A/N: thank u readers for your patience. I had been in a soft writer block over past few days, unable to muster the intent to write even through I had outline for chapter ready. And then over that, my end semesters have arrived, leaving me even less time to spend elsewhere.
by expectations, next chapter would be posted on patreon by 23 or 24th and on webnovel/scribblehub, the day after whenever its posted there.
hope you enjoy the chapter!
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The twin suns were already up and doing their best to murder everything underneath them by the time I guided the speeder back into the rocky hidey-hole.
Heat shimmered off the sand like a bad hologram. My poncho was plastered to my back, and the helmet's vents were wheezing like an asthmatic bantha. Fun times.
My morning trip to Anchorhead had taken longer than I'd planned. A necessary one it was through.
My three angry friends, dumped in Mos Eisley and left without a ride, were a walking, talking liability bomb. I needed eyes on them. Not to mention, I had to pick up some key components for the next phase of my master plan. In Tatooine, you just had to pay Creds, and people were aplenty looking for opportunities to help.
After my little chat with Ben yesterday, my entire daylight cycle had been spent elbow-deep in my gear. The BattleArmor v1 and its buddies had seen their first real dust-up, which meant a whole lot of maintenance, tuning, and battlefield-improvement upgrades were on the menu.
Checking in on the refugees I'd dropped off yesterday morning at Anchorhead was just another item on the to-do list. While Lyra was still crashed out in the Scythe's makeshift medbay—her injuries were bad enough that even I couldn't bring myself to kick her to the curb, not after hearing story of her sister atleast...the other through...those three were chomping at the bit to get as far away from the Jundland Wastes as possible. I got the feeling they'd be leaving Anchorhead entirely, soon.
But you can take a man out of the sand, but you can't take the sand out of the man. At the end of the day, this was still Tatooine. Not many people get a ticket off this dustball. Still, getting them farther away from the epicenter of their trauma was a net positive.
Kind as I am, leaving a potential loose end wasn't my style. I'd saved them, sure, but that didn't mean they'd value my skin more than their own when the Empire came knocking. This was Tatooine. People try to survive. I wasn't a fan of the 'dead men tell no tales' approach for poor moisture farmers, but a little bit of mind-groping went a long way. Just enough to plant some seeds of trust and loyalty towards me. Enough to make them think twice before spilling my guts to the first Imp in a shiny helmet who asked nicely.
I killed the speeder's engine, the repulsor-coils dying with a whining groan that sounded suspiciously like "kill me."
"Yeah, yeah, hold your horses, your majesty," I muttered, hopping off the saddle.
I reached for the heavy canvas bag strapped to the back. It was filled with tools, spare power couplings I'd scavenged from my own stash, and a few illicit modification parts I'd been saving for a rainy day. Or, well, a sandy day.
I hoisted it over my shoulder. The contents shifted with a heavy, metallic CLANK-THUD that echoed off the canyon walls.
Heavy. Good. Heavy meant reliable.
I trudged up the Scythe's ramp, the hydraulic hiss sealing out the furnace-like heat of the desert. The interior was cool, sterile, and smelled faintly of ozone and Nari's quiet despair.
The ship was still packed with junk, but after a quick mental reshuffle, I figured I could clear enough space to bring my speeder bike aboard. Couldn't leave my sweet ride out here to get stripped by Jawas, could I?
That aside, I found the man in robes exactly where I expected him to be: the cockpit. He was slumped in the pilot's chair, head lolling to the side, mouth slightly open. The poor guy looked like he'd gone ten rounds with a Rancor and lost nine of them.
I walked up behind him, the heavy bag of tools still on my shoulder. I paused for a second, debating the merits of a gentle wake-up call versus the funny one.
Funny won.
I let the bag drop.
CRASH.
It hit the metal decking like a thermal detonator.
Nari didn't just wake up; he practically levitated. He scrambled upright, his hand instinctively clawing for the lightsaber at his belt, his eyes wide and frantic as he spun the chair around.
"Imperial—! Who—! What!" he stammered, the blue blade half-ignited before his brain caught up with his reflexes.
"At ease, soldier," I grinned, kicking the bag with the toe of my boot. "Unless you plan on fighting a bag of hydro-spanners. In that case, my money's on the bag. It's got a better center of gravity."
Nari slumped back into the chair, deactivating his saber with a hiss. He rubbed his face with both hands, letting out a groan that was 50% exhaustion and 50% exasperation. "Fulcrum. Is it necessary to shorten my lifespan every time you enter a room?"
