My name's Adam Kriss. Nineteen standard cycles on the registry, Coruscant-born and raised, which is a polite way of saying I learned to sleep through the sound of speeders screaming by at four in the morning and senators screaming at each other at four in the afternoon. I'm a brand-new Jedi Knight, newly handed a general's stripe and a war I didn't ask for—Support and Infiltration Company 190, codename Bad Company. First in, last out. Half the time, that sounds heroic. The other half, it sounds like a eulogy waiting for a name.
I was brought to the Temple before I could say "Temple." Foundling in a blanket with a datatag and a pulse that made the nursing droids blink twice. They tell me—Siri told me, when I was old enough to ask—that I didn't cry when they took me from the communal crèche to the Initiate dorms. I reached out, touched the air, and the holomobile I wanted rolled to my hand like it had been waiting for me to figure out the trick. Cute party trick. Terrifying omen.
I grew up in the shadows of statues: Nomi Sunrider, Revan's unmarked plinth (because history is tidy only when it's lying, but his mask was a big giveaway of who he was), and a nameless sculpted hand holding a saber, because sometimes memorials are for the fallen we can't admit we failed. The Temple was a forest of stone and rules, and I learned early where the rules bent and where they snapped. I learned I could make friends with people who hit me hard on the mat and harder with the truth.
Master Cin Drallig was the closest thing I had to a father. The salle d'combat smelled like oil, leather, and polite threat. Cin didn't teach you to win; he taught you to stay alive. He'd sweep my feet out from under me and be explaining footwork as I hit the floor: "Balance is intent in motion. Intent without balance is bravado. Bravado gets you dead." He was the only one who could sneer and care at the same time. He'd laugh when I tried Ataru flips before I'd earned them, then make me hold a guard for ten minutes until my arms shook like cheap durasteel. My first true compliment from him wasn't "good form." It was, "Better. Do it again."
Siri Tachi was the mother I didn't know I needed until she was already busy teaching me how to walk away from anger before it learned my name. Siri had a way of looking through you and into the room behind your eyes. She had a smile like a blade turned flat—gentle, but honest about what it could do if it needed to. She taught me how to ask questions that matter and ignore the ones that don't. She told me kindness isn't weakness, it's aimed strength. When I snarled about Senate dithering, she'd say, "Will, if you can't track your own heartbeat, you'll never track the room." We sparred words more than sabers. I lost those bouts as often as the ones in the salle, and I'm grateful. When she died—on a mission with Master Kenobi, Master Skywalker and Senator Amidala, that still tastes bitter when I breathe—I found a corner of the archives and didn't speak for a day and a night. Then I got up. Siri would've had words for sulking. None of them flattering.
When I was old enough not to break, the Council put my name on Even Piell's list. If Cin was a tower and Siri was a compass, Master Piell was a storm-chiseled cliff: blunt, unarguable, there whether you respected it or not. He had no patience for theater and less for excuses. But he laughed—stars, he laughed—like a vibrofile on stone when you surprised him with a clean solution. He taught me to use the Force like a lever: precisely, efficiently, without the romance. He taught me that stealth isn't the absence of sound, it's the harmony of intent—your breath, your weight, your choices lined up until even the air is on your side.
My friends? The Temple gave me a pack whether I wanted one or not. Ahsoka Tano, although she was three cycles younger than me, was the first to call me out for being too serious by half; she sparred like a hyphen—sharp at both ends—and learned faster than anyone had a right to. We traded tricks: she gave me a timing cadence for Ataru acrobatics; I showed her how to cut angles on a three-opponent rotation without tripping over your own feet. Barriss Offee had hands like still water and a mind like a library with teeth. When I got reckless, she'd arch an eyebrow and ask if I was writing a cautionary tale. Nahdar Vebb grinned through everything, hid a surgeon's precision behind a brawler's swagger, and died too soon in a corridor that didn't deserve him. Serra Keto—Cin's Padawan, and somewhat a sister for me—sparred me until both our knuckles bled and then stole my ration bar with a smile that said I'd earned the theft. Etain Tur-Mukan fought the way prayers sound when you're not sure anyone's listening; she never quit. Kento Marek tried to keep up with all of us and, he made me feel older than nineteen sometimes; he was an exceptional duelist, but not so atuned with the Force at the time.
We were kids pretending to be legends while the Temple pretended we weren't kids.
The Masters were stars you learned by: Windu with his spine like an edict, Shaak Ti whose silence taught more than most lectures, Plo Koon with kindness that didn't flinch, Obi-Wan who made diplomacy look like a kata and a kata look like diplomacy. Anakin was an argument with gravity; he made the impossible look common. I liked him because he believed you could save everyone and still sleep at night. I feared for him because I knew he was keeping score under his skin; he was a great friend, not much older than me and was already a great non-official master for many in the Order.
