Star Wars: Slave Of Darkness

Olia leaned against a wall, gulping in as much air as her lungs would allow. Sweat poured off her as a mind-numbing ache spread through her muscles.

She had managed to buy herself a few moments to retreat and catch her breath by using the Force to throw the other acolyte through a column. The fallen Jedi knew she had heard more bones break, but she also knew it wouldn't stop him.

He kept coming, no matter what she threw at him. Broken bones, burns, and lacerations were ignored. It was made all the worse by that damnable laugh.

Oh, the other acolyte was certainly severely injured and it was only a matter of time before he succumbed. Not even the Force could keep him going indefinitely. 

However, the same could be said of her. Given her current condition, she wasn't willing to bet that she would win a battle of attrition.

She had neutralized Aldrex's poison, but that had only prevented it from causing more damage, not heal what damage had already been done. That she had managed that much was, admittedly, more of a result of XoXaan's talent as a teacher than her own natural skill as a healer.

Never in all her years as a Jedi had she encountered such a fast-acting poison as whatever concoction that Huttspawn had acquired. It had only taken less than a minute after application to begin wracking her body with pain and sapping her strength.

This berserker was a challenge, yes, but one that she should have been able to overcome with only a modicum of effort. That she was struggling spoke volumes of the poison's potency.

Not for the first time and certainly not the last, Olia cursed the day Aldrex was born.

With each breath, lances of agony stabbed into her chest as her lungs spasmed. With each movement, her limbs burned. Yet her hands somehow still managed to clutch her lightsaber in a death-grip.

She tried to dump as much of the pain into the Force as she could, but it wasn't enough.

It was never enough.

Olia pushed the traitorous intrusive thought away. She needed no distractions.

She wouldn't die. Not here and not now.

Her tired mind sluggishly tried to come up with some clever way to win. Tactic after tactic flashed through her mind's eye, each discarded because of her present weakness.

At last, she came to the first viable plan. Her lip curled up in distaste though.

Just as she made to discard it, the sound of laughter reached her ears.

"Damn it." She cursed quietly.

No more time.

...

Everything hurt. Even the things Caleb hadn't known could hurt.

His right leg was making a funny crunching sound as he walked, his breathing was coming in weird-sounding weezes, and, judging from the pain in his abdomen, he was pretty sure that at least two organs had ruptured.

And he was loving it.

Absolute bliss sang through him more potent than any Spice high he had ever experienced.

It had been a long time since anyone managed to kriff him up this badly. Years, at least. Not since before he was drafted into the academy and before he could touch the Force.

With the Force, it was definitely a different experience than last time.

As he pushed himself forward on his broken leg, sputtering laughter escaped his lips right before a glob of blood splattered on the floor.

Oh yeah. He definitely had a ruptured organ. He just hoped it wasn't one of the flash-cloned ones. Those were a pain to replace and the doctors complained when it happened. At this point, he was almost on first name basis with the the medical ward personnel.

Ah well. Free food and bed that wasn't full of sand was a step up from his room.

Not to mention, there was a new nurse he had his eye on recently…

Caleb paused and shook his head.

Finish the fight first, then think about bedding the pretty nurse.

He mentally added a concussion to his list of injuries. He wasn't usually this scatterbrained.

The marauder wasn't the best at sensing on a good day, much less when his head was so fuzzy. Despite that, he could still feel a presence nearby.

"Come on, girl!" He called out, "I thought we were having a grand time! Party's not over yet!"

She'd kept up better than most of his sparring partners, including Aldrex. But Caleb knew she was tiring. However, a tired opponent was much different from a dead one. The Jedi girl would likely still have some trick up her sleeve to watch out for.

As Caleb rounded the corner, he saw her waiting for him. Blue and red light met in between them.

Yellow eyes glared at him as their owner gasped for breath. But she didn't say a word.

He'd been a little disappointed at the lack of banter, but it seemed that she was one of those fighters that preferred to fight rather than talk. Caleb himself was more of a talker, but he had put that to the side for the moment.

The Jedi wordlessly raised her lightsaber in a guard position. Still had a bit of fight left in her, then.

Caleb's grin widened. Good.

With a laugh, he threw himself across the gap between them, his lightsaber screaming towards her right shoulder. Her blade intercepted his, but she had learned quickly not to block.

The momentum of his lightsaber was deflected up and over her head with a deft parry in an attempt to knock him off balance. He'd seen that simple technique used enough times that it shouldn't have worked.

Unfortunately, his leg let out a sickening series of crunches as he put his full weight on it and momentarily buckled, forcing him down onto one knee.

But Caleb was long used to such injuries and he knew it would only temporarily hinder him, so he merely pretended to be more crippled than he actually was.

The Jedi girl brought down her lightsaber in a two-handed power blow in an attempt to take advantage of his lower position. However, his arms were working just fine and he was able to block her strike easily with only one arm holding his own saber.

His other hand darted down to his right boot for a split-second. There was a flash of silver and a cry of pain.

Olia suddenly toppled to the ground as Caleb's boot knife slashed across the hamstring of her left leg. As she fell, he dropped his saber and grabbed her other leg, pulling her closer to better enable him to clamber atop her.

His good leg pinned her right arm, the one holding her lightsaber, at the wrist, while his right leg and bulk pinned her waist to the ground. In such close-quarters, a longer weapon was more of a hinderance than a boon.

It was why he liked smaller, more…personal weapons. Made things more fun.

The girl wasn't dumb. She knew what was coming and she tried to defend herself with her free arm. Caleb harshly smacked it away, punched her in the face with his left hand, and wrapped the same hand around her throat. Her breathing turned to wheezing as he tightened his grip.

The knife, still coated in blood, rose and stabbed down, embedding itself in her stomach. Her eyes widened as what air was left in her lungs was forced out. It was pulled out and jabbed down again in a spot nearby.

Eight more times it rose and fell rapidly, leaving the Jedi girl's abdomen and chest to become a bloody mess. Or it would, if she hadn't been wearing all black.

It wasn't his most precise work ever, but it'd kill her all the same. Eventually. Stomach wounds were slow, but he was sure he at least got a lung.

But the girl had strength in her still.

A great weight slammed into his chest like a wrecking ball, tearing through his shields and launching him into the ceiling. Several more somethings crunched as gravity reasserted itself and he hit the ground.

That…hurt.

A chuckle escaped his bloodied lips as he pushed himself up, forcing his leg to support his weight with a liberal amount of Force enhancement to keep himself standing.

Olia had managed to roll herself onto her belly and was trying to drag herself away with her arms and her one good leg. A trail of red was smeared on the ground behind her.

She wasn't moving very fast.

The smile started to drop from his face incrementally as he slowly walked towards her. It seemed that Force push was the last bit of fun he'd be getting from this fight. The girl just seemed to be focusing on getting away now.

One large hand grabbed a handful of matted black hair and pulled back, eliciting a cry of pain. It was quickly silenced with another jab of the knife, this time into the base of her head, where the spinal column met the skull.

The Jedi fell limp almost instantly.

Pulling the knife back out, Caleb waited a moment to make sure. When she failed to move after a minute, he started humming a nameless tune as he cleaned his knife off on her robes and replaced it in his boot sheath.

Retrieving his borrowed lightsaber, he glanced at the Jedi's weapon as well. With a shrug, he picked that one up too.

Glancing one way, then the other, he muttered to himself, "Now…how do I find Aldrex without setting off any of his damned traps?"

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The first book of this fanfic has been completed on Patreon, you can look it up in the collection alongside the second book. You can visit Patreon if you want to read in Advance.

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