[AN: Sorry for the lack of a chapter this last Friday. My laptop died on me. Lost a lot of data, but thankfully, none of my writing. I've got something working for now, and we'll see what happens when I get my main laptop back from service. It ruined my week, but we persist, ya know? Nothing else I can really do but keep writing :]
— Atom —
I was falling through the void.
There were stars at my back, a heavenly firmament stretching back to the birth of the whole galaxy. And a whole world splayed out before my eyes. So close below, yet so far above. It took up my entire view, the edges curving away from sight in the distance.
Calling it a 'horizon' would've been an injustice, for it was far from horizontal, and I was far above where both earth and sky met. I saw the sphere of the world in all its humbling size — a third of it cast in the shadow of night, and the rest a splattered and naturally chaotic painting of mottled greens, yellows, and browns.
I was practically a satellite unto myself, mapping out the world from the near-heavens above. Nal Hutta, I noticed, had no true seas. Once, it might've. But after millennia of Hutt terraforming to make the world into the 'jewel' of their species, entire oceans had been reclaimed and made into relatively shallow, stagnant swamps. The former natural order of the world had been replaced by the Hutts' preferred natural order — a planet-wide environment of invasive species, artificially created swamps and quagmires and sumps, and so, so muchmuck — metaphorical and literal.
In the Force, Nal Hutta was a study of Life. Even after millennia, traces of the world's former natural order remained, for life would find a way. They showed as a rippling undercurrent of Light — the way things should've been for the world. But covering, consuming, encompassing it all was a murky Darkness — this 'preferred' natural order forced upon the world.
The Darkness wasn't evil. It wasn't unnatural. Just… not native. It dominated Nal Hutta, not out of malice, but out of simple, adaptive, and invasive success and survival. Like with its sentients, the invaders ruled Nal Hutta's natural order now. They out-competed the natives, drove many and much to extinction, but in the end, life was life. The Force didn't damn the introduced order any more than it blessed the native one. It all simply… was, every spark of existence doing what it needed to survive and thrive.
Of course, that 'study' fell apart when it came to the sentient population of the world. Those who could think and feel and do more than simply survive. There, the Darkness was malicious.
Once, Nal Hutta had been 'Evocar', home of the Evocii. Now, Evocar had been erased — in name, in memory, in reality. Only Nal Hutta remained. Only Nal Hutta was even remembered.
The Hutts had been purposeful, thorough, and cruel in claiming a new homeworld for themselves. They completely evicted the native sentient species and took the world as clay to be molded in their slimy hands. They imposed the natural order that served them best, crafting an artificial jewel with the technological power of gods. They rewrote reality to make Nal Hutta the swampy Hutt paradise it was today. The feat was as impressive as it was loathsome, as great as it was terrible.
This… This was Hutt society. This was Hutt arrogance and callous ambition. This was Hutt 'supremacy'. A 'jeweled' testament to just how far the Hutts would go for their self-centered whims and all they would crush to get there.
And today, it would fall for good, just as the whole of Hutt society eventually would. It would be lost to the Hutts, just as their first homeworld had been. It would be taken, conquered, stolen away from them, just as they'd taken and conquered and stolen from every non-Hutt for the whole of their history.
And so, to that end, I was falling through the void.
It was good, I'd freely admit, to be getting out there again. I needed the action, the return to getting shit done. Not to say the last week and a half had been boring. Just… trying, what with the constantly ongoing consolidation of our grip on Free Nar Shaddaa, the diplomatic mission from the Republic, opening their eyes and the talks that came after, meeting the Chosen One, not-so-seriously romancing Padme, and, of course, the monumental steps forward that were recognized sovereignty for Free Nar Shaddaa and the shining Signing of Mighty Leia's Laws.
The last two were events with implications still unfolding. Even now, the creation, cementation, and circulation of Mighty Leia's Laws rang through the Force. They set the whole moon firmly into a new realm of Hope.
They were a goal, a purpose, a shared declaration, a collective culmination of the Freedom we'd won and the intent to see it spread further beyond, a shining shout of legitimacy from and to the stars; they were Free Nar Shaddaa.
