“Come on,” Ahsoka Tano urged the seated Iktochi. “Now.”
“I- what?” the man looked up, blinking. “I can’t-”
“You’re not who I thought I was coming here for but I’m not just going to leave an innocent to die if I can help it,” she cut him off. “We don’t have a lot of time, so get up.”
“I-I can’t, master Jedi,” he answered. “The Lady Inquisitor… she promised I’d be let go after this… I have a business, a life to return to…”
“Are you an idiot?” the Togruta scowled. “Do to you really believe that you’ll be allowed to leave? After being used to lure in someone like me? At best, she’ll keep you stuck in an out of the way prison somewhere to be pulled out to repeat this scam. But I think she’ll just kill you when this is over. Can’t have you blabbing about this little trick. Oh, and I’m not a Jedi.”
“K-Kill me?” the man’s horned face was pale.
“Yes. It’s how the Empire operates when it feels like keeping secrets,” Ahsoka cast a quick glance over her shoulder, but the hall was still clear. “Look, we don’t have a lot of time before someone comes along, so come with me if you want to live. Or you can sit here and leave yourself to the mercies of one of Vader’s dogs. Your choice.”
“I…” he looked down at his hands.
Ahsoka sighed, then turned to leave.
“I’ll go.”
“Good,” she didn’t look back. “Get up and follow me. And try to stay quiet.”
“Too late for that.”
Luna couldn’t help but feel a little smug when both the Togruta and Iktotchi jumped a little, the latter looking around wildly while the former’s eyes jumped immediately to the nearest speaker mounted in the hallway. Her hands went to the twin lightsabers on her belt.
“Did you really think I was not aware of your coming, Jedi?” the princess said into her helmet’s commlink. “I knew you were here from the moment you first set foot inside this prison.”
The Togruta seemed to be ignoring her little lie, gesturing for the prisoner to follow her. Shivering, the man got to his feet, and the Jedi raced down the hallway almost at once. She was fast, but constrained by the need not to get too far out ahead of the man she bizarrely hoped to rescue. Luna switched channels on her helmet commlink while continuing to watch the cameras’ feed through her helmet lenses.
“Lock down the hallway,” she ordered. “Initiate toxin dispersal.”
“At once, my lady,” came the reply.
On the feed in front of her, Luna watched with a slight sense of pride as the blast doors at either end of the prison’s hallway sealed themselves shut. Yes, you cut through them with a lightsaber, but that required time. As the local ventilation sealed itself as well, that was time they simply didn’t have. Pale green mist began to seep out of vents in the floor and ceiling across the length of the hall.
The Togruta female’s eyes widened, and she raced to the nearest blast door without delay. Activating one lightsaber in her right hand, she plunged the bright green blade into the reinforced durasteel. The grey metal turned a molten red around her sword.
“Are you afraid to fight me yourself, you cringing coward?!” she barked, using one hand to yank Shike closer with the Force.
Luna switched her commlink’s channel back. “Foolish risks are just that, foolish,” she said through the speakers in the walls. “I learned long ago that honor is of no use to the dead.”
The Jedi’s lightsaber was carving through the blast door, but the thick and heavy metal did not make for easy cutting. The circle she was obviously intending to make was only around a third complete, and the fog was creeping close to her dark boots. She turned, left hand extended, and unleashed a Force wave that pushed the gas cloud back a ways.
“Besides, you ought to be thanking me,” the alicorn continued. “Choking to death on your own blood is considerably more merciful than the alternatives.”
“Gee, thanks,” she murmured.
Still guiding her lightsaber in a broad circle with her right hand, the Jedi closed her eyes and reached out with her left. With two fingers outstretched, she began to twirl the whole arm. Slowly at first, but with increasing speed as the gasses drew near once again. For a moment Luna didn’t quite understand what she was doing, until the pale green mist nearest to her suddenly stopped drifting forwards and instead swirled upwards. Just as swiftly as it came, the gas was sucked into a swirling and static vortex covering the entire breadth of the hallway. She was using the Force to manipulate the air itself into a defense. Clever, Luna had to give her that much.
