The air of Sundari had gradually thickened into a choking cocktail of smoke, scorched flesh, and the ever-present Mandalorian dust. The capital's walls, once a blinding white, were now scarred with plasma bolt impacts and streaked black with soot. The city — the living symbol of Duchess Satine's pacifism — groaned under the weight of a civil war that had ignited faster than the Jedi had managed to draw their blades.
"This isn't a riot anymore — it's a massacre! And we can't do a thing to stop it..." Skywalker swept his blue blade sharply upward, deflecting a burst of fire raining down from the upper levels.
"Master, where is the Sith? We've swept half the government district and all I'm sensing is fear and rage from Mandalorians — that's not the Dark Side!"
Obi-Wan Kenobi was breathing hard, his back pressed flat against a column that was steadily shedding chunks of decorative stone with each well-placed shot. His expression was focused and grim.
"He's here, Anakin. I felt his presence in the throne room — cold, calculating. Nothing like the rage coming off Vizsla's fighters."
"Like all Sith, he's a coward!" Skywalker snapped, lunging forward and cutting straight through the jetpack of a Death Watch warrior who had come in too close. "He stirred up all of this, set us up, and the moment we drew our sabers he ran!"
"Or he's simply better at hiding than you're giving him credit for, Master," Ahsoka Tano said quietly from behind them, covering their rear.
"They're massing. If we don't push through to Vizsla's command post right now, they'll bury us in numbers."
Obi-Wan peered around the edge of their cover. Their plan had been straightforward — almost frustratingly Jedi in its directness: arrest Pre Vizsla and force a public confession about the bombings before Satine lost control of the situation entirely. But Death Watch was operating with a coordination and speed that caught him off guard. The Mandalorians were exploiting every narrow passageway and using the vertical advantage of their jetpacks to turn every meter of progress into a fight for survival.
"Follow me! I'll carve a path to the central tower — we can't afford to get bogged down in street fighting; we need the head of this snake!" Anakin shouted, already surging forward — and completely ignoring the "Anakin, no!" that Kenobi threw at his back.
He ran headlong, spinning his blade in a defensive pattern until he was little more than a blue whirlwind that forced the Mandalorians steadily backward. His former Master and his Padawan followed despite the sheer recklessness of it — because what else could they do? But a few hundred meters on, an explosion shook the ground with devastating force. One of the bridge's support towers collapsed, cutting the Jedi off on a narrow, exposed parapet with nowhere to run.
A storm of thermal rockets came screaming down from above. The Jedi were boxed in from every direction: a sheer drop ahead, Death Watch infantry pressing in from behind, and Mandalorian jetpack troops hammering them from the air above.
"This is what I was talking about, Anakin!" Obi-Wan shouted, straining through the Force to deflect a full volley of rockets simultaneously.
"Master... we need to get out of here. Now." Ahsoka stated the obvious, though with fire raking them from every angle, no obvious way out presented itself...
XXXXXXX
A few kilometers from where the Jedi were currently being blown apart, the situation in the smoke-filled corridors of Satine's palace technical sector was no less dire.
"Oh, maker preserve us! We're finished!" C-3PO flailed his golden arms in a panic as stray blaster shots whizzed past him from every direction.
"Artoo, I told you that following Master Anakin into the thick of a battle was a logical error! And now we are cut off, completely disoriented, and in all likelihood about to be melted down into drink coasters!"
R2-D2 responded with a rapid burst of sharp, indignant beeping, his dome spinning briskly.
"Call for reinforcements? But how?!" Threepio froze.
"Every frequency is jammed by Death Watch scramblers! We can't even get a signal past the upper atmosphere!"
Artoo suddenly went quiet. His sensor eye locked onto a landing pad half-hidden behind a curtain of smoke. Parked there was a sleek, clearly modified ship with sharp, angular lines — personal transport that belonged neither to the Mandalorian militia nor to the Republic.
R2-D2 let out an excited sequence of chirps, projecting a frequency analysis graph onto his small display screen.
"What do you mean, 'anomalous signal'?" the golden protocol droid asked.
