The group stepped into the black stone of the Sith Temple's main chamber. The room was vast, carved from the bedrock beneath Coruscant's lowest levels. Pillars of obsidian rose in twin rows toward a vaulted ceiling lost in shadow, their surfaces etched with Sith script. The air was cold and dry, preserved like a tomb's. Between the pillars, a central dais, and upon that dais sat a throne of rough-hewn stone.
And in the throne sat a man Tyson had last seen falling from a landing pad thousands of levels above.
Senator Palpatine wore no senatorial finery now. The robes were black, heavy, hooded, the cowl drawn forward so that shadow pooled where his face should have been. Only his hands were visible, pale and long-fingered, resting on the throne's arms. Waiting. The wound Tyson had dealt him was hidden beneath the robes, but the Force, Empathy, and the medical tricorder readings popping up in his HUD told the rest of the story. Phaser burn. Diminished vitality, pain held at bay through will alone, and beneath it all, a fury so controlled it barely registered as emotion at all.
D'Lavina flanked Tyson's left. Kreia walked three paces behind them both. She stopped when they reached the bottom tier and said nothing, her blind gaze fixed on the throne with an intensity that suggested she could see more than either of them.
"You." Palpatine's voice filled the chamber, carried by acoustics designed for exactly this purpose. He did not rise. "You have cost me a great deal. Decades of careful work. A position cultivated with patience you cannot fathom. Relationships built across years of Republic governance, dismantled in a single afternoon because a boy decided to hire some bounty hunters and play hero before the Jedi High Council."
The cowl tilted. Beneath it, Tyson caught the gleam of yellow eyes.
"I stood before them," Palpatine continued. "Mace Windu. Yoda. Ki-Adi-Mundi. Plo Koon. All of them staring at me as though I were some common criminal, when I had shaped the very Republic they swore to protect. I was the architect of their peace, and they did not even know it. And they would never have known. I was invisible, boy. The Force itself concealed me. A thousand Jedi meditated in the temple above this very ground and never once felt the darkness beneath their feet."
His pale fingers curled against the throne's armrests. "Decades. Decades of patience. Of sitting through interminable Senate sessions, smiling at fools, building trust one handshake and one favor at a time. I cultivated Valorum's weakness. I nurtured the Trade Federation's craven greed. I positioned myself so precisely that the galaxy would ask me to lead it, and the Jedi would thank me for accepting. Every piece was placed. Every contingency accounted for." His voice dropped, and the rawness in it hardened into something closer to disbelief than rage. "And you simply hired bounty hunters and showed them our fight. No investigation, no evidence chain, no political maneuvering. You opened a portal before the most cautious, most skeptical governing body in the galaxy and said, that man is a Sith Lord, and they believed you. Because they felt it, they saw it with their own eyes. Because once you pointed them in the right direction, the truth was obvious."
He leaned forward. "Do you understand what that means? It means I was one revelation from being untouchable. One. And you, a boy with no rank, no standing, made me visible. Through an unknown power and sheer, insufferable arrogance."
The yellow eyes fixed on Tyson. "You did not outmaneuver me. Let us be clear about that. You did not uncover my identity through investigation or deduce it through the Force. You knew. You carry knowledge you should not have possessed." He settled back into the throne, and his composure reassembled itself, but the cracks still showed. "I have spent the hours since then considering what you are. Anomaly. Vergence. I have felt you in the Force, and you are wrong. You do not belong in the weave of this galaxy. You are a thread pulled from somewhere else entirely, and you have snagged on the tapestry I spent a lifetime weaving."
"Tragic," Tyson said. He stopped at the base of the dais, close enough to see the pale hands tighten on the armrests. "Really, genuinely tragic. You could've been Supreme Chancellor. Leader of the galaxy. Instead you're, what? King of a basement temple? His Most Excellent Majesty of Sitting Alone in the Dark?"
D'Lavina snorted beside him.
"Emperor of a room that smells like a crypt," Tyson continued. "Grand Moff of Nobody Cares. Darth... what is it? Darth Sulking?"
The yellow eyes burned brighter. Palpatine's fingers curled, and the stone beneath his nails cracked.
"Sidious," Kreia said.
The name landed. Tyson cursed, "Way to undo all that banter," he mumbled.
Palpatine's attention shifted, and for the first time, something other than rage moved behind those eyes. "Ah." The word was soft. Almost gentle. "I wondered if you would come yourself. He must be your latest project." His gaze moved from Kreia to Tyson and back. "You always did prefer to work through others. It is the one trait we share."
"We share nothing. You are what happens when ambition operates without understanding. A man who learned every technique of the Dark Side and comprehended none of it. You wield the Force as a tool of domination, and you believe this makes you its master. It makes you its most elaborate slave."
Palpatine's lips stretched into a thin line. "Still lecturing. After all these years. Tell me, old woman to old man, did your philosophy comfort you when your own students turned from you? When the Jedi cast you out? When you wandered the galaxy, stripped of purpose, clinging to the belief that your understanding of the Force elevated you above those who simply used it?"
"My failures are my own. I do not dress them in black robes and call them destiny."
"No. You dress them in righteousness and call them wisdom. We are not so different."
"We are entirely different. I sought to free others from the Force's will. You seek only to impose your own."
