A/N: sorry for the late update, I fell asleep in evening and missed the right ti to update (and dinner T_T)
__
I always knew that one day my habit of pissing off ancient, all-powerful entities would co back to bite .
And yet, sohow, I didn't expect "bite " to be quite this literal.
The abyss swallowed whole. Cold, stale air roared past my ears as I plumted into absolute darkness, one arm clamping Arachnae against my chestplate like a terrified parent clutching a toddler during an earthquake, the other hand gripping Hett's lightsaber with a knuckle-white fist.
Never dig straight down. That's, like, the first rule of Minecraft. I should have known better.
Above , the shattered floor shrank into a rectangle of distant crimson light. Vitiate's smug, fading presence lingered at the edge of my perception like a bad aftertaste.
Pray for your success, child. Real rich coming from the guy who just demolished his own temple to avoid getting exorcised by a twelve-year-old.
The shaft walls were ancient stone, slick with moisture and threaded with dead root systems. I could see them by the faint glow of the lightsaber's emitter, and they were rushing past way, way too fast.
Right. Slowing down. That would be nice.
I twisted mid-fall, extending the lightsaber toward the wall, and jamd the blade into the stone.
The impact nearly ripped the hilt out of my hand. Ancient masonry exploded in a shower of sparks and dust, the sudden drag slamming my shoulder hard enough to make my teeth rattle. The blade carved a molten furrow down the shaft wall as gravity fought for every inch.
The stone crumbled. Of course it did. The temple was old enough that its structural integrity was more of a suggestion than a fact.
I stabbed again. Slower. Another furrow. More crumbling.
I'm basically doing the world's worst rappelling session.
The shaft bottom materialized out of the darkness—smooth stone, cracked but mostly intact, about four ters across. I pulled the lightsaber free, rode the last ten feet on pure montum, and landed in a Force-assisted crouch that still sent a lance of pain through my already-broken ribs.
"Ow."
I stayed there for a mont, one knee on the ground, breathing through my teeth while Arachnae beeped sothing plaintive against my chest.
"Yeah," I managed. "I'm fine too. Thanks for asking."
I looked up.
The hole I'd fallen through was a distant circle of faint red light, maybe forty ters overhead. Vitiate's presence had already withdrawn entirely, leaving nothing behind but the oppressive, suffocating weight of the dark side.
Cool. Great. So that happened.
I sat back on the cold stone, letting the lightsaber rest across my knees, and flipped the ceiling a long, deliberate middle finger.
"Hope that shit hurts, you body-snatching fossil."
The silence didn't respond.
I sat there for a few minutes, letting the adrenaline drain while I took stock of the situation. Because that's what responsible people do when they get dropped into the bowels of an ancient Sith temple by a psychotic ghost.
Option one: climb back up. Forty ters of smooth, crumbling stone with a twelve-year-old body, broken ribs, and a damaged droid. Hard, but not impossible. I could carve handholds with the lightsaber, leverage the Force for the heavy lifting.
But then what? I'd erge into a swamp full of terentateks that were very much awake and very much hungry, Vitiate was back in hiding, and there was no way to shut the dinner bell off.
Not to ntion I didn't had any way off planet either, even if I did handle the terentateks. With Vitiate pulling the strings, I had even less hope for Kael to have survived, much less found a high ground to send the signal to Bail.
Through if this was Dromund Kaas, I faintly rembered that Sidious had so dark side cult residing here in Legends, which was a news as good as bad. A planet was not as small as Star Wars showed them to be. Them existing and being on planet didn't an that I would find them just like that.
Even if I got a general direction through the Force, they could be thousands of kiloters away. Trying to Spider-Man my way through a planet-sized jungle would take months, if not years.
And then what? Break into the place? Like I was no Anakin Skywalker, and even he wouldn't dare to do it...wait, perhaps he might, the bastard was insane like that.
And even more this was not, this were not characters from canon universe, but rather that wanked to high heaven Legend continuity. Who knew how powerful they were and what ans they had.