Being recognized as sovereign and signing those unprecedented, one-of-a-kind, nigh-divine Mighty Leia's Laws into existence was a milestone, to be sure. The kind that shook up all the galaxy thought it knew. But it was only the first step of Free Nar Shaddaa's new, hard-fought, and self-forged path. There was plenty of work to be done from here.
'Cause that peace Padme tried to preach? I did want that. Maybe not for myself; I'd go spare and psycho in boredom. But for the little people we were fighting for? For Free Nar Shaddaa and for all of Mighty Leia's siblings, there and beyond? They deserved that peace. They'd get that peace. And I didn't care how many Hutts and masters I had to flatline to give it to them.
That conviction, of course, wouldn't be realized on its own. Everyone who believed in it would need to work for it. Even — especially — me. We'd 'won'. I'd 'won'. But I couldn't — wouldn't — rest on my laurels.
It wasn't like me, anyway, not the type of leader to get complacent like some gonk. Nah, I was The Gonk, reclaiming the word to mean something special. The Gonks were leading Free Nar Shaddaa into a new era, and I was determined to keep doing my part and more — everything I could to see our collective conviction, our shared Hope, realized.
Busy as I'd been lately, it wasn't the sort of business I was used to. It'd been coordination and organization, legitimate diplomacy, and looking toward the future, not preem violence, Spiting all challengers, and living or dying in the moment. It'd been necessary work, and not unfulfilling, but also not the kind of work that suited me best.
The last two to three weeks had been the longest I'd gone without zeroing a slug since I started the Gonk movement. That couldn't fly for too long unchecked. I couldn't have myself, my iron, and my steel getting rusty, not with so much still ahead of us. Now, it was about fraggin' time that Nal Hutta fell.
My plan for taking the Hutt homeworld and eradicating the last Hutt presence in the system wasn't simple. Not when I was the only one who could conceivably pull it off. But it was straightforward enough.
It brought me here, clad in steel and falling from orbit. Nal Hutta's planetary shield was still up — shaky but holding. It wouldn't fall anytime soon with the void iron we had on hand. Worldwide shields like this were meant to take unimaginable punishment, enough so that even professional and superior navies would rather set in for a siege than try to breach one outright. For our Gonk Fleet — numerous but mostly relying on starfighters, bombers, and other small craft — that feat was even more out of the question.
A methodical siege was equally out of the question, though. That was much too long to be leaving a dagger like Nal Hutta in Free Nar Shaddaa's back. And I hadn't forgotten about the twisted, monstrous 'Huttest Hutt' who was almost certainly gathering and solidifying strength on the world.
So I found another way to get past the last lingering protection that Nal Hutta could still claim. Planetary shields were vastly upscaled deflector shields, and thus, shared the same issue of struggling to stop slow-moving objects from slipping through.
Of course, that usually wasn't much of a weakness on starships, when even enemy fighter craft would be moving at relativistic sublight speeds, or on planets, when anything slow enough to get through would inevitably fall to the planet's gravity well. But the fact remained that deflector shields could be bypassed if someone was skilled, daring, or simply determined enough.
I just so happened to be all three of those things. So I gladly took on the suicidal mission of willingly falling through the shield from orbit. Not just falling, but cold-inserting, too. My Mek would have to be turned off at the last moment, turning into barely more than a steel coffin.
'Cause even if something managed to slip through a deflector shield, it was still a fuck-off big high-energy shield. And all of that radiated energy tended to absolutely fry any electronics passing through its threshold. Even going in cold as can be, my Mek would come out worse off, unlikely to power up before reentry claimed me.
But that was why I was the only one who could conceivably pull off this plan. I was ready for the damage of falling through the planetary shield. And while our other steel pilots wouldn't be able to do emergency repairs while falling from orbit, I had the Force. I had Mechu Deru. I'd get Big Red back up and running in time to catch my fall.
Before I explained the moving parts, my plan had been met with amusing reactions from the crew.
"Great, our Head Gonk is suicidal," Lucy had rolled her eyes.
"Not the right kind of 'blaze of glory' we should want to go out in, Choom-Daddy," Becca laughed.
Sasha had smiled eerily, "Atom… I trust you, I do… Just. Don't. Die. Neh?"