"And yet here we sit. Both of us in the dark. Both of us with apprentices at our sides. Both of us certain we are right." He settled back.
"As it has always been. And what of your master, Sheev?"
"Oh, yes. We reach the true question that lies behind that veil of philosophy. You wish to know how the story ended. The story, or should I say... the tragedy... of Darth Plagueis the Wise."
"And here we go," Tyson mumbled.
"Darth Plagueis was a Dark Lord of the Sith," Palpatine said, "so powerful and so wise, he could use the Force to influence the midi-chlorians to create... life." He let the word hang. "He had such a knowledge of the dark side, he could even keep the ones he cared about from dying."
Tyson had mumbled the speech along with Palpatine. D'Lavina shot him a sideways glance.
"The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be... unnatural." Palpatine's pale hands spread, in a gesture of offering, of generosity, as though he were sharing a gift. "He became so powerful, the only thing he was afraid of was losing his power. Which, eventually, of course, he did. Unfortunately, he taught his apprentice everything he knew." The yellow eyes found Tyson's. "Then his apprentice killed him in his sleep."
Silence.
"Ironic," Palpatine said softly. "He could save others from death. But not himself."
"Charming story," Tyson said. "You should write it down. A novella, poem, maybe a series of haikus."
Plague of Butterflies, his ass. That story was from the movie, verbatim. His mind shifted while listening to a story he'd already heard. Three against one. Palpatine was wounded, diminished, cornered in his own temple. When the battle started, it was in their favor. It would end here.
Then he felt it. A second presence in the Force, coiled tight behind the throne like a spring compressed. A figure stepped from the shadow behind the throne. Red and black tattoos covered a face split by a crown of short horns. Yellow eyes burned above a mouth set in a permanent snarl. In his hands, a long-hilted lightsaber ignited at both ends with twin crimson blades.
Darth Maul said nothing. He didn't need to.
Palpatine rose from the throne. The motion was slow, deliberate, the wounded animal revealing it still had teeth. "You thought you had me cornered. Alone." He descended one step from the dais. "I called my apprentice home the moment I felt the Anomaly, the Force vergence, coming to Coruscant. Maul has been eager to prove himself after your last battle."
"And while we settle matters here," Palpatine continued, "my other apprentice ensures that the situation on Naboo escalates beyond anything your Jedi friends can contain. By the time they realize what they are truly facing, the blockade will have become an invasion, the invasion will have become an atrocity, and the atrocity will fracture the Republic Senate into factions that will never reunite." He spread his hands. "Civil war. Born from the Republic's own inability to protect its members. I will not need the Chancellor's seat to rule what remains. I learned from you, old woman. A triumvirate, very clever, but destined to fracture. I created my own triumvirate, one under my rule, one whose petty infighting won't lead to my fall, as your own did."
"A triumvirate," she said. "You speak as though you understood why the first one failed." She walked forward, past Tyson, past D'Lavina, until she stood at the foot of the dais with nothing between her and the Sith Lord but three steps of carved stone. "The Sith Triumvirate did not fall because of infighting, Sidious. It fell because none of its members understood what the others truly wanted. You have repeated the error precisely. Your assassin wants blood." She tilted her head toward Maul. "Your Trade Federation puppets want profit, your apprentice there is either a false-freedom fighter or a true believer in the cause, neither of which will you embody. And you, you want godhood dressed in political robes. A position now beyond your reach. Three desires pulling in three directions, held together by fear and dogma. Fear is not loyalty. Dogma is a leash, and leashes break."
Palpatine's jaw tightened, but he did not interrupt.
"You believe you have accounted for every variable. That is how you fell," Kreia continued. "You have not accounted for me. I have watched Sith Empires rise and fall. I have watched men far more gifted than you convince themselves they had transcended the cycle, only to become its latest casualty. You are not special, Sidious. You are next."
She turned her back on him. The gesture was a deliberate insult. She addressed Tyson and D'Lavina as though the two Sith behind her were furniture.
"The apprentice is rage without direction. Fast, aggressive, reliant on physicality and the double blade to overwhelm. He will press forward and never retreat. He is yours." She looked at D'Lavina. "Both of yours."
D'Lavina's saber was already in her hand. She rolled her wrist, letting the hilt spin once between her fingers. "Two on the angry one. And you take the old man alone?"
"I take the old man alone."
"That's suicide," Tyson said.
"Sidious is wounded, diminished, and fighting from a position he did not choose. His strength now is manipulation, not combat. Against a direct assault from all three of us, he would simply flee. Against me alone, his pride will not permit retreat. I know this, because it is exactly what I would do."
Maul descended from behind the throne, double-blade humming.
D'Lavina pointed her blade in his direction. Green light met red across the chamber floor. "Come on then, handsome," she said. "Round two."
"Foolish old woman." Palpatine's voice was quiet, almost pitying. He descended another step from the dais, and the black robes parted enough to reveal the curved hilt of a lightsaber in his right hand. "You could never match me with a blade. Not in your prime. Certainly not now."
"My connection to the Force is stronger than it has ever been."
Her robes parted. Not by hand. The fabric simply moved, drawn aside by invisible fingers, and from beneath the folds three lightsaber hilts rose into the air. They hung suspended around her in a slow orbit, each one turning lazily end over end, and then all three ignited simultaneously. Red. Yellow. Blue. Three blades of light spun in a controlled orbit around a blind woman who stood with both hands folded over the head of her walking staff.
