Beating Heart of Industry

Posted on Sun Dec 14th, 2025 @ 10:46am by Kalen "Rex" Vickers & Thane & Amare & G2-O7
Edited on on Sun Dec 14th, 2025 @ 9:00pm

5,620 words; about a 28 minute read

Chapter: Chapter VIII: Broken Chains
Location: Carbonite Facility, Cloud City, Bespin
Timeline: Week Two (Around a week after Irrikut)

OLD

The droid warbled acknowledgement and rolled after the guide. The rest of the Ugnaughts fell in behind, a ragged procession of soot and frightened purpose.

Thane set off at their heel, cloak drawing the corridor’s cold into its folds. “Come,” he said to his apprentice as he passed her. “History has left us a map. We will finish what it began, and then we will tear out their heart.”

Amare gave him a curt nod of agreement and tried her best to match his bold stride. However, it became difficult for her to focus on the mission as her mind grew perturbed and filled with awe from what the Force had revealed to her. She had to know who that Sith Lord was with the booming electronic voice that she heard, and made a mental note to inquire about it with the Telos Holocron later.

The passage dipped and tightened. Heat bled up from below in slow, furnace breaths; somewhere ahead, a deep pump cycled, and the blue ghost-light of ancient carbonite arrays began to flicker through the haze.

NEW

The last turn of the passage opened like another wound into the past.

Thane stepped through first, boots striking the grated floor with a hollow metallic echo that vanished into the vastness of the chamber beyond, with G2 rolling close behind, then Amare. The old carbon-freeze facility yawned before them - an enormous cylindrical pit descending into blue-lit gloom, girded by circular walkways, machinery, and the skeletal remains of control consoles long since gutted or cannibalised.

The air was colder here. Clean in a way that didn’t fit the rest of the cult’s domain.

Thane halted at the railing, the glow from the ancient freeze-pit flickering across his leather vambrance. “A freeze chamber… still functioning, after however many centuries.”

His gaze swept the catwalks and gantries spiralling around the chamber, and what had once been orderly industrial precision was now a grotesque hybrid of Old Empire-era engineering and cult graftwork. Snaking pipes pulsed with faint orange light. Lattices of welded scrap metal hung like ribs from the ceiling. Crude rails carried clusters of shimmering, glassy crystals - dead things, hollow, their colour wrong in every way. They resembled Kaiburr shards only in silhouette... mere imitations pretending to contain power.

G2 trundled up beside him and issued a brief, insistent sequence of beeps. A thin line of Aurebesh scrolled across his projector in clipped translation: POWER DRAW: ACTIVE. TEMPERATURE CONTROL: STABLE. MODIFICATIONS: NON-STANDARD. A second line blinked into being, a fraction slower, as though the droid was struggling to categorise what it was seeing: CRYSTAL RESONANCE: DETECTED. TYPE: UNKNOWN.

Thane reached out then with the Force, brushing the nearest cluster from a distance. The crystals vibrated faintly, but not with life. They hummed with the artificial resonance of desperate hands striving to mimic something grander and purer. “Unrefined. Powerless,” he judged. “These are shadows of the real thing. Craft without understanding.”

Across the walkways, more Ugnaughts shuffled like grey ghosts. They were thin, exhausted, their movements mechanical. They operated heavy levers, monitored dials, dragged crates of raw crystal through hanging chains of steam. None looked up at the Sith pair. Some wore metal collars humming faintly with energy; others bore scorch marks across their backs, as though the machines themselves punished mistakes. A few others had the molten markings glistening in their scarred flesh, reminiscent of the markings they had seen across the walls in the Cult lair.

Thane watched one nearer to them struggling to operate a jammed valve, fingers raw and breathing ragged. Another Ugnaught jabbed it in the ribs with a sparking baton. It squealed but kept working.

The Sith Lord’s jaw tightened.

Not in sympathy - never that, now - but at the inefficiency and crudeness. The ugliness of their method. “Crude labour for crude results,” he said quietly echoing his internal thoughts. “They drain life to imitate power."

Below them, the great freeze pit rumbled, releasing a plume of pale vapour. The machinery groaned, ancient components forced to operate in ways they were never designed to.

