Two brilliant white blades hissed through the damp air, narrowly deflecting a massive, bone-spurred claw that could have easily crushed a speeder.
Ahsoka Tano exhaled a sharp breath and pivoted through the knee-deep mud as the towering creature roared. Its voice was a guttural, vibrating screech that physically rattled the surrounding trees.
"Alright, big guy," Ahsoka muttered, adjusting her grip on her hilts. "Let's see if we can speed this up."
This was the third one she had encountered in the past four hours.
An old memory from the Jedi Temple archives surfaced as she ducked beneath another frenzied swipe. She recalled a faded holographic illustration from a restricted text on ancient Sith alchemy. The beast matched the description of a Terentatek.
According to the old records, these creatures were supposed to be ambush predators. They typically nested in areas heavily saturated with the dark side and waited patiently for Force-sensitives to wander into their territory.
These beasts were behaving completely differently.
This one had not been actively tracking her. She had simply crossed its path while it was already on the move, marching through the swamp with a strange, agitated urgency. Something was driving these territorial nightmares out of their normal hunting grounds, and Ahsoka sincerely doubted it was a natural weather pattern.
Dodging a sweeping tail, she kept her footwork light. The entire planet felt like a physical weight pressing against her senses. The atmosphere was practically drowning in dark side energy, making her skin crawl and smothering her broader connection to the Force.
That oppressive energy alone would have made the rescue mission difficult. The real complication was the Imperial presence.
When she first dropped out of hyperspace and identified the uncharted coordinates, she naturally assumed the Empire had tracked the boy's stolen Inquisitor transport to the surface. She had expected to find a temporary search grid or perhaps a few deployed hunting squads.
Instead, her ship's long-range sensors had picked up established communications towers, heavily fortified landing zones, and atmospheric patrols operating on strict, routine flight paths.
You did not build permanent military infrastructure in a few days just to hunt down a crashed twelve-year-old. The Empire was already here. They had been secretly occupying this forgotten Sith world for quite some time.
Because the airspace was crawling with patrols, Ahsoka had been forced to park her ship miles away from the original distress signal. Now, she was paying the price for that caution in the middle of a hostile swamp.
The Terentatek lunged again, its jaws snapping wildly.
Ahsoka sidestepped the charge, her right blade snapping out to sever a thick cluster of tendons behind the beast's knee. The creature shrieked and stumbled, its massive weight working against its compromised leg.
Brute force was entirely useless against a hide that thick. Her lightsabers scored the flesh but refused to cleave cleanly through the alchemically altered muscle. She had to dismantle the monster piece by piece.
She darted inward, delivering a shallow cut to its left shoulder joint before spinning away to avoid a crushing backhand. Another glancing burn across its inner elbow followed seconds later. It was a precise, tiring dance of death by a thousand cuts.
Slowly, the creature's movements grew sluggish. Its attacks devolved into a berserk, uncoordinated thrashing as its mobility failed.
Sensing its mounting frustration, Ahsoka baited the next attack.
The beast charged blindly, tearing up massive chunks of earth in its wake. Ahsoka did not retreat. She vaulted forward, planting her boots firmly against the trunk of a massive, rot-hollowed tree.
Using the creature's own momentum, she launched herself into a high backflip just as the Terentatek slammed headfirst into the wood beneath her. The heavy trunk splintered with a deafening crack.
Ahsoka twisted in mid-air, dropping directly onto the creature's hunched back. Before it could shake her off, she reversed her grip and drove her left lightsaber deep into the softer, unarmored tissue just behind its ear canal.
The creature went rigidly stiff. A final, gurgling breath escaped its jaws before it collapsed into the mud with a heavy, wet thud.
Ahsoka pulled her blade free and deactivated her weapons.
"Well, that was certainly a workout," she sighed, wiping a mixture of mud and moisture from her face.
The sudden silence of the swamp was instantly replaced by the steady dripping of water from the canopy. The entire planet seemed to exist in a permanent state of thunderstorms and suffocating twilight. She considered herself incredibly lucky that the worst of the weather had broken in the last hour, allowing a few pale shafts of light to actually spill through the dense forest canopy.
That faint light was the only reason she had managed to spot a pair of Vine Cats earlier. The massive wild felines utilized their matted fur and hanging foliage to blend perfectly into the jungle rot, waiting until prey was mere inches away to strike.
She was also actively avoiding the canopy altogether to steer clear of the Mailocs. The legless, flying predators traveled in constantly shrieking swarms, utilizing two-pronged stingers capable of punching straight through standard armor. Everything on this planet was seemingly designed to be lethal.