Tyson caught the activation in his peripheral vision. He turned, and the colors registered, and then the hilts registered, and his mouth opened before his brain could stop it.
"Are those mine?"
Kreia did not turn.
"Those are mine. I offered you my collection as a courtesy. A gesture of hospitality. You judged me for it, and then you just... helped yourself? A red, a yellow, and a blue?"
"I did not say the weapons themselves were without use. You had more than you needed. I took what served a purpose. This is not theft. It is a correction."
"It's theft."
"It is redistribution."
D'Lavina laughed. "I like her more every day."
Palpatine ignited his blade and raised the saber overhead in a two-handed grip, the tip angled back past his shoulder.
And then he launched himself from the dais.
The scream that tore from his throat was not human. It was a sound ripped from the dark side itself. His body corkscrewed through the air in a diving spin that covered the distance between the throne and Kreia in the space of a heartbeat, his blade carving a spiral of red light, robes flaring behind him like wings.
Kreia's three sabers snapped into formation. The blue blade rose to meet the descending strike. The yellow swept laterally to cut off his landing angle. The red drove forward in a thrust aimed at the space his torso would occupy when the spin completed. Three weapons guided by a single will, each one moving independently, to create a web of light where Palpatine's trajectory would end.
His blade clashed against the blue saber. Palpatine landed in a crouch, redirected the yellow blade with a flick of his wrist, and twisted past the red saber's thrust with centimeters to spare.
He was already striking again before his feet were set.
Maul charged.
Maul came at them, closing the distance in three bounding strides, the double-blade spinning in a horizontal arc that forced Tyson to give ground immediately. The crimson blades hummed past his face, close enough that he felt the heat on his skin, and Maul was already reversing the spin, driving the opposite end downward in a diagonal slash meant to split him from collarbone to hip.
Tyson's green blade caught it.
The impact traveled up his arms and into his shoulders, and he let it. He'd learned from their fight on Tatooine. Last time, he'd tried to match Maul and the Zabrak's raw ferocity had overmatched him. Not this time. He shifted his grip, angled his wrist, and let the green blade slide along the crimson in a textbook Makashi redirect. The force of Maul's strike bled off to the side, and Tyson stepped into the opening with a precise thrust aimed at the Zabrak's throat.
Maul batted it aside. The double-blade came around again, low this time, sweeping for his legs. Tyson retreated a half-step and parried. Makashi was a duelist's form, built for single combat, for precision over power, and against Maul's whirlwind style, it should have crumbled. The Sith generated too much kinetic force, too many angles of attack, too much raw momentum for a finesse form to absorb. But Tyson wasn't absorbing it. He was channeling the Force through every muscle fiber, turning each parry from a desperate block into a controlled deflection. Force-enhanced strength beneath Makashi precision, stacked on top of his natural Augment baseline.
Every strike Maul threw at him met a blade that simply would not yield, guided by a hand that redirected rather than resisted. Maul pressed harder. The double-blade became a blur of red light, overhead strikes flowing into lateral sweeps, flowing into reverse spins that attacked from angles no single-bladed fighter should have been able to track. Tyson tracked them. His time in the holodeck practicing against the Grevius hologram he'd created came in handy. Green met red, again and again.
Maul's yellow eyes widened by a fraction. He remembered Tatooine, too.
This was not the same man.
D'Lavina hit him from behind.
Her green blade came in fast and low, aimed at the back of Maul's knee, and the Zabrak sensed it a heartbeat before contact. He pivoted, one end of the double-blade sweeping back to catch her strike while the other maintained pressure on Tyson. For two seconds, he fought them both simultaneously, the staff spinning between his hands like a propeller, each end engaging a different opponent.
Then he turned on D'Lavina fully, abandoning Tyson, and throwing himself at her with concentrated fury. His blade work changed, the horizontal spins tightening into vicious overhead chops that drove her guard down, then reversing into rising cuts that forced her to stumble backward. D'Lavina parried the first three strikes cleanly. The fourth drove her green blade wide. The fifth nearly took her hand.
She was good. She was not good enough for this.
Maul feinted high and reversed the saber in his grip, driving the opposite end backward in a stabbing thrust aimed at her midsection. D'Lavina saw it too late. Her saber was out of position, committed to the feint, and the crimson blade was already closing the distance to her stomach.
Tyson's blade intercepted it six inches from her body.
The clash of energy sent sparks scattering across the stone floor. Tyson shouldered past D'Lavina, putting himself between her and the Zabrak, and locked blades with Maul long enough to force a separation.
"Go help Kreia," he said. "Now."
D'Lavina's jaw tightened. She looked past him at Maul, then over her shoulder at the dais where Kreia's three orbiting sabers were struggling to contain Palpatine's onslaught. The old woman was giving ground. Slowly, but giving it.
"Don't die on me, darling," she said. "I haven't finished with you yet."
She disengaged and sprinted toward the dais.
Maul watched her go. His yellow eyes tracked her for exactly one second before snapping back to Tyson.
"Just us now," Tyson said. He raised his green saber in a classic Makashi salute, blade vertical before his face. "Shall we?"