"An encrypted friend-or-foe identification channel? Artoo, no! That would be unauthorized intrusion into private property! It's completely against— Hey! Where are you going?!"
Without so much as a beep of acknowledgment, the astromech shot off at full speed toward the distant ship. His logic circuits were running at maximum capacity: if that vessel had a communications system capable of punching through Death Watch's planetary blackout, it was their only chance of saving the Jedi.
Rolling up to the airlock, Artoo extended his scomp link. The security codes were complex — clearly written by someone who understood modern encryption protocols. But Artoo was no mere droid at this point; he was a seasoned veteran of electronic intrusion, whether or not the Republic Army had ever seen fit to create a rank for it. Ten seconds of furious indicator-light activity later, the hatch hissed open.
"We're going inside?!" Threepio stepped reluctantly but inevitably aboard after Artoo.
"I am filing a formal complaint with the Senate about your conduct! Although... it is rather cozy in here. And there are a remarkable number of surveillance systems..."
Artoo plugged directly into the main terminal without hesitation. Somewhat remarkably, the ship appeared to have something close to administrative-level access to various systems across the planet — which allowed the astromech to confirm within moments that the Jedi were in a critical situation. Without wasting another second, he activated the engine warm-up sequence and seized control of the external turrets.
XXXXXX
Up on the tower parapet, the situation had been critical for the past several minutes. Ahsoka had taken a hit to the shoulder, and Anakin was straining every last reserve of strength to push back rockets and intercept sniper fire. At least the Mandalorians had grown somewhat more conservative over time and stopped pouring quite such a relentless volume of fire into them.
"There's no other way out. On three — we jump to the lower level!" Skywalker shouted.
Obi-Wan grimaced, but nodded anyway.
"It's suicide, but at least it gives us a chance."
"One... two..." Anakin started — and then his count was swallowed up by the deep, surging roar of engines.
A dark ship came tearing out of the smoke like a bird of prey. It moved oddly — lurching, stuttering — but its side-mounted guns had suddenly come alive, and the Death Watch positions across the rooftops were being walked over by precise plasma fire. The Mandalorians, completely blindsided by fire coming from one of their own allied vessels, scattered into cover in a panic.
"Is that... reinforcements?" Ahsoka looked up in bewilderment.
"No — that's Vizsla's ship. But look who's flying it." Anakin squinted at the familiar silhouette.
For just a moment, a golden figure was visible in the cockpit viewport — unmistakably Threepio, gesticulating wildly and almost certainly wailing about something. The next instant the ship tilted forward, revealing the second droid who was actually at the controls, and then it swung broadside to the Jedi and lowered its boarding ramp in open invitation.
"Artoo?! How did he even— never mind. Jump!" Obi-Wan commanded, his feelings thoroughly mixed.
The Jedi crossed the gap to the open ramp in one extended leap. The moment the last of them was aboard, the ship banked sharply and pulled into a steep turn, pulling away from the rocket salvos that finally came screaming after it.
Inside the ship, despite the fact that nothing had actually hit them yet, everything was chaos.
"Artoo, give me the controls!" Anakin burst into the cockpit shouting.
"Vwee-fwit-vwoo—" The astromech responded with a rapid series of whistles, which the Jedi loosely translated as: They've noticed we've stolen their ship, locked out the autopilot, and now we're being flown wherever they're directing us. Also, the ship's security system just came online.
"I'll deal with the doors and the defense drones!" Ahsoka reacted immediately to her Master's rough translation, igniting both her blades just as turrets began rolling down from recesses in the ceiling.
While Skywalker wrestled with the controls, fighting to wrest authority over the stubborn vessel, R2-D2 was not idle. He kept working through the ship's data buffers, methodically trying to determine who owned this thing.
"Bwee-bwee-vwiii!" Artoo suddenly let out a triumphant sequence of chirps.
"Master Obi-Wan!" Threepio's voice was quivering with agitation. "Artoo has found something in the hidden logs of the navigation computer! It appears to be a fragment of encrypted communication that was never properly deleted!"
