[Ezra POV]
A damn terentatek of all fucking things.
The forest floor ten meters ahead of me bulged upward like a rupturing blister. A massive slab of mud and tangled roots heaved into the torrential rain as the monstrosity literally dug itself out of the earth. It hauled its hulking, rancor-sized frame out of the crater, dragging four massive claws through the mire. Long, venomous-looking tusks jutted from a maw flanked by weird, fleshy flaps, and its leathery hide looked less like skin and more like jagged, dark volcanic rock.
The sheer dark-side aura rolling off the beast was absolutely suffocating. It smelled like ancient rot and battery acid, thick enough to coat the back of my throat.
I remembered this thing faintly, from the game Knights of the Old Republic.
Creatures Sith alchemically engineered in ancient times, these things walking tanks specifically to hunt down and devour Force-sensitives.
Which meant Kael was just extra meat. I was the main course.
"Kael!" I yelled over the roaring thunder, keeping my eyes locked on the glowing, feral eyes of the beast. "Take the comms amplifier and run!"
"What?! What about you?!" Kael stammered, freezing in the mud, his flashlight beam shaking wildly.
"It doesn't want you! I'm a glowing all-you-can-eat buffet to this thing!" I shifted Arachnae tighter against my chest, her metallic legs hooking frantically into the gaps of my chestplate. "Go in the direction of the incline, rig the signal, and do not look back! I'll draw it off!"
Kael hesitated for half a second before his survival instincts overrode his shock. He hiked the heavy survival pack higher onto his good shoulder and bolted blindly up the muddy incline, disappearing into the dark tree line.
I didn't hand Arachnae over. Kael was a liability who would probably drop her the second he tripped. Plus, I needed the moral support.
"Hang tight, girl," I muttered, drawing Hett's lightsaber with my free right hand. "Let's see if this ugly bastard actually respects boss fight mechanics."
The crimson blade snapped into existence with an angry hiss, casting long, bloody shadows through the downpour.
The terentatek let out an ear-splitting, vibrating roar that rattled the teeth in my skull. It plunged a massive claw into the earth, ripping up a waterlogged stump the size of a landspeeder, and hurled the massive chunk of wood directly at my head.
I channeled the Force into my legs to vault over the incoming projectile, but the heavy dark-side saturation of the swamp immediately interfered. The energy flickered like a bad holonet connection, sending only half the power I needed into my muscles. I managed to jump, but my broken left hip servo shrieked in protest, locking up mid-air.
The massive stump grazed my armored boot as it flew past. I crashed down into the knee-deep mud, violently twisting my torso to ensure I landed on my right shoulder instead of crushing Arachnae beneath me.
The beast was already charging.
With my left arm completely occupied keeping my droid secure, a two-handed power strike was out of the question. I locked my right wrist, dug my boots into the muck, and leveraged my entire forward momentum. I dashed straight into the creature's guard, dragging the red plasma blade across its massive thigh in a horizontal slash.
Sparks showered violently into the rain. The lightsaber caught on the hide like a dull saw blade grinding against starship plating. The strike left a deep, glowing orange trench across the creature's leg, filling the air with the stench of burning sulfur, but the beast didn't even flinch.
"Okay, so the hide is basically beskar-laced rock," I grunted, parrying a stray branch it kicked up. "Good to know."
Before I could even adjust my footing, the terentatek spun with impossible agility. A massive hand swept through the dark, its venomous claws aimed to rip me into pieces.
I scrambled backward, boots slipping in the slop. Every time I tried to draw on the Force to enhance my speed, a chorus of oily, whispering voices crawled through my mind. They sounded like distorted static, urging me to just lie down in the mud, to let the dark consume me, to stop fighting. The planet itself was actively trying to break my concentration.
I told the voices to fuck right off.
Trying to buy a single second to breathe, I reached out with the Force and attempted to lock a telekinetic grip around the beast's swinging arm. My invisible grasp materialized, but it instantly slid off the creature's hide like I was trying to grab a greased boulder. The legends about their resistance to the Force were incredibly accurate.
The terentatek lunged forward, snapping its venomous tusks inches from my face.
In a moment of pure, adrenaline-fueled panic, I thrust my lightsaber hand out and forced the air directly in front of me to solidify into a hardened kinetic barrier. The invisible wall successfully kept the venomous teeth from sinking into my flesh, but it did absolutely nothing to absorb the momentum.