Maul didn't wait for an answer.
He launched forward with a guttural roar, the double-blade whipping into a diagonal slash that would have bisected a slower man from shoulder to waist. Tyson sidestepped, letting the crimson arc pass through the space his torso had occupied, and answered with a single precise cut aimed at the Zabrak's extended wrist.
Maul pulled back in time. Barely.
The double-blade reversed, both ends spinning in a tight vertical circle, creating a wall of red light between them. Maul advanced behind it, using the spinning weapon as both shield and battering ram. It was aggression channeled through chaos, every strike feeding into the next, building momentum meant to overwhelm through sheer, relentless violence.
Tyson gave ground. One step. Two. His green blade moved in small, tight arcs, each parry angled to shed momentum rather than absorb it. Makashi didn't fight force with force. Every redirect cost Maul a fraction of his balance, a centimeter of his footing, and those fractions accumulated.
Maul pressed harder. The double-blade came around in a sweeping horizontal cut aimed at Tyson's ribs, and when the green saber dropped to intercept, the opposite end reversed upward toward his jaw. A killing combination. Fast, brutal, perfectly timed.
Tyson caught the low strike, let his blade roll along the crimson edge until the hilts nearly touched, then snapped his wrist and disengaged. The upward strike whistled past his chin. He was already inside Maul's guard.
His thrust took the Zabrak in the shoulder with a shallow cut. The green blade scored a furrow across the muscle before Maul wrenched himself away. Smoke curled from blackened flesh. Maul snarled.
Tyson reset his stance. Blade forward, weight on his back foot, free hand tucked behind his hip in the classical Makashi posture. "You keep swinging harder," he said. "That's not actually a strategy."
Maul answered with a Force-augmented leap that carried him six meters into the air. He came down like a meteor, driving toward the crown of Tyson's skull with his full weight behind them. The stone cracked where Tyson had been standing.
Had been.
Tyson was three paces to the left, blade already moving. The green saber caught Maul across the back of his hand as the Zabrak tried to wrench his weapon free from the fractured stone. The Zabrak's fingers spasmed. He didn't drop the saber, but his grip shifted, and the double-blade's rotation stuttered for half a second.
Half a second was enough.
Tyson closed the distance and struck twice. The first cut opened a line across Maul's forearm. The second drove the Zabrak back three full steps, his double-blade barely catching the thrust that would have pierced his chest.
Every charge met a blade angled to redirect rather than resist. Every committed swing bought Tyson another opening, another shallow wound added to the tally. A cut across the thigh. Each one deliberate. Each one a sentence in an argument the Zabrak couldn't answer because his vocabulary was three words long. Harder, faster, angrier.
Maul threw himself forward again, the double-blade spinning into a combination that should have been overwhelming; six strikes in two seconds, each arriving from a different angle, the crimson blades a continuous ribbon of light. Tyson deflected five. The sixth, he simply wasn't standing where it landed. His footwork carried him off the attack's line, and his riposte opened another furrow across Maul's forearm. The Zabrak converted the pain into a snarling lunge. Tyson's wrist rotated, caught the thrust, guided it past his hip.
"You're bleeding from four places now. Or would be if the wounds weren't cauterized," Tyson said. "I can keep counting if you want."
Maul threw himself forward with both blades spinning, the crimson light blurring into a solid disc of red. It was a desperation technique, sacrificing defense entirely for overwhelming offense, betting everything on the assumption that no one could parry an attack coming from every direction simultaneously.
Tyson didn't parry.
He stepped into the windmill, closing the distance to zero, putting himself inside the arc of both blades where the long hilt became a liability instead of an advantage. Maul's eyes went wide. At this range, the double-blade couldn't generate cutting angles. At this range, a single-blade duelist owned the space.
Tyson's first cut took Maul's right leg above the knee.
The green blade passed through flesh and bone with no resistance. Maul's scream changed pitch, from rage to something else entirely, and his body torqued sideways as the limb separated. The double-blade's spin collapsed. Maul tried to catch himself on his remaining leg, tried to bring the saber around for one final strike, and Tyson was already moving.
The second cut took the left leg at mid-thigh.
Maul hit the stone floor. The double-blade clattered from his grip, both ends extinguishing as it rolled away across the polished surface. The Zabrak's hands clawed at the ground, dragging himself forward on pure hatred, his mouth open in a continuous howl that echoed off the vaulted ceiling. Smoke rose from the cauterized stumps where his legs had been.
Tyson stepped back. He lowered his blade but didn't extinguish it. The green light hummed between them, steady and patient.
"Stay down," he said again. Quieter this time. "It's over."
Maul's fingers dug gouges into the stone. His yellow eyes burned up at Tyson with a hatred so concentrated it was almost tangible in the Force, a white-hot knot of fury and humiliation and something that might have been disbelief. His lips pulled back from his teeth.
"Kill me," Maul rasped.
"No."
Maul's fingers scraped against the stone. His torso heaved with each breath, the stumps of his legs smoking faintly. "Kill me," he said again. The words came out wet, ground between his teeth. "Or I will find you. I will crawl across every world between here and wherever you hide, and I will—"
"Yeah, no. I've got a better idea."