Obi-Wan crossed to the holographic projector. By now all of the cockpit turrets had been destroyed, and Ahsoka could be heard somewhere further back in the ship dealing with whatever dangerous surprises remained. What materialized before Kenobi was a grainy, badly degraded image. Two figures stood in a dimly lit room. One of them — Pre Vizsla — was easy to recognize from his bearing and insignia. The second was apparently speaking over voice comms and remained off-camera, but his voice... cold, carrying a faint accent that Obi-Wan had already heard once before, in the aftermath of the mine attack.
"...the explosives are already in position in the mines," the voice on the recording was saying. "When Satine announces the start of negotiations, the detonation in Sector Four will create the chaos we need. Blame it on Republic saboteurs. The people will demand your protection themselves, Vizsla."
"Zarek Von." Obi-Wan breathed the name. "That's him. Vizsla's 'advisor.'"
"The recording is damaged," Ahsoka noted, leaning in to peer through the static. "We can't see his face — only a silhouette. But it's enough. The plan to blow the mines is being discussed right there in plain language."
Anakin finally leveled the ship out, pulling a sharp loop above the central plaza.
"Enough for a formal inquiry before the Republic Council — but not nearly enough for the mob in the streets that wants our blood." Skywalker glanced at the communications panel. "Artoo — can you splice this ship's transmitter into all the city's broadcast systems?"
The droid whistled an affirmative.
"Perfect. We're not just running." Anakin's teeth showed in a predatory grin. "We're going to give them a premiere they won't forget for a very long time. All of Mandalore is about to hear exactly how their 'hero' Vizsla was planning to slaughter his own workers for a shot at power."
XXXXXXXXXX
The same time. Taalas (Brute).
I stood on the observation balcony of Satine's palace, watching my recent plan — neat, timed to the second — not quite fall apart, but quietly slide from the category of "nearly bloodless seizure of power on Mandalore" into something that was starting to look uncomfortably like "civil war." High above the city's spires, Vizsla's personal transport drifted with a kind of magnificent, almost laughable audacity, broadcasting our conversation through every government channel from its powerful transmitters — a conversation that the idiot had apparently not bothered to properly delete.
The voices were distorted by interference and the picture came through in rolling bands of static, but the substance was clear to anyone listening.
"Master," — Kem's voice on the comlink was, as always, gratingly loud, and he poured every drop of his customary irony into that particular title — "the command post is asking for your instructions."
"..." I said nothing, turning the situation over in my mind.
In the grand scheme of things, how bad was this, really? I'd be stuck here for another couple of weeks. I'd be going up against three Jedi. Hardly the end of the world. And then the CIS and the Republic would start moving their main forces in and things would get really interesting! Ha... ahem. Panic? No — panic was a luxury I couldn't afford. My mind was already burning through options at full speed, discarding the losing ones. Skywalker thought the truth was like his lightsaber — something you could swing directly at a problem. Right now he was swinging it at me. What he had forgotten was that in this war, truth was simply a matter of how the light fell, and I was holding at least two handles on that particular weapon, if not more.
I activated a broadband broadcast across all government frequencies, hijacking the signal, and pulled on my Mandalorian helmet — the "military advisor to Vizsla" disguise.
"Citizens of Mandalore!" My voice, amplified by the vocoder, poured from every street speaker in the city, drowning out the ship's transmission.
"Do not be taken in by this provocation! The Jedi have stolen your governor's personal transport. What you are hearing is a fabrication — a forgery manufactured by Coruscant's finest, designed to justify the kidnapping of Duchess Satine!"
I let a beat pass, giving the words time to settle into the minds of the crowd.
"At this very moment, the Duchess is being held hostage by the Jedi!" I continued, pushing pre-prepared footage into the network — footage of Satine surrounded by Jedi that could easily be read as an armed escort. "They are forcing her to issue orders for the suppression of these protests! They have violated our neutrality! Mandalorians — defend your freedom!"