"Keeps your reflexes sharp," I said, dragging the bag closer to the engineering console. "Besides, sleeping on the job? Tsk tsk. We've got work to do. My contacts in Anchorhead just pinged me about our 'friends' in Mos Eisley."
"Work?" Nari blinked, trying to scrub the sleep from his eyes. He looked around, confused. "You... spoke with your contacts? You have contacts? And about what? The Inquisitors?"
"Yup, I did. Surviving in a shithole like Tatooine makes it a necessity to have some. It's not a big deal through. Throw creds at people and they spill things, and you just climb up the ladder of whom to throw creds at."
I knelt down and unzipped the bag, the smell of grease and metal wafting up. "And good news. We aren't dying today. Probably."
I started laying out the tools—laser calipers, a fusion cutter, and a portable diagnostic tablet.
"My associates have brought news. The Inquisitors bought the Lando Calrissian story hook, line, and sinker. They're currently still sitting in Mos Eisley, fussy and being a bitch, but waiting for a pickup that isn't coming for some days at least. As long as we keep our heads down, they're a non-issue."
Nari let out a breath he seemed to have been holding since yesterday. "That is... a relief. Then we should focus on repairs and prepare to leave. Once my ship is reassembled, we can make for the Corellian Run."
"About that," I said, pausing with a hydro-spanner in my hand. I turned to look at him, letting my expression harden into something serious. "The plan has changed slightly. We're not just leaving. Not yet."
Nari's brow furrowed, his guard going up instantly. "What do you mean? You just said the Inquisitors are stalled. This is our window."
"The Tuskens," I interrupted. "Specifically, the group that attacked your shuttle. The ones who took those prisoners."
Nari looked baffled. "What about them? We rescued the prisoners. We recovered the parts they stole. Surely you aren't suggesting we hunt down every raider in the Jundland Wastes?"
"I'm saying this isn't just about raiders anymore," I said, meeting his gaze. "You saw the condition of those survivors, Nari. You saw the specific way they were bound, the calculated starvation. This isn't just opportunistic scavenging. It's organized."
"Organized?" Nari shook his head, skeptical. "They are Tuskens, Fulcrum. They move in clans. They raid. That is their nature."
"Not like this," I countered, my voice dropping an octave. "I've been running diagnostics on the patterns of attacks in this sector for months. It's escalating. They aren't just hitting moisture farms for water or scrap. They're taking strategic points. They're building supply lines. And they're taking people—not for ransom, but to break them."
I let a touch of genuine anger color my voice. "They're building an army, Nari. Not for a squabble with the Hutts, but to systematically terrorize and break the spirit of every living thing in these Wastes."
Nari stared at me, the skepticism slowly bleeding out of his face, replaced by a dawning horror. "An... army? Here?" He looked down at his hands, likely remembering the gore on his own shuttle. "I... I assumed the brutality was an isolated incident. A particularly vicious chieftain."
"It's a Warlord," I corrected. "A new one. And he's turned them into a machine."
Nari's jaw tightened. "That... that is an atrocity. By the Force... is no one doing anything to counteract them?"
"People here are busy fighting for water to survive," I said with a dismissive wave. "Anything else is a problem they learn to live with. The Hutts run this place, but they aren't bothered unless it eats into their spice profits."
"And that is why we can't just leave," I said softly, reeling him in. "If we fly off, that Warlord keeps doing what he's doing. More people like Jax and Lyra get dragged into the desert to die screaming. We cannot allow such darkness to fester."
Nari stood up, pacing the small confines of the cockpit. "Then we have to stop him."
"Thing is... we can't," I said, cutting through his rising battle spirit with a sharp, bitter edge. "Not directly. Not without attracting the kind of attention that gets us both killed."
Nari stopped pacing, turning to look at me with frustration etched into his features. "So we do what? We cannot fight because of the Inquisitors, yet we cannot leave because of the Warlord. You present a paradox, Fulcrum."
"I present a solution. Just... not a Jedi one." I leaned forward, lowering my voice conspiratorially, even though we were the only two sentient beings for miles. "I have... contacts."
Nari narrowed his eyes. "Contacts? You mean criminals."
"I mean professionals," I corrected. "Assassins, saboteurs—the kind of people who make problems disappear without a manifesto or a flashy lightsaber duel."
"Assassins," Nari repeated, the word tasting like poison in his mouth. He looked repulsed. "You suggest we hire murderers to dispense justice?"