Tyson extended his free hand. The air behind Maul split open. Maul twisted on the ground. He saw the portal. He didn't understand it, but he recognized the intention.
"No—"
The Force gathered in Tyson's palm and released in a single concentrated burst that caught Maul's body and launched it backward through the portal like a stone from a sling. The Zabrak's scream dopplered as he crossed the threshold.
"Vicky," Tyson said, speaking low so only he could hear. "Detainment. He's missing both legs, but don't let that make you complacent. The facility's strength is based on mine, so it should hold him."
After a pause, there was a faint acknowledgment that registered within his HUD.
The portal sealed and he turned toward the others. The fight had gotten worse.
Kreia stood at the base of the throne's steps with her staff planted before her, both hands folded over its head, her body perfectly still while the air around her was anything but. Three lightsaber hilts orbited her in red, yellow, blue. Each blade moved independently, guided by invisible hands that answered to a single will, and each one was engaged with the crimson blur that was Palpatine's saber work. The old man fought, moving in ways that defied his apparent age. His blade caught the blue saber in a bind, wrenched it aside, and drove through the gap toward Kreia's chest. The yellow blade swept in from the left to intercept. Palpatine disengaged, spun, and attacked from a new angle before the yellow had completed its arc. The red saber caught his thrust. He batted it away and pressed forward again.
Three blades against one, and the one was winning. Each exchange pushed Kreia's orbiting weapons a fraction wider, forced the telekinetic coordination to stretch thinner, and Palpatine exploited every gap. His blade found the seam between the blue and yellow sabers' coverage and drove through it. Kreia's staff shifted. The red blade whipped across to cover, but it arrived late, and Palpatine's saber scored a line across the stone an inch from her feet.
D'Lavina hit him from the flank.
Her green blade came in fast, aimed at the tendons behind his knee, and Palpatine sensed it without looking. He pivoted on his back foot and caught her strike with a contemptuous flick that sent her stumbling sideways. But the moment of distraction cost him. Kreia's blue saber drove forward in a thrust that forced him to abandon his advance and parry. The yellow swept low. The red came high. For three seconds, the old woman's telekinetic assault found its rhythm again, all three blades converging on Palpatine from different vectors while D'Lavina recovered and pressed in from the side.
Palpatine caught the blue blade on his own. Deflected the yellow with a pulse of Force energy that sent it spinning off course. Sidestepped the red. Turned D'Lavina's follow-up thrust and drove his elbow into her sternum hard enough to send her back two steps.
Four weapons. Two opponents. And the fight was even.
Tyson started walking toward the dais.
Palpatine's crimson blade was everywhere at once, catching Kreia's orbiting sabers on angles that should have been impossible, redirecting their telekinetic momentum with flicks of his wrist that looked almost lazy. The blue saber drove in from the left. Palpatine parried it without looking, his attention already on the yellow blade sweeping toward his ankles. He hopped the low cut, landed, and drove his saber through the gap between yellow and red with a lunging thrust that forced Kreia to pull all three blades back into a defensive screen.
D'Lavina circled to his blind side. Her green blade came in fast, a rising diagonal aimed at the space between his shoulder blades, and Palpatine sidestepped without appearing to move. A micro-adjustment that put her strike into empty air. His free hand snapped out in a backhand pulse of Force energy that caught her across the chest and sent her skidding back three meters on her heels. She caught her balance and didn't charge back in. Instead, she changed her stance, lowering her center of gravity, holding her blade close. When Palpatine's attention flickered to Kreia's next attack, she moved, not toward the Sith Lord but parallel, circling to a position where his peripheral vision couldn't track her without sacrificing focus on his primary threats.
"You fight well for a pirate," Palpatine said, not even breathing hard. "But you are still just a pirate."
"Sweetheart, I've been underestimated by better men than you." She twirled the green blade once. "They're all dead now... Well, except for one."
Kreia's three sabers surged forward again. The red came high, the blue came low, the yellow drove straight for Palpatine's center mass. A triangulated attack with no clean escape vector. Palpatine caught the yellow on his blade, used the bind to pivot his body out of the blue's path, and let the red saber pass over his ducked head close enough to singe the hood of his robes. His counter was immediate. A vicious horizontal slash that caught the yellow saber's hilt and sent it tumbling end over end across the chamber. Kreia's hand twitched. The yellow blade arrested its flight and reversed course, but for two seconds she was fighting with only two weapons, and Palpatine exploited the gap ruthlessly.
His blade became a red smear. Three strikes in a single second, each one driving deeper into Kreia's reduced defense, and the old woman's remaining sabers struggled to cover the angles. The blue caught his overhead cut. The red swept in to cover the follow-up thrust. But the third strike, a spinning reverse cut that came from below his own center of gravity—
D'Lavina's green blade caught it at the last instant. She'd thrown herself back into the fight, body low, saber extended in a desperate lunge that intercepted Palpatine's cut six inches from Kreia's hip. The impact drove her arms wide, and Palpatine's boot caught her in the ribs before she could recover. She hit the ground hard, rolled, and came up spitting blood.
"Still alive," she said, grinning red. "Your kicks need work, old man."
The yellow saber returned to Kreia's orbit. Three blades again. The old woman hadn't moved from her position, staff planted, hands folded, but the strain showed in the set of her jaw. Telekinesis at this level demanded concentration that bordered on meditation, and Palpatine wasn't giving her a single moment of peace to find it.