Ahsoka reached for the modified holotracker hooked to her belt, using her thumb to clear a smudge of dirt from the cracked display screen.
The faint, encrypted distress beacon Bail had provided was still pulsing rhythmically. The signal was heavily degraded by the planet's atmospheric interference, but the directional arrow remained steady, pointing her deeper into the heavily occupied sector.
Bail had been incredibly sparse on the details regarding the boy but if a trained former Jedi was struggling this much just to navigate the local fauna, she could only imagine what a child was going through in this nightmare of an ecosystem.
Add an established Imperial garrison to the mix, and the situation looked incredibly grim.
Ahsoka tapped the side of the tracker, committing the heading to memory before clipping the device back onto her belt. She offered a quiet, desperate plea to the universe, hoping that wherever Ezra Bridger was, he had the sense to stay completely hidden until she could find him.
---
TK-6731 decided, with growing conviction, that Imperial Command could shove its classified wildlife suppression order directly up a star destroyer's exhaust port.
Sideways. With rusted durasteel thorns.
When he signed up for the Imperial Stormtrooper Corps, the recruiter had promised him a shiny garrison post on some civilized Core World. He expected to be guarding a pristine plaza on Coruscant or checking civilian IDs at a luxury spaceport on Corellia.
Instead, he got shipped to this uncharted, storm-choked armpit of the galaxy where literally every native organism was actively trying to murder him. The sky never stopped pissing rain. The trees were covered in carnivorous moss. If you looked up, you got impaled by swarms of shrieking mailocs with stingers the size of vibrodaggers. If you looked down, a camouflaged vine cat bit your kneecap off.
And if the wildlife didn't get you, the red-robed bastards commanding the sector eventually would.
They called themselves Prophets of the Dark Side. Bron just called them a massive pain in the ass.
He had no idea why the Empire gave a bunch of creepy, cloaked zealots absolute authority over an Imperial garrison, but nobody asked a grunt for his opinion. These cultists just floated around their ancient sanctuaries, occasionally pointing their weirdly pale fingers at problems for the stormtroopers to solve.
Like this current mess. The local beasts had suddenly gone completely feral, abandoning their deep swamp nests to attack Imperial outposts for no apparent reason. The Prophets had immediately ordered Vell's squad into the muck to cull the herd.
The first creature had taken nine men, one E-Web emplacement, all their breaching charges, and half of Sergeant Vell's left leg before finally bleeding out.
They had tracked that monster for six hours through fungal ravines and knee-deep black water, laying sensor lures and bait charges exactly according to the emergency predator protocol the red-robed freaks had provided.
The protocol had technically worked.
The beast had died after Corporal Nema overcharged the E-Web and poured continuous fire into the same opened wound for nearly a full minute. By then, its claws had already turned two troopers into very expensive floor paint, its tail had crushed their portable comm array, and one of its tusks had gone clean through Nema's chest plate.
Nema had kept firing anyway. Bron had seen veterans on Mimban with less discipline than that.
Now there were only three of them left. And the second creature was significantly bigger.
"Move, move, move!" Sergeant Vell barked.
The sergeant's voice came through the helmet channel full of static and pain. His left leg was splinted with a broken blaster stock and sealed with way too much coag-foam. Every step he took made a wet mechanical crunch that made Bron want to vomit inside his helmet.
He suppressed the urge. Stormtrooper helmets recycled air terribly under normal circumstances. Adding fear-puke to the situation would qualify as an act of treason against his own nose.
"Rask, keep its attention right!" Vell shouted. "Bron, with me! Grenades on my mark!"
Bron raised his E-11 and fired blindly at the creature's face.
The red bolts splashed across its thick hide with insulting uselessness. Some scorched the mud. Some glanced off bone spurs. One clipped the wet membrane near its left nostril, earning a roar so violently loud his helmet dampeners crackled in protest.
The beast charged.
Rask tried to dive around a moss-choked stone column.
He almost made it.
A massive claw caught the edge of his backplate and sent him spinning into a tree with enough kinetic force to fold the plastoid armor entirely around him. Rask made one thin, wet sound over the comms—more surprised than afraid—and then the channel cut to a flat tone.
Bron threw his grenade anyway.
The detonite charge bounced once in the muck, rolled under the creature's foreleg, and detonated with a thunderclap that filled the swamp with steam and black water.
For a half-second, Bron genuinely thought they had done it.
The creature stumbled. One foreleg buckled as strips of burned flesh peeled away from the joint. Its massive head dipped low toward the mud.