Down in the streets, the chaos shifted direction. Part of the crowd stared at the sky in horror, believing the recording — but another part, already primed by Vizsla's speeches, erupted in raw fury. For them, the sight of the governor's ship being stolen by Jedi was a far more concrete and tangible crime than some grainy hologram playing on a screen.
But the recording was still running. That particular antenna needed to be silenced.
"Vizsla — we need to bring that thing down immediately! Get your pilots in the air!" I barked, switching to a private channel. I usually spoke to him with at least a veneer of diplomatic courtesy, but the fact that those recordings had never been wiped was his failure, and I let a thread of genuine irritation color my voice.
I wasn't planning to sit and wait either. The jetpack on my back hummed to life and launched me into the thin upper air of the capital. Within a minute I had dropped into the cockpit of a borrowed Fang fighter — a Mandalorian interceptor one of the governor's retinue had left sitting unattended.
As it turned out, I was the quickest off the mark, because there was no one else in the sky. The Jedi's commandeered transport and my fighter were it — even civilian vessels, which had been buzzing freely back and forth until minutes ago, had cleared out, sensing what was coming.
Judging by the way Vizsla's transport was moving — lurching and aggressive — Anakin had noticed me and had officially stopped caring about safety margins of any kind. He was driving the massive ship at an extremely low altitude, practically brushing the smooth faces of skyscrapers with its hull. And he was doing it deliberately — hunting for dead zones in the stationary jammers so the broadcast could keep going.
"What an absolute idiot," I muttered, banking after him and dropping lower myself out of necessity.
Now my fighter was skimming close enough to building facades that I could see my own engine reflections in the panoramic office windows. Skywalker dived beneath an elevated transit line, scattering civilian speeders like a flock of startled birds.
"He's got droids," I realized, watching the stolen ship's turrets cut off my approach vectors with mechanical precision.
"Kem — cut off his exit to the central plaza!"
I squeezed the trigger. Laser fire licked across the transport's shields. Skywalker answered with a sharp banking roll that nearly clipped the spire of a communications tower. The Force around the Chosen One pulsed like a bright star. I could feel his exhilaration, his righteous anger — and his luck. That extraordinary, utterly irrational luck that let him fly through gaps where every law of physics said there should be nothing but a fireball and debris.
I adjusted my approach, launching a pair of rockets not at the ship itself but at a decorative archway directly ahead of it. The explosion brought tonnes of stone crashing down right across his flight path. Skywalker was forced to yank the nose up sharply, bleeding speed in an instant. In that moment, Death Watch's ground-based anti-air batteries finally locked on. A burst of fire from the surface tore through the transport's left wing.
Vizsla's ship, trailing smoke and shedding hull plating, went into a hard descent. In a display of piloting that bordered on the miraculous, Skywalker managed not to scatter the burning wreck across the residential blocks below — instead he walked it down, deliberately, into the central plaza of Sundari, the very place where Satine usually gave her speeches to the public.
The impact hit like a thunderclap. Metal screamed and tore. A wall of dust rolled outward and swallowed the crash site.
By the time I landed nearby, the dust had not yet settled. The ship lay on its side like a broken animal. Around it, a ring of Death Watch Mandalorians was already drawing tight.
The broadcast had cut out. The silence that fell over the plaza was more terrible than the sound of a hundred explosions. Thousands of eyes stared at the smoldering wreckage. Vizsla, who had climbed out of his own fighter moments earlier, stood at the head of his forces, his hand closed around the hilt of the Darksaber.
The hatch of the downed ship ground against its frame and blew open.
Three figures walked out of the smoke. Obi-Wan Kenobi looked as though he had just been put through a grinder — his tunic was thick with dust and blood — but his expression was calm. Anakin and Ahsoka stood a half-step behind him, ready to fight.
"Enough blood, Vizsla!" Obi-Wan's voice carried across the entire plaza. He wasn't shouting, yet everyone heard him — some kind of amplifier, clearly. "Your lies have been exposed. The whole city heard your own words. Lay down your weapon and we end this without any more deaths."
Vizsla gave a short laugh. There was more desperation in it than triumph. He knew as well as anyone that nothing was ever going to be simple again.