Thane stepped forward along the catwalk, cloak trailing behind him in the rising steam. His eyes traced the network of pipes, the flow of heat, the looped conduits pulling tibanna gas into the heart of the forge.

He tilted his head slightly and spoke. “They have anchored their furnace to the chamber’s central spine… and they feed that spine with... Whatever it was you felt before.” His gaze flicked to the walls, where the faintest scorch marks, centuries old, still clung to the durasteel.

The echo of the conflict Amare had felt more keenly than her master lingered here, too. Not as sharp or as immediate as in the corridor above, but still present.

“The Cult built atop an intersection of power they do not comprehend," Thane concluded haughtily. "Good. It means we can unmake it cleanly.” He glanced sideways at his apprentice. “Tell me what you see. What the machines conceal. Where this place breaks.”

Amare's eyes swished to and fro as she attempted to suss out what her master was looking for. She cautiously walked around the carbon freeze pit, though she did not know or understand much about the inner workings of the centuries-old tech in spite of her knowledge of starships.

A blur of something that rose up from the pit swooshed past her peripheral vision, startling her into a low breathy gasp. She glanced up at the circular collective of worn-out pipes and pressure seals, her instincts telling her something jumped up there, but she saw nothing with her naked eyes. She shut her lids, held out an open palm and concentrated.

"This place..." she said in barely more than a whisper. "...someone...afraid, yet bold...powerful...darkness stalking..."

She turned and slowly opened her eyes to find that her color perception had failed, and everything was monochrome, and the light around the perimeter of her vision was rippling and chaotic. At the top of the short set of stairs leading up to the catwalk opposite of her was the personage of darkness itself, a monolith of a masked man cloaked in peerless black.

She started to feel faint, finding it harder to breathe, her wind pipe constricting slowly--less like a choke, and more like the air itself assaulting her lungs, or a sudden onset of severe bronchitis. She staggered and feel to one knee. With deep fear and confusion, she gazed up again in hopes of seeing the threat, but the dark one had vanished where he had stood. Amare's breathing eased.

"I love you..."

Spoke the anguished voice of a woman whose voice echoed across time to Amare's heart. Such was its power that it moved Amare's lips causing her to say words herself aloud for Thane's ears to hear.

I know...

For a moment, Thane simply regarded her.

Amare’s voice—no, the echo spoken through her—still hung in the cold air of the chamber, as fragile and unreal as the vapour rising from the carbon pit. Her eyes were wide, not with ignorance, but with the weight of something profound. The Force had seized her, shaped her, spoken through those trembling syllables…

I love you.
I know.

The ancient words were not meant for her, nor for him—yet they had passed through her as though she were a conduit plugged directly into the memory-scars of the place.

Amare heard the strange man's soft yet defiantly masculine words in reply, but she did not say them. She turned and locked eyes with her master, believing the words had echoed through him as colour returned to her sight.

Thane felt a prickle move across his skin at how the power took root and exposed itself within her.

Behind them, G2 emitted a startled chirp and reversed half a metre, dome swivelling rapidly toward the pit. Its sensors pulsed once, twice, as if tracking something that was not quite there. He projected another short line, broken up by interference, declaring there was nothing physical it could comprehend, expressing its best imitation of artificial confusion.

“This gift of yours…” Thanesaid, voice low, almost reverent, as he stepped closer, paying no heed to the astromech. “It is not subtle, Amare. To display it at this strength - visions so tightly bound to the fabric of a place that they bleed even into speech... it is rare. Powerful. I can think of very few Jedi in the Order that have barely touched upon the skill, let alone channeled it this way. Your power has always been undeniable - but your pace is incredible."

His eyes narrowed slightly, studying her face, the unsteadiness still clinging to her posture. “You truly hid yourself well on Nar Shaddaa and before.” But, now, his tone shifted - firmer, grounding, no longer indulging the moment. “Let these ghosts guide us - not drown you."

He placed a steadying hand on her shoulder. It was neither gentle nor harsh, but anchoring. The leather of his glove creaked faintly as he exerted just enough pressure to make her feel the present, not the past.

“Stand. Breathe. Claim your footing. Whatever this place once was, it submits to us now, and not the other way around.”