"You… can do this, right, big choom?" David had asked. "If you need any cover or distraction, just ask. My gonks will fly for you."
"Are the Meks rated for reentry?" V had been more curious than judgmental. "Honestly, I wouldn't put it past Womp-Rat-Works."
"BETTER NOT TAKE ALL THE GOOD MURDER ON THE GROUND BEFORE REINFORCEMENTS CAN DROP ON YOUR ASS, MEAT-CLONE. BEEN TOO FRAGGIN' LONG SINCE I HAD A GOOD ORBITAL DROP AND PLANETARY INVASION. I AIN'T MISSING OUT ON THIS ONE, COPY?" Smasher had rumbled.
"And we'll be dropping after you?" Podry had blanched slightly at the idea. "As eager as I am to join the fight, I don't think I have any training in surviving reentry."
"Is it strange that I absolutely believe he could pull it off?" Aayla had wondered aloud.
"We're becoming rather inured to the impossible here," Quinlan had agreed with his former Padawan.
"Ah, I see," Fay, used to thinking with the Force, had gotten my plan immediately. "That will certainly be impressive. I almost wish I could ride along with you to experience such a rare working of the Force."
Still, I wasn't dissuaded from my plan. Getting someone on the ground was the most straightforward way to disable the planetary shield so everyone else could join the fight. A cold-insert turned hot drop, and then straight into the action to establish a foothold on the surface and turn off the shield generators.
Again, not simple. But other than the nitty gritty detes, there were only a few actual steps to focus on, and they were as clear-cut as it got: survive the fall, take and destroy, and call in the orbital cavalry.
I didn't expect myself to fuck it up, and as the only one who could, I was falling through the void.
It was a pretty scene, up here in near-orbit, but what it preceded would be even prettier. I was real fraggin' ready to squash the last slug in the system. Goren, that 'Huttest Hutt', had long overstayed his welcome, and what he represented was just as bad as what he'd become.
I'd been cast into a stable near-orbit by one of our modified Mek-transport freighters. Any orbit was just falling fast enough and at just the right angle to consistently 'miss' the gravitational body below, and so with some maneuvering, I'd 'burned' to cancel that orbital velocity. Luckily, this close to Nal Hutta, the repulsorlifts on my Mek had a gravity well to push against. For now, I was falling through the void under my own power, no external boosters necessary.
It was a tricky needle to thread. I wanted to fall, but I couldn't do so fast enough to trigger the shield. Definitely didn't want to find out what it felt like to be 'deflected'. That meant my orbital decay was gradual, and that I had to cut the Mek's power fully at just the right moment… so the whole process of falling from orbit was a long and tense one. Plenty of time to enjoy the view of the world I was about to fall upon like a spiteful steel angel.
Occasionally, I was treated to fleeting glimpses of the planetary shield I was aiming for. Only when the light from Nal Hutta's star struck it just right. It was a shimmering, shifting thing — an aurora of 'lightly' ionized and excited energy in colors that barely seemed real, naturally occurring neon and pastel greens, blues, reds, and pinks.
I came upon the shield's threshold slowly, just barely failing to hover against the pull of gravity. At the last moment, I cut my Mek's power to mitigate the damage as best I could. The tightly and protectively wrangled high-energy field was almost solid, and I fell through it like molasses. As I did, my skin tingled like a billion sparks were dancing across it. My flesh and insides began to heat.
"Wonderful," I grumbled. "Super cancer. Just fucking wonderful."
Thankfully, the heat was immediately counteracted by the gold in my veins. My 'ganic nanomachines activated, and I could feel them working to keep the 'super cancer' at bay. I still added a healthy touch of more active Force Healing, just to be sure I wouldn't die a slow, painful, hyper-radiated death.
Even with my steel running cold, I could sense the absolute havoc the shield's obscene energy had wrecked on its systems. But I was past the barrier, with just a bit of fixable super cancer and radiation-fried steel. So as soon as I was, I set to work with a Forceful command of Mechu Deru.
"Repair."
The Mek did, but it was slower than I knew it could be. Rolling my eyes, I put some gravitas into the Forceful command on my second attempt.
"Glorious partnered machine, REFORGE YOURSELF!"