"You stole my ship, Jedi. You brought war into my home — and you call me a liar?" The accusations rang out across the square as Pre ignited the Darksaber. Its black blade, ringed with a halo of white, hummed with a low and ominous resonance.
"Mandalorians don't surrender on the orders of men who hide behind women's backs!" he added with a mocking grin, rolling his shoulders loose.
Obi-Wan stepped forward and put out a hand to stop Anakin. He understood perfectly well: if this dissolved into a general brawl, the Jedi would simply be torn apart by sheer numbers.
"Then let's settle it your way." Obi-Wan ignited his blue blade.
"I challenge you to a duel. One on one. The winner takes everything — the loser leaves Sundari. Before the eyes of your people, Vizsla. Or is your honor as hollow as your promises?"
The crowd began to murmur immediately. A Mandalorian challenge. Vizsla couldn't refuse. To back down now would mark him as a coward in the eyes of every warrior in beskar. His authority would collapse on the spot.
"I accept, Jedi," Pre growled.
They came together in the center of a circle formed by fighters and frightened civilians alike.
I stood in the shadow of the wreckage, feeling a creeping cold settle in my chest. This was a bad development. Vizsla was an excellent warrior — but he was no match for Kenobi. In a fair fight, the Mandalorian's chances were slim.
Their blades met with a screech that set teeth on edge from the very first clash. Vizsla used his jetpack — launching upward and crashing down from above, hosing fire from the flamethrowers built into his gauntlets. Obi-Wan moved in contrast: economical, precise, using the Force without hesitation to redirect every attack.
Five minutes passed at that pace. Vizsla was already winded — his movements had grown visibly heavier. Kenobi was holding up considerably better. At a certain moment Obi-Wan threw a feint, let Vizsla's strike sail past him, and drove a sharp kick straight into the Mandalorian's footing.
Vizsla dropped to one knee. The blue blade froze a centimeter from his throat.
"Surrender," Obi-Wan said quietly.
Vizsla stared up at him with undisguised hatred, his hand drifting toward a concealed blade. The crowd held its breath. This was the end. The central piece on the board of the Mandalorian uprising was about to be swept off it.
Not on my watch, I thought.
I closed my eyes and focused. I couldn't afford to reveal myself. The Force was not only lightning and choking — it was kinetic energy, and kinetic energy could be disguised.
A few meters from the dueling pair lay the mangled engine housing of the downed ship, still weeping fuel and spitting sparks.
I extended my hand, barely moving my fingers. The Dark Side within me responded eagerly, coiling into a tight rope of will. And then the explosion came.
I hadn't simply pushed or unleashed a Force lightning strike — I had carefully, with measured precision, triggered the ignition of residual fuel vapors inside the engine, while simultaneously driving a concussive Force wave directly into the space between Obi-Wan and Vizsla.
The flash was blinding. The blast made every person on the square duck instinctively. Acrid black smoke poured across the plaza.
"Vizsla — we're leaving!" I was beside him in the next instant, stepping out of the smoke.
Obi-Wan, thrown back by the blast wave, was trying to blink his vision clear, his lightsaber extinguished from the impact against the stone. While the Jedi were still finding their footing, I seized the disoriented Vizsla by the collar, triggered his jetpack to force him upward, and fired my own at the same moment.
We shot into the sky, swallowed by the smoke screen and the chain of smaller explosions still rolling through the crash site below.
"It was a malfunction! The engine blew!" voices were shouting somewhere beneath us.
Looking down at the shrinking figure of Kenobi — already back on his feet, already staring straight up into the sky where we had vanished — I felt a cold needle of unease. Obi-Wan wouldn't believe in coincidences. He had almost certainly already understood that it was me.
But that didn't matter right now. Vizsla was alive. His credibility had taken a serious blow, but in the eyes of the crowd, the Jedi were the ones responsible for a crash and an explosion in the heart of the city.
And yet — setting aside the disinformation for now and moving on to a different approach — I was fairly confident I could still turn this situation to our advantage. Especially given that Vizsla's people had already secured Satine and most of her inner circle.