Episode 51 - Coruscant's Depths
Stardate: 4 2 0 1 7.9
Earth Standard Date: January 07, 2365.
Location: Coruscant
Tyson plummeted through open air, the wind tearing at the Grey Goo Suit as Coruscant swallowed him whole.
The city-planet was beyond comprehension. Not a city built on a world but a world replaced by city, layer after layer stacked of durasteel and ferrocrete and the accumulations of a thousand generations. The upper levels gleamed. The Senate district, the Jedi Temple, the embassy towers and penthouse gardens of the five-thousands, all of it polished and maintained and lit by sunlight. From up there, the Republic looked like it worked.
Tyson fell past all of it.
The transition happened in stages. First, the architecture lost its curves, organic flourishes giving way to functional angles and exposed conduit. Then the light changed, sunlight replaced by the sickly amber of industrial lamps spaced too far apart. By the three-thousands, the buildings had stopped pretending to be anything other than what they were: stacked housing blocks and processing plants, walls streaked with chemical runoff and decades of atmospheric grime. Graffiti covered every surface that wasn't actively electrified, tags in a dozen languages marking territory for gangs and syndicates the Senate pretended didn't exist.
By the twenty-three hundreds, the wind had become something alive. It screamed through vertical canyons between structures, channeled and compressed by architecture never designed for open-air transit. The suit's inertial dampeners worked overtime as the air thickened with particulate pollution and the temperature dropped.
"Vicky, do you have a location on Palpatine? Transport me nearby."
Blue particles engulfed him mid-fall. The howling wind cut to silence. He materialized one foot above a metal grate and dropped onto it with a solid thunk, boots ringing against latticed steel.
Tyson laughed. That was ridiculous. He was lying in a maintenance corridor, the ceiling low enough to touch. Pipes ran along both walls, sweating condensation that pooled in the grate's gaps and dripped into whatever lay below. A single strip of emergency lumens cast everything in washed-out blue. The corridor looked like the inside of a bruise.
He started running.
Vicky painted the indicator on his HUD without being asked, a directional marker pulling sensor data from the Iconic Interceptor in orbit and translating Palpatine's life signs into an arrow and distance readout. The Sith was moving fast. Faster than an old man who'd taken a phase pistol bolt to the back and fallen off a building had any right to move. The distance wasn't closing.
The mid-levels blurred past. Streets that had never seen real sunlight, storefronts sealed behind blast shutters, cantinas pulsing with bass. Security droids tracked him with photoreceptors that glowed like cigarette cherries in the dark, but none moved to intercept. Down here, a man running meant a man with somewhere to be, and the droids had learned that interfering with that kind of urgency was bad for their operational lifespan.
In the nineteen hundreds, the sensor data led him to a shaft. Not a turbolift, not a maintained access point, but a raw vertical drop where something structural had failed or been removed, leaving a wound in the city's body that went straight down. Tyson dropped in without hesitating, using the Force to slow his descent, his hands finding corroded rungs that crumbled under his grip.
The darkness ate him.
Below the fifteen hundreds, the sounds of habitation faded. No more bass from cantinas. No more speeder traffic. No more voices. Just the drip of water through ancient pipes and the distant, arrhythmic groan of the city's bones settling under their own weight. The air thickened with refuse and chemical decay, compressed and fermented by the weight of everything built on top of it.
Level 1313 stopped him. The shaft ended at a sealed bulkhead someone had cut through with a plasma torch years ago, leaving a hole just wide enough to crawl through. Beyond it, the level opened into a warren of corridors and open spaces that had once been commercial districts, now abandoned to the dark and whatever lived in it. Tyson searched for a new way down, his HUD flickering as the Iconic Interceptor's sensors struggled to penetrate the sheer mass of infrastructure above him.
Palpatine was still ahead. Still moving. The life sign indicator pulsed steadily, deeper and further. How did a man in Senate robes navigate this labyrinth so quickly? Had he planned for this? Did the depths of Coruscant hide a bolt-hole prepared for exactly this contingency?
Of course they did. A man who'd hidden in plain sight for decades didn't leave his escape to chance.
Tyson pushed deeper. Past 1313, past the last pretense of civilization, into levels where the numbering on the walls was faded to illegibility, and the only light came from bioluminescent fungi growing in the seams between wall panels. The corridors narrowed. The air grew wet. Something skittered in the dark ahead of him and then was gone.
Level 127.
Power generation and distribution.
The corridor opened into a vast industrial space, the ceiling lost somewhere in the darkness above, the floor a maze of cable trenches and transformer housings the size of small buildings. Massive conduits ran floor to ceiling, humming with contained energy that fed the levels above. The sound was everywhere, a low, constant vibration that settled into his bones and stayed there.
Tyson stopped walking.
His Empathy registered a cold knot of controlled emotion behind him and to the left, disciplined but not empty. The suit's tricorder confirmed it, a single humanoid life sign. Thirty meters back. And the Force whispered what he already knew.
He was not alone.
He turned slowly.
"I was wondering when you'd show yourself," he said to the dark. "You've been back there since 1313, haven't you?"
The cloaked figure stepped from behind a transformer housing and ignited a red blade.
It wasn't Palpatine.
The figure was slight, shorter than him by half a head, wrapped in dark robes that pooled around bare feet. The hood was deep, the face beneath lost in shadow, but the red saber's glow caught details as it hummed to life. A woman. Thin, her frame suggesting someone denied more meals than she'd been given. Skin white, touched with something that might once have been warm but had been leached away by years spent far from any sun. The robes were layered and worn, patched in places with mismatched fabric. Function and anonymity, not appearance.
But it was her face that held him.
A veil of dark cloth was bound across her eyes, wrapped twice around her head and knotted at the back, the fabric old and fraying at the edges. Beneath it, thin lips pressed together. Her hair, what little showed beneath the hood, was dark and lank, cut short and uneven as though maintained by her own hand with a blade not meant for the job.
She held the red saber in a two-handed grip, angled across her body in guard position. Her stance was rooted but not rigid, weight distributed with the balance of someone who had fought blind for so long that sight would have been a distraction. The Force moved around her, parting and reforming, but he sensed her connection to it didn't have the raw power of a Sith Lord.
She said nothing. The red blade spoke for her.
Tyson drew his green lightsaber and ignited it. The two colors met in the space between them, casting the transformer housings in sickly yellow-green where the light overlapped.
The woman moved first. It was a test, a sliding step forward that brought her red blade up in a diagonal cut aimed at his leading shoulder. Controlled. Measured. I want to see how you respond more than I want to kill you.
Tyson caught it on his green blade. The sabers locked for half a second, spitting light, and then she disengaged with a twist that redirected his parry into empty air and flowed back to guard.
"So, Palpatine's got friends down here after all. You always ambush people in power stations, or is today special?"
She didn't answer. Her next attack came low, a sweeping cut at his legs that forced him to drop his blade and step back. He gave ground willingly, reading the attacks. Precise, economical, built for dueling rather than battlefield work. She wasn't trying to overwhelm him. She was feeling out his footwork. He knew very little of this form, but recognized it as similar to that Count Dooku had used in the movies.
He obliged her with a riposte, a quick thrust toward her center mass that she batted aside with a flick of her wrist. The red blade barely moved.
"I am not with the one you hunt," she said. Quiet voice. An accent he couldn't place.
"Funny place to not be with someone." Tyson circled right, keeping a transformer housing at his back. "You just happen to be lurking in the bowels of Coruscant."
She matched his movement, bare feet silent on the floor. The Force rippled around her as she tracked him without eyes. "I followed the Vergence in the Force. It drew me here." Her blade dipped slightly. "I felt the battle. Felt the Sith expose himself. Felt you descend."
Tyson probed with a quick two-strike combination, high then low. She parried both without retreating, her responses arriving before his strikes did, reading his intent through the Force rather than reacting to the blade itself.
"I am Visas Marr," she said between the clash of their weapons. "Last of the Miraluka of Katarr."
