A/N: Took a bit too long to write. Had an Tech Expo where I had to present whole day, and not to mention this chapter is quite possibly the first fight scene of the book so I had to struggle quite a lot.
Hope you enjoy it, and do tell your thoughts about it
--
Well, time to find out.
I knelt, my glove hovering over the dark, crusty patch of blood. Hyper Perception could give me the gist, a sort of "bad vibes were here" summary from a distance. But for the full-resolution, 4K Blu-ray experience? You had to touch.
Touching gave me control. It let me aim my psychometry, to see a specific event instead of just getting a sensory smear of everything that had happened in the last week.
I pressed my gauntleted fingers into the blood-soaked sand.
My fist clenched. The servos in the glove whined in protest. If I wasn't wearing it, my nails would've been digging into my palm hard enough to draw blood.
A cold, quiet rage settled in my stomach.
I forced my voice to stay level, but it came out tight, like a wire. "The tracks... it was the Tuskens."
I looked over. Nari was on his knees by the empty cargo bay, holding a single, lonely-looking power conduit like it was the skull of Yorick. He was mumbling something about "residual charge" and "resale value," still stuck in the "bargaining" stage of grief.
"They're recent," I said, louder. "At most an hour ago. They won't be far, not with all the... 'baggage' they're carrying. If we move fast, we can catch up."
He snapped his head up, his expression a perfect mix of "what?" and "I just found a dead loth-cat in my boot."
He scrambled to his feet, the useless conduit dropping from his hand. "Catch up? Fulcrum, these are Tuskens. Back in Mos Eisley, they say you can't track them. They move through the desert and just... vanish. It's impossible."
I paused, letting the silence hang for a beat. "The Force is guiding me."
Nari just stared at me. I could practically see the gears grinding in his head, trying to square "Force guidance" with "grand theft starship" and "exploding pilots."
"The Force?" he said, his voice squeaking. "It's... guiding you? To retrieve stolen goods? Are you sure that's not just a mirage from the heat? I've... I've never heard of the Force running a planetary repo service."
That was it. I was done.
"Look," I snapped, "do you want to stay here and hold a funeral for this piece of junk? You gonna give it a viking burial? Or do you want to move your damn ass and get your shit back?"
He flinched. "Right! Right. Get my... shit... back. Okay." He looked wildly from the Scythe's direction to his looted shuttle. "But what about the ship? The... our ship? We just... leave it?"
I walked past him. "Is there anything left to steal on this thing? They already took the fucking seats, Nari. No one's coming back for the crumbs. Get in the Scythe. We're flying low."
"Right, low," he repeated, jogging to keep up. "But... shouldn't we stay above the clouds? To avoid being seen?" He immediately answered his own question. "Oh. But then we can't... see them. Right. Great. Okay. How low is 'low'?"
I hit the ridge and pointed back toward our stolen ride.
"Stick to the ground. I want you to fly that thing like it's a landspeeder you're trying to hide from your dad."
---
If there was one thing I'd come to hate most during the past few months on this dustball, it was the refugees.
Not the people themselves, but the fact of them.
The ones who trickled into Anchorhead from the outlying settlements, their bodies bloody, their minds held together with nothing but cheap stims and the will to survive.
They weren't even surviving for themselves. That part of them was already dead, sand-scoured and buried. They were surviving for the person who was gone—the husband, the wife, the kid. Someone who was either slaughtered... or worse, taken.
The stories were always the same. Tuskens. Sand People. Natives of Tatooine.
They'd slaughter most, age and gender meant nothing. But they always took a few back with them.
The rumors about why were... creative, in the most fucked-up way possible. Slow torture for some kind of coming-of-age ritual. Rape and breeding. Brainwashing them by doing the previous two until they were just hollow, screaming shells.
No one really knew what happened. Because when the remains were found—if they were found—they weren't... human. Or Twi'lek. Or Rodian. They were just... meat.
The thought of Vasha, taken and trapped, made my stomach clench.