There was a noticeable trembling and unstable gait as Thane assisted his inexperienced apprentice. Amare, a wave of fatigue washing over her from her involuntary use of power, wanted to verbally agree with Thane. However, the Force seemed to insist that she repeatedly be a recipient of its mystical machinations whether she liked them or not, and therefore she held her tongue. Were it not for Thane's firm stabilizing presence and guidance, she knew the Force would have likely ruined her by now. In spite of the meteoric rise of her power over the last year, she's wasn't too prideful to admit that it took a strong man to guide a lost and traumatized woman to reach her potential.

When she had recovered enough to steady herself, Thane withdrew his hand and surveyed the chamber again, and this time not with idle curiosity, but with the sharpened eye of strategy.

The carbon chamber was alive with motion. More Ugnaughts hunched over consoles, pipes glowing with unstable energy, ersatz crystals clattering along rails overhead. The architecture of the Force-echoes Amare had sensed began to make sense to him, although not as mysticism, but as structure. Residual power, old wounds, and mechanical potential.

He began walking, slow but purposeful, cloak trailing through the cold vapour.

“These forges… all of this-” He gestured to a rack of jagged red crystals lying on a workbench, each humming faintly but erratically. “They've attempted to stabilise whatever resonance Kaiburr shards have by siphoning ambient emotion and pain from the chamber," he theorised, looking around.

The crystals pulsed weakly as if in answer.

“It is clever,” the Caanan admitted. “In theory. Feed the shard with conflict. With memory and with suffering.” His fingers ghosted above a crystal, feeling its sickly, artificial throb. “But this is imitation without comprehension, I fear. Something natural and powerful beyond their crude understanding of our universe and the Force."

A nearby Ugnaught glanced up, eyes hollow, and scurried back to its work.

Thane turned away from the crystals and faced the piping network instead. His senses followed the flow of tibanna, the cycling heat, the pressure building in the wrong chambers and starving the right ones. The entire refinery had been seemingly lashed together - it was like a wounded beast forced to keep walking.

“It is all connected,” he said. “Every furnace. Every vent. Every failed crystal they tried to birth.” A faint smile began to form - predatory and calculating. “I think that if we break the spine of this system, the entire city will choke on its own imbalance.” He tilted his head to his Sith apprentice. “And fall.”

Amare's eyes followed his logic and felt inspired by Thane's destructive realization. She was no dedicated engineer, but she knew enough about starship mechanics to see the vulnerabilities that caught her master's attention. She was prepared to support his plans, but was concerned what their exit strategy would be, and how much time they would have to escape.

Thane then continued onward toward a central walkway that led above a cluster of cylindrical compression chambers. His boots rang sharply against durasteel and the Ugnaughts flinched at the sound, though none dared speak.

“There,” he said, gesturing toward a junction node. It was an ancient septagonal console grafted grotesquely with cult-made conduits. “That is where their power converge, surely. Destroy it, and the false crystals die. Destroy it thoroughly, and Cloud City’s repulsorlift balancing system collapses.”

He did not soften the implication - he did not have to with Lady Amare. So, he reached for his lightsaber and ignited the violet blade. Its hum filled the chamber. It was steady, disciplined, familiar.

Yet, as he moved it into guard position, something shifted, like a subtle drag in the hilt - a faint resistance from the blade’s core, as though the weapon were suddenly heavier and less willing.

Thane’s jaw tightened, irritation flickering behind the gold of his eyes.

He would examine that later - as the first cultists emerged from the steam.

Four figures stepped onto the upper gantry, each bearing a red blade - unstable, flickering, fed by the false shards embedded in crude metal cages strapped to their chests. Their molten tattoos glowed like hot seams through cracked skin. They descended in silence, the rhythm of their footsteps eerily in unison.

“Good,” Thane murmured, turning to face them, blade casting an eerie glow through the steam. He welcomed them with a slow, rising guard. Nearby, G2 emitted a low warble and retreated to a nearby nook, with a clear view of its allies and their foes.

"At last," Amare said with a wry grin of morbid satisfaction. "The vermin have come to play."