Katarr. He hesitated. Tyson knew that name, knew this woman, knew her story from his metaknowledge. Katarr was a Miraluka colony, a world of Force-sensitives. Destroyed. Consumed. By Darth Nihilus, Visas Marr's master.
She pressed into his hesitation with a sharp cut he barely turned aside, the red blade passing close.
"Okay, Visas Marr," he said, resetting his guard. "If you're not with Palpatine, what exactly are we doing right now?"
She answered by advancing in a straight line, footwork precise, each step placing her weight exactly where it needed to be for the next strike. The red blade moved in tight arcs, never extending further than necessary, never committing more energy than the cut demanded. Thrust, disengage, cut. Thrust, disengage, cut.
Tyson gave ground. Not because he had to. Because he wanted to watch.
Her form treated lightsaber combat as a conversation, each movement a sentence, each exchange a paragraph building toward an argument the opponent couldn't answer. Her parries were redirections rather than blocks, using his blade's momentum against itself, turning his energy into her advantage. When she attacked, the strikes came from angles that exploited whatever guard he presented, sliding past his defense like water finding cracks in stone.
She was good. He let her push him back another three meters, cataloging her patterns. A rhythm, a cadence she fell into when pressing an advantage. Thrust-cut-thrust, always in threes, always targeting the same zones. Wrist, shoulder, throat. The form didn't try to cut you in half. It tried to take you apart one piece at a time.
He found what he was looking for on her fourth combination. A micro-pause between her second and third strikes, barely a fraction of a second, where she reset her wrist for the finishing cut. Invisible at normal speed. To his Augment reflexes, it was a door left open.
Tyson stopped retreating.
His body shifted. Weight dropped into his legs, center of gravity lowering as the muscle memory from Meetra's single brutal lesson in Ataru took hold. The form was the antithesis of everything Visas was doing. Where her style was a scalpel, Ataru was a hurricane. Where she moved in lines, he moved in circles. Where she conserved energy, he spent it like a man who had more than he knew what to do with.
He launched himself at her.
The first strike came from above, a leaping overhead cut that used his height and the Force-enhanced jump to generate power no wrist-flick could match. Visas caught it on her blade, but the impact drove her back a full step. Before she could reset, he was already spinning, the green blade whipping around in a lateral arc that forced her to abandon her guard entirely and simply get out of the way.
She twisted, fluid and fast, the red blade coming up in a desperate parry that caught his follow-up at an angle that should have locked their weapons together. But Tyson was already moving past the point of contact, momentum carrying him into a spinning backhand that came from a direction her Force-sight hadn't predicted because he hadn't decided to throw it until his body was already in motion. Ataru didn't plan. Ataru reacted. Ataru trusted the body to find the strike the mind hadn't conceived yet.
The green blade passed close enough to her veil that the fabric rippled.
Visas adjusted. Her footwork shifted, abandoning the linear advances for something more defensive, blade held closer to her body, movements tighter. Trying to weather the storm, to find the gaps in his aggression where her form's precision could slip through and punish his overextension.
The problem was that he wasn't overextending.
An Augment didn't tire the way a normal human did. The explosive acrobatics that made Ataru devastating but unsustainable for most practitioners cost him nothing. He could maintain this pace indefinitely, each leap, spin, and strike delivered with the same force as the first, his muscles operating at a baseline most species couldn't reach at their peak. Visas was fighting a style designed to burn bright and fast against an opponent who burned bright and never stopped.
He pressed her. A rising cut that she parried high, followed immediately by a Force-assisted leap that carried him over her head. She tracked him through the Force, her blade already turning to meet him as he descended, but the sheer speed compressed her reaction window to nothing. His green blade hammered down on her red one from above and behind, and the impact buckled her arms.
She staggered. Recovered. Launched a counter-thrust at his sternum.
Tyson caught the red blade on his own and pushed. Not a parry. A shove. His strength against her slight frame. The red blade was forced wide, arms splaying open, guard broken.
He didn't give her time to rebuild it.
Three strikes. Fast, heavy, relentless. The first she caught near the hilt of her saber, a desperate block that numbed her fingers. The second she dodged by throwing herself sideways. The third she couldn't avoid at all.
The kick connected with the hilt of her lightsaber at the emitter shroud, striking with enough force to wrench the weapon from her grip. The red blade died as the hilt spun away into the dark.
Visas stood empty-handed. Her chest heaved. Bare feet planted on the cold floor, robes disheveled, the veil slightly askew from the violence of the final exchange. She did not reach for the fallen weapon. She did not call it back with the Force because Tyson's green blade hummed at her throat close enough to feel the heat on her skin. Close enough that a twitch would end it.
"Yield," he demanded.
Visas Marr lowered her head. The movement was small but deliberate, chin dipping until the green blade's glow painted the underside of her jaw. "I yield."
He held the blade there for two seconds. Then deactivated it. The green light vanished, and the darkness of Level 127 rushed back in, broken only by faint bioluminescence clinging to the walls and the distant amber of the level's lighting.
"Good fight. You almost had me with that counter-thrust."
"No," she said quietly. "I did not."
She was still standing with her head bowed.
"I have wandered," Visas said. "Since Katarr. Since my world was consumed and I was left alive without reason or purpose. I have searched for meaning in the Force, for some answer to why I survived when all others perished." Her voice was steady, but something beneath it stretched thin over an old wound. "I felt the wound in the Force when my people died. I have carried it since. It is all I have."
Tyson said nothing because what was there to say to that? He let her speak.
"When I felt you descend through the levels of this world, I felt something I had not felt. A vergence. A point where the Force gathers and bends." Her veiled face turned toward him, sightless and seeing. "You carry something within you that I do not understand. But the Force moves around you as it moves around no other I have encountered. It pulled me here. It placed me in your path."
She lowered herself to one knee. Hands together in front of her, fingers interlaced, head bowed until her forehead nearly touched her knuckles.
"My life for yours," Visas Marr said. "Where you walk, I will follow. Where you fight, I will stand beside you. Your enemies are mine. Your purpose is mine. This I swear by the sight I no longer possess and the world I can no longer return to."
Tyson stared down at the kneeling woman.
He had no idea what to do with this. An oath of service from a stranger in the guts of Coruscant, the hum of transformers filling the silence where a response should go. He was an exile from Starfleet. He was denied by the Jedi. And she was looking at him like he was the answer to something she'd been carrying for years.
"I'm barely a Padawan. I couldn't teach you anything worth swearing oaths over."
Visas remained on her knee. Her veiled face tilted upward, not quite toward his face but toward the center of his chest, where the Force gathered thickest around him. "I did not ask you to teach me. A teacher imparts knowledge. I am offering service. There is a difference."
"Service to what?"
Visas rose to her feet. Unhurried, hands falling to her sides. "You defeated me," she said. "You could have killed me and did not. You carry a wound in the Force that mirrors my own, though yours is different in its nature. The Force brought me to you. I do not need to understand why to know that it did."
"I'm going to fight a Sith Lord. That doesn't concern you?"
"You are concerned enough for both of us. I have lived without purpose since Katarr. Whatever comes, it will be better than that."
His Empathy read her cleanly. No deception or hidden agenda. Just a vast, quiet grief undergirding resolve. She meant every word.
"Fine," he said. "But if you're coming with me, we need to move. Palpatine's getting further away, and I'd rather catch him before he finds whatever hole he's been preparing down here."
"Lead," she said. "I will follow." Visas remained where she stood, empty-handed, still breathing hard from their exchange. The veil had shifted during the fight, sitting crooked across the bridge of her nose, and she made no move to adjust it.
He reached out with the Force.
The fallen lightsaber hilt stirred beneath the transformer housing, scraping against metal conduit as it lifted free. It drifted through the dark between them, rotating slowly, and settled into his open palm.
He held it out to her.
Visas accepted the weapon with both hands, fingers closing around the hilt with a care that suggested it meant more to her than its function. She held it against her sternum for a moment before sliding it into the folds of her robes.
"I appreciate your returning my lightsaber to me," she said.
"Why did you attack me?" Tyson asked again.