Sergeant Vell laughed through his teeth. "Again! Put the ugly bastard down!"
Bron fumbled for another grenade. His fingers shook violently against his belt clasp.
The creature moved faster than anything that large had any right to move. It shoved off its injured limb, twisted its massive bulk, and swept its spiked tail through the undergrowth.
The tail struck Vell squarely across the ribs.
The sergeant vanished into the reeds like a swatted fly. No scream came through the channel.
Bron froze.
The creature turned slowly toward him. Its eyes were tiny and buried deep beneath ridges of alchemically thickened bone. Its mouth opened wide enough to swallow a speeder bike's engine block, showcasing rows of uneven teeth and strings of dark, acidic saliva.
Bron's Imperial training demanded he stand his ground and fire. His survival instincts demanded he run screaming into the woods.
His legs ultimately formed a committee, elected cowardice as chairman, and achieved a pathetic backward stumble.
He held the trigger down until his E-11 power cell ran dry.
The creature barreled forward.
Bron threw himself sideways into the mud just as its jaws snapped shut exactly where his torso had been. He slammed shoulder-first into a massive root system, rolled over the wet wood, and came up desperately reaching for his sidearm.
Something sharp punched directly through his lower abdomen.
For a terrifying second, he thought the creature had bitten him. Then he looked down.
A thick, jagged branch had slipped right under the seam of his armor, pierced the black body glove, and gone straight into his gut just below the ribs. It had entered at a truly disgusting angle. A dark red stain was already spreading rapidly across the white plastoid plates.
Bron stared at the wood sticking out of him.
"Well," he whispered, his breath fogging the inside of his visor. "That's completely against regulation."
The creature snarled and turned back to finish him off.
Bron tried to lift his blaster pistol, but his arm refused to cooperate. The world around him started narrowing down to rain, mud, and the heavy thud of the monster's approaching footsteps.
Then brilliant white light flashed through the trees.
Two glowing blades spun across the beast's flank in a clean, crossing arc. The cuts did far less damage than Bron expected against the thick hide, but they drew the monster's attention immediately. It recoiled with a deafening roar and swung a massive claw toward the new arrival.
A figure slipped under the attack with ridiculous ease.
Bron's first foggy thought was that she was moving wrong.
Everyone moved badly in this swamp. Troopers sank into the muck, stumbled over roots, dragged their boots, and cursed the mud every three steps. Even those red-robed acolytes moved carefully, mostly pretending their cloaks were mysterious instead of just damp laundry with delusions of grandeur.
This woman moved as though the swamp had agreed to make a personal exception for her.
She ducked beneath another swipe, planted one boot on a raised root, and sprang gracefully upward. Her twin white blades carved shallow, agonizing marks across the creature's shoulder joint before she landed safely behind it.
Bron's vision blurred. The white blades came into focus again.
His blood went colder than the rain.
"Jedi," he breathed.
The word felt stupid in his mouth. The Jedi were dead. Every child in the Empire knew that. Every training holo explicitly said so. They were all wiped out for treason.
The woman vaulted over a tail sweep and drove one blade cleanly into the back of the creature's knee.
The monster screamed.
Bron decided Imperial truth couldn't have been further from reality.
He fumbled for his blaster pistol. These kriffing traitors to the Republic were supposed to be extinct. He knew perfectly well he wasn't going to survive this swamp, but he figured he could at least take down a Jedi before he bled out.
His fingers finally closed around the wet grip of his sidearm.
The Jedi was still moving in a blur, her white blades carving through the creature's hide in surgical, efficient strikes. She was winning. Of course she was winning. Traitors always had some kind of unfair advantage.
Bron raised the blaster with a violently shaking arm.
His vision swam heavily. The tree line doubled, then tripled. He blinked hard, tasting copper in the back of his throat.
The creature collapsed into the mud with a ground-shaking thud.
The woman stood over its massive corpse, her back completely turned to him.
Bron fired.
The red bolt went wide by half a meter, harmlessly scorching wet bark off a nearby tree trunk.
She spun immediately, one blade snapping up in a flawless defensive guard as her eyes locked directly onto him.
Bron tried to adjust his aim for a second shot.
His arm dropped like dead weight, and the blaster slipped from his numb fingers straight into the mud.
"Ah, hell," he muttered.
---
A/N: Liked the imperial perspective? I was experimenting with this type of cinematic pov switches which are used in movies so would love the feedback.
I thought it would make the world feel more alive in a sense.
Also, dont forget to donate stones!
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