he always do that?"
Echo shook his head. "No."
Flint looked at him. "You sure?"
"I'm very sure."
Cutup tried to make a joke, but it died before leaving his mouth.
Fives kept them moving. "Heads in the fight. Whatever happened, we can think about it after we're not being hunted through our own ship."
He said it firmly, but even he was wondering.
Something had happened.
Something bad enough to make General Skywalker walk through the Resolute like he wanted the entire universe to feel pain.
They eventually reached the wide access hall that led toward hangar bay two.
From the other direction came the survivors.
Obi-Wan Kenobi was running with his saber still in hand, his face pale beneath soot and alien blood. Commander Cody came beside him, one arm braced against a wounded trooper while still keeping his rifle ready. Rex, Virek, and Commander Cairn followed with battered squads from the 501st, 212th, and 119th. Ahsoka came with them, shaken and wide-eyed, her face marked by grief that she was trying and failing to hide.
The droids were there too.
R2 rolled close to Ahsoka, his dome turning anxiously. K2-SO walked with damage scored across his side, one arm moving a fraction slower than the other. HK-47 carried both blasters, but for once the old assassin droid did not sound delighted by the carnage.
They all stopped when they saw Anakin.
The hallway seemed to tighten around him.
Virek straightened despite the wounds and exhaustion visible in every line of his body. "General."
Anakin said nothing.
Virek's visor tilted slightly, as if he were trying to find the most efficient way to report the worst thing imaginable. "An elite force of the invaders breached the hangar. They were stronger than the first wave. We attempted to hold, but—"
R2 let out a low, mournful whirr.
HK turned his head toward Virek. When he spoke, the label came softer than usual, without mockery or theatrical pleasure.
"Statement: Commander Virek, Master Ani already knows what has happened. Repeating the data will not improve his response."
Virek stopped.
For a second, no one spoke.
Then Virek lowered his head once. "Understood."
Obi-Wan took a step toward Anakin. His mouth opened, but no words came. The grief in him was too raw, too tangled with rage and shock. He looked at Anakin not as a fellow general, not even as the boy he had helped raise, but as someone standing at the edge of a cliff and realizing the person beside him had already stepped over.
"Anakin," Obi-Wan managed.
Anakin walked past him.
Ahsoka moved as if to follow, then stopped herself and called after him instead.
"Master, wait!" Her voice shook despite her effort to steady it. "They're too strong. We couldn't stop them. Not even Master Obi-Wan and Master Qui-Gon could—"
Obi-Wan placed a hand on her shoulder.
She looked up at him, hurt and confused.
He shook his head once.
"There's no stopping him now," Obi-Wan said quietly. His eyes remained on Anakin's back as the masked figure continued toward the hangar. "All we can do is trust that he wins… and pray there is enough of him left afterward to come back to us."
Behind them, Rex turned toward Domino Squad and the other clones who had come in Anakin's wake.
"What happened back there?"
Trail answered before any of the 501st could. His voice carried the controlled disbelief of a clone who had seen too much and still could not sort it into a report.
"General Skywalker was slaughtering them, sir. I've never seen anything like it."
Cody looked toward the destroyed corridor behind the squad. "Explain."
Echo's voice came hollow through his helmet. "He's using the ship against them. Walls, cables, broken machines, debris. Anything that can move, he's moving. Anything sharp, he's throwing. Anything heavy, he's crushing them with."
Cairn's gaze shifted from Echo to Virek. "Is that normal for him?"
Virek watched the hallway where Anakin had disappeared.
"No," he said. "The General usually holds something back."
Rex tightened his grip on his blaster.
Fives looked at him. "And now?"
Virek's answer was quiet.
"Now he isn't."
The scene shifted deeper toward the hangar.
The Vong leader strode through the smoke with his remaining warriors behind him.
His name meant nothing to the creatures of this galaxy, and perhaps that was fitting. Among his own, it had already been stripped of honor. He had been cast out by his domain, sent on this distant and insulting scouting expedition with lesser castes and expendable advance forces. His enemies had called it mercy. His kin had called it opportunity. He knew it for what it was.
A sentence.
If he returned with valuable knowledge, with blood, with proof that he had still been shaped for glory, then perhaps his name would be restored. Perhaps those who had looked away from him would lower their eyes again. Perhaps his disgrace would be carved into a new meaning.
He had brought his strongest loyalists with him, warriors who had followed him even into exile, and until now he had found little in this machine-galaxy worthy of true respect. The scouts had died, yes, but scouts were meant to discover danger by bleeding against it. The soldiers of this ship were brave enough, but fragile. Their armor cracked. Their weapons overheated. Their courage did not make their bodies less weak.
The green-bladed one had been different.
The leader had killed him anyway.
That memory warmed him.
Then he heard a wet, piercing sound behind him.
He turned.
One of his oldest companions hung impaled against the wall. A jagged piece of metal had driven upward through him, entering low and exiting through his open mouth. His eyes were still alive for a heartbeat, wide with pain and disbelief, before his body sagged and the metal spike held him upright like an offering.
The Vong leader stared.
He had seen worse.
He had done worse.
But something about the suddenness of it made his anger sharpen.