She was quiet for a moment. Her veiled face remained oriented toward his chest, toward whatever she perceived there through the Force. "I was sent to find you, Tyson."
"Who sent you?"
"My master." Visas turned from him slightly. "I am Miraluka. My people saw the galaxy not through eyes but through the Force itself. It was our sight, our connection to all living things. We had no need for what other species called vision. The Force showed us everything. Katarr was our homeworld. A colony of Force-sensitives, thousands of us gathered in one place. We thought our connection to the Force made us strong." Her voice held steady, but the words thinned as she continued, pulled taut over something that had never healed. "It made us a beacon for my master."
"Darth Nihilus," Tyson said quietly.
Her head turned back toward him. "You know the name."
"I know enough."
"He consumed Katarr," Visas said. "Every living thing on the surface. Every man, woman, and child. Every creature that drew breath and touched the Force. He devoured them all in a single act, and the world died screaming through a frequency only those attuned to the Force could hear." Her hands had tightened at her sides, knuckles pale. "I alone survived. I do not know why. He took me as his servant, his eyes, because he had consumed so much that the galaxy had become a blur of hunger to him. I saw for him. I found his prey. But I've broken myself free of his influence. What I offer you now, I offer freely. My life for yours. I am your servant."
Tyson looked down at her. The hum of Level 127 filled the space between them. Somewhere deep in the infrastructure, a pressure valve released with a hiss that echoed through the housings and faded into nothing.
"Then, as my servant, my first request of you is..." He paused. The joke died before it started. What came out instead was quieter, almost sincere. "Teach me how to use that lightsaber in your style."
Visas tilted her head. The cloth binding shifted with the movement, and for a moment she was parsing the words for some hidden meaning her Force-sight couldn't detect.
"You defeated me," she said. "And now you ask me to teach you the form you defeated."
"I defeated you with Ataru. Which is like winning a boxing match by throwing a chair. Your form was cleaner. More controlled. I want that too."
Visas was quiet for several seconds. Then she drew her own saber and held it vertically before her, the hilt at chin height, the emitter pointed toward the ceiling. She did not ignite it.
"Makashi," she said. "Form II. It is a duelist's form. It assumes your opponent carries a blade and seeks to defeat them through precision, timing, and control of distance."
She stepped forward, bare feet finding purchase on the cold floor, and assumed a stance Tyson hadn't seen before. Her weight sat almost entirely on her back leg, front foot barely touching the ground, saber arm extended with the hilt angled slightly downward. The posture looked almost casual. Fencing, not fighting.
"The foundation of Makashi is the understanding that a lightsaber has no weight to its blade. Unlike a metal sword, there is no mass beyond the hilt. This means that the large, sweeping motions of other forms waste energy on momentum that serves no purpose. A lightsaber cuts with equal lethality whether swung with the full force of your body or guided with a turn of your wrist."
She demonstrated. A flick of her wrist sent the unlit hilt through a tight arc, the movement so small it barely disturbed her sleeve. Then she repeated the same arc with a full arm swing, the kind of motion Ataru demanded.
"Both cuts kill," Visas said. "One costs you nothing. The other costs you balance, position, and time. Makashi chooses economy."
Tyson mimicked the wrist motion. It felt wrong. His body wanted to commit, to throw weight behind the movement the way Meetra's Ataru training had drilled into him. The small, precise flick felt like pulling a punch.
"It feels like I'm not doing anything."
"You are not accustomed to trusting the weapon." Visas moved closer. Her hand found his wrist, Force-sight guiding her fingers to the exact point where his grip met the hilt. She adjusted his hold, rotating the saber fifteen degrees so that the emitter sat in line with his index finger rather than the web of his thumb. "Makashi treats the lightsaber as an extension of the hand. Not a tool held by the hand."
The grip change was subtle but immediate. The hilt felt different. More responsive. Like the difference between holding a hammer and holding a pen.
"The stance." Visas stepped back and resumed her position, weight on the back leg, front foot light. "Your center of gravity sits behind you. This is counterintuitive. Every instinct tells you to lean forward, to press, to close the distance. Makashi does the opposite. You control distance by threatening to close it. Your opponent must respect the reach of your blade, and that respect gives you space to choose when and how you engage."
Tyson shifted his weight back. His front foot came up onto the ball, barely kissing the floor. The stance felt precarious. Like standing on one leg.
"I feel like a slight push would put me on my ass."
"Then a slight push would find a lightsaber in its throat before it arrived." The corner of Visas's mouth shifted upward into a smile. "The stance is deceptive. You appear vulnerable. Your opponent sees an easy target and commits to closing the distance. When they do, they enter your range on your terms."
She ignited her red blade. "Ignite your weapon. We will begin with the salute."
Tyson thumbed his saber to life. Green joined red, and the two colors bled together where they overlapped.
"Makashi begins and ends with the salute." Visas raised her blade vertically before her face, the red glow illuminating the cloth across her eyes. "It is not ceremony. It is the first position, the neutral state from which all other movements flow. Every attack begins here. Every defense returns here. When you are lost, when your opponent has disrupted your rhythm, you return to the salute and begin again."
She held the position for a breath, then snapped the blade down into a diagonal cut that stopped precisely at waist height. The transition from vertical hold to cutting arc was seamless, as though the blade had simply decided to fall along that particular line.
"The attacks of Makashi are numbered. There are six primary zones." She traced each one with her blade. "Head. Right shoulder. Left shoulder. Right flank. Left flank. Legs. Every offensive action targets one of these zones. Every defensive action protects one of these zones. The form is a language with six words, and mastery comes from learning to speak them in combinations your opponent cannot answer." She returned to the salute. "Attack me. Zone one. The head."
Tyson raised his blade and brought it down toward her skull. He kept the motion controlled, resisting the Ataru instinct to leap and add momentum. A clean, vertical cut.
Visas didn't move her feet. Her blade rotated forty-five degrees and met his at an angle, redirecting the green saber past her right shoulder. The contact lasted less than a second. His blade slid along hers and continued past, pulled by its own trajectory into empty air, and before he could recover, the tip of her red blade rested against his collarbone.
"You committed your weight forward," she said. "Makashi punishes commitment. Again."
He reset. Attacked zone one again. This time he kept his weight back, letting the wrist do the work the way she'd shown him. The cut was lighter, faster, and when her blade came up to redirect it, he felt the difference immediately. His balance held. His blade didn't carry past the point of contact. He was still in position. Still in the conversation.
Her red blade didn't find his collarbone this time. It found his sternum instead, arriving from a slightly different angle, exploiting the micro-adjustment he'd made to his guard.
"Better," she said. "But you anticipated my riposte and adjusted your guard before I moved. Makashi does not anticipate. It reads. There is a difference. Anticipation commits you to a response before the stimulus arrives. Reading allows you to respond to what actually happens."
"So stop thinking ahead."
"Stop thinking entirely. The blade thinks. You simply hold it."
"So it's not completely different from Ataru in that way," Tyson said.
"Ataru and Makashi share the philosophy that the Force guides the weapon. They differ in what they ask the body to do while the Force works. Ataru demands everything. Your legs, your core, your momentum. It treats the body as a delivery system for the blade. Makashi asks almost nothing of the body. It treats the body as a platform. Stable. Quiet. Still. The blade does the work, and the body simply puts the blade where it needs to be."
She stepped to his left side, circling him slowly. Bare feet made no sound on the floor. "Raise your blade. Salute position."
Tyson brought the green saber vertical before his face. The light hummed against his skin.
"Now. Without moving your feet, without shifting your weight, without engaging your shoulder, cut to zone three. Left shoulder."
He tried. The motion started clean, the wrist rotating to angle the blade toward an imaginary opponent's left shoulder, but halfway through the arc his elbow flared outward and his right foot slid forward an inch, his body instinctively trying to add force to the cut.
"Stop." Her hand found his elbow and pressed it back against his ribs. "Your arm is not a catapult. It is a rail. The blade travels along it. The arm does not throw the blade. Feel the difference."