I wasn't a hero. I never called myself one, and I damn well never wanted to be one. Heroes are the first to die in the real world, the one without plot armor.
But I am a selfish man. And this selfishness sometimes makes me want to correct what I see. Not because of some high-ground morality, or some vain ideal of justice.
But just because I want to. Because it pisses me off.
My Hyper Perception was skimming the temporal signatures in the sand as the Scythe cruised through the dunes like a landspeeder.
The "smell" of the tracks was fresh, reeking of violence and... ofcourse, their terror.
Through my deeper dives in the Force past months, I have noticed how darker emotions tended to have a noticeable shadow or weight in the Cosmic Force. It did fade away fast, like the current case was, swept away in the cosmic ebb & flow, but I could imagine how it could remain in place if it was larger.
The "scent" in the Force was getting stronger. Sharper. Less like a faded memory and more like a fresh, open wound.
__________________
"Alright, Nari, take us up. Two thousand meters."
I opened my eyes, easing out of the hyper-focused perception state. The world snapped back from that weird, hyper-detailed fugue where I could count every grain of sand in a dune. "Let's stop hugging the dirt."
Nari, who'd been surreptitiously wiping his hands on the pilot's seat fabric for the fifth time, shot me a look. It was the look of a man who'd seen too much today and was one more surprise away from dissociating entirely.
"Up?" His voice had that frayed edge, like a cable about to spark. "You sure? I thought... I thought the Force was guiding us down."
"The Force is guiding us to the right spot," I said, tapping the side of my helmet. "Atmost two klicks dead ahead."
I guessed based on their movement speed. "These engines, even throttled down, sound like a constipated Rancor. We stay this low, they'll hear us before we see them."
Nari's mouth opened, closed. I could see the question forming: How does the Force give you precise distance measurements? But the guy was running on fumes, trauma, and the lingering stench of exploded pilot. He just nodded, his knuckles white on the yoke, and eased the Scythe upward.
The canyon walls dropped away fast. The Jundland Wastes sprawled out below us, an endless stretch of tan that could turn your brain to mush. I pressed against the viewport, helmet sensors dialed to max.
"Keep it steady... hold course zero-three-zero..."
There.
"Got 'em," I muttered.
"Where?" Nari was squinting so hard his eyes were slits. "I don't see—"
"Left ten degrees. See those two mesas that look like rotting teeth? Follow the shadow line."
Even with my helmet's zoom, it was a bitch to spot. A thin, brown-on-brown line snaking through the dunes. The Tuskens' robes were perfect camo, but you can't hide a fucking parade.
They had a full convoy. Banthas, eopies, at least a dozen hover-sleds piled with junk. It looked like a garage sale organized by psychopaths.
Nari fumbled in his robes, pulled out electrobinoculars, and pressed them to his face. Well, gotta give him to him for being prepared atleast.
"That's... that's my hyperdrive!" The grief in his voice was almost comical. "Those bastards! They're dragging it through the sand! Do they have any idea what that does to the primary—"
His voice just... stopped. The binoculars stayed glued to his face, but his whole arm started shaking.
"Wait..." he whispered. "By the Force... what's on that last sled?"
My thermal scan had already tagged them. Heat signatures, faint but there. People. Stripped, tied down, piled together like cordwood.
"Is that..." Nari lowered the binoculars. His face had gone pale under the desert grime. "Are those... corpses?"
"No," I said, and my voice came out harder than I intended. The sight of that sled was doing things to my blood pressure. Things involving an urge to commit xenocide. "They're alive. Most of 'em."
Faint, terrified, weak... but alive. Humans. Rodians. A few I couldn't ID at this distance.
Nari dropped the binoculars into his lap like they burned him. The grief for his ship evaporated, replaced by that familiar rage, the kind that had nearly brought his death back in Mos Eisley.
"Alive? We... we have to save them! We can't just let them be taken! Force knows what those... what they'll do to them!"
Nari's voice cracked on the last word. His hands were white-knuckled on the yoke, like he wanted to ram the whole ship into the convoy right now.