That seemed to do the trick, the Force giggling up a storm and Big Red snapping to attention like it had a life of its own. So deeply connected to me through Mechu Deru, it fuckin' might've… I certainly wasn't fully directing the repair process. Big Red seemed to know its proper working state and was reforging itself in that image.
And then, I was no longer falling through the void. I was falling through atmo, the air itself eager to contest my entry. Shit got hot, real quick. But Big Red held itself together, and much of the thermal energy was dissipated by its shield. Still, I was an undeniable falling star, fiery and furious, likely seen from the ground. I didn't much care about announcing my presence like that. Knowing I was coming wouldn't save Nal Hutta or Goren, the Huttest Hutt.
Big Red's repulsorlifts caught my fall and turned it into proper flight. My angle of reentry leveled out. I focused on the world below, looking for the working remnants of the planetary shield generators. David had said he'd given 'em a good bombardment, but they were obviously still up and running, if shakily.
Long-range sensors zeroed in on the unsubtle generators projecting their shield, and I started to angle that way. Immediately, I knew we were in for a fight. Within the envelope of the planetary shield, the Force of Nal Hutta was clearer. A veritable smack in the face. There was still the murky natural Force order I'd sensed from near-orbit, but now, I realized something was wrong, as well. Wrong. Twisted. Rotting more and more by the moment.
A Force parasite had taken up residence on Nal Hutta. The feeling was familiar, the same as all my previous encounters with kyber-spice and its wrongness. But this… this was worse than any other encounter I'd had.
Goren had wormed his way into Nal Hutta's Force, entrenched himself more deeply than anywhere else I'd seen. He carried an inherent rot with him, and it was spreading to take over the whole world. If his influence wasn't purged and excised soon, I had a terrible premonition… Something utterly damned, in the demonic or biblical sense, would be born here.
The local Force had been made teeming; millions or billions of infesting insectoid souls who never lived for the kyber-spice's creation were twisted into an unnatural unborn life here. All the writhing Force weight Goren bore, all the infested, bloated, rotted, hungry ethereal mass, had been introduced into the murky local balance. And the natural order of Nal Hutta, invasive or natively lingering, never stood a chance.
Goren had taken his kyber-spice addiction so far that it surpassed comprehension. The sheer horror in the air, in the Force, was almost impossible to put into words.
"… The flamer was absolutely the right choice here," I muttered. "The only solution now is a whole lot of holy, purging fire."
I could sense the largest concentration of Goren's corruption as a chewed-through black hole in the Force. Even now, it was growing. Consuming. Every bit of Force it touched was food for the countless unborn maws given new life by Goren's kyber-spice bloat. Nal Hutta's natural order was flooded, not by invasive, outcompeting predators, but by unstoppable, insatiable parasites that wormed and ate their way through souls like they were physical flesh.
Not bothering to land and make myself vulnerable, I descended upon the shield generators at speed. Launcher tubes opened up on Big Red's shoulders. Pink, proton-torpedo hellfire rained down across the valley the generators stood in. Six in total, each of the generator installations got two torpedoes for good measure.
The high-energy warheads lit up the Nal Hutta evening. Pink bursts blinded Big Red's sensors as they detonated. A terrible proton flare, light and energy that flashed brighter than the sun. A deafening, world-shattering noise that was somehow worse, the kind of all-consuming sound that no sentient was naturally meant ot hear. Brief spikes of pure heat, felt from afar and still hot enough to spark sweat in my steel. Even flying high above, the air itself shook as a dozen shockwaves came in controlled, particle-projecting pairs of nuclear fury.
On the ground, the generators were ripped asunder. Towering, humming, satellite-dish-capped monuments to protective technology fell to a dozen destructive mini-monuments of the opposite sort. Tech vs. Tech, the nuclear option easily won out.
Above, the aurora of the planetary shield — much more consistently visible from below — scattered into the void. A beautiful view, a protective view, a wonder of harnessed physics, destroyed for a mortal cause. It was necessary, but no less tragic or humbling for that necessity.
Similarly necessary, similarly tragic and humbling, I'd prepared myself for the deaths in the Force that would come from destroying the shield installations. They were the little people of Nal Hutta, the workers and gears in the callous Hutt machine, already abandoned by most of their sluggin' masters. Some were undoubtedly guilty of enough to warrant a death sentence, just as most were undoubtedly innocent. Yet I hadn't — couldn't have — stayed my hand.