She guided his arm through the motion. Elbow pinned, wrist loose, the saber describing a tight arc that terminated exactly where a left shoulder would be. The cut felt absurdly small. Like signing his name instead of swinging a weapon.
"That wouldn't cut through anything."
"It would cut through everything. The blade has no weight and infinite sharpness. The only force required is the force needed to move the hilt through space. Anything beyond that is waste, and waste is what your opponent exploits." She released his arm and stepped back. "Again. All six zones. Salute between each."
Tyson worked through them.
Zone one, the head: a vertical drop from the salute, wrist-driven, the blade falling like a guillotine. Return to salute.
Zone two, right shoulder: a diagonal that wanted to become a baseball swing but he caught it, kept the elbow quiet, let the wrist do the steering. Return to salute.
Zone three, left shoulder: the mirror, slightly easier because his body had started to understand what she was asking.
Zone four, right flank: a horizontal cut that his Ataru training screamed should involve a hip rotation, but he kept his hips dead and let the blade find its own line.
Zone five, left flank: the same, reversed.
Zone six, legs: a downward diagonal that terminated at knee height, the lowest cut, the one that required the most wrist control to keep from becoming a wild slash.
"Acceptable," Visas said, which Tyson was beginning to understand was high praise from her. "Now. The riposte."
She raised her red blade into the salute and held it there. "Makashi's defensive philosophy is built on a single concept. The parry-riposte. You do not block. Blocking is Soresu. You do not evade. Evasion is Ataru. You redirect, and in the same motion, you attack. The parry and the riposte are one action, not two. Your opponent's blade arrives. You turn it aside. The turning motion becomes your counterstrike. There is no pause between defense and offense because there is no distinction between them."
She demonstrated in slow motion. Her red blade came up to meet an imaginary attack from zone one, angling to catch the incoming blade on her own and guide it past her right side. But the motion didn't stop at the deflection. The same rotation that turned the attack aside carried her blade in a tight circle that ended with the tip pointed directly at throat height. Parry and thrust, one continuous movement, like a door swinging open and closed on the same hinge.
"This is fencing," Tyson said. "It's all literally just fencing."
"I do not know this word."
"It's an… Sword fighting with thin swords. The whole philosophy is basically what you just described."
Visas tilted her head. "Then your philosophy understands something that many Jedi have forgotten. The lightsaber is not a broadsword. It is a needle that cuts."
She reset to the salute. "Attack me. Zone one. Full speed."
Tyson attacked. The green blade came down clean and fast, and Visas's red blade rose to meet it. The blades kissed; his slid past her shoulder, redirected by an angle so subtle he barely felt the contact, and her riposte was already there, the red tip pressing at the hollow of his throat before his blade had finished its redirected arc.
"Again. Zone four."
He cut toward her right flank. Her blade dropped to intercept, caught his at the midpoint, and the same circular motion sent his blade wide while hers came up and around to rest against his left temple. The whole exchange took less than a second.
"Again. Zone two."
He attacked her right shoulder. This time he watched for the redirect and tried to pull his blade back before she could complete the riposte. Her blade followed his retreat, the tip tracking his withdrawal like a compass needle finding north.
"You cannot outrun the riposte by retreating," Visas said. "The riposte is part of the parry. By the time you recognize the parry has occurred, the riposte has already arrived. The only defense against a Makashi riposte is another Makashi parry. Which becomes another riposte. Which requires another parry. This is the conversation of the form. It continues until one duelist's vocabulary fails them."
"So two Makashi duelists just stand there flicking blades at each other until someone runs out of answers."
"Yes." The corner of her mouth shifted upward again. "It is considered the most elegant of the seven forms. Also, the most frustrating to watch, if you prefer spectacle to substance."
"I get the feeling that I'm all spectacle."
"You are." Visas returned to the salute. "Again."
— Star Jumper —
The lowest levels of Coruscant had a smell. Not the recycled-air staleness of the mid-levels or the chemical tang of the industrial sectors, but wet stone and dead air, the kind that hadn't circulated in centuries. Tyson's boots found purchase on steps that predated the buildings above them by millennia.
Visas moved beside him in silence, her red lightsaber unlit but held loosely at her side. She hadn't spoken in some time, and Tyson understood why. The Force down here was wrong. Saturated. The dark side hadn't pooled here. It had soaked into the bedrock over thousands of years, layer upon layer of Sith meditation and ritual bleeding into the stone until the stone itself carried it.
Untainted kept the corruption from taking root in him. The dark side pressed against his awareness the way humidity pressed against skin, present and undeniable, but it slid off him without purchase. Unpleasantly without being dangerous. Like standing in a room where something had died and been cleaned up, but you remembered where the body lay.
"Vicky," he said quietly. "Where am I?"
You are below the foundation level of the Jedi Temple. Structural scans indicate you are entering a pre-Republic construction zone. The architecture does not match any known Coruscant building period in my database.
"That's because it's not Coruscant architecture." Tyson ran his hand along the wall. "I think the Jedi built their Temple on top of this deliberately. Hoping the light side presence of the Jedi meditating above would suppress whatever was down here."
"It did not work," Visas said.
"No. It didn't."
The corridor widened. The walls pulled back, the ceiling climbed until it dissolved into darkness overhead. They had entered a chamber, though "chamber" undersold it. The space was cathedral-vast, carved from the same black stone, and the architecture was unmistakably Sith. Massive columns rose from the floor in pairs, each carved with figures in attitudes of supplication and agony. The walls bore bas-relief carvings depicting the elevation of individual will over collective existence. It was propaganda carved in stone, and it had outlasted every civilization that tried to bury it.
At the far end of the chamber stood the doors.
Thirty meters tall. The carvings showed two figures facing each other across a threshold.
"Cheery," Tyson said.
He pressed his palms flat against the stone. The doors resisted, the weight enormous, and then something in the mechanism gave way with a sound like a bone cracking, and they swung inward. The hinges hadn't been oiled in who knew how many years, and they screamed about it.
Inside, the temple proper unfolded, every surface carved with Sith sigils that sat dormant in the stone like embers waiting for breath. As Tyson and Visas passed, the sigils flared to life, red-gold light bleeding from the carved lines and illuminating their descent.
The darkness between the sigils was worse. It wasn't the absence of light. It was a substance, thick and clinging, pressing with a physical weight that made breathing feel like work. Visas walked through it without apparent difficulty, her Force-sight rendering the visual darkness irrelevant, but Tyson caught her adjusting her grip on her saber hilt twice.
"You feel it," he said.
"This place remembers what it was," Visas replied. "The stone holds echoes. Thousands of years of Dark Side practitioners left their imprint here. The emotions are... layered. Rage beneath sorrow beneath hunger."
They descended three more levels before Tyson's tricorder stopped working. The device simply went blank, every sensor returning null values, as though the space ahead didn't exist in any measurable way. Vicky's voice cut out mid-sentence, replaced by silence so complete Tyson could hear his own blood moving through his ears.
He held up a fist. Visas stopped beside him.
The corridor ahead opened into another chamber, smaller than the cathedral above but somehow more oppressive. The ceiling was low enough to touch, the walls close enough to feel claustrophobic, and at the center of the room stood a figure.
Tyson's hand went to his lightsaber.
The figure was his height. His build. Wearing Mandalorian armor of a design he recognized. This one was green, pitted, worn.
Boba Fett.
He raised his lightsaber but did not ignite it. The figure hadn't made an aggressive move. Yet.
The figure's hands rose slowly to the sides of his helmet. Seals hissed. The helmet lifted away, revealing a face Tyson saw every time he looked in the mirror. Same jaw. Same cheekbones. Same eyes, but crueler.
The greatest deviation sat on his chin. A thick, meticulously groomed goatee that framed his mouth.
"You look weak," the doppelganger said. His voice was Tyson's voice, but the cadence was different. Slower. More deliberate. A man who expected to be listened to.
"Bullshit, we look exactly the same," Tyson said. "Nice goatee, by the way. But you can't be the mirror universe version of me. I'm the mirror universe version of me."