It was simply walking into the den of lions.
Option two: go deeper into the temple.
Which was, objectively, the dumbest possible thing I could do.
I knew that. My ta-knowledge was screaming at . This was the part of the horror movie where the audience throws popcorn at the screen because the protagonist just walked into the obviously haunted basent.
But there was a but.
And I hated that there was a but.
Even with Vitiate gone, even with his manipulative bait still dangling, sothing deeper than his gas was pulling downward. A resonance. A low, steady hum in the back of my mind that had been there since the mont I set foot on this planet.
The calling.
And I couldn't pretend I didn't feel it.
I tried to convince myself.
This is an ancient Sith temple. The ultimate loot spot. And sowhere down there, there are artifacts that could actually help . So old tech that could help send a signal. Hell, maybe even so ship that could be repaired, given ti.
And admittedly convincing myself was not the hard job...
I closed my eyes and exhaled, looking at the situation from another angle.
Vitiate wanted down here. That much is obvious. But does his wanting it make it a bad idea, or did he simply exploit a genuine opportunity to herd like livestock?
Both, probably. The bastard was efficient like that.
He had also paid a catastrophic price to send here. That severance stunt—cutting away part of his own spiritual existence to bypass my cage—wasn't theater. I had felt the threads of his consciousness fray. Whatever ga he was playing, he was playing it with fewer pieces than he started with.
Which ant he was weaker now. And a weaker Vitiate ant a smaller window of "things that could go horrifically wrong."
Not zero. Just smaller.
I need to deal with him eventually anyway. The prolific body-snatcher isn't the kind of threat you can just ignore and hope goes away.
But I wasn't about to charge into it headfirst like so shōnen protagonist screaming about friendship while running face-first into obvious traps.
First things first. I was injured, exhausted, and my droid was falling apart.
Let's fix what I can fix.
I'd been aning to heal my ribs since I first landed in the temple, but a certain spectral narcissist had interrupted that plan rather rudely. Now that Vitiate was gone—temporarily, at least—nothing was stopping .
I settled into a cross-legged position on the cold stone, ignoring the chill seeping through my flight suit, and closed my eyes.
The healing technique was sothing I'd reverse-engineered on Tatooine through a combination of Hyper Perception and what I generously called "applied biophysics."
The theory had been that every living cell had its own resonant frequency—a unique vibration that the Living Force maintained like a cosmic tuning fork. When tissue was damaged, those frequencies distorted. The waveforms warped, lost their rhythm.
The trick was to observe the healthy cells surrounding the damage, interpolate what the correct frequency should be, and then use the Force to vibrate the area at that precise resonance. Get the pitch right, and the cells healed themselves. I just had to sing the right note.
The attempt on Tatooine had nearly turned my brain into soup.
The mathematical modeling required to calculate true frequencies from scratch and them vibrating the Force around to emit those waves for thousand upon thousand of cell clusters had been so ntally taxing that my first real test—saving Herana's severed lekku on Tatooine—had left unconscious and bleeding from every facial orifice.
But it turns out I had been fucking dumb. There was already a better way which I had totally skipped and instead taken the path through the thorns instead.
Good ol' Psychotry.
Body was, in a way, machine like any other. it had its temporal history embedded in its presence in Force, and records of when it was operating right.
Sure, reading the Living Force through touch was exponentially harder than reading residual energy in objects, but it sure beat turning my brain into a supercomputer every ti I got a scratch. Instead of calculating thousands of frequency models, I could feel the correct state directly from the tissue itself. The healthy cells whispered what the broken ones needed to sound like.
Still required intense focus. Still needed to sit perfectly still and concentrate. But the ntal bandwidth it freed up made the actual healing emission far more manageable.
I'd spent the weeks between Tatooine and Alderaan practicing on every minor scrape and bruise I could find. A skinned knee here. A sore muscle there. Never anything dramatic enough to floor .
A broken rib was the most serious thing I'd attempted since Herana. But I was more experienced now, and my reserves, while depleted, were more disciplined than they'd been on that desert planet.