Moments later her lightsaber’s circle was complete. Gathering her energy, the Togruta unleashed a powerful wave that swept the roiling cloud back halfway down the hall, then turned and without pause blasted the metal circle she’d carved out the opposite side of the blast door. Luna could see the perspiration on her head.
“Come on!” she yelled, tumbling nimbly through the semi-molten opening in the blast door.
Almost the moment that she hit the other side, her green lightsaber was in motion. The Togruta was caught in a t-intersection, a sealed blast door on one side and ten Stormtroopers on the other. The hallway was filled with red blaster bolts as the Imperials opened fire, several glancing off the Jedi’s lightsaber. Quickly she drew a second, smaller one, placing herself between the Iktotchi and the men as he scrambled awkwardly through the opening, sustaining several burns in the process.
Luna observed the girl’s lightsaber technique through the cameras, analyzing the style as best she could. The reverse grip she was using pointed to the Shien variant of Form V, a style primarily focused on turning defense into counterattack. The way her main saber and smaller shoto flew about seemed to confirm this, redirecting several shots into the Stormtroopers positioned near the intersection. Her application wasn’t perfect though – a red bolt slipped past her blade and caught her compatriot in the right horn. He cried out, toppling over backwards.
The Togruta reacted immediately, thrusting out both hands in yet another display of raw Force power. The Imperials that were still standing were bowled over by the wave, and she didn’t waste any time in closing the distance. A pair of rapid leaps, one after another, set her down in the midst of them. Before the Stormtroopers still scrambling to get back on their feet could do much of anything, she cut them down one after the other in a series of continuous sweeps. It was rather un Jedi-like, the princess noted, she wasn’t even trying to go for disabling hits.
Once the Stomtroopers were down, the Jedi looked around quickly. No other enemies immediately presented themselves, so she shut down her blades and ran swiftly towards her stricken companion. The Iktotchi was struggling to sit up, clutching the right side of his head. A substantial chunk of his horn’s tip was missing, and his cheek was burnt. It was clearly more pain than the middle-aged casino proprietor had experienced in a long time, if ever.
“Are you alright?” the Togruta asked, getting down on one knee. “How bad is it?”
“I’ll… live,” he managed through gritted teeth.
“Not for very much longer if we stay here,” she said offering him a shoulder. “Come on.”
The man took it with one arm, and together they rose. The two of them set off down the hallway the Jedi had just cleared, albeit at a much-reduced pace.
“Your concern is truly an inspiration to us all,” Luna said drily through the wall speakers. “But ultimately quite pointless. Surely you realize that neither of you are ever going to get out of this place alive?”
“Come out and fight me you spineless worm!” the Jedi called out. “I thought Inquisitors were supposed to be warriors!”
“Let me think about that,” the princess answered. “No.”
The blast door in front of the duo sealed itself shut.
“There are thousands of Imperial troops in this district, and I am perfectly willing to crush you to death with the weight of their corpses if that is what will be required. But I doubt it will come to that. You will exhaust your reserves long before I do.”
“You coward!”
“I would not waste my breath were I you,” she continued. “For you will soon have need of it. No one has ceased the toxin’s dispersal.”
“That cowardly schutta!” Ahsoka thought as she plunged her lightsaber into a blast door for the second time that night.
This wasn’t going well. This mysterious Inquisitor could have, and no doubt had, mobilized hundreds of troops and ratcheted the prison’s defenses to high alert. The Jedi she had come to help didn’t exist, and the man she was helping had no skills in combat. She was being forced to exert yet more energy to maintain another swirling barrier of air between them and the ever-growing pale green cloud. Her Iktotchi cohort was leaning against a wall, struggling to bring his breathing under control.