"Funny." The double said with a smile. "I'm not that funny."
Behind the doppelganger, figures knelt in a loose semicircle, arranged like supplicants before an altar. Women. All of them. Some wore uniforms he recognized. Some wore almost nothing. Each one had a collar around her throat.
They were hazy. Not quite solid. Their edges blurred and shifted like heat mirages, as though they existed in a state between real and remembered. Force projections, maybe. Echoes. Possibilities.
But he could identify them.
T'Pol knelt closest to the double's right hand, in her Enterprise-era Starfleet uniform. Behind her, Hoshi Sato, smaller, dark hair hanging loose around her face. Next to Hoshi, an Andorian woman, recognizable by her blue skin and antennae that drooped forward. Tyson couldn't place her. Further back. Troi, Crusher, Yar. All in uniform, standard versions, not mirror-universe. All collared. All kneeling with that same learned stillness. Behind them was a woman it took him a moment to recognize: Ariana, the Tarellian survivor. The last woman was the clearest of them all. He could feel her Force presence even through the dark side saturation of the temple, a bright point of defiance that the collar around her throat couldn't quite extinguish. She knelt in a bikini, brown hair pulled back, jaw set in an expression that promised violence the moment the opportunity presented itself.
Princess Leia Organa. In the outfit Jabba the Hutt had forced her to wear in Return of the Jedi.
Even as a Force echo, or a ghost, representation, or whatever she was, she looked like she was planning someone's murder. Probably his, or rather this duplicate version of his.
The smell hit him then. Familiar but wrong. The same biochemical signature as D'Lavina's pheromone output, but pitched differently, masculine, aggressive.
The Perk he hadn't selected. Pheromones.
He'd looked at it when he selected the Bad Guy Origin and rejected it because some prices weren't worth paying.
His double had not rejected it.
"I entered the cave on Dagobah," the doppelganger said, "thinking I'd increase my connection to the Dark Side. Instead, I find you. Or rather, me."
He gestured at the kneeling women when he caught what Tyson was looking at. "Now you're beginning to see all the opportunities you had. You didn't even try to take any of them, did you? I can sense your confusion. None are chained to you as they are to me."
Tyson looked at the women. At T'Pol's empty composure. At Hoshi's bowed head. At Leia's burning, impotent fury.
"Yeah," Tyson said. "I can see that."
"You had the same choices I did. The same Perks. The same opportunities. And you chose, what, exactly? To play hero? To pretend you're better than what we are?"
"What we are," Tyson repeated. "You keep saying 'we' like we're the same person. We're not. We stopped being the same person the moment you decided that," he gestured at the collared women, "was something you wanted."
"Want has nothing to do with it. Power is what it is. You either use it or someone uses it against you." The double stepped closer. "I didn't make the rules. I just stopped pretending they didn't apply to me."
"That's a hell of a speech. You practice it in front of the mirror? You know, looking at your mirror-universe goatee?"
The double's jaw tightened. The humor had landed, but not the way Tyson intended. His doppelganger wasn't embarrassed. He was annoyed, the way a teacher gets annoyed with a student who won't stop making jokes during a serious lesson.
"You think deflection makes you strong," the double said. "It doesn't. It barely makes you tolerable. There's a difference."
"I'll take tolerable over whatever this is." Tyson kept his voice level, but shifted his weight onto his back foot, the Makashi stance Visas had drilled into him. "You've got enslaved women and a goatee. You're literally a villain. You know that, right? You have to know that."
"They're not enslaved. They're devoted."
"They're wearing collars."
"Symbols of commitment."
"They're wearing slave collars." Tyson pointed at T'Pol's throat.
"You're afraid of what you could be," the doppelganger said.
"No. I'm pretty clear on what I could be. I'm looking at it. And I'm telling you, as someone who shares your face and your history and apparently your terrible taste in facial hair, because despite being evil, I still like the goatee. Look, me, you can still walk this back." Tyson lowered his unlit saber to his side. Open posture. Non-threatening. "Whatever this cave is showing us, whatever test this is, the answer isn't to double down. Take the collars off. Stop using the Pheromones. Let them go or at least let them choose. We both know that's the right call."
"The right call." The double laughed, his laugh yet hollow and lacking any genuine amusement. "You sound like a Jedi."
"Jedi? Nope, not one of those, not really. I sound like someone who looked at the Pheromones Perk and said pass. That's not Jedi philosophy. That's basic decency."
"Decency? Decency is what the powerless call their inability to act. We are not powerless. We have never been powerless. And pretending otherwise is the only real weakness either of us has ever had."
"We have been powerless. How strong were you when you arrived here?" Tyson asked quietly.
"Last chance. Whatever you are, I'm telling you the same thing I tell myself. This isn't strength. This is the easiest, laziest version of power there is. You took the shortcut. You used a Perk to skip the part where people actually choose to be with you. And now you're surrounded by women who can't leave, telling yourself you're strong." He paused. "That's not strong. That's pathetic."
The double's hand moved to his belt. Fingers closed around a lightsaber hilt.
"Then let me show you what strength looks like," the doppelganger said.
The red blade ignited with a snap-hiss, painting every surface in crimson.
Tyson's thumb found the activation stud. The green blade sprang to life with a clean, resonant hum that filled the low-ceilinged chamber and pushed back the dark side saturation for exactly as far as its light reached. Which wasn't far enough.
His doppelganger looked at the green blade and laughed. This one was a real laugh, head tilting back and everything. Very villainous.
"Green? Really?" The double twirled his red saber in a lazy figure-eight, the blade leaving afterimages in the dark air. "Not even something interesting like purple?"
"Vicky has the purple one."
The double's amusement flickered. His brow creased, and for the first time since Tyson had entered the chamber, the settled confidence on that mirror-face cracked. "Who's Vicky? I don't remember a Vicky."
Tyson didn't answer. He was thinking.
His duplicate had never visited the world of the Old Republic. That much was obvious now. If the man had spent time on Taris, walked the streets of the Upper City, broken into the Sith military base, crashed on the city-world, Bastila Shan would almost certainly be kneeling in that semicircle. Maybe Mission Vao too, though the thought was one he didn't want to examine. But Vicky wasn't native to that setting. She was a purchase he was able to make there, but not from there. His duplicate should have had the same option. Maybe he had, and skipped her. Maybe he'd looked at a helpful AI assistant and decided she wasn't useful enough compared to other Perks or Items.
That tracked. Perfectly.
Which meant the duplicate likely didn't have a Grey Goo Suit either. Or if he did, it wasn't Vicky's version. No suit meant no cortosis that could short out a lightsaber blade on contact, disrupting the magnetic containment field that gave plasma its killing edge. Or the Adaptive Personal Force Field. Against a Force user who didn't know about either feature, the suit was the kind of advantage that ended fights.
But he didn't comment or answer. No need to reveal capabilities to an enemy who shared his face and might share his tactical instincts.
Tyson raised his lightsaber to vertical, blade before his face, then swept it down and to the right in the Makashi salute. Clean, precise, exactly as Visas had drilled it into him. He settled into the opening stance, blade low and angled, weight on his back foot, body turned to present the narrowest possible target.
His duplicate stared at the salute.
"What the hell was that?" the doppelganger said.
"Manners," Tyson said.
The double attacked.
No salute. No transition from conversation to combat. One moment the red blade hung at his side; the next it carved upward in a diagonal slash aimed at Tyson's left hip, a power stroke meant to bisect him from waist to opposite shoulder. The doppelganger's body torqued into the swing with his full weight behind it, feet planted wide, shoulders rotating to drive maximum force through the cut.
Tyson's blade was already moving. The parry caught the red saber at its midpoint, not meeting force with force but angling to redirect, guiding the ascending slash past his left side the way Visas had shown him. The blades shrieked against each other, plasma grinding on plasma, and the red blade slid past his ribs close enough to warm the fabric of his suit. His riposte came as part of the same circular motion, blade tip tracking inward toward the doppelganger's exposed throat.
The double threw himself backward, gracelessly but effective, the red tip missing his Adam's apple by centimeters.