Eerily, though, the deaths I expected to sense… never came. There was no passing of souls into the Force, no peace to be found, even with the proton-scattering, nuclear annihilation. Just… a brief — oh-so-brief — quieting of the teeming local Force.
As the shield overhead disappeared, I sent a tightbeam comm message to the rest of our forces, "Path is clear. Drop and get your asses down here. I'm getting… just rancid vibes, right now. Bring fire. All of the fire."
I heard Becca squeal over the comms at that order, "Oh, Choom-Daddy! You know just how to speak my language~…"
"I CAN GET BEHIND SOME BURNIN'," Smasher chuckled.
"We need fire?" V asked.
"Need," I confirmed, stressing the word. "Don't come down here if you don't have a flamer of some kind, even a holdout."
"Right, you're boots on the ground. We'll heed your advice," V said. "Give us 15 to get re-outfitted. You gonna be safe and solid for that long?"
"Solid?" I asked rhetorically. "Yeah, always. Safe? Don't hold your breath."
"DON'T GO JUMPING THE MURDER QUEUE ANY MORE THAN YOU ALREADY HAVE, MEAT-CLONE," Smasher growled.
"I don't see you down here to stop me," I shot back. "So chop-fucking-chop, old man."
Sasha's voice came over the comms, worryingly calm and almost sweet as she asked, "15 minutes, Atom. You can't wait 15 minutes?"
I sighed, "Honestly? It's not feeling like it. Something's building. Like the whole world is being actively decomposed alive. If I wait any longer, I'm not sure that 'alive' part will still apply when you get down here."
"I sense it, too," Fay told me. "Hold strong, Atom, and do what you need to do. Aid is on the way. You may have started this — back then and now — but we'll finish it together. The Force is with us, with you."
"Got a bad feeling we'll need it to be," I said seriously. "Hurry up and get down here. I'm gonna go on ahead by myself. See if I can get some actionable intel. Wherever I end up, drop on my position and let's finish the fight."
Signing off the comms, I focused my attention on the largest concentration of Goren's corruption that I could sense in the Force. A twitch and thought sent Big Red flying in that direction. The air began to thicken, not physically, but in that gnawing, writhing, teeming way that was infesting the whole world. That feeling… That's what was building, a creeping intensity that threatened to consume all.
The site Goren had chosen to hole up in was as impossible to miss as the black hole in the Force radiating from his singularity-soul. That kilometer-long Warbarge of his had crashed nose-down into one of Nal Hutta's countless swamps. Even then, half of it was submerged, less a swamp and more a stagnant sea. And the half above water, Goren had turned into a corrupted palace of rot, decomposition, and infestation.
Ghostly shapes writhed and wormed their way through desicated armor plating. What remained of the hull wasn't just scorched black, but black with mold, too. Mold that seemed to superimpose its growth onto the Force itself.
Metal rotted and rusted much quicker than it should've. Gaping holes in the hull seemed to breathe labored, tortured breaths. And for a mile in every direction around the crashed-ship-turned-corrupted-palace, every sign of life had been stripped and twisted to feed ever-hungry maws.
I sensed things swimming in the stagnant sea. But they weren't alive in the Force, not anymore. A dozen-meter-long dragon-serpent surfaced, and I saw dead eyes full of hundreds of unspeakable, unborn ghosts made both physical and not. Beneath its scales, I sensed only living, teeming decomposition, an infestation piloting the corpse of a once noble and fearsome beast.
Humanoid figures crawled and shambled across the exposed portion of Goren's corrupted palace ship. Seeing them, I knew what evils the 'Huttest Hutt' had wrecked upon Nal Hutta's population in his short time crashed here. Not all, thankfully. The worst of it was centered here, a rising monument of infestation. But that monument was now rising from souls consumed and subsumed into Goren's singularity.
I couldn't imagine he had any more kyber-spice to gorge himself on. So, to grow now, he needed a new form offodder. His infestation needed to spread, and those unborn insectoid souls he'd become found plentiful feeding grounds in the Forceful soulstuff of those unlucky enough to venture too close.