She drew and brought her golden lightsaber to life low and to her side in a single smooth motion. She noticed a similar resistance in her own weapon, but having dealt with taming her rebellious shoto over the last year, she passed it off as residual loss of focus from her tappings into the past and applied tighter control over her hilt to compensate.

As one of the cultists took point and drew closer to her, Amare drew upon her recent defensive training with Thane and the Darth Bane holocron, and swiftly raised her own guard high at face level with a sideward Soresu stance holding the lightsaber hilt with crossed arms, blade pointed at a slight downward angle directly at her aggressor giving him momentary pause. It was a tight battle-ready posture that lent itself to allow for easy stabs, and left no room for fancy tricks or bravado; just violent business.

Thane stepped forward and readied himself as the first blow came his way - and when their blades struck his, that subtle wrongness in his weapon grew stronger, like a stubborn heartbeat resisting the rhythm of his own.

Thane’s frustration sharpened to anger, but his movements only grew more lethal.

The first cultist struck with a reckless overhead chop, the unstable red blade sputtering violently as it fell. Thane pivoted in what was Makashi economy incarnate - his violet blade gliding up in a tight arc to catch the blow at its weakest angle. Sparks spat across the railing. The cultist’s momentum faltered, and Thane flicked his wrist, a sharp, precise disengage that sent the man stumbling two steps past him.

His blade dragged through a coolant pipe on the follow-through, so a jet of supercooled vapour blasted upward, engulfing the cultist in a cloud of ice crystals. He screamed once before toppling over the railing and vanishing down the pit.

The cultist that approached Amare head-on did so in a basic high-guard shii-cho stance. Amare lowered her guard to a basic mid-level stance of her own, then raised her blade and pressed forward with a horizontal stab. The cultist snarled and attempted a fierce overhead chop believing the alien female to be too committed to her awkward thrust. Amare's deception worked and she allowed the falling cut to strike her blade. In that same instant, she stepped slightly to her left as the chop came down missing her by inches just as she riposted with a flanking arced slash that divorced the cultist's head and some of his left shoulder from the rest of his body.

The clean swift kill filled her with dark elation. She bared teeth in tandem with a wicked hissing smile.

Another cultist lunged at her, snarling something guttural, their unstable blade fizzing violently as the ersatz Kaiburr shard on their harness pulsed erratically.

This time, there was no simple opening for Amare to exploit, and she found her herself instantly on the defensive. A brutally fast exchange of strikes and blocks led to both cultist and Sith locking blades. However, the cultist had the upper body strength advantage, and Amare was being pressed back, teeth grinding under the strain. She desperately gained some leverage by putting one foot back behind the other, but the cultist's energy blade kept creeping closer under the loud frayed crackling of one energy blade grinding against the other. Drool slipped free from the cultist's lips, and it burned instantly upon Amare's lightsaber, the hunger for the kill filled with deep anticipation. Just a few seconds more...

Thane barely spared the moment to check her positioning. His attention swept the chamber, recalculating the layout as the machinery groaned under their intrusion. The forge was a network, and if he drove the fight through the right arteries, it would devour itself.

He stepped sideways, parrying another wild strike. The Sith's blade dragged again, the resistance inside the crystal unmistakable now, but he adapted, relying more on footwork, more on redirection, and less on power.

Makashi, still his most intimately accomplished form, flowed from him like a cold, cutting wind, even against numerous opponents - who were woefully undisciplined, even compared to their confederates they had encountered before, such as on Nar Shaddaa.

His next thrust speared the man's false Kaiburr casing. The shard inside pulsed violently once and then detonated. The cultist was flung backwards across a workstation, smashing through glass and crystal husks. The explosion ruptured another conduit, sending molten slag splashing across the floor - and a few shards pierced into Thane's arm as he raised it to protect his face.

Machinery screamed and lights flickered. Ugnaughts scattered in terrified, ritualistic patterns, as though repeating motions long beaten into them.

Thane used the chaos. He pressed forward through the narrowing catwalk, angling them toward the central junction node. Each interception of a blow redirected into machinery rather than flesh - pipes were rupturing, sparks raining down, steam bursting in violent plumes.

