Star Wars: Slave Of Darkness

Hologram projectors came standard on probe droids. Demolition charges were easy to acquire. Smoke grenades and sonic screamers were part of the standard trooper load out.

And the best part? None of them were particularly expensive and were regularly purchased in bulk. Obviously, the poison was more difficult to acquire, but the point remained.

For all their god-like reputation in the galaxy, Jedi and Sith could be killed on the cheap…if you knew what their weaknesses were and how to take advantage of them.

When fighting a Jedi, do everything you can to prevent them from focusing their full attention, and thus their full power, on you.

Attack their allies. Drug them. Blind them. Distract them. Attack from multiple angles.

Anything and everything that can throw them off their game or mentally unbalance them.

Don't use weapons they can simply deflect back at you.

No thrown grenades. No rockets. No blasters.

Of course, those tactics were devised with a non-Force Sensitive or a droid in mind. A Sith has other options.

Instead of preventing them from focusing on you, make yourself into the largest threat. Make them focus on you so hard that they stop paying attention to what is happening around them and ignore subtle changes in their rush to put you down.

And above all…

Make them lose control.

Behind my helmet, I smiled. From the small blips of frustration seeping out from the Quarren's oh-so-carefully built shields, it was already working. The poison was only making it worse.

Sith Poison was a particularly insidious substance, but only really saw its potential to shine when used on Force Sensitives. Normal people would be in a great deal of pain and eventually die, but they wouldn't see the worst of it.

No, for a Force Sensitive, it would alter their brain chemistry and eat away at their rationality, make them more prone to lashing out in anger. High doses would induce an almost berserk state. For a Jedi, this would make it more difficult to connect to the Force.

Or rather, it would make it easier to accidentally draw on the Dark Side and disrupt their serenity.

When Ulic Qel-Droma was captured by the Krath and was injected with a syringe full of the stuff, he was hit with the effects instantly. Though I didn't use nearly as much on Garsh, he was still clearly feeling the effects.

I could hear the Quarren's footsteps hot on my trail behind me as I raced down the corridor towards my next surprise.

My foe was not a slave-turned-Sith or a failed Padawan, but a full-fledged Jedi Knight, possibly Master, in the prime of his life. There would be no talking him down, no call for mercy. He would kill me, given the chance.

In theory, such a foe should be beyond me.

But this was not the first time I had faced such odds. Ever since I came to the academy, I'd been thrown at things that should have killed me.

I wasn't powerful, not directly. All of my enemies to date have been stronger than me. But for each one, I found ways to turn an unfair fight to an even one.

Castor and his zombies should have buried me beneath sheer numbers and left me to be torn to shreds. I found an army of my own to negate that advantage.

Hakagram Graush had me helpless and bound until I inadvertently turned his own power against him at the right moment. Had he kept his focus entirely on me and ignored Darth Scriver for just a moment longer, I would have died.

The Leviathan should have killed me. It would have killed me if I had faced it on foot with only a lightsaber and the Force. Instead, I turned ancient weapons of war, Sith Alchemy, and the sky itself against it to bring down the titan.

This fight would be no different from all the others. I just needed time and patience.

With each step I took and he failed to catch me, the more the poison bled him of caution as it burned through his veins. Every moment sapped away more of his vitality and weakened him. And the faster his heart beat, the faster it spread.

But as with every advantage I had scrapped and scraped together in the past, it was only an equalizer, not a game-breaker. I had to remember that before I got a big head.

As I passed an archway, I threw my hands out to the side and surged power into the floor, walls, and ceiling. I felt more than heard the stone begin to warp and transform as I continued on, only sparing a glance over my shoulder to see the effects.

The air shimmered as the illusion spells shattered and hidden Sith Alchemical arrays activated. The stone around the Jedi warped and shot out in sharp spikes towards him.

Both blades of his saberstaff flashed around him in a green-hued globe, neatly severing each spike before it could come close to touching him.

He hadn't missed a single step while doing so, nor had he slowed down.

Not nearly close enough…but that was fine. I wanted him to chase me, after all. And I still had a few surprises left in store.

Naga Sadow's tomb was not nearly as expansive as that of the other Dark Lords, likely due to the turmoil of the time he lived in, both from the Republic and from the Sith Traditionalist faction that was opposed to his rule in the first place. While that meant there was less of a chance of getting lost, there were also fewer corridors that could be safely trapped and still leave a means of getting back to the surface.

There were only two main tunnels…and I had already blown up one of them. Because of that, the remainder of my preparations had been made in the main tomb chamber.

No droids tried to intercept us as we passed, their cyclopean eyes dimmed. I had already done a sweep through the tomb a day ago, suborning them to my will and using them to empty the tomb of acolytes.

The smartest ones left as soon as they noticed the droids converging on them. The strongest fought their way out. The ones who were neither…simply died.

After their bloody work was done, I placed them on standby. I didn't need them just yet and actively controlling them all at once was too taxing to be practical, even when drawing on the latent power of the tomb. Nevertheless, they were available should I have need of them.

I burst through the yawning maw that opened up into the sarcophagus chamber…or where it would have been had Sadow actually been buried here.

Instead, countless bones littered the floor, all bleached white from centuries in the chill of their underground tombs, with some still having tattered, ancient skin sticking to them. 

Additionally, fourteen black shapes were limply sprawled atop them and the corpse of a freshly slain Tu'kata lay against the wall, a pool of blood still oozing out from under it.

I slowed my pace to a calm walk until I was at the center of it all, where I stopped and turned to face my adversary.

Garsh's footsteps likewise slowed as he reached the entryway before halting completely just inside of the chamber. His posture was rigid as his large opulecent eyes swept the room warily, his chest rising and falling just a little more rapidly than before.

It seemed the poison hadn't completely eaten away at his caution yet. No matter, it was too late anyways.

Raising my hands, I fired a short burst of lightning from each. The Jedi startled and raised his lightsaber in front of him in preparation to catch them.

However, I wasn't aiming at him. Instead, the lightning struck the walls to either side. Strands of Force-imbued webbing, invisible to the naked eye, channeled it through them, causing the entire mass of connected webbing to suddenly contract and block the entrance.

Garsh glanced behind him, likely sensing what had just occurred even if he couldn't see it.

"No more running for either of us, then." He commented tonelessly.

I allowed myself a small, cruel smile beneath my helmet. I was going to enjoy this more than I probably should, "Oh, I wasn't running."

The air stilled as I spoke my next words.

"Vexok savaka."

Wake up, there's work to be done.

The Ancient Sith words, spoken as an order and intoned with power, left a bitter taste on my tongue. But the effect was immediate.

Bones began to clatter and bang against each other as they rose from the ground in tiny, man-sized whirlwinds as they assembled themselves into complete skeletons, glowing red pinpricks of light shining from their empty eye sockets. The black-clad lumps let out haunting groans as they stood, grasping vibroblades in decaying fingers.

And finally, scales and claws scraped against stone as the corpse of the slain Tu'kata heaved itself up off the ground.

Fortunate for me that Iren had not been slightly more specific when he asked what I had found…and never said that my task included returning the scrolls that Castor had stolen from the higher archives so many months ago.

For the first time since I met him, I saw a genuine reaction on the Jedi's face that matched what I could feel leaking out from behind his shields.

"What have you done?" Shock and disgust colored his tone.

I drank it in for a moment before reigniting my lightsaber, "What I had to to survive."

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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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