I kept my eyes on the viewport. The sled with the prisoners was a dark smear against the sand, getting clearer by the second. My stomach did that cold, tight thing again—the same feeling I got when I thought about Vasha. Different planet, same helpless cargo.
"Working on it," I muttered. My HUD painted targeting brackets over each Tusken, counting heads. Thirteen, lucky number, or perhaps unlucky. And plus the prisoners. Math wasn't the problem. The problem was doing this without turning the sled into collateral damage.
Nari hit that fist-to-palm thing again, softer this time. "The Force... it didn't bring us here for parts. It brought us here. For them."
I blinked behind my visor.
W-What? Where did he get that from? But thinking about it, it was kind of true,wasn't it? And it did help the situation too.
"Yeah," I said, giving his shoulder a hearty pat that made the armor clank. "Must be why. Force is a real romantic like that."
I spun the nav chair back to the console, pulling up a topographic overlay. "Alright, actual plan time. Wide arc, swing west, put the sun at our backs. Then you drop to deck level and kiss the port wing into the dune."
Nari's head snapped around. "I'm sorry—kiss?"
"Just enough to throw up a dust wall. Blind them for thirty, maybe forty seconds."
"And then what? You sprint out there in the open? They'll cut you down before the sand settles."
"Sand settles fast," I agreed, standing. "But thirty seconds is a lifetime if you know how to use it."
He opened his mouth—probably to argue about Jedi honor or some shit—but I was already heading for the corridor.
"Better idea," he called after me. "Let me go. I've danced with worse odds than this. Jedi aren't just temple ornaments, we—"
I paused at the hatch, looked back. "That's exactly why you aren't going. Tuskens see a lightsaber, they'll torch the sled out of spite. Empire sees a Jedi, they glass the whole dune. Me?" I tapped my chest plate. "I'm just another armored asshole with a grudge. No flags, no politics. Now open the belly doors."
The cargo bay lights flickered as I jogged down the ramp. Overcoat hit the deck with a heavy thud, revealing the Mark 0.5 in all its patchwork glory: matte-gray plates, scavenged hydraulics, shoulder cannons folded tight. Looked like Mandalorian cosplay designed by a caffeinated raccoon. Good enough.
I reached back, found the two stubby handles protruding from the spine plate, and pulled. Collapsible vibro-blade snapped out to full length with a satisfying shnnk.
Forty centimeters of buzzing death. Not a lightsaber, but it didn't need to be.
Nari's voice crackled over the intercom. "Hey, Fulcrum? Getting a real bad feeling about who's actually gonna be hiding when that dust clears."
I gave the blade a test twirl, servos whining. "Relax, Knight. I'm just going down to negotiate."
"With a sword?"
"Negotiations go smoother when you bring visual aids."
The belly doors groaned apart. Sunlight knifed in, painting the bay gold. Below us the convoy crawled, unaware, like ants on a dinner plate.
I stepped to the edge, wind whipping sand through the gap.
Thirty seconds, I thought. Let's see what four months of Steve-beating and Ben-lectures actually bought me.
"On my mark," I said, voice steady. "Three... two..."
The ship banked hard, sun blazing at our backs.
---
The impact was anything but a kiss. It was a violent, grinding collision. The ship shrieked as its port wing carved a furrow through the dune, the whole frame bucking with a force that threw me against my restraints. My gauntleted fingers slipped on the support handle, the metal groaning under the strain.
"Sorry!" Nari's voice crackled over the internal comms, tight with strain. "Banked a tad too hard!"
No time to answer. The displaced sand didn't entered the hangar bay like the eruption of an volcano. A solid, abrasive torrent scoured every exposed surface with a deafening hiss that almost drowned out the rhythmic thump-hiss of our laser turret firing blindly into the chaos.
"Ramp is clear! Going up in five!"
I didn't need the countdown. My world was already a series of calculations.
One. I was moving, a sprint toward the gaping maw of the ramp.