Just as Amare was about to overwhelmed by her opponent pressing down hard on their saber lock, she felt more than heard the unmistakable roars and frantic cries of a frenzied Wookie warrior. She felt an echo of his rage from across time, a Wookie desperate to save his beloved friend from someone. That raw, natural rage echoed through recent events, to another cultist, another Wookie...

Mange...

Amare's mind became steeped in that unbridled brutality from that ancient Wookie. She felt his love, his anger...his power.

Her left hand ignited in a halo of bright red energy, a smoldering deep crimson flared deep within the oily pools of her eyes, and her muscles rippled with newfound unnatural power. She began to reverse the direction of the cultist's press, horrified as just how much stronger the Nautolan suddenly became.

I have to save him!
Han needs me!

The lingering echo of the ancient Wookie's heroic fight became her blind momentary obsession. She viciously shoved the cultist back and lunged with an uncharacteristic berserker's cry of malicious intent. Her swings were sloppy but overwhelming, almost Djem-So in their style.

With the cultist in full defense, Amare brought her energy sword down in three brutally quick overhead chops, the last blow again locking their blades. Flush with strength that wasn't her own, she pinned him down, holding the blade lock with just one hand, and slamming her energy-engulfed left hand on the small cage fixed to the cultist's chest. She felt the Force working in there and she began engorge herself in its lingering presence through that hand, hungry for more raw untamed power wherever she could find it. The cultist howled in pain as a result.

To the side, cultist leapt down from an overhead gantry, aiming for Amare’s back with a savage diagonal cut.

The Lady of the Sith, still in a frenzy, released her grip from the cage, turned in the very instant the assassin had leaped down at her, and she "caught" him in mid-air with the Force. Not pushed. Held. Amare stepped off the cultist she had pinned who was still writhing in pain and walked casually up to the other that she held, and, with an angry atavistic growl, she slashed his feet clean off. The scream of pain and the whiff of burned flesh from the stump legs upon the tender nostrils of her soft button nose fed deeply into her bloodlust. But while her olfactory sense was being barbarically sated, her hearing and feelings through the Force instantly guided her down to one knee, her free hand letting go of the snared cultist she held and then snatching her hidden shoto from her belt and throwing it ignited behind her, its green blade having carved through flesh.

The one that was held in mid-air fell hard onto the walkway, just as Amare's shoto returned to her hand shortly after it tore through the cultist she had pinned down a moment ago. He had apparently recovered enough to get up and try to take her from behind, but gravely underestimated Amare's preparation. Amare shoved him down with a boot to his gut, then casually approached the other with the stump legs, and ended him by walking by his writing form with her lightsaber slashing along the walkway and cutting him in half from pelvis to skull without so much as looking at him as she passed. Amare felt her rage subsiding, and her borrowed superhuman strength fading back to normal.

The forge shuddered all around them.

The ancient carbon-freeze chamber, already pushed beyond any sane operating threshold, began to vent power through the floor grates. Blue-white light surged upward in broken pulses. The walkways glowed with stress fractures.

Thane cut through a supporting pylon - it was not elegant, merely necessary - and the whole processing arm sagged dangerously, spilling canisters and half-grown synthetic shards across the walkway.

Another cultist then charged him, screaming a fractured litany to Axion. The glow on their chest-shard flared, pulsing with unstable resonance.

Thane hissed as he parried three frantic, sloppy swings in succession. He stepped aside and redirected the cultist’s overextended strike into a power conduit. The resulting burst hurled the man screaming into the pit, tumbling end over end into the blue-lit depth.

Amare followed Thane's lead and split another pylon. Chaotic sparks and dangerous jets of steam blasted in her wake.

More pipes ruptured around them. Steam poured, thick and choking. The Ugnaughts, overwhelmed by contradictory alarms and malfunctioning commands, stampeded across the walkways, some flinging themselves clear of the most volatile machines. One scurried directly into Thane’s path, mindless with terror.

Unable to sidestep the being and still moving to defend himself from their foes and navigate the ultimate sabotage of the facility, he simply carved the diminutive being aside, giving little thought to the entity amid the chaos and battle.

He paused as he felt an echo of those ancient forebears Amare had channeled before. Lightning crackled somewhere far above.

“We end it here,” Thane declared, voice raised above the growing roar to both Amare and G2-O7. “Drive them to the opening - to the catwalks!"