And then there was Yoda. Everyone says "small, green, funny syntax." That's like saying a star is hot. It misses the point. Yoda watched me like he already knew the shape of the trouble I could cause and loved me enough to let me find it anyway. The day he ended my apprenticeship, after Lola Sayu stole Even Piell and the Nexus Route turned from coordinates to epitaph, Yoda called me into a meditation chamber that smelled like old wood and new rain. He told me things I had no right to know. One of them was a name: Avar Kriss. He didn't say the word ancestor. He didn't need to. The name hung in the air like a chord you can feel in your bones. "Shine, your lineage does," he said, placing one three-fingered hand just above my heart. "Blind you, it must not." Of all the secrets I carry, that one is carved deepest—and it's the one I keep quiet. It's ours.
Before that chamber, before the stripe, there were moments that made me. One was Christophsis. I wasn't a Knight then; I was Piell's shadow. The siege glassed the city in emerald, and the streets sounded like cooking oil when the blasterfire hit the rain. We'd been working a listening post angle, trying to peel the skin off a Separatist relay lattice. Our team burned the night the droids found us. We ran. I fell—cut off in a crystal cavern that painted me green. I felt the Force pull my face toward a fissure that sang so quietly it could have been my own blood. I reached in up to the elbow and came out with a Kyber that hummed my name back at me. I didn't forge the blade then (a high risk mission is not the best of the moments for this), but I slept with that stone under my pillow like a child too old for talismans and too young not to need one.
Another was the salle at 0300, the night Siri found me chewing on anger like gristle. I'd watched a Senator—the kind who smiles like a mirror—reduce a refugee petition to a talking point. I swung until my shoulders shrieked. Siri didn't scold. She took a training saber off the rack, ignited it with that dry lightning sound, and met me. She fought me until breath was a rumor and then said, very gently, "Adam, you can't cut politics. You can cut lies. Learn the difference." I didn't sleep that night. I learned where to put the blade.
The Death Watch research was a different shape of lesson. They were plundering some pacific villages in allied planets. While Master Piell was pulling down the sky in the Outer Rim, I was buried to the eyebrows in intel—timestamped holos of armor with too much pride and not enough history, speech patterns that told you who had trained under who, skirmish layouts that read like text in a book you don't want to admit you can read. I learned patience. I learned that if you follow a pattern long enough, it becomes a confession. I learned much more where Master Windu and Count Dooku made wrong choices than in the recent Mandalorian history of clan Kryze.
And then the call from Lola Sayu: scrambled, shot through with static and pain. Even Piell had been taken. In the end, he didn't come back. I'm not writing the details here. Some things belong to the dead. What I will say is that the war reached into my chest that day and rearranged the furniture. I went to Yoda's chamber a Padawan. I came out with a scar no robe could hide and a rank that felt like a promise and a threat.
My sabers? All right. You want the poetry of the thing? Here it is. The primary is green, Christophsis-born, with a curved hilt that fits my hand like it was made for it—because it was. There's a basket guard I engineered in the workshop—retractable when the blade's dead or when I want it to be hidden, it's very exclusive to duel with masters and more cheating opponents, but it blossoms open at my will when it's alive. Makashi loves it; you can catch a line, roll it, own the tempo. When I need to move, when Ataru's on my tongue, the curve becomes a thought that takes me where my body wants to go. The secondary is a blue shoto from Ilum, simple, honest, Soresu's favorite child. I keep it close—off-hand defense, interception, closing the pocket when the world's trying to crowd me; but it has a secret, the handle it's longer, and resembles the Temple Guard sabers, because is secretly a pike saber, so when in emergencies, I can activate the second side, turning it in a pike equal to the Temple Guard, but blue, and it became natural in my hand with the help of Master Drallig. The pair together are a conversation—question and answer, pressure and pause. In my hands, they make music I'm proud to play.
They say I have explosive strength and stupid fast reflexes. That's training and luck married under pressure. The Force runs hot through me—faster than my tongue, which is saying something. I'm good at the delicate work: telekinesis with edge control, three-object independent vectors, threading a fuse through a moving drone's innards while a droideka is explaining its feelings to my cover. I do Tutaminis decently—energy in, choice out. And there's a thing that isn't a Form and doesn't have a name I trust except my own: I call it the harmonic. When it's right, I can feel timing like a tightrope, step on the beat between beats, and move where the enemy thinks I won't because even I didn't know I would until I did. It's not magic. It's listening. I trained to made it my natural state every day with my soldiers in an exercise that Skywalker called Death Circle Survival Simulation—or DCSS to simplify.
Talking about the clones; they were strangers in white once. They aren't anymore. Rift, my captain, has a brain that maps rooms faster than I can insult them. He pretends he's a cynic; he isn't. He's a shepherd with a blaster. Burner names his detonators like masters and generals accordingly to the detonator's function and has hands so gentle with wiring I've seen him disarm a mine like he was petting a scared animal. Doc saves men who shouldn't be saveable and calls me "sir" like he's daring me to flinch. Spark hacks droids and makes them sing things the droids would be deeply embarrassed about if they were capable of shame. Frost misses less than I worried I would when I first saw the distances he works at. Brick is a wall you can carry into a hallway. Jackal scares me, which is how I know he's doing his job. They call me General, but that's a technicality. I learn from them. I eat with them. I bleed beside them. I use their armor's color. If a Councilor wants to call that attachment, they can file the reprimand in the cabinet labeled "necessary."