"Justice comes in many flavors, my friend. Sometimes it's a civilized weapon for a more civilized age, and sometimes..." I shrugged. "Sometimes it's a slugthrower from a klick away."
I saw him bristle, ready to argue the morality of it, so I pressed harder. "Look, these people... they have their own interests. A Warlord disrupting supply lines and terrorizing the locals is bad for business. They're willing to remove the problem. But they're not locals. They don't know the terrain."
I gestured to the viewport, to the endless, rocky expanse outside.
"The Jundland Wastes are a maze. If my contacts go in blind, they'll get ambushed and slaughtered. They have the trigger fingers, Nari, but they don't have the eyes. They need intelligence. They need to know where the Warlord's main base is, where he keeps the prisoners, and where he commands from."
Nari was listening now, his hand resting uneasily on his belt. The repulsion was still there, but it was warring with the pragmatism of a soldier who had lost a war. "And they wish for us to provide this intelligence?"
"Precisely," I said, sensing the hook setting in. "Our job isn't to be the executioners. That risks too much—any overt Force usage, any flash of a blue blade, and the Inquisitors will sniff it out. We can't afford to leak information about us, and we certainly can't risk leading the Empire to... well, to anyone important."
I gave him a pointed, hard look. "We could try to do it ourselves, kill every witness we find to keep the secret... but that wouldn't make us much better than the Inquisitors, would it?"
Nari visibly flinched at that, the logic slapping against his Jedi Code. He looked down, his shoulders sagging under the weight of the compromise. "No. No, it would not."
He took a slow breath, looking out at the horizon. "If providing target data creates a path to save those prisoners... to stop the torture..." He looked back at me, his expression grim but resolved. "Then it is a burden I must accept."
"That's the spirit," I said, keeping my relief hidden behind a professional nod. "We act as the eyes. We help end a monster's reign, and we keep our hands clean enough to stay off the radar. Win-win."
"Tell me what you need," Nari said, stepping forward.
"That's where your ship comes in," I said, finally getting to the point. "We can't have a stolen Imperial vessel—one that's supposed to be 'off-planet' with Lando Calrissian—flying grid patterns over the Wastes. That's asking to get shot down or spotted."
I pointed a thumb toward the cargo bay, where the mountains of stripped parts we'd recovered from the Tusken sleds were piled up.
"Your shuttle, on the other hand, is just another beat-up civilian transport. It's generic. It's boring. It's perfect."
"But she is in pieces," Nari countered, looking toward the cargo bay.
"She's disassembled," I corrected, grinning. "The Tuskens didn't break the parts; they just stripped them. We have the engines, the nav-computer, the sensor array—all sitting right there in a pile. It's just a really expensive, 3D puzzle."
I tossed him the fusion cutter again. This time, he caught it with purpose.
"We put her back together. We fly high, I use your sensor suite to scan The Needles, we pinpoint the camp, and we send the coordinates to the cleaners."
Nari weighed the tool in his hand, looking from me to the pile of scrap that used to be his life.
"Very well," he said, a flicker of determination returning to his eyes. "We find him."
"Good man," I said. I grabbed a hydro-spanner and slid under the engineering console of the Scythe to route some power for our tools. "But before we can play spy satellite, we need to get the heavy lifting gear online."
My voice echoed slightly from the tight space as I started wrenching a bolt.
"So, chop chop, Master Jedi. We're gonna fix your beloved."
---
The twin suns were just beginning to breach the horizon, casting long, bruised shadows across the canyon floor. The air was still cool, holding onto the last dregs of the night's chill, but the promise of the day's furnace was already lingering in the stillness.
I slid out from under the belly of Nari's shuttle, my back protesting against the hard rocky ground. With a final, satisfying click, the magnetic locks on the ventral chassis engaged.
"And... boom," I whispered, wiping a streak of grease from my forehead. "You are now the prettiest girl at the ball."
I stood up, cracking my back in three different places, and stepped back to admire the work.
The shuttle—which Nari had affectionately revealed was named the Dawn Strider—didn't look like a carcass anymore. It looked whole. The plating was reattached, the landing struts were firm, and the engine housing was sealed tight.
But it was the underbelly that held my real pride and joy. Four sleek, black modules were magnetically clamped to the hull, spaced out for maximum coverage. To the untrained eye, they looked like extra sensor nodes or maybe aftermarket cargo pods. To me, they looked like victory.