I placed my hand over the fracture site and reached in.
The bone told its story imdiately. Sharp, discordant vibration where the split ran through the tissue. The surrounding muscle was inflad, compensating, its frequency pulled out of alignnt by the injury's gravitational pull.
I let the neighboring cells whisper their song—smooth, resonant, even—and held that tone like a tuning fork.
Then I breathed it into the break.
The resonance took hold. Slowly at first, like a hesitant musician finding pitch, then building as the damaged cells began vibrating in sympathy. The fracture line thinned. The jagged edges smoothed. New tissue flowed into the gap like water finding its level.
The muscle damage ca next. Then a hairline crack in my left wrist I hadn't even noticed. Then bruised intercostal tissue. Each one a small, precise note in a growing chord.
When I finally opened my eyes, my ribs moved freely when I breathed. My wrist bore full weight.
And I was utterly, completely drained.
Right. Arachnae. Then ditate. In that order.
I set her down gently on the stone floor and began unstrapping the heavy pack from my back, pulling out the battered toolkit I'd scavenged from the Scythe.
"Alright, little lady," I muttered, popping the latches on the case. "Let's hope you didn't break sothing I don't have replacent parts for."
Arachnae's photoreceptor flickered, and she let out a rapid series of sharp, indignant beeps that sohow managed to convey the emotional equivalent of a middle finger.
I paused.
"Excuse ?"
More beeps. Angrier this ti. Her manipulator arm jabbed accusingly in my direction.
Did she just—
"Holy shit, what do you an I did that?!"
BEEP beep beep beep.
"Where did you even learn the word little lady?!"
Beeeeeeeep.
"I was not—" I sputtered, genuinely offended. "I was not fucking the ship, for god's sake. I was piloting it through hyperspace with my brain so we didn't all die. There's a difference."
Her photoreceptor dimd in what I could only interpret as deep, withering skepticism.
"Are you seriously giving attitude right now? You're literally held together with tape and hope."
BEEP.
I pointed a wrench at her. "Do you want to get repaired or not?"
She went silent.
"That's what I thought."
I turned my attention to her chassis, running my hands along the damage with familiar focus. Buckled fra panels. Cracked sensor housing. A bent main servo pin throwing her locomotor system off calibration. Two fractured micro-conductors in her left manipulator. A stress fracture running through the secondary power coupling.
Nothing catastrophic, but enough to leave her running at maybe forty percent since the crash.
"Alright," I murmured, pulling out the micro-driver and a spool of replacent conductor wire. "Let's start with the easy stuff. Conductor first, then the—"
I touched the first fracture.
My mind reached for the familiar routine—Hyper Perception, map the damage, calculate the correction, guide the Force through each step. But the mont my fingers made contact with the broken wire, sothing else happened instead.
I knew what was wrong.
The way you feel a wrong note in a song you've heard a thousand tis.
The conductor was broken. It should be whole.
My fingers stayed on the chassis.
The conductor flowed back together.
I didn't register what was happening at first. My conscious mind was still trying to load up the analytical frawork, still preparing for hours of painstaking micro-surgery.
But the Force had already moved on. The bent servo pin was straightening. The cracked housing was sealing. The stress fracture in the power coupling was smoothing out like ripples being pressed from water.
My hands stayed on Arachnae's chassis.
My mind went sowhere else.
When I opened my eyes, my fingers were resting on smooth, unblemished tal.
I blinked.
Every piece of damage I had catalogued—every dent, crack, and misalignnt—was gone. Repaired. Properly. As if the damage had never existed.
I stared at my hands, then at Arachnae.
She beeped softly. A contented, purring sound I'd never heard her make before.
...How long was I out?
I checked my chrono. Forty-seven minutes.
I sat there for a long mont, processing.
The hyperspace jump. Flying the Scythe. When I had rged with the ship, felt its circuits as extensions of my nervous system, steered by instinct rather than calculation.