Two. A massive, shaggy shape resolved in the swirling brownout—a Bantha, its Tusken rider already turning, alerted by the shriek of our ship.
Three. Two more Tuskens, crouched low behind a rusted hover sled, their gaderffii sticks raised like primitive spears.
Four. I leaped. The world snapped into a crystalline, slow-motion tableau. My helmet's thermal vision flared, painting seven crimson silhouettes against the churning sand. Four attack vectors unspooled in my mind, calculated and discarded in a nanosecond. I locked onto the optimal path.
Five. I landed. Not on the sand, but squarely on the back of an unsuspecting Tusken scrambling for cover. My vibro-blade sank to its hilt between his shoulders. He was dead before he crumpled, a mere obstacle in my path.
I didn't pause. Using his falling body as a pivot and the Force as a spring, I spun, my feet finding purchase for a split second before launching myself low across the sand.
The next target screeched—a sound my databanks tagged as raw panic—and swung his club-shaped gaderffii in a clumsy, horizontal arc aimed at my head.
My left-hand blade came up, catching the staff with a jarring spray of sparks, the vibro-motor whining in protest. My right blade stabbed forward, seeking the gap between his heavy robes and the rim of his mask.
THUMP.
The impact was brutal, a shockwave that would have shattered an unmodified eleven-year-old. But my armor's servos locked with a hydraulic groan, holding the weapon inches from my helmet. The Tusken's beast-like strength was irrelevant. My right blade found its home, sinking deep into his throat.
I used his own panicked momentum against him. As he tried to wrestle his weapon free, I ducked, sliding under his guard and between his legs. The coarse sand grated against my backplate. I yanked my blade down as I went, carving a clean, vibrating line from his neck through his sternum. His life-sign vanished from my perception.
That was the easy part. The world snapped back to full, desperate speed.
The other two Tuskens from the sled had finally registered my presence. They screamed, not in panic, but in rage, and thrust their spiked gaderffii sticks forward, a twin-pronged attack meant to impale me.
There was no time to think. Only to act.
I pushed my nervous system with the Force, demanding speed that flesh and bone should not possess. The twin thrusts seemed to slow, just enough. I wove my body through the gap between them, a hair's breadth from a spiked tip grazing my pauldron with a shriek of metal. My blades, now in a reverse grip, danced out on either side.
The barest touch of the ultrasonically vibrating metal was all it took. It didn't cut; it excavated, leaving gaping, cauterized wounds across both their lower torsos.
I didn't watch them fall. My momentum carried me forward, and I dug my boots into the dune, sand spraying up as I forced a hard stop.
I took one short breath to balance my pace.
Four down. Nine to go.
The sand was finally starting to settle, which was bad news for me. The cloud cover was almost gone.
My HUD updated, tagging the new threats. Three of the remaining Tuskens weren't on foot. They were mounted on fucking Banthas.
The huge, shaggy beasts snorted, their breath pluming in the air, and started pawing at the ground. Great. Just great. This was going to be a pain in my ass.
The other six fanned out on foot, their gaderffii sticks held tight. Their yelling had stopped as three of them begun to take out their rifles.
Now it was just quiet, hostile breathing and the low huff of the Banthas.
This was not going to be a clean fight.
"Alright, you ugly bastards," I muttered to myself, my thumbs hovering over the activation runes on my wrist. "Let's make this quick."
On my back, the armored plates shifted with a series of solid clicks and whirs. The Predator turrets unfolded, rising over my shoulders. My helmet's HUD flickered, painting crimson targeting reticles over the closest Bantha rider.
Time to even the odds.
"Let's dance."
[Few Bloody Moment's Later]
I let out a long breath, the servos in my leg armor whining softly as I shifted my weight. The adrenaline was fading, leaving behind the usual tired ache and a half an dozen new bruised spots on my body.
Better than my expectations.
My vibro-blade was still humming, its tip resting against the throat of the last Tusken Raider. He was kneeling in the sand, one arm bent wrong. The place reeked of blood, ozone, and cooked meat.