"You learned something," the doppelganger said. His eyes were fully yellow-gold now, the veined corruption bleeding into the sclera. "Where?"
"Around."
The double came again. Overhead chop, two-handed, putting his full body weight into a strike that would have split durasteel. Tyson sidestepped rather than parrying, letting the red blade crash into the stone floor where it carved a molten furrow in the black rock, and his counter-thrust caught the doppelganger's right pauldron. The green blade skated off Mandalorian beskar with a shower of sparks but didn't penetrate deeply.
The armor. Right. His duplicate was wearing a full suit of Fett's gear.
The doppelganger pressed forward with a flurry. Diagonal slash, reverse cut, overhead, thrust, each delivered with raw aggression and considerable physical power. The man fought like a brawler who happened to be holding a lightsaber. Every attack committed, full-extension, maximum force, designed to overwhelm through sheer violence of action. No economy in his movement. No conservation. Burning hot and fast, trusting rage and strength to carry him through.
Tyson gave ground. Not because he had to, though there was enough power behind those strikes to force it, but because Makashi rewarded patience. Each retreat was measured, a half-step back that maintained distance while his blade performed the small, precise deflections that turned killing blows into near-misses. Parry four redirected a cut to his right flank. Parry two caught an overhead and sent it sliding past his shoulder. Each parry became a riposte, and each riposte forced the doppelganger to abort his next attack to defend, breaking his rhythm, interrupting the chain of aggression that was his only real strategy.
The double was fast. Strong. Absolutely committed to killing Tyson.
But he was wild.
Tyson understood why as their blades locked at the crossguard, faces centimeters apart, yellow eyes boring into him. His duplicate had said he'd entered the cave on Dagobah. Dagobah, where Yoda lived in exile. The only person in the galaxy during the original trilogy, besides perhaps Obi-Wan Kenobi, who could have taught a Force-sensitive proper lightsaber technique. But Yoda would have sensed the Dark Side corruption in this version of Tyson the moment he set foot on that swamp world. The old master had nearly refused to train Luke Skywalker for being too old and too impatient. He would never train a man who reeked of the Dark Side.
So the doppelganger had the Force. Had the raw power. Had the lightsaber. But no one had ever taught him how to use it. He'd learned to fight through aggression and instinct and the desperate creativity of someone who'd had to figure it out alone. How Tyson himself had fought, before Meetra and Kreia and Visas.
Against an untrained opponent, it would have been devastating.
Against Makashi, it was a stunted vocabulary trying to win a debate.
Tyson disengaged from the bind with a sharp rotation that sent the double stumbling forward, overcommitted, and his riposte opened a thin line across the doppelganger's unarmored left forearm. The smell of cauterized flesh joined the temple's ancient rot.
The double snarled and came again, faster now, the Dark Side fueling his muscles past their natural limits. Strikes in combinations of three and four, each powerful enough to batter through a conventional guard. Tyson parried the first, redirected the second, sidestepped the third, and put his riposte through the gap between the doppelganger's chest plate and shoulder pauldron. The green blade bit into the bodysuit beneath, not deep, but enough to draw a hiss of pain and force the double to disengage.
"You're losing," Tyson said, keeping his voice conversational. "You know that, right? I'm taking you apart."
"Shut up."
"Seriously, who taught you to fight? Because I want to send them a thank-you note. Every attack you throw is a telegraph. You wind up like a baseball pitcher. I can see your shoulders commit before your blade moves."
The doppelganger's response was a scream, raw and unfiltered, channeled through the Force in a wave of telekinetic fury that picked up loose stones from the chamber floor and hurled them at Tyson like shrapnel. His blade swept through the debris, bisecting stones and sending molten fragments scattering, but the barrage forced him back three steps, and the double was already closing the distance, red blade leading, yellow eyes blazing.
Their blades met in a rapid exchange, six strikes in two seconds, the chamber strobing red-green-red-green as plasma screamed against plasma. Tyson caught a thrust, guided it past his hip, and his counter-cut scored across the doppelganger's right thigh where the armor didn't cover. The double's leg buckled. He caught himself, pivoted on his good leg, and threw a wild horizontal slash that Tyson ducked beneath with centimeters to spare.
"Stay still," the doppelganger spat.
"I'm not really moving that much."
The doppelganger's overwhelming strikes should have been enough. Raw power channeled through the Dark Side, every swing carrying the kind of force that could batter through a conventional defense and turn a Makashi practitioner's precision into a liability. That was one counter to Form II. Brute force collapsed elegance.
But the equation only worked when the brute was actually stronger than the fencer.
Their blades locked again, green grinding against red, and Tyson felt the truth through his arms and shoulders and planted feet. The pressure was enormous. It was also familiar. The same Force-augmented strength. The same body, built from the same Perks. When the doppelganger bore down with everything he had, Tyson held. Not comfortably, not without effort, but he held, because the man trying to crush him was his exact physical equal.
Which meant the only variable that mattered was skill.
Tyson disengaged with a lateral twist, letting the locked blades separate with a shriek of protesting plasma, and put his riposte through the space the doppelganger's guard should have covered. The green tip scored a line across the man's left bicep, and the double jerked back with a snarl.
"You know," Tyson said, resettling into his stance, "there's still time. You can stop this. Put down the saber. We talk it out like two reasonable versions of the same person."
"I'm done talking."
"See, that's the problem. All rage, no reflection, even when faced with… your reflection. You went straight to the 'unlimited power' part and skipped the chapter on 'maybe don't enslave people.'"
The doppelganger launched himself forward with a roar, red blade sweeping in a vicious arc aimed at Tyson's midsection. Tyson parried at the last possible instant, the deflection sending the red blade skating past his ribs, and his counter-thrust caught the double's right hand guard. Sparks flew from beskar. The double reversed into a backhand slash that Tyson ducked, feeling the heat of the plasma pass over his scalp, and came up with a rising cut that opened another wound on the doppelganger's already injured left arm.
The double hissed, circling, left arm hanging lower now, blood seeping through the cauterized edges of the cuts. "You have everything I have. The same body. The same Force sensitivity. The same potential. And you waste it playing nice." He spat the word like poison.
"Funny. You see how this fight is going, and you think that I'm the one wasting their potential."
"Spare me."
"I'm trying to." Tyson lowered his blade half an inch. Using the moment to again try to get through to his double, but also creating an opening. "Seriously. I am literally trying to spare you. This is me, extending an olive branch, while also beating you in a sword fight. Multitasking."
The double's answer was another charge, fueled by anger and a growing desperation, the creeping realization that the fight was slipping away from him. His combinations came faster, wilder, three-strike chains blurring into four and five, each thrown with total commitment and zero conservation. Spending himself like a man who'd decided the next thirty seconds were all that mattered.
Tyson met each strike with small parries and minimal blade movement. Let the attacker's momentum carry them past, then punish the opening. The green blade moved in tight arcs, never traveling further than it needed to, each deflection flowing into a riposte that found flesh or forced the double to abort his next attack. A cut to the right forearm. A thrust that skated off the chest plate but forced a stumbling retreat. A low slash that opened the doppelganger's left thigh to match the wound on his right.
"Strike me down with all of your hatred," Tyson said, and he couldn't quite keep the grin off his face, "and your journey toward the Dark Side will be complete."
The doppelganger's yellow eyes went wide. "You're quoting at me? You're quoting the Emperor at me?"
"Seemed appropriate. You've got the eyes for it."
"I heard Kenobi's lectures on Tatooine. I sat through every sanctimonious word that old fossil had to offer about the Force and balance and the right path." The double's voice cracked. "I don't need to hear it from a pansy version of myself who thinks being nice is a substitute for being strong."
"Obi-Wan was right, though. About some of it. The part about the high ground was a little on the nose, but the core message holds up."
The doppelganger screamed and threw himself at Tyson with everything he had left. Just a man with a red lightsaber and enough rage to drown in, committed to one final, all-or-nothing assault.