When this circle was complete, Ahsoka paused a moment to catch her breath and wipe a bit of sweat from her brow. The next moment, she stretched out her hand, and blasted the carving she’d made out with maximum force. Before anyone had a chance to fill the hole with blasterfire, she leapt through it. Landing nimbly on her feet, she looked up and saw another group of Stormtroopers a good twenty five yards down the hallway, just as expected. Now she just-
Acting on sudden instinct, the former Jedi threw herself hard to the tight, just in time to avoid a hissing red blade that seemed to spring out of nowhere. Instead of removing her head from her shoulders it nicked the side of her left montral, though that was painful enough.
She slammed roughly into the wall, but recovered almost immediately. Her two lightsabers formed a cross guard, catching a follow-up swing of the red blade. The three swords crackled against one another, but Ahsoka sensed that there wasn’t a lot of pressure behind the floating sword’s blow. Rallying despite the pain and her mounting fatigue, she pushed back and sent it hurdling into the opposite wall.
Abruptly, the Force about her seemed to change as her opponent abandoned her efforts at concealment. Ahsoka could sense the Inquisitor’s darkness as she rounded a corner not far behind the Stormtroopers. The lightsaber that had nearly taken her head suddenly deactivated, then shot back towards its owner like a bullet. The troopers themselves had their blasters leveled but did not fire.
Ahsoka took a moment to get a good look at the other woman. She was a quadruped of a species the Togruta had never encountered or even heard of before, with visible wings, hair, and a tail poking out from under her armor. Her visible parts, like her armor, were varying shades of dark blue. A skull-faced mechanical mask stared her down.
“I thought you said you weren’t coming out to play,” Ahsoka breathed, conscious of the Iktotchi clambering through the blast door behind her.
“It seems that I lied,” the Inquisitor answered, striding confidently through her Stormtroopers. “Lord Vader will be more impressed when I bring him your head this way.” The white-armored men parted to let her through. “You were a fool to come here tonight, Jedi.”
“I wasn’t there the last time someone needed me,” Ahsoka retorted. “I won’t make that mistake again. And I’m no Jedi.”
That earned a chuckle, sounding mechanical and soulless through the helmet.
“If you say so, little girl.” She flared her wings, and four lightsaber hilts of varying design hovered about her head. They blazed to life, three red and one, to Ahsoka’s grief, green. “You will not be the first of your feeble kind that I have ended.”
“That’s funny,” the former Jedi answered, “I was just thinking the same thing.”
Then the clash began.
When Ahsoka moved, it wasn’t so much as a person as a blur. The Force guided her steps, crossing the distance to the Inquisitor in the blink of an eye. The Togruta leapt into the air and came down with the force of an avalanche, lightsaber poised to split her foe’s face in two. But a pair of red lightsabers rose up to form an X in front, catching the blow though they quivered under the strain. The green lightsaber came swiping from her right-hand side, the third red blade came stabbing upwards at her chest.
The Togruta batted away the stab with a sideswipe from her shoto, broke the blade lock, and then ducked beneath the green blade. She tumbled gracefully, coming up on her foe’s left flank and stabbing experimentally at it with her shoto. A spinning red blade appeared to knock it aside. Before the Inquisitor could bring any more to bear Ahsoka flipped easily over her back, landing perfectly and immediately swiping at her opposite side. With most of her lightsabers caught out of position, she had to give ground, backing up several steps. But before she could refocus on an attack Ahsoka had already moved again, this time leaping back to the quadruped’s front.
She had her foe’s measure now, or at least thought she did. The Inquisitor’s quadrupedal nature hurt her as much as it helped. While it offered greater stability, it denied the use of most forms of acrobatics. While lacking arms did allow her to pull off unusual angles of attack, she suspected it was also the reason that every blow her enemy tried to land felt weaker than those of more conventional opponents. Unable to rely on her body, she was having to juggle four lightsabers purely with her mind. Her primary tactic must be to confuse and overwhelm opponents with unusual and unorthodox swordplay, rather like Grievous once had. But she couldn’t do that if Ahsoka denied her the ability to focus all her blades at once.