The physical mass of the ten-ton monster collided with my barrier. The kinetic transfer launched me backward through the air like a discarded ragdoll.
I curled my body inward to shield Arachnae as my back violently impacted the greasy trunk of a massive swamp tree. A sickening crack echoed in my ears, accompanied by a sharp, breathtaking agony flaring through my ribs. I collapsed into the wet roots, coughing up a mouthful of muddy water that tasted distinctly like metallic copper.
Yep. Something definitely just broke.
Arachnae let out a series of high-pitched, distressed trills, tapping her front legs rapidly against my chin to check if I was still breathing.
"I'm alive, I'm alive," I wheezed, clutching her tighter as the heavy rain washed the blood from my mouth.
Then, my hyper-perception picked up the vibrations again.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
I pushed my raw, flickering senses out through the rain, ignoring the agonizing dark-side static. The seismic tremors weren't just coming from the creature currently tearing up the mud in front of me. Another massive vibration was rapidly approaching from the east. A third was charging through the deeper swamp to the right.
Fuck me, how many of these things are out there?
Then again, they fed on Force-sensitives. Me using my abilities to fight this one could be basically ringing a giant, glowing dinner bell for every single predator in the entire hemisphere.
Hell, even my existence here could be enough to bring their attention. Not everyday you get to have a force sensitive in this god forsaken planet.
The terentatek roared, raising both heavy arms to crush me into paste.
I forced myself off the ground, gritting my teeth against the awful grinding pain in my ribs, and threw myself to the right. The beast's fists slammed into the spot where I had just been sitting, shattering the massive tree roots into wooden shrapnel. As I slipped past its flank, I slashed my saber across the back of its knee joint in a desperate counter-attack.
It left another glowing scorch mark, but no severed tendon. The beast merely roared louder, thoroughly enraged by the superficial burn.
Hobbling backward to gain some distance, a dozen desperate plans cycled through my head. A prolonged duel was completely out of the question. I couldn't win a war of attrition against a walking tank while holding a fragile droid in one arm.
"Seems like I won't have time to deal with you," I gasped.
Instead of charging the beast for a suicidal strike, I pulled my right arm back and hurled my lightsaber into the air like a glowing red boomerang.
The blade spun in a wide, lethal arc through the canopy above, cleanly slicing through the thick, greasy trunks of the four massive swamp trees surrounding the clearing.
The creature paused, blinking its feral eyes in momentary confusion as the lightsaber snapped back into my waiting palm.
"See you never," I grunted.
I pointed my blade toward the canopy, fighting through the agonizing flare in my chest, and unleashed a massive telekinetic shove. I didn't target the Force-immune beast. I targeted the heavy timber hovering precariously above it.
The massive wooden pillars groaned, tilting inward before collapsing in a catastrophic avalanche of branches, heavy sap, and crushing weight. The trees slammed down directly onto the terentatek, burying the monster beneath tons of dense swamp wood. A muffled, furious bellow echoed from the wreckage as the beast thrashed blindly against the timber.
I didn't wait around to see how long it would take to dig itself out. Kael had gone north, up the incline.
So, I turned south.
I could already feel the approaching tremors grow nearer.
"Alright, boys!" I whispered to the dark, empty forest, breaking into a sprint away from Kael's path.
"Dinner's on me!"
I slid through the knee-deep muck, my locked-up left hip servo screeching in protest as the massive claw of yet another terentatek whistled millimeters over my visor. The wind pressure from the swing alone threatened to tear my ear drums.
I scrambled back to my feet, barely keeping my balance as I squeezed Arachnae tighter against my chest. The little droid was clicking frantically, her remaining legs hooked into the gaps of my dented chestplate.
I didn't even bother looking back. Fighting was completely off the table now. The number of these things roaming the forest was far beyond anything my worst nightmares could have conjured. If I stopped to parry even one of them, god knows how many more would catch up to me in that single second.
The only viable strategy left was to keep running.
...
...
"Ezra… Ezra… why didn't you save me?"
I flinched, my boots slipping on a slick, greasy root.
"You never cared about me, did you? Just lust."
"Shut up," I hissed through my teeth, blinking away the sweat and rain sting in my eyes. "You're not real."
"I died because you didn't save me, Ezra…"
The voice—the soft, melodic voice I yearned to hear more than anything else in the galaxy—kept whispering incessantly in the back of my mind. Even though my rational, twenty-seven-year-old brain knew it was just the malignant aura of the planet playing mind games, the words still pricked at my ears.