Tyson had stopped walking twenty meters away and studied the fight.
Makashi wouldn't work here.
He'd used it against Maul because the form's precision, bolstered by his strength, countered everything in the Zabrak's arsenal. Every wild swing met a calculated redirect, every surge of momentum bled away by spacing, angles, and footwork. The perfect answer to a berserker. But Palpatine wasn't a berserker. Palpatine was a surgeon who happened to fight like a hurricane. His Vaapad, or whatever bastardized version of it the Sith had developed, combined the relentless aggression of Juyo that Maul used with a technical precision that matched or exceeded Makashi's own.
Trying to out-finesse Palpatine wouldn't work. He needed something else.
The best evidence of how the Sith fought was recalling Yoda in the Senate chamber. Small and green and ancient, launching himself at Palpatine with an acrobatic fury that had nearly ended the Sith Lord's reign before it began. Ataru. Yoda had matched Palpatine blow for blow, his small body becoming a whirling engine of destruction that compensated for its lack of reach with sheer velocity and Force-enhanced athleticism.
It had been close, but Yoda had lost.
Tyson understood why now, with the benefit of having studied the form himself rather than watching it play out on a screen. Ataru burned through its practitioner's reserves like a bonfire through kindling. Every leap, every spin, every Force-enhanced burst of speed drew from a finite well of energy. Yoda had fought brilliantly, but he was eight hundred years old, and his well had run dry. The same flaw that had killed Qui-Gon Jinn against Maul on Naboo. Ataru was a young warrior's form, built for explosive engagements that ended quickly, and when the fire burned out, you were left standing in the cold with nothing.
Tyson had fuel to spare.
The Force flowed through him in quantities that would have staggered most practitioners, Augmented by abilities that had nothing to do with midi-chlorians. His stamina wasn't just good. It was functionally inexhaustible for any engagement shorter than hours. Ataru's fatal weakness, the burnout that had doomed Yoda and Qui-Gon both, simply didn't apply.
He could burn as bright as he wanted. The fire wouldn't go out.
Tyson shifted his grip on the green saber. He dropped the Makashi stance, blade lowering from its vertical guard position, and settled into something wider. Knees bent. Weight centered. Saber held at his side in a low guard that coiled his entire body like a compressed spring.
The Force exploded through his legs, and he crossed twenty meters in a single bound, his body rotating in the air, green blade extending into a spinning slash that arrived at Palpatine's flank like a thunderclap. The Sith Lord sensed him. His crimson blade disengaged from Kreia's red saber and swept around to meet the green.
Palpatine's yellow eyes found Tyson's face over their locked blades. Something flickered in them. Reassessment.
"Ah," Palpatine said. "The apprentice finally joins."
"You're awfully smug for a dead man," Tyson quipped back before breaking the bind and attacking.
The green blade became a storm. Tyson threw himself into Ataru with everything he had, his body spinning, leaping, inverting, each movement flowing into the next without pause or hesitation. He came at Palpatine from above with a descending slash, landed, reversed into a rising cut from below, then launched himself sideways into a corkscrew spin that brought the blade around in a horizontal arc aimed at the Sith Lord's neck. Every strike carried the full weight of Force-enhanced and Augment-bolstered momentum behind it, and every strike came faster than the last.
Palpatine parried the first. Deflected the second. Sidestepped the third. But the fourth caught him off guard, a spinning heel kick that transitioned into a saber strike without the gap between them that conventional technique demanded. Palpatine's blade caught it, but he gave ground.
Kreia's three sabers pressed in from the opposite side. With Palpatine's attention divided, her telekinetic coordination tightened, the three orbiting blades moving in synchronized patterns that covered each other's gaps. Red swept low while blue drove high. Yellow thrust through the center. Each attack arrived a half-beat after Tyson's, forcing Palpatine to transition from one defense to another without rest.
D'Lavina hit him from the third angle.
She'd circled wide during Tyson's initial assault, putting herself on Palpatine's left flank where neither Tyson nor Kreia's blades could accidentally find her. She wasn't as powerful as Tyson or as technically precise as Kreia's telekinetic assault, but she was fast, and she was fearless, and she kept finding the gaps.
Three fronts. Six blades. One target.
Palpatine fought them all.
His crimson saber was a continuous blur, transitioning between opponents with a speed that defied comprehension. He caught Tyson's overhead slash, redirected it into the path of Kreia's incoming blue blade so the two weapons tangled for a fraction of a second, then spun and drove D'Lavina back with a combination so fast her green blade barely intercepted the killing stroke. Three opponents simultaneously, and he made it look like choreography.
But he was giving ground; the combined assault pushed him back toward the throne. Tyson pressed harder, pouring more Force energy into his Ataru sequences, his body becoming a whirlwind of green light that attacked from angles that shouldn't have been physically possible. He bounced off a pillar, inverted, and drove downward with a two-handed slash that Palpatine caught on his blade, bracing with both hands. The impact cratered the stone beneath the Sith Lord's feet.
"You have power," Palpatine admitted through gritted teeth, their blades locked, faces close. "Raw, unrefined, wasted on sentiment. But power nonetheless."
"I already heard this speech today."