At the far end of the corridor stood a man in black armor and a dark cloak. He carried a sword made of light, a disgusting weapon of technology and weakness, and yet the air around him seemed to bend in a way the Vong leader could not name.
The black-armored man raised his hand.
Red lightning filled the corridor.
Pain took the Vong leader to one knee.
It burned across his armor and through his nerves, locking his muscles and filling his mouth with the taste of blood. Behind him, warriors screamed. Some collapsed at once. Others dropped their weapons and convulsed on the deck. A few of the strongest remained upright, but only barely.
The leader forced himself to stand.
His burned flesh smoked beneath the armor.
He gripped his amphistaff until the living weapon hardened into a spear.
This one was worthy.
This one would be taken.
He charged.
The duel that followed was faster than he expected and shorter than he deserved.
He came in with every ounce of ferocity exile had left him. His amphistaff snapped, coiled, hardened, and struck. He aimed for joints, throat, weapon hand, center mass. He used strength, speed, feints, and every cruel lesson taught by warrior masters who had beaten weakness out of him since childhood.
The black-armored man gave ground only once.
Then he stopped giving ground at all.
The blade in his hand moved with terrible economy. It did not dance. It did not flourish. It cut only where it meant to cut. When the Vong leader tried to bind it, the man turned his wrist and forced the spear aside. When the leader drove forward with brute strength, the man stepped inside the strike and hammered one armored fist into his chest hard enough to crack living shell. When the leader tried to use pain as fuel, the man seemed to answer with something colder and deeper than rage alone.
The Vong leader remembered how quickly the green-bladed one had died.
This man killed him just as quickly.
There was a flash of red-edged light.
Then heat filled the leader's mouth.
The blade pierced up through his throat, and for a brief, impossible moment his vision remained clear enough to see the black mask staring back at him without triumph, without hatred spoken aloud, without even the courtesy of a battle cry.
The blade moved again.
His body fell away beneath him.
The last thing he saw was the corridor turning sideways as his head struck the deck.
Then his exile ended.
Anakin watched the Vong leader's head roll to a stop.
He felt no satisfaction.
The kill had been too quick to satisfy anything inside him, and the rage remained as hot as before. He stepped over the body and continued into the hangar.
The remaining Vong turned toward him.
Anakin slaughtered them.
He did it quietly. That was what made it worse. He did not scream Qui-Gon's name. He did not curse them. He did not tell them what they had taken from him. He cut one down at the waist, drove a shard of torn gunship plating through another, wrapped live cables around the throat and weapon arm of a third until both snapped, then sent a broken cargo loader smashing into two more before finishing them with his blade.
The last warrior tried to retreat toward the boarding pod.
Anakin raised his hand, and the pod's own torn organic shell folded inward around the Vong like a closing fist.
When the screaming stopped, the hangar was silent.
The battle beyond the ship still raged somewhere distant, but in that chamber, the fighting had ended. Smoke drifted above the broken starfighters. Emergency lights flashed over clone bodies, Vong corpses, shattered equipment, and the scarred deck where too many had died trying to hold the line.
The Force did not calm.
It raged around Anakin with such intensity that even the damaged lights above him flickered in uneven pulses.
Then he saw Qui-Gon.
The body lay where the survivors had been forced to leave him.
Anakin walked to him and stopped.
For a long time, he only stared.
Qui-Gon Jinn looked smaller in death than Anakin could accept. His armor and robes were torn where the spear had gone through his chest. Blood had dried dark against the fabric. His green lightsaber rested close to one hand, as if he might still reach for it if someone called his name.
His eyes were open.
They stared toward the ceiling, wide and still, and Anakin had the terrible feeling that they were not looking at nothing. They seemed to stare past the smoke, past the ceiling, past the ship and the battle and the stars beyond, straight into the part of Anakin that had not yet decided whether it was grief or something far worse.
A commlink sounded.
Anakin answered it without looking away.
The voice that came through was measured, alien, and calm.
"This is Senior Captain Mitth'raw'nuruodo. General Skywalker, the enemy fleet has been defeated."
Anakin closed his eyes for a moment.
When he opened them again, Qui-Gon was still dead.
"Thank you, Captain," he said. His voice was low, almost empty. "I would like to meet you when this is over. First, I need to tally our dead and find the survivors."
There was a brief pause on the other end, not hesitation so much as respectful calculation.
"Of course, General. I will await your convenience."
The transmission ended.
Anakin did not move.
Around him, the hangar remained broken and still. Somewhere behind the sealed doors, Obi-Wan and Ahsoka were coming. Rex, Cody, Virek, Cairn, Domino Squad, the Pathfinders, and what remained of the defenders would follow. The ship would keep bleeding. The fleet would count its losses. The Chiss captain would wait with the answers he had and the warnings he had not yet given.
But Anakin stayed where he was.
He stared down at Qui-Gon Jinn's open eyes.
The man who had found him.
The man who had believed in him.
The man who had taught him that anger heard did not have to become anger obeyed.
Anakin stood over his master's body, silent beneath the mask, while the dark side wrapped around him like a living cloak.
And for the first time since Tatooine, since Shmi, since the Tusken camp and the blood-soaked sand, there was no voice inside him strong enough to tell the rage no.