The overhead strike came down like a guillotine. Two-handed. Full extension. Every remaining ounce of Dark Side fury compressed into a single killing blow aimed at splitting Tyson from crown to groin.
Tyson stepped offline, sideways. Left foot planted, right pivoted, body rotating out of the descending blade's path. The red blade crashed into the stone where he'd been standing, carving a molten trench in the black rock, and the doppelganger's arms were extended, center of gravity committed forward, wrists exposed.
The green blade rose in an arc, leaving a clean cut. The edge passed through the doppelganger's right wrist with brief resistance.
The hand separated. The red lightsaber tumbled through the air, still clutched in severed fingers, its blade guttering and dying as it fell. It hit the stone floor with a clatter.
The doppelganger dropped to his knees. His left hand clutched the cauterized stump, yellow eyes staring at the space where his hand had been. Shock hit first. Then agony. He looked up at Tyson, and for one instant the Sith corruption in those eyes flickered. Beneath the gold and the veined darkness, something human looked out.
"You could have killed me," the double whispered.
"Yeah," Tyson said. He deactivated his lightsaber. "I could have."
Every carved symbol on every wall surface ignited simultaneously with a white so pure and so absolute that it obliterated shadow itself. The light held for three seconds. Four. Five. Then it faded, pulling back into the carved symbols, and the chamber returned to darkness.
Tyson lowered his arm and blinked until his vision cleared.
The doppelganger was gone. The semicircle of kneeling, collared women was gone. The severed hand and the fallen lightsaber were gone. The molten furrows carved into the floor by their duel remained, still faintly glowing at their edges, proof that the fight had been real, or at least real enough to scar the stone. But his dark mirror had vanished as completely as if he'd never existed.
Tyson stood alone in the chamber, breathing hard, his deactivated lightsaber hanging loose in his grip. The joke was right there. He could feel it forming. Something about therapy bills, something about facing yourself literally being a cliché, something about needing a drink. The joke was right there, and he let it go because the humor felt wrong.
T'Pol's face stayed with him. Kneeling with a collar around her throat, the emptiness in her eyes. A doll dressed in the skin of someone he cared about. Hoshi with her head bowed. Leia Organa in a slave outfit, planning murder with every breath she took, because that was the only freedom she had left.
He'd looked at the Pheromones perk. He remembered the moment. Remembered the description, the power, what it represented. He'd clicked past it. It hadn't felt like a major decision. It had felt like not picking the obviously distasteful option on a character sheet.
One click. One moment of not even heroism, just basic human decency so unremarkable he barely remembered choosing it. And that was the part he couldn't get past. Not the horror of what his double had done, but that one offhand moment of basic decency was apparently the wall between who he was and who he could have been.
He sat with that until the silence of the chamber became its own kind of weight, and then he stood up, and breathed.
Footsteps from the corridor he'd entered through had him turning, thumb resting on his saber's activation stud. Visas Marr stepped through the doorway. She stopped three paces from him.
"What happened here?"
"Cave showed me myself," Tyson said. "The version that took every shortcut and made every wrong choice. We had a conversation. Then we had a lightsaber fight. I used Makasi and won, so thanks for that."
Visas was silent for a moment. Her perception swept the chamber through the Force, picking up every residual energy signature, every trace left behind by what had transpired.
"This place is a Dark Side nexus. It shows those who enter what they need to see," she said. "Not what they want to see. That you faced your shadow and did not fall to it speaks to something I have sensed in you." She paused. "You are stronger than you believe yourself to be. Not in the Force. In your conviction."
"I cut his hand off," Tyson said. "Felt very appropriate."
Visas tilted her head; it was obvious she didn't understand what he meant. "The wound you inflicted was symbolic as much as physical. You severed his ability to grasp what he had taken. The Force recognized the act." She gestured toward the walls, where the sigils had gone dark and inert. "These markings are old. Older than the Sith presence that corrupted them. They were a test, waiting for someone to pass it."
"Lucky me."
"Perhaps." Visas turned back toward the corridor. "We should continue. The purging of the dark side energy will not go unnoticed by those sensitive to such shifts."
Tyson turned to Visas before they'd made it ten steps down the corridor.
"Actually, Visas, I think we should part ways here."
He raised his hand, and a portal opened in the corridor. Through it, sunlight on blue water and white stone columns rising against a Mediterranean sky.
Visas stopped. Her veiled face turned toward the portal, then back to him. "I do not understand."
"The Sith Lord waiting for us out there, the one I chased here, he's beyond your skills. I'm not saying that to be cruel. I'm saying it because I fought him, and he's operating at a level that would get you killed."
"My life, for yours." She said it without hesitation, with the absolute conviction of someone who had already decided her death was an acceptable price. "That is the oath I swore."
"And I wouldn't trade that life pointlessly." Tyson looked at her, at where her eyes would be behind the veil. "If you're to serve me as you claim, you'd serve better alive. Come on."
He stepped through the portal. After a moment's resistance, the kind that showed in the set of her shoulders rather than any spoken objection, Visas followed.
The Jedi Temple he'd built overlooked the Aegean. The portal deposited them at the temple end of the Dragonstone steps leading to the small island, built on a foundation of Kyber Crystal.
D'Lavina was draped across a stone bench near the hall's edge, one green leg dangling. She looked up with a smile. "You're back, and you brought company." She glanced at Visas with open curiosity. "She's pretty. Under the veil, I mean. I can tell."
Visas said nothing. Her veiled face had turned toward the temple interior, her attention fixed on something beyond the open colonnade.
D'Lavina stretched like a cat, rolling onto her side to get a better look at the newcomer. "Quiet type. I like that. The quiet ones are always hiding something interesting."
A presence approached from deeper within the structure. Kreia emerged from the shadow of the inner hall. She stopped at the edge of the colonnade and regarded the group. Visas went rigid. She'd been composed through a lightsaber duel and a Dark Side nexus, and this locked her in place. Her hand drifted toward her lightsaber.
"Peace," Kreia said. It was a command dressed as a courtesy. "I am no threat to you, child. Not today."
"I know what you are," Visas said. Her voice had dropped to something low and careful. "I can feel the wound you carry. It is... vast."
"How perceptive. And how tedious, to be perceived by one who kneels so readily." Kreia's attention moved from Visas to Tyson. "You have brought home a stray. One trained by Darth Nihilus, if I am not mistaken. The echo of his hunger clings to her like perfume."
"Visas Marr," Visas said. She straightened, and some of the tension left her shoulders, though her hand stayed near her weapon. "I served Nihilus. I no longer do."
"So you say. The leash changes hands, but the collar remains." Kreia's lips thinned. "But that is your burden to examine, not mine."
"Okay," Tyson said, stepping between them. He looked at Visas. "Speaking of collars. I really don't like that word. I don't like the concept. I don't like anything about what it implies, and after what I just saw in that temple, I like it even less."
Visas turned toward him but said nothing.
"So here's what's going to happen. I absolve you of whatever debt you think you owe me. Whatever obligation, whatever servitude, real or imposed, it's done. Gone. You're free."
"You cannot simply—"
"I just did. Stay here if you want. Learn. Relax. Meditate. Cleanse yourself of the Dark Side, or don't. That's your choice now, not mine." He held up a hand before she could object again. "If you follow me after this, you do it because you chose to. Not because you swore something in a moment of desperation. Not because you think your life belongs to me. It doesn't."
He turned to D'Lavina and Kreia. "That goes for everyone. Nobody here serves me. Nobody here is bound to me. You're here because you want to be, or you're free to leave. Got it?"
D'Lavina gave a lazy salute from her bench. "Wasn't planning on going anywhere, but noted."
Kreia regarded him with an unreadable look. She said nothing, which from Kreia was its own kind of answer.
Visas stood very still. The hand near her lightsaber had dropped to her side.
"Now that everyone's met and we've established the appropriate level of mutual acquaintance and suspicion, I need to brief you on what's happening."
D'Lavina sat up, tucking her legs beneath her. "This sounds like the part where you tell us something terrible and then make a joke about it."