Tyson broke the bind with a Force-enhanced shove that sent Palpatine stumbling back a step. Kreia's red saber was already there, driving toward the Sith Lord's exposed back. Palpatine twisted, caught it, and D'Lavina's blade scored a thin line across his forearm before he could recover his guard.
First blood.
Palpatine looked at the wound. A thin trail of smoke rose from the singed fabric of his sleeve; the flesh beneath it was blackened in a shallow furrow. His expression didn't change, but something in the Force shifted. The ambient temperature in the chamber dropped several degrees.
"Enough," Palpatine said.
Dark side energy gathered in the Force so dense it was almost visible, pooling around Palpatine's body. His saber work changed.
He drove Tyson back with three savage cuts. He caught Kreia's yellow saber in a bind and wrenched it so hard the telekinetic grip shattered, sending the hilt clattering across the floor. He turned on D'Lavina with a focused fury that put her on her heels immediately, his blade hammering against her saber in a descending sequence that drove her guard lower and lower until her arms shook with the effort of holding it.
Tyson launched himself back in. Ataru carried him over Palpatine's head in a spinning leap, his green blade carving a descending arc toward the crown of the Sith Lord's skull. Palpatine caught it one-handed. His free hand caught Kreia's blue saber on a pulse of Force energy. His boot drove D'Lavina back again.
Three opponents. Five blades now, with the yellow saber still rolling across the floor. And Palpatine was holding them.
But only holding. Not advancing. Not winning.
Tyson pressed. He threw combination after combination, each one drawing deeper from the Force, each one arriving faster and harder than the last. Ataru's fire burned through him and found no bottom to his reserves. He could do this all day. All week. The form's fatal flaw was endurance, and endurance was the one thing he had in abundance.
Palpatine knew it. The calculation behind those yellow eyes was cold and strategic, the mind working even as his body fought at inhuman speeds. The Sith Lord was expending energy to maintain parity. Tyson was expending energy to maintain pressure. The math favored Tyson, and Palpatine was too smart not to see it.
The Sith Lord disengaged.
He didn't retreat. He simply stopped fighting on their terms. His crimson blade extinguished, and both hands came up, fingers spread. The Force gathered around him in a vortex so thick the air itself seemed to darken.
Lightning erupted from his fingertips.
Not in bolts but in a torrent. A continuous river of violet-white energy that split into branching tributaries and filled the chamber with the smell of ionized air and burning stone. It hit everything.
Kreia's three sabers snapped into position before her, forming a triangular screen that caught the initial surge, each one drinking the lightning. For two seconds, the defense held. For three. Then the lightning intensified, and the sabers began to shake.
The telekinetic grip that held them faltered, as if Palpatine's lightning carried a secondary payload that attacked the Force connection itself. The three hilts locked in place, suspended not by Kreia's will but by the current running through them. Then the current cut through whatever remained of her hold, and all three sabers dropped to the stone floor in a clatter of metal and extinguished plasma.
Kreia stepped back. Her hands came up, palms forward, and she caught the lightning on a barrier of pure Force energy that buckled immediately under the strain. She retreated another step, then another, the barrier shrinking with each one, her boots scraping against stone as the sheer kinetic weight of the attack drove her backward toward the chamber wall.
D'Lavina had no barrier.
The lightning found her mid-stride, caught her in the chest, and picked her up off her feet. Her green saber tumbled from fingers gone rigid, every muscle in her body seizing at once. She flew backward six meters and hit the ground on her back, sliding another three across the polished stone before friction stopped her. Smoke rose from her clothes. Her body twitched once, twice, then went still.
Palpatine lowered his hands.
The silence that followed was worse than the lightning. Palpatine stood at the center of it, his robes singed at the edges, the thin wound on his forearm still smoking. And he laughed.
It started low. A dry, rattling sound that could have been mistaken for a cough. Then it built, echoing off the vaulted ceiling until it came from everywhere at once. The laugh of a man who would have orchestrated the fall of a Republic, who would have played both sides of a galactic war like a puppet show, who would have watched the Jedi Order burn and found it funny.
"Such fragile things," Palpatine said. "You come into my throne room with your borrowed blades and your borrowed courage, and you think yourselves my equal."
He turned toward Tyson.
The lightning erupted again.
Tyson didn't dodge. He didn't slow. He didn't raise his saber or throw up a Force barrier or do any of the things that Palpatine's experience told him a target should do when faced with enough electrical energy to stop a rancor's heart. He lowered his head and charged straight into it.
The lightning struck something before it struck him. A barrier materialized around his body, translucent and faintly iridescent, absorbing the current in cascading ripples that spread across its surface like rain on water. Palpatine poured more into the attack, fingers spreading wider, the lightning thickening from a stream to a flood. The barrier flickered. Held. Flickered again.
Fifteen meters.
Ten.
The barrier popped like a soap bubble, fragments of energy dissolving into nothing, and the lightning hit Tyson directly. It crawled across his suit, arcing between the segments of grey material, and did nothing. The residual charge that made it through was negligible, a tingling across his skin that barely registered. Still running. Still closing.
Five meters.
Palpatine killed the lightning and his crimson blade reignited in the same motion.
He swung.
Tyson swung.