Around us, his buddies weren't getting up. The Scythe's ramp was open now, and I could feel Nari staring from inside. Probably having another moral crisis.
The Tusken looked up at me, his mask hiding his face, but his whole body was shaking with pain and pure hate.
"You... dare..." he rasped, his voice shredded. "You attack the warriors of Hett! The desert will drink your blood, off-worlder! Your bones will—"
"Spare me the crap, motherfucker," I cut him off, my vocoder making me sound bored. "I get it. Your planet got invaded. Outsiders bad. But you're out here slaughtering settlers and taking slaves? You're not any better than them. And your Hett can go suck his dick for all I—"
I stopped.
Wait.
Hett?
The name tickled something in the back of my brain. It sounded... familiar. Like a name from a wiki dive or a deep-cut lore video. But I couldn't quite place it. It didn't fit here.
My grip on the vibro-blade adjusted slightly.
"What did you say?" I asked, my voice dropping. "Hett? Who the fuck is Hett?"
The Tusken's chest puffed up with a pained, wheezing pride. "A'Sharaad Hett! The Ghost-Walker! The True Son of the Dune Sea! He will avenge us! He will—"
Sharaad Hett.
The name slammed into my brain with the force of a freight train.
No. Fucking. Way.
That wasn't a canon name. That was a deep-cut Legends name. Darth Krayt. The Tusken Jedi who founded his own Sith Order over a century from now. What the hell was that name doing here, in what was supposed to be the clean, streamlined Disney timeline?
My mind was racing, trying to process the name and half failing. A glint of movement snapped me back.
The Tusken's good hand twitched, going for a hidden blade in his wrappings. It was a desperate, last-ditch move.
My body moved before my brain did. A lifetime of fighting Steve in the vision-arena and Ben's relentless drills took over.
There was a wet, crunching sound.
I blinked.
My vibro-blade was no longer at his throat. It was buried to the hilt under his chin, the tip probably poking into his skull. His body went rigid for a second, then slumped.
The hidden blade clattered to the sand.
"Oh," I said, my voice flat inside the helmet. "Shit. I didn't mean to do that."
I'd meant to break his arm, maybe. Not give him a lobotomy from below.
Well, no taking it back now. The guy was definitely on his way to meet his desert gods.
What the fuck?
You can't just drop a lore nuke like that and then check out, you asshole!
I needed to know more. Was this just some random with a cool name, or was my meta-knowledge completely fucked?
Ben's lessons were the theory. My own messed-up perception was the practice. It was worth a shot.
I knelt, ignoring the blood, and pressed my gauntlet to the Tusken's forehead. I pushed past the fading pain and the animal fear, sifting through the mental junk.
Then I saw it. The clearest thought in his dying mind.
A figure in Tusken robes, but moving with a fluid grace these clowns could never manage. A lightsaber—pale green—flashing in the sun. A feeling of pure, reverent awe from the raider.
It matched the descriptions I had read perfectly.
I yanked my hand back.
"Shit."
Fuck.
This was a problem. A massive fucking problem.
If A'Sharad Hett was running around Tatooine with a lightsaber, then what the hell else was different? Was the goddamn Yuuzhan Vong invasion scheduled for next year? Was the Death Star gonna be piloted by a resurrected Emperor Vitiate?
My entire plan, my whole "I know the future" advantage, was built on knowing the script. This was like showing up for a test you've memorized, only to find out it's for a completely different class.
"What the fuck is this timeline?" I muttered, staring out at the empty dunes. Nobody answered. The sand just kept blowing.
---
A/N: So My Patreon has been approved and is up! I am kinda still setting it up so there arent any advanced chapters yet.
The Link Is: https://www.patreon.com/c/AbstractoX
And some people had asked about what even was the previous chapter about. It was not a part of current story , just something of an work in progress that I wanted to get some thought about from readers. It would be deleted/moved to appendix soon.
You can read its synopsis on here: https://pastebin.com/ECwRShku