"You know me so well." Tyson leaned against one of the white stone pillars. "Short version. I found a Sith Lord operating on Coruscant. He'd embedded himself in the Republic Senate, posing as a senator. I engaged him. We fought. He's powerful. Significantly powerful. With backup of several Jedi and bounty hunters, he was injured, and we forced him to retreat, but didn't finish him, and now he's gone to ground."
Silence held for a beat.
"A Sith Lord," D'Lavina said, "hiding in the Senate." She laughed, a rich sound that carried across the open stone. "That's almost impressive. How long?"
"Many years. Long enough to have infrastructure. Contacts. Resources. He wasn't just hiding. He was building something."
"Reckless." Kreia declared flatly. "You discovered a Sith Lord embedded in the political heart of the Republic, and your first instinct was to engage him. Tell me, did it occur to you that a Sith Lord who has survived undetected within the Senate might possess contingencies beyond martial skill?"
"It occurred to me, yeah."
Kreia did not change. "You are fortunate your arrogance has not yet exceeded your ability. That balance will not hold forever."
"Noted." Tyson pushed off the pillar. "He's regrouping. I intend to find him, and end it."
D'Lavina was already on her feet, rolling her shoulders. "I'm coming."
"D'Lav—"
"Don't." She held up a green finger. "You're not talking me out of this one. A Sith Lord who's been playing senator? That's almost more interesting than the mysterious Sith that had you on the back foot days ago. Besides," she smiled, "you need someone watching your back who doesn't have philosophical objections to stabbing people."
Kreia regarded them both. "I will not join you."
Tyson looked at her.
"Do not mistake my refusal for indifference," she continued. "A Sith Lord who has woven himself into the Senate is not defeated by lightsabers alone. While you chase him through corridors, someone must examine what he has built. The networks. The alliances. The political architecture he has constructed. Sever the man, and another takes his place. Sever the structure, and you accomplish something lasting."
Tyson crossed his arms. "Already covered that. I exposed him to the Jedi High Council. Every member saw his face, felt his presence in the Force. After he fled, the Council moved to unravel his political position. Meetra and Bastila are en route to Naboo with two other Jedi to handle the Trade Federation blockade he orchestrated. That leaves me to hunt the Sith himself."
D'Lavina whistled low through her teeth. "So the Council's doing cleanup while you go after the source." She cocked her hip against the stone bench, arms folded beneath her chest. "Bold play. Stupid, but bold."
"Though I have known him for only a short time, those do not seem to be mutually exclusive for him," Visas said quietly. It was the first thing she'd said since Tyson had released her from her oath, and the dry edge of it caught everyone off guard.
Tyson pointed at her. "See? She's already fitting in."
Kreia had not moved from the colonnade's edge. The sea wind stirred the hem of her robes, but nothing else about her seemed touched by the world around her. "You exposed a Sith Lord to the Jedi Council," she repeated, and she said it the way she said things she found simultaneously correct and insufficient. "And the Council responded by dispatching Jedi to address a blockade."
"The blockade is part of his leverage. Remove it, and he loses his major political steppingstone."
"You describe symptoms. The disease walks free, and you propose to chase it." Kreia's blind gaze settled on him. "Tell me what you know of this Sith. Not what he did. What he is."
"Trained. Patient. Decades of discipline. His lightsaber work is refined, not raw. He fights like someone who learned every form and then spent years deciding which pieces to keep. His Force abilities lean toward manipulation, concealment, misdirection. Though he doesn't lack in strength, he held his own against a handful of Jedi. He didn't survive in the Senate by being powerful. He survived by being invisible."
"And now he is visible," Kreia said. "A creature of shadow, dragged into light. What does a cornered shadow do?"
"Gets desperate."
"No. It finds a deeper shadow. You will not corner him again. He will choose the ground, the moment, and the terms. If you pursue him as you are, you will fight the battle he has prepared for you." She paused. Kreia's silence stretched. The sea wind filled it, salt air and the distant cry of something winged over the Aegean. "You have not entirely squandered this."
Tyson blinked. "Was that a compliment?"
"It was an observation. Do not confuse the two. The Council moves to dismantle his political scaffolding. Meetra Surik is competent enough to handle a blockade, and Bastila Shan's battle meditation will ensure the engagement tilts in the Republic's favor. You have, against all reasonable expectation, distributed the problem correctly."
"I'm going to frame that. 'Against all reasonable expectation.' Really captures our relationship."
"What it captures is that you stumbled into sound strategy through instinct rather than discipline, which means you cannot replicate it reliably. But the result stands. The question remains. What now?"
"Now I hunt him."
"Yes. You said as much. I will accompany you."
D'Lavina's eyebrows rose.
"I hold no standing among the Jedi, and the Republic's political machinery is beyond my reach. What I can do is make sure that when you find this Sith Lord, you do not die from your own lack of foresight. Someone must watch for the traps you will walk into with your characteristic enthusiasm."
"So you're coming because you think I'm going to get myself killed."
"I am coming because you will get yourself killed without counsel, and I find the prospect of your death inconvenient. I have invested time in you. I do not waste investments."
D'Lavina had been quiet through Kreia's declaration, which was unusual enough to draw attention. She stood with her arms crossed, and her expression had lost the performative ease. "You're all talking about what he'll do," she said. "The traps. The contingencies. The deeper shadow." She looked at Tyson. "Nobody's asking the harder question. What did he lose today?"
Tyson frowned. "Everything. His Senate seat, his cover, his—"
"His identity." D'Lavina pushed off the bench and walked to the colonnade's edge, looking out over the water. "I grew up on a slave world. I know something about men who build themselves around control. When you strip it away, they don't become cautious. They don't become strategic. They become the thing they were always hiding underneath the strategy." She turned back. "Kreia's right that he'll choose the ground. But she's assuming he'll choose it rationally. A man who just lost everything he spent decades building isn't rational. He's grieving. And grief makes people do stupid, vicious things."
"The pirate is not entirely wrong," Kreia said. "Cornered predators are at their most lethal. But they are also at their most predictable. Rage narrows the field of vision."
"So we use that," D'Lavina said. "Well. That's settled, then. The old woman's in, I'm in."
"Wonderful," Kreia said. "A hunting party composed of a fool, a hedonist, a broken penitent, and myself. The Sith Lord should be terrified."
"Visas isn't coming. He'd kill her. This isn't a slight against her. She isn't ready for this fight."
Visas's hand closed at her side. Not reaching for her saber. Just closing, the way a fist forms around something you're not ready to release. "You freed me from obligation and now deny me the choice to follow."
"I'm not denying you anything. I'm telling you what happens if you come. You die. That's not a choice I'm willing to put in front of you."
Visas inclined her head, a fraction of a degree, and stepped back.
Tyson turned to D'Lavina and Kreia. "So it's a hedonist, a fool, and a..." He gestured vaguely at Kreia. "What would you call yourself?"
"I am the only person in this temple who understands what you are walking into. That should be title enough."
"I was hoping for something punchier. 'The Wise One.' 'The Crone of Good Decisions.' Something with flair."
"I am the reason you will survive long enough to make your next foolish choice. If you require a title for that, you are welcome to invent one. I will not use it."
D'Lavina laughed. "She's fun. I've decided I like her."
"You would," Kreia said. "You like everything that amuses you, which is to say, everything. It is a shallow way to move through the galaxy."
"Shallow keeps you floating, old woman." D'Lavina winked. "Deep just means you drown."
Kreia said nothing, but the quality of that silence was closer to approval than anything she usually offered.
Tyson clapped his hands once. "Great. Team bonding. Love it." He turned toward Visas, who stood apart from them, her veiled face turned toward the sea.
"Visas. You don't owe me anything. I meant that."
"I heard you." She didn't turn from the water. "I am... considering what freedom means, when one has not practiced it."
"Take your time. The temple is yours."
He opened a portal. Through it, the inside of the Sith Temple within Coruscant's depths. D'Lavina stepped to his side, close enough that her shoulder brushed his arm, and looked through.
"After you," she said. "I want to watch your back on the way in."