Two killing blows launched simultaneously, each one committed beyond the point of recall, neither fighter willing to sacrifice offense for defense.
Palpatine connected first.
The crimson blade hit Tyson across the torso in a diagonal slash that should have opened him from hip to shoulder. Should have bisected muscle and bone and organ, should have ended the fight in a spray of cauterized viscera.
The blade met the material of Tyson's suit and died.
The plasma dispersed on contact, scattering into harmless light as the cortosis woven through the suit's structure disrupted the magnetic containment that gave a lightsaber its killing edge. The crimson blade winked out of existence for a fraction of a second, leaving Palpatine holding nothing more than a metal cylinder.
Palpatine's yellow eyes went wide as Tyson's swing followed through.
The green blade completed its arc. It passed through the space where Palpatine's neck met his shoulders with no more resistance than air, the plasma cutting through flesh and bone and spinal column in a single clean stroke. The Sith Lord's head separated from his body. It rose slightly, carried by the momentum of the blade, and for one frozen instant those yellow eyes were still alive, still wide, still processing the impossibility of what had just happened.
Then gravity reasserted itself, and the head of would-be Emperor Palpatine hit the stone floor of his own throne room with a sound like a dropped melon. His body stood for a half-second longer, the crimson hilt still clutched in dead fingers, before it folded and collapsed beside its missing piece.
The Force shuddered.
Tyson felt it in his bones, a disturbance that rippled outward from the body, the psychic weight of a presence that had dominated the dark side for decades, finally released. It passed through him, through the walls, through the structure of the Sith Temple itself.
Palpatine was dead. The Force knew it.
Tyson stood over the body, green blade still humming, and let out a breath.
"Guess your head wasn't in the game," he said to no one in particular. He looked down at the severed head, its expression frozen in that final moment of shock. "Sorry. That was terrible. I can do better." After a pause, he continued, "No, I can't. That's the best I've got for decapitation humor. Maybe I should have gone with, 'My blade wasn't borrowed'?"
Behind him, Kreia straightened from where the lightning had driven her against the wall. Her staff found the floor, and she leaned on it for a moment before pushing herself upright. Slowly. Deliberately. Refusing to look like she needed it. She looked at Palpatine's body. Then at his head. Then at Tyson.
"Crude," she said. "Effective, but crude. The shield was a gamble. The cortosis was a gamble. Had his blade not struck first, had your timing been off by even a fraction, you would be the one in two pieces on this floor."
"Good thing my timing's great."
"Your timing is adequate. Your luck is exceptional. Do not confuse the two." She extended her hand, and the three fallen lightsaber hilts rose from the floor and drifted back to her, settling into orbit around her body. "He was powerful. More powerful than I anticipated. The lightning carried a disruptive frequency within the Force itself. My telekinetic bonds were not merely overwhelmed. They were severed." Was that respect? Professional curiosity? Hard to tell with Kreia. "I have not encountered that technique before. It died with him. A waste."
"You're mourning his technique?"
"I am mourning lost knowledge. There is a difference, though I would not expect you to appreciate it."
Tyson crossed the chamber floor at a jog to drop to one knee beside D'Lavina. She was on her back, arms splayed, her green saber hilt two meters away where it had fallen. Smoke still curled from the front of her jacket, and the leather across her chest was blackened and cracked in a pattern that traced the branching paths the lightning had taken across her body. Her eyes were closed. She wasn't moving.
"D'Lavina." He pressed two fingers to her neck. Pulse. Rapid, thready, but there. "Hey. Wake up."
Nothing.
He reached into the Force. Her presence was there, dimmed but intact, like a candle flame guttering in a draft. The lightning had done real damage, the kind that scrambled nervous systems and stopped hearts, but she was alive.
D'Lavina's fingers twitched. Then her hand. Then her eyes opened, unfocused and glassy, staring at the ceiling without seeing it. She blinked once. Twice. Her lips moved.
"...did we win?" The words came out slurred, her jaw not quite cooperating with her brain's instructions.
"We won. Palpatine's dead. Head's about three meters from his body."
"Good." She coughed, and it turned into a groan she tried to swallow and failed. Her hand came up to her chest. "That... that bastard. I've been hit by disruptors that hurt less than that."
"Can you move?"
She tested her limbs one at a time, and hissed through her teeth. "Everything moves. Most of it hurts. Give me a minute."
She squinted up at him. "You look annoyingly uninjured."
"The suit helped."
She let her head fall back against the stone and stared at the ceiling. The humor drained from her face, and beneath it was the real her. Tired. Hurt.
"You know what I was thinking when the lightning hit me?" She didn't wait for him to guess. "I was thinking about the slave pits on Verex III. The compliance collars they used there. They worked on the same principle. Electricity through the nervous system until you stopped fighting and started being a thing that did what it was told." She coughed, and it clearly hurt. "Funny how the tools of powerful men always seem to work the same way, whether they call it Sith sorcery or slave management."
She looked at him without flirtation or humor. "You killed a slaver today. I don't care what the Jedi call him. That's what he was. The biggest one in the galaxy, building a cage the size of a Republic. And you cut his head off. That was worth the lightning."
"Yeah, I'm great, but let's get you to the Medical Bay."
"While you two prattle about," Kreia said, "I will report the death of the Sith to the Jedi Council," and she walked off.