Maybe just those unlucky enough in general… I couldn't imagine the souls manning the nearby shield generators had escaped Goren's hunger, no matter how important their posts were. Souls consumed, bodies terribly filled with writhing ghosts, left to go through dull motions at their posts… Whatever remained of them, nuclear fire had been a mercy.
In fact, some more nuclear fire sounded real good right about now. Miles away from the corrupted palace, I came to a hovering stop. At first, I tried targeting the thing with Big Red's systems. I quickly stopped that when the ghosts in and around the crashed ship reared their heads.
They leaked into the physical world, creeping and crawling. Big Red's sensors started to flicker as ghosts tried to tag along on returning radar signals. Even high-frequency energy was just fodder for their rot and decay and decomposing consumption. Immediately, I shut the sensors down. I wasn't about to risk that getting into my Mek. Visual targeting it was, then.
Keeping a tight rein on it, I let the Force guide me as I loosed the rest of my proton torpedo arsenal. Fuck knocking, I opened with overkill. It still wasn't enough…
Half a dozen pink, proton-scattering torpedoes raced forth from my Mek. They screamed through the air. The ship and the area it claimed dominion over reacted as soon as they flew.
Twisted monsters rose from the depths. Not just haunted, but infested. Draconic serpents, tentacled kraken, swimming leviathans, aquadic rodents of unusual size, hulking amphibian tanks, shelled crustaceans like crawling islands, and a hundred more 'smaller' species taken over by Goren's scourge; all ridden by figures that'd once been sentient. They rushed my way, driven by hive-minded command. An army, a horde of Force pests piloting physical forms.
Worst of all, for the brief moment as the torpedoes flew, the crashed ship itself shuddered as if trying to rise under its own power. Labored breaths became shattering swells of the desicated hull. Like an unholy inhale, the crashed ship tried so desperately to take on a life of its own.
Then, thankfully, gloriously, nuclear fire flared into existence as the torpedoes impacted the shuddering, swelling, hulking husk. Six reality-shattering detonations exploded into blinding pink flashes — light and sound blending into each other, becoming one. Yet the unshielded husk didn't disintegrate on impact and explosion.
Only half of that pink light and sound, half of the nuclear force and fire, went off as it should've. That half ravaged the target, rending holes and vaporizing material and turning stagnant water into a great, lingering burst of steam.
The rest, however, was devoured by the legion of eager, hungry ghosts haunting the metal, mold, and rust. Pure, overwhelming energy converted to feeding fodder.
Within the chewed-through black hole in the Force, something sparked. Eerie, ethereal laughter rang out across the physical world and the Force, and that building, feeding something I sensed quickly approached critical mass.
"ASCENSION! YES, ASCENSION! FEED, GROW, SPREAD; IT IS ONLY NATURAL! AN ORDER TO THE WORLD, UNMATCHED! UNRIVALED! UNFATHOMED! NOW, WITHIN MY GRASP! EVERYTHING WILL FEED MY SUPREMACY, MY ASCENSION!" Goren's voice shook the world. Even the Force trembled.
The teeming void in the Force began to shift, blacker than black on black. Emptiness evolved. The process was greedy. Hungry. Willing to consume anything and everything for its selfish ends. Just like a Hutt.
Within the crashed ship, I could sense something growing at a truly obscene rate. Bloating flesh, a swelling scourge, an incensed infestation. From cloaking clouds of boiling steam, it rose, wearing the crashed ship like a shell.
Physics, evolution, anything natural surrendered to anti-Forceful ascension. Decomposing meat spilled forth like liquid from the cracks and holes in its new shell — a sickening green and brown that matched the water below. Chitonous, unborn ghosts crept along every surface, taken along for the ascending ride. And from the former ship's prow, a fleshy face emerged, complete with a slavering, sprawling, smiling maw of spiked teeth.
The thing Goren was becoming had no natural shape. No set form, only terrible, terrible function. Bloated, roiling, and shifting with parasites, preying upon everything it touched, constantly decomposing even as it lived; that was the Huttest Hutt's ascension, the pinnacle of their philosophy as a species.