The nimble Togruta flipped back and forth across the prison hallway in the acrobatic sequences of Form IV Ataru. Ahsoka was everywhere and nowhere at once, constantly adjusting her position to appear at one of the Inquisitor’s flanks, or behind her, or in front of her while her head was turned. She rained down a series of light jabs, slashes, and thrusts, one after another. Her sheer speed meant that her foe couldn’t whip all of her lightsabers around to try and overwhelm her, her constant probing attacks and feints meant that she had no choice but to split the four up for maximum defensive coverage.
Seizing an opportunity when it presented itself, Ahsoka leapt over a swing at her legs and delivered a roundhouse kick to the side of the Inquisitor’s face. Enhanced by the sustaining powers of the Force, her gymnast’s leg muscles delivered enough impact to crack the armored helmet she wore. With a cry, she staggered back, though her quadrupedal nature kept her from falling over. Ahsoka rushed in to press the advantage, but suddenly had to throw her arms in front of her face to defend against a surge of power from the foe. The energy wave washed over her but was intense enough to force the ex-Jedi to take several steps backwards to avoid falling over.
“Blast her!” the Inquisitor barked.
The Stormtroopers behind her, until then inactive spectators, immediately obeyed. Red blaster bolts flew at the Togruta, and her green sabers rushed up to meet them. The Force guided her blades, and she quickly sent one back into the helmet of a trooper. But the remainder continued to fire, not doing enough to injure Ahsoka but holding her back long enough for the Inquisitor to catch her breath.
Without warning, the quadruped exploded back into action. She surged forward with a wrath-filled cry, four blades whirling in a dizzying array of lightning-fast sequences. All four came at different heights and were spread throughout the hallway, widely enough to deny Ahsoka a space to slip past them. None of the blows were committed power attacks, but they were as constant and unrelenting as a thunderstorm. The blades constantly altered their positions and angles of attack, and there was never a moment where at least two of them weren’t swinging. Spread so widely across a comparatively narrow space, there was no way to jump around them. And the Inquisitor was standing far enough back from the hurricane she created that none of Ahsoka’s limbs or swords had any hope of reaching her from there. Forced onto the defensive, she had no choice but to give ground. She could sweat trickling down her body, her muscles now beginning to ache.
“I told you,” the Inquisitor hissed, “that you were a fool to come here.”
“And you were a fool,” Ahsoka thrust out a hand, twin fingers raised, “to face me!”
The Force push staggered the Inquisitor and broke up her lightsaber sequences. The Togruta wasted no time in surging forwards, both sabers swinging down for a double-handed power blow. All four of her blades raced to meet it, and then all six were locked in one brilliant contest of strength that blazed like a newborn star. Through that blaze a grim, determined face stared at a soulless mechanical mask.
“This…” whispered the Inquisitor, barely audible above the crackle, “is personal for you, is it not? You lost someone to the Empire… someone you cared for deeply.”
Ahsoka’s only response was to bare her teeth, displaying her species’ prominent canines, and push down harder.
“I can sense your pain… your anger… you want revenge. Who was it then, little girl? A friend? A partner? A… master?”
That word felt like salt rubbed in an open wound. With a primal cry she lashed out with the Force, blowing past the other’s defenses and sending the quadruped hurdling down the hallway. She hit the ground rolling, continuing a little ways until she bumped into one of her own Stormtroopers. They trained their guns on Ahsoka once more, but did not fire.
“Touched a nerve, did I?” the Inquisitor chuckled slight as she regained her feet.
“Master Anakin was a good man,” Ahsoka pointed one of her lightsabers. “And your kind killed him!”
“Anakin?” there was an emotion the Togruta couldn’t quite comprehend through the filter, not that she was trying.
“You or that monster Vader,” the ex-Jedi went on. “I know my master, he wouldn’t have run and hide when the Empire sacked the Temple.”
“Heh heh heh…” there was a quiet, mechanical chuckling. The mask looked down at the floor. “Hah hah hah hah hah…”
“Are you mocking me?” Ahsoka’s expression tightened, as did her grip on her weapons.
“You fool,” the Inquisitor looked back up, her lenses boring into Ahsoka’s eyes. “Anakin Skywalker is Darth Vader.”