This was the sa thing. The sa shift from analysis to intuition. Except instead of happening under duress while the universe tried to kill , it had just... happened. Naturally. The way breathing happens when you stop thinking about it.
Since when did my tech analysis beca technopathy for god's sake?
But the more I thought about it, the more it made kinda sense. Feeling the right and the wrong in a tech wasn't anything new, I had been developing intutition for it since even back from Lothal
Have I been doing this long enough that it's finally becoming instinct?
From the mont I'd psychotrized my first engineering textbook at Vasha's kitchen table to the thousandth micro-repair in our workshop to rewiring starship systems with my bare hands. Thousands of hours. Tens of thousands of individual manipulations.
Maybe it wasn't sudden. Maybe it was the lid finally blowing off a pot that had been building pressure for years.
The Force heeding my call through, was different. Yes, I got an upgrade after Daiyu but sure a hell it wasn't to this degree...
Scythe...it had been since during that this weirdness started. After that botched hyperspace jump...then that spark carrying information from a dying navicomputer.
I ntally catalogued this shit for later. It wasn't harming and even increased my chances of repairing tech or ship if I found one, so sure as hell I was thankful for it.
Then I looked down at Arachnae, who was happily rotating her repaired manipulator arm in wide, experintal arcs.
"You're welco," I said.
She beeped sothing that sounded suspiciously like "finally."
And then the realization landed.
My armor. The Imperial suit I'd stripped off and abandoned near the temple entrance because I couldn't fix the damage without proper parts.
I stared into the middle distance.
I could have fixed that.
I could have just touched it. Let the Force straighten the warped plating, seal the cracked joints, recalibrate the malfunctioning servos. Everything I'd written off as unfixable.
"GODDAMMIT VITIATE!" My voice bounced off the walls. "You ancient, wrinkly, cockblocking—"
I stopped. Took a breath. Recounted to ten in three languages.
If I ever got the chance to visit the Old Republic era, I was going to find this man's original body, seduce every single one of his concubines, and mail him the holorecordings.
Fucking cuck him so hard that his entire bloodline retroactively ceases to exist
That's the plan. That's the revenge. Write it down, future .
Between the fight, the cage, the fall, the healing, and the Arachnae repair, I was running on fus so thin they were basically theoretical.
I need to refuel before I go poking around whatever's waiting deeper in this dump.
I settled deeper into the stone, spine straightening, hands resting on my knees, breathing slowing to a crawl. The Sith temple pressed against my senses from every direction—cold, ancient, hostile.
Except.
The longer I sat, the less hostile it felt.
I frowned internally, keeping my breathing steady.
When I'd first entered the temple, the dark side had been suffocating. A crushing, all-encompassing pressure that smothered my Force perception like a wet blanket. Walking the corridors had felt like wading through invisible tar.
But now, sitting still, reaching inward, the Force was flowing smoother. Cleaner than it had any right to be, given where I was. The whispers at the edge of my hearing—the constant background radiation of the dark side—had grown quieter. Not silent. Just... less insistent.
Like they were getting used to .
Since when does the dark side do "not dark" things?
I didn't trust it. The dark side didn't adapt to people; it consud them. That was its whole deal. Its entire brand identity.
But I also couldn't deny what I was feeling. The Force moved through with less resistance here than it had in the open swamp. Less turbulence. Less static.
Maybe my body's just acclimatizing to the ambient energy. Like how you stop slling a bad odor after being in the room long enough.
It was the only explanation that didn't make my skin crawl.
Probably.
I let the ditation deepen, pulling threads of the Living Force into my exhausted body, letting them replenish what the day had drained away.
The temple humd around , ancient and patient, and sowhere in the darkness above, the terentateks roared.
Below , sothing waited.
And I was almost ready to go et it.
__
If you want to support or read chapters before they are released on , you can do so at . I would be highly appreciative of that and it would support very much in my writing endeavors.
Link: www(dot)(dot)com/Abstracto101
User Comments
0 comments from readers