---

Rex throttled hard to port as another plume of smoke belched upward from Cloud City’s lower levels. Alarms were going off everywhere - citywide klaxons, grinding metallic sirens, automated distress calls overlaying one another in a chaotic chorus.

“Great,” he muttered, flicking switches with increasingly frantic taps. “That’s… reassuring.”

Through the canopy, he saw it: a jagged, gaping wound torn into the mid-structure, steam venting in violent bursts. The whole section shuddered as though the city were breathing its last.

The nav scanner pinged - heat signatures, two of them, moving fast and erratically through the internal walkways.

Rex leaned forward. “Oh kark, yeah, that’s them.”

He kicked the ship into a steep banking dive, engines howling as the ship threaded dangerously close to the superstructure. Distant explosions rippled through the metal around him, with long corridors collapsing inward, pressure bays venting, entire segments failing.

“Come on, girl,” he said through gritted teeth, slapping the console as the proximity alarm screamed. “Hold together. Just a little closer…”

And then - there they were.

Two figures sprinting along a collapsing exterior strut: Thane with cloak snapping violently in the wind, Amare at his side, G2 trailing behind, the entire facility detonating in staggered arches behind them...

---

A secondary blast tore out of a nearby chamber the pair were running from, fire and crystal shards ejecting like shrapnel. A whole catwalk buckled outward, dangling over the abyss.

Amare and Thane ran across the large catwalk walkways, escaping the claustrophobic confines of the carbon freeze facility, suspended high over a chasm leading into the depths of Cloud City. Far below, metal would eventually give way to the gas giant beneath - where Thane hoped the whole city would soon fall into, ending the Cult's dark plans with finality.

Two more cultists now emerged from opposite ends of the catwalk, one reaching for Amare, the other rushing Thane with a saber raised high - and again, that faint drag, that resistance.

Not now. Not here.

A massive explosion deep below signaled the beginning of a catastrophic failure, and shook all four of the combatants on the walkway, each using the Force and their advanced senses to steady themselves. G2 extended a tool, marginally in time to steady itself from plummeting to an early doom.

Thane turned sharply, eyes burning with purpose. “Amare!" He called. "We need to finish them, and move! The catwalks won’t hold!”

"Then we end this the only way the Sith can!" Amare, knowing there was no time for swordplay with lightsabers that were acting strange in their hands, remembered how Thane handled Darth Cabal back on Vaa. Her free hand rose up, palm open. "Now!"

Short-lived sputtering arcs of blue lightning lanced free from her fingertips at one of the cultists, stopping him in his tracks with electrical agony, slowing to a near standstill, but not enough to incapacitate him.

Thane did not speak immediately, but he appeared satisfied with his apprentice's display of power - technique relatively recent to them both.

The resistance in his saber flared again as he gripped his hilt - insolvent and dragging. He let it go slack at his side as the wind tore at his cloak and the catwalk opened out around them, vast and exposed, framed by broken arches and yawning emptiness, where a father had once broken a son and cast truth into the abyss, faintly echoing through history to the Sith pair now.

Yer, then, through the Force bond, pain lanced into him.

Bomoor.

He could sense an immediacy - there was fear, strain, and the edge of loss pressing so hard it felt like a hand closing around Thane’s own heart.

His eyes burned gold as he stepped forward into the storm and raised his hands, assenting to Amare's dark plan.

A roaring lattice of blue-white energy tore free from him, branching wildly into the open air, striking rails, pylons, deck plating in violent succession, larger than any he had unleashed before, but far from controlled. The catwalk became a conductor, arcs racing along its length, hammering into the cultists from every direction at once. Thunder cracked overhead through broken gaps in the ancient structure. The vision of the onslaught briefly reminded him of the power the Kaleesh cultist had unleashed upon him on Korriban - and he would not be outmatched by a perverted disciple of Axion.

The cultists screamed - their bodies locked and bowed under the force, silhouettes writhing against the lightning glare as the ersatz Kaiburr crystals strapped to their bodies or embedded in their armour flared in blind panic. The false shards fractured almost immediately — spiderweb cracks racing through them before they burst apart in showers of molten fragments, their sabers collapsing into fizzing, useless stubs that spat sparks and died.