I didn't know when, but the formless whispers of the dark side had shifted entirely into Vasha's voice. It was an overwhelming, overlapping chorus. Some of the voices sounded hazy and distant, some were filled with desperate yearning, and others were laced with a cold, biting anger. It felt as if she were standing right behind my shoulder, pouring her resentment directly into my head.
Whenever my focus wavered for even a fraction of a second, the very forest seemed to warp. The twisted branches of the trees momentarily shifted into the metal struts of a burning imperial prison, and the puddles of muddy water looked like pools of fresh blood.
This damned planet. It was actively peeling open my skull and rummaging through my deepest, most pathetic insecurities.
...
...
I had been running for force knows how long.
Sometime during the chaotic sprint, a flying chunk of stone from a near miss had shattered my shoulder-mounted flashlight, sending it clattering into the darkness. I had neither the time nor the luxury to stop and retrieve it from the rising tide of beasts pursuing me.
As a result, I was running entirely blind, guided solely by the hazy, distorted feedback of my hyper-perception. What once gave me a god-tier, microscopic map of my surroundings was now severely numbed by the heavy dark-side static. It was like trying to look through a grease-smeared window in a blizzard, but that vague, blurry sensory radar was the only thing keeping me from slamming face-first into a tree.
I knew this wasn't a sustainable plan. My twelve-year-old muscles were already screaming, my chest felt like it was full of hot coals, and my stamina was rapidly dwindling to zero. The heavy, tight Imperial armor that was supposed to protect me had become nothing more than a suffocating metal cage dragging me down.
I had to find a way to get rid of these creatures, but how?
They tracked me through the Force. It didn't matter how much I tried to suppress my power or hide behind trees; this entire world was absolutely drenched in the dark side, and my living presence here was like a bright flare in a dark room.
A desperate, highly dangerous idea began to brew in my mind. I had no clue if it would actually work, but it felt like the only hand I had left to play.
Yes, my presence was a light in the dark... but what if I plunged myself into a darkness deep enough that even a sliver of light couldn't escape it?
Through the thick, oily static of my numbed senses, I could feel it. A heavy, gravity-like pull.
I could sense what it was instinctively. A nexus of Force, drowning in dark-side.
It was close. No doubt about it, the source was somewhere in this very forest.
Would stepping into a dark-side nexus actually mask my signature from the beasts? I didn't know.
But I was out of options, and for some bizarre, unsettling reason, it felt like something within that heavy pressure was actively calling out to me.
...
...
I tore through a dense wall of thorny briars, the sharp branches scraping loudly against my dented chestplate, and stumbled out into an open clearing.
I stopped dead in my tracks, my jaw dropping beneath my visor.
"What... what is this place?" I breathed.
Sitting directly in the middle of the dark, swampy forest was a massive, ancient stone structure. It was tall enough to break clean through the oppressive canopy, its ancient, crumbling spires bathed in the pale, cold moonlight filtering down from the storm clouds.
Moss and thick vines clung to the dark stone walls, but the unmistakable, jagged geometry of ancient Sith architecture peeked back at me from the shadows.
---
[Image]
A/N: Yo ho, how's the chapter? Someone from old times is gonna make a appearance next chapter hoho.
And I didn't post last week and would apologize for that. I had gotten an idea for another fanfic you see, and had ended up in a feverish rush to write it. Didn't knew how time passed. I wrote up around 40-50k. words of it in one go lol.
I haven't decided on final name for this fanfic yet, but basically this is a Multiversal Fanfic with homeworld as Star Wars in Republic/Clone-Wars Era. Remember that Ezra Omake I had posted a while ago? Basically what if Alex woke up in republic era instead of rebels era. That was the inspiration for this story.
And combined with the republic era plot, other worlds like Cyberpunk EdgeRunners/2077, Elden Ring, Skyrim etc would also be explored.
Also this is a an full fledged R18 crack fic (the porn aspect in it is for laughing, not for fapping. not saying that you can't). Its tentative name right now is:
[Plowing Girls Every Day Keeps Problem Away]
Have posted a couple chapters of it on patreon as free ones, you can check em out. Once I accumulate some bit, I will start posting it on webnovel for regular updates.
___
Also its a new week so please donate your powerstones if you liked the story.
Bonus chapter if we reach 500 stones by wednesday
Support the cause and read advanced chapter on Patreon!
Link: www.patreon.com/AbstractoX