The rain had never truly stopped on Jabiim, but today it fell like judgment.
From the northern highlands, Alto Stratus watched the horizon burn. Two million battle droids marched in perfect, soulless ranks—B1s, B2s, droidekas rolling forward like black waves. Behind them rolled fresh armored columns: TB-2 repulsor tanks (the angular, heavily shielded predecessors to the future Alliance's T-2B hovertank, their twin laser cannons already glowing), Hailfires spitting missile salvos, dwarf spider droids scuttling on razor legs. Dwarfing them all strode new walker designs—prototype octopods with rotary blasters—and remnants of the Nationalist army, perhaps three hundred thousand souls still clinging to fanaticism, faces gaunt, eyes hollow, uniforms rotting from endless mud.
At the fore rode Durge.
The Gen'Dai bounty hunter towered atop a modified speeder bike, his ancient beskar armor—forged from the corpses of Mandalorians he had personally slain millennia ago—gleaming wetly under the storm. Flanking him marched five thousand IG-880 assassin droids: sleek, black-plated killers with modular weapon arms—electrostaffs crackling, flamethrowers hissing pilot lights, vibroblades extended, shoulder-mounted blasters as mere backups. Their photoreceptors glowed cold violet, Jedi-killer protocols running hot.
Stratus raised his comm. "All forces—advance. Crush Handuin. No prisoners."
Durge's guttural voice answered over the open channel. "The Jedi General dies today. Then the girl. Then every clone who still breathes."
The ground shook as two million metal feet and repulsor engines surged forward.
---
At ARC Base Handuin, I stood atop the central bunker, machine gun in one hand, lightsaber rifle slung across my back. The weapon in my left fist—my own design—was no ordinary blaster; its barrel was wrapped in conductive coils, fed directly by channeled Force lightning. Every trigger pull would be a storm.
I closed my eyes. Battle Meditation flowed outward, threading through every clone, every Scorpenek, every turret. Their fear dulled. Their aim sharpened. Their rage… I let it burn.
I keyed the base-wide comm. My voice carried across the mud, the trenches, the walker cockpits.
"Everything you thought had meaning. Every hope, dream, or moment of happiness. None of it matters as you lie bleeding out on the battlefield. None of it changes what a speeding rock does to our body. We all die. Does that mean our lives are meaningless? Does that mean there was no point in being born? Would you say that of our slain comrades? What about their lives? Were they meaningless? They were not. Their memory serves as an example to us all—the greatest, the anguished father. Their lives have meaning because we, the living, refuse to forget them. And as we ride to certain death, we trust our successors to do the same for us. Because my soldiers do not buckle or yield. When faced with the horror of this world, my soldiers push forward. My soldiers scream out. My soldiers rage."
Silence answered—then a roar from thousands of clone throats. Phase II armor, heavily modified since the first battle—reinforced plating, segmented pauldrons, capes of blackened fabric, wrist-mounted secondary blasters resembling something out of a nightmare legion—gleamed wetly as they formed firing lines in the trenches.
Defense turrets spun up. Barrels glowed cherry-red within seconds, overheating warnings flashing ignored.
The enemy arrived.
Explosions walked across the plain like thunder made visible. TB-2 tanks fired in unison, blue lances slamming into our outer perimeter. Juggernauts answered with heavy lasers, carving glowing trenches through droid ranks. Scorpeneks unleashed dual-cannon barrages, shields flaring as they absorbed missile after missile.
I leaped from the bunker, machine gun roaring. Lightning arced from the coils with every burst—blue-white chains leaping from droid to droid, melting circuits, detonating power cells. Bodies—metal and flesh—crumpled in smoking heaps.
Durge charged.
His speeder bike screamed forward, a black comet trailing fire. Assassin droids flanked him, weapons cycling.
I met him head-on.
Force surged. Time slowed. I thrust one hand forward—Breath of Thunder, First Flash. A single, blinding bolt of concentrated lightning slammed into the speeder's front repulsor. The bike flipped end-over-end, Durge leaping clear in a shower of sparks.