The shockwave rolled outward, a section of railing sheared off and vanishing nto the abyss below. The catwalk groaned and dipped under the violence of it, metal screaming in protest as stress fractures rippled across its surface.

G2 wailed and skittered back, globe snapping side to side as arcs snapped dangerously close. The droid magnet-clamped itself to a strut and hunkered low, every system screaming warnings as it withdrew from the open span.

Thane held the storm for a heartbeat longer than was wise before letting go. The lightning collapsed inward, snapping back into nothingness, leaving scorched metal, smoking bodies, and the open howl of the wind rushing through the ruined span. The surviving cultist slumped, twitching, his harness cracked and blackened, power utterly gone.

Thane stood unmoving at the centre of the devastation, cloak snapping hard in the gale, ozone curling from his fingertips. He rest a hand on the catwalk to steady himself, the exertion of that display taking its toll.

He flexed his fingers once, as if shaking the last sting from his nerves, and the catwalk answered with a groan that travelled through the durasteel like a dying animal. Somewhere behind them, deeper in the structure, another concussion rolled outward; the whole span dipped a fraction, rivets shrieking, the wind rising to fill the new gaps. A garbled warning blared from half-functioning speakers bolted along the archway before it choked into static and repeated again in Huttese.

A familiar thrum then cut through the din - engines powering hard, close enough that the wind itself seemed to shear aside. The Red Raptor surged across, banking dangerously tight around the broken structure as sparks and debris spiralled off her hull. Running lights strobed against smoke. The ship’s underside skimmed the edge of the span with obscene confidence, stabilisers whining as Rex fought to keep her level in the turbulence.

The hatch yawned open mid-flight. Inside was darkness, a strip of hard light, and the frantic flicker of warning panels. A voice bellowed out over the howl, distorted by the ship’s external speaker: “Move! Move! I can’t hold her here!”

Another section of railing tore free beside them and vanished into the clouds. The catwalk lurched again. Thane’s cloak snapped like a banner in a gale as he turned toward the open hatch, eyes still lit with that violent gold. G2 released its clamp with a plaintive warble and rolled forward in a desperate, uneven sprint, gyro compensators fighting the tilt.

The ship hovered inches from disaster, hatch gaping, engines straining, and the span beneath Thane and Amare began to split, hairline fractures racing toward their feet as the city continued its long fall - and the catwalk finally gave way with a shriek of tearing metal.

Thane broke into a sprint without looking back, cloak snapping violently as the span dropped beneath his feet. Amare was already beside him, boots pounding, G2 skittering behind with panicked warbles as the Raptor drifted closer, engines screaming in protest. The open hatch yawned toward them just as a whole section of deck folded downward, vanishing into the storm.

Thane leapt, although the wind tried to tear him away. He twisted midair and hit the deck hard, boots skidding as Rex hauled the ship sideways to keep them aligned. Amare followed a heartbeat later, vaulting cleanly through the hatch and rolling as the deck lurched beneath her. G2 clipped the threshold, sparked, then bounced inside with a startled artificial screamas the hatch began to slam shut behind them.

Rex did not wait for it to seal. The ship pitched upward brutally, engines howling as debris and lightning flashed past the canopy. Warning klaxons screamed throughout the whole vessel.

Thane was already on his feet, braced against a bulkhead, eyes distant and burning.

“Up,” he said, voice sharp and absolute. “Bomoor is in immediate danger.”

Rex shot him a glance over his shoulder, teeth clenched. “You got a bearing to go with that!?”

Thane did not answer with words. He stepped closer, one hand lifting, fingers splayed as he oriented himself through the storm and the city’s collapsing skeleton.

“There,” he said. “Higher. Crown spire. External platforms.”

Rex swore once and yanked the controls hard. “Strap in, boys and girls."

The Raptor screamed upward into the clouds, banking toward the collapsing summit as Cloud City fell around them.

__________________________________

AMARE

▬ Force Lightning Increase

▬ Force Psychometry Increase

▬ Lightsaber Combat - Form III (Soresu) Increase

THANE

▬ Force Lightning Increase

__________________________________

 

RSS Feed