A waft of something actually smelling edible drifted from the Scythe's open ramp. Lyra.
The Twi'lek had surprised me. Most people, after being rescued from a torture camp, would be catatonic or begging for the first ticket off-world. When I offered her a ride to Anchorhead with the others, she'd looked me dead in the eye and asked, "What are you going to do?"
When I told her we were hunting the bastards' home base, she simply nodded and started organizing the ration packs. She wasn't leaving without her sister, Herana. I respected that. Hell, I related to that.
Footsteps crunched on the gravel behind me. I turned to see Nari emerging from the Scythe, stretching his arms wide and stifling a massive yawn. He looked marginally better than the zombie I'd met yesterday, though his robes still looked like they'd been chewed on by a Bantha.
He blinked, focusing on me, then on the shuttle. His eyes widened.
"By the Force," he mumbled, voice thick with sleep. "You are already awake?"
"Sleep is for the weak and the people who aren't on a timetable," I said, grabbing a rag to wipe my hands. "Besides, I only had the finishing touches left. Wanted to get the retrofitting done before the suns got angry."
Nari walked closer, his hand running affectionately along the hull of his ship. "She... she looks whole." He sounded genuinely emotional. He circled the landing strut, checking the welds I'd done on the hydraulic lines, before stopping dead.
He crouched down, squinting at the new additions.
"Fulcrum," he said slowly, pointing at the black modules. "What exactly did you do to her ventral plating?"
"Upgrades," I said, tossing the dirty rag onto a crate. "High-definition optical cameras with variable zoom, coupled with a custom sensor suite I cannibalized from the Scythe's survey drones. You've got thermal, ultraviolet, and a localized magnetic resonance scanner."
Nari stood up, looking from the high-tech blisters back to me, his expression shifting from impressed to skeptical.
"Honestly," he sighed, crossing his arms. "I still do not understand what we are trying to do here. I am just to... fly the ship around?"
He gestured helplessly at the infinite expanse of beige and brown surrounding us.
"Fulcrum, look around. This is the Jundland Wastes. It is thousands of square kilometers of rocks, sand, and more rocks. Flying around hoping to spot a camp... how does that make sense? It is practically searching for a needle in a desert."
"If you were flying blind? Yeah, it would be," I agreed, walking over to my datapad which was resting on a fuel drum. I keyed it on, projecting a holographic map of the Wastes into the air between us.
"But we aren't looking for a needle. We're looking for an army. And armies have needs."
I tapped the map, bringing up a complex grid of green lines overlaying the terrain.
"I haven't just been fixing your ship; I've been building a flight path. This," I pointed to the grid, "is a search pattern based on exclusion. Tuskens aren't random. They can't just pitch a tent anywhere. They need shade to survive the midday suns. They need defensible ridges to protect against Krayt Dragons. And most importantly, for a group the size of Hett's, they need deep cavern systems to hide their numbers from orbital scans."
I zoomed in on a cluster of jagged rock formations—The Needles.
"I've cross-referenced local geography with the known locations of the smaller, traditional clans. We ignore those. We focus here, here, and here." I pointed to the deep, jagged scars in the earth where the shadows were deepest.
"You fly these grid lines. The sensors I installed will do the heavy lifting. They aren't just recording; they're relaying a live feed back to me at the Scythe. I'll be running the data through an algorithm to flag heat signatures, unnatural rock formations, or high concentrations of biological waste."
I looked up at him, grinning.
"You don't have to find the needle, Nari. You just have to fly the magnet. I'll do the finding."
Nari stared at the map, then at the ship, processing the logic. The skepticism slowly faded, replaced by a grudging respect.
"You have put... a disturbing amount of thought into this," he admitted.
"Paranoia is a virtue in our line of work," I said, clapping him on the shoulder. "Now, go grab some of whatever Lyra is cooking. You launch in twenty."
Nari let out a groan that was less Jedi Knight and more exhausted college student. "Twenty? By the Force... I haven't even pissed yet."
I smirked, already turning back to my datapad to calibrate the sensor feed. "Well, once you're up in the sky, nobody's gonna check if you take some liberties. Just aim downwind."
Nari looked at me with profound revulsion, his nose crinkling. "That is... viler than the Inquisitors. I am going inside."
He marched up the ramp, muttering something about "uncivilized times," while I chuckled and keyed in the final encryption codes.
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PS: I have exams tomorrow(Control Systems), wish me luck!
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