He landed in a crouch, towering over me—three meters of immortal hate wrapped in ancient beskar.
"You die slow, Jedi," he rumbled.
He fired. Twin wrist cannons spat slugs. I twisted aside, sabers igniting—blue in right hand, white in left. The rifle clattered to the mud.
He lunged. I parried. Beskar rang against plasma. Assassin droids closed in; I spun, lightning chaining through three of them, their chassis detonating in sequence.
Durge laughed. "Pathetic."
He swung a vibro-axe. I ducked, slashed—white blade scoring his pauldron. Sparks flew. He backhanded me; I flew ten meters, crashing through a trench wall.
Then Ahsoka appeared.
I hadn't sensed her—Battle Meditation had narrowed my focus too tightly. She dropped from an AT-TE's flank, green blades blazing, leaping straight for Durge.
"No!" I shouted.
Too late.
Durge pivoted with impossible speed. His secondary blade—vibro-knife extended from his forearm—lanced forward.
It pierced her abdomen.
Time stopped.
Sounds vanished.
A wave of pure agony crashed through the Force—her agony. Everything else dissolved: the pain of dying clones, the fear in the trenches, the horror of the slaughter. Only her pain existed, bright and unbearable.
Then it… stopped.
Her presence winked out.
No!
She must be alive. She can't die like this!
But in the roaring silence of my mind, I couldn't find her spark. Fatigue—days, weeks, months of it—slammed down like a mountain. Inner peace shattered.
Anger rose in its place.
Take revenge. Kill them all. Tear them apart. Torture them. Destroy them. I will give you the Force!
Stop—this is wrong. What the hell is happening to me?
Suddenly I was… elsewhere.
A place without size, without shape. The Force flowed everywhere—light and dark intertwined, darkness blooming from the very heart of light.
Its tentacles had spread inside me without my notice. Devouring. Growing.
This is the dark side.
It calls. Promises power. Revenge.
No. I can't. I don't want to!
Pain—my own now—rolled in waves. Outside, death echoed.
I don't want!
The headache became blinding. Skull splitting. Blood pouring from eyes, nose, ears.
You are mine!
Click. A disfigured face in a mirror. My face. Yellow eyes. Feral.
I don't want to.
You are mine!
Click. Ahsoka staring in horror—her eyes reflecting mine. Yellow.
No!
Click. Skywalker on Mustafar, hands around Amidala's throat.
Click. Me in his place. Instead of her—Ahsoka.
I don't want to! I don't want to! Go away, you bitch!
---
Alpha-Seventeen hit the mud beside Lucky. "Get down!"
Blue lightning erupted—not from the sky, but from me.
It covered the heavens.
Every enemy droid—two million strong—froze. Circuits overloaded. Power cells detonated in chain reactions. Nationalist remnants—three hundred thousand souls—screamed as their bodies ignited, turning to living torches, then ash.
Above, the sky tore open.
Blue lightning dragons—coiling, roaring serpents of pure Force energy—reached into orbit. They seized Lucrehulks, Munificents, Recusants. Hulls buckled. Reactors detonated. Ships plummeted like falling stars, crashing across Jabiim in distant fireballs.
Orliss Gillmunn watched from the loyalist hidden base. Blue lightning caged the entire planet—an electrical storm visible from horizon to horizon.
His son, second-in-command, whispered, "I saw… a serpent in the sky. Fierce. Alive."
Gillmunn's voice was hollow. "That's no serpent. That's rage."
In the center of the crater that had been the battlefield, I knelt beside Ahsoka's body.
Her eyes were open. Unseeing.
The lightning faded.
Silence fell—broken only by the rain.
And the sound of my own heartbeat.
Slow.
Too slow.
I reached for her face. Fingers trembling.
"I'm sorry," I whispered.
The dark side coiled tighter.
And for the first time, I didn't push it away.