The Senate is a storm with antlers. Bail Organa shakes my hand and means it. Senator Amidala looks you in the eye like truth is owed. The Chancellor—Palpatine—smiles like a warm room on a cold day. The smile doesn't reach his eyes, and maybe that's my prejudice talking, but I've learned to trust the part of me that twitches when someone likes the war a little too much. I can play polite. Siri taught me. But my patience for power with a grin has a shelf life. And my patience with him is running thin.
I was knighted in a ceremony that was both everything and nothing: a circle of Masters, sabers vertical like a grove of light, the hum in the air like prayer if prayer wore boots. Yoda's blade skimmed my shoulders. I felt the heat and the promise. I said the words that mean you'll try to be who you say you are on days when it's impossible. After, Cin shook my forearm like a soldier and then—rare—pulled me into his chest for a breath. He didn't say "I'm proud of you." He said, "Don't betray your ideals and morals, kid." From him, that was the same thing.
I'm supposed to pretend the moment was dignified. It wasn't. I cried in a corridor where the frescoes pretend not to see you, and then I laughed because Siri would've teased me for crying where the frescoes could definitely see me. I went to the workshop and finished mating the guard assembly on my green hilt. It clicked into place the way a lock likes a key. I slept three hours. In the morning, I put on a general's facade that felt like it belonged to someone older. Maybe it does. Maybe that's the point. We carry the weight until we become the back that can.
My relationship with the Council didn't change when the braid came off. I still argue with Master Windu in my head and sometimes out loud. I still ask Obi-Wan questions I shouldn't and get answers I don't deserve. Plo still tells me I'm kinder than I believe and warns me not to weaponize it. Shaak Ti still watches me like she's measuring the space between my choices and the consequences I think I can outpace. And Yoda still smiles like the sky does right before the first drop of rain.
I took Bad Company out for our first op as a formal unit two days after the ceremony. The Resolute Dawn hummed around us like a cat too proud to admit it's pleased you came home. The briefing holoprojector painted the room blue and grim. Our target was a Separatist listening station welded onto the spine of a mined-out asteroid that spun just out of anyone's way by design. Insertion window: six minutes and a lie. Exfil: "creative." Rift looked at me and said, "We'll make you look good, sir." I said, "Please don't. Make me look lucky." Burner cackled. Frost checked wind on a rock in vacuum out of habit. Doc pretended not to be amused and handed me a field stim "in case your better angels need chemical encouragement." Spark taught Beeper, my R3-series droid, a new swear. Brick tested his shield against the bulkhead until the bulkhead complained. Jackal sniffed the air because of course he did.
Before the drop, I thumbed my sabers alive in the armory's dim, just to hear them answer. Green, a long note that lives in the chest. Blue, a higher thread that twines it. I breathed until my breath wanted to be useful. If there was a prayer, it wasn't words. It was readiness.
You want to know what I feel? Fine. I feel too much. I feel joy at the stupid jokes on the drop ramp and grief that bites when I see a boy in a white bucket take a bolt meant for me and leave a hole where his soul used to be. I feel anger at people who use words like cover fire: Senators who play chess with people, generals who want a cleaner story more than a messier truth. I feel hope like a stubborn weed through duracrete when Ahsoka grins and says "we can do this," when Barriss says "we must," when Serra says nothing and takes guard without asking. I feel something ugly and honest when I think about killing men who would kill us because someone put different colors on our maps. I don't want to be a weapon. I want to be a hand.
So: Adam Kriss, nineteen, Jedi Knight, General of a company with a name that sounds like a joke until you see it on a wall and realize the wall is the only thing that kept you from vacuum. I carry a green curve and a blue truth. I had a father who taught me to stand, a mother who taught me why, and a master who taught me to move through hell like I mean to come back with something worth the trip. I serve a Council that tries, a Senate that lies, and men who deserve more than what any of us can give them but take what we can anyway.
I was born in 5 BGR [40 BBY] and knighted in 14 AGR [21 BBY]. The calendar isn't important except when it is. What matters is that right now, I'm stepping into a gunship that smells like ozone and old leather, Rift is giving me a nod that means "we've got you," and my sabers are the weight I choose every time.
I am not a legend. Legends don't have to wash blood out of their sleeves or write letters to brothers who look like you because they are you and somehow are still themselves. I am not a hero. Heroes don't wake up at 0300 to argue with ghosts whose names you can't say out loud without breaking the room.
I am a Jedi. I am Adam. And I am going to work.
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- Hey guys, Author here, my new fan fic, it will be posted in parallel with 'DxD: Monogamic Issei', and I hope you guys like it.