"OH, AREN'T I PRETTY, FRIEND~? AREN'T I PERFECT? I MUST THANK YOU FOR GIVING ME THE FINAL SPARK I NEEDED. PLEASE, TREAT MY MANY WRITHING CHILDREN WELL. THEY ONLY WISH TO MAKE YOU THEIR KIN." Goren grinned, an abominable sight.
Those 'writhing children' Goren mentioned were still rushing my way. Futilely, I might add. I had no intention of getting into range of the diverse infested horde. I had no intention of engaging in any sort of traditional manner, in fact.
"Yo, David?" I simply connected to the fleet above instead.
"What's up, Atom? The others just dropped," David replied.
"That's great, but things have changed down here. We don't need boots on the ground anymore; we need overwhelming ortillary. Tried overkill. It half-worked. Just means we need to overkill harder. So, everything the fleet has? Direct it to the fucked up mass at my position. Impossible to miss, neh?"
"Mass… at your pos-…?" David trailed off, likely checking his ship's sensors. "… What. The. Fuck. Is that?"
"Anti-Force ascension bullshit," I answered. "Doesn't matter. It'll be dead soon. More dead than it already is. Just turn this swamp into glass and don't bother holding back."
The others, in the process of dropping from orbit, joined the comm call, V asking, "Atom? Why is that crashed ship moving again?"
"Some real horrifying bullshit," I grunted.
"That… That thing is damned," Fay muttered, disbelief and dread audible in her voice. "That thing shouldn't be. The Force itself is crying out in horror. It is physical and… not, unnatural and impossible even by the Force's standards. I don't say this lightly, but that thing needs to cease to exist."
"No arguments here, Fay," I snorted. "I'm thinking we make this a bombardment, not a fight. Even if it's on some conceptual shit, orbital bombardment is pretty consistent with the concept of annihilation."
"YOU TELLIN' ME I WON'T GET A FIGHT AFTER ALL?" Smasher asked.
"Even if you did, it'd be less of a fight, and more just carving up way too much meat for the slaughter," I retorted.
"CARVING MEAT FOR THE SLAUGHTER IS EVERY FIGHT FOR ME, YOUNGIN'," Smasher snorted. "BUT I'M SNIFFIN' WHAT YOU'RE SHITTIN'. EVEN I'M NOT LOOKING TO GET MY HANDS THAT DIRTY."
I physically winced on the other end of the call, "… Never use that phrase again, Smasher. Fraggin' weird…"
"So that 'fire' you had us equip," V asked. "Still useful or nah?"
"Upgrade it to explosives or outright nuclear fire," I told her. "I know everyone's steel has a few protons or concussions at least. Don't be cheap with 'em."
"You got it, Choom-Daddy~!" Becca chimed. "Let's crack the crust beneath this bitch!"
Quinlan cut in, "Aayla, Fay, and I are in a Tengu, escorting the other drops. How can we help?"
"Protons guided by the Force," I answered. "I imagine it'll give your contribution a bit of extra kick. It feels eager to help. Horrified, like Fay said. Even the Light Side is raging down here. And Fay? A healthy bit of that purging Force-fire of yours wouldn't be amiss, either."
"ARE YOU IGNORING ME, FRIEND?" Goren's voice echoed. "DO YOU NOT WANT TO PLAY~? I CAN GUARANTEE THAT I'LL HAVE FUN AS WE DO. COME, LET YOURSELF BE THE HUTTEST HUTT'S FIRST PLAYTHING…"
Though it wouldn't do much, I still let off a Mek-scaled Gauss pistol shot in the mass's direction. It found something soft, not much of a feat, and desicated flesh sprayed into the air from the hypersonic impact.
Goren, the abomination of rotting mass that he'd become, giggled at that, "OH, THAT TICKLES! CAN'T YOU SEE, FRIEND? WE WOULD HAVE SUCH FUN TOGETHER! I ONLY WISH TO EMBRACE YOU, EMBRACE THE WHOLE GALAXY AS IS MY RIGHT AS THE MOST SUPREME AND ASCENDED BEING IN IT! JOIN ME EARLY, FOR ALL THINGS EVENTUALLY WILL…"
I scoffed and projected my voice toward the mass, "Ascended? Supreme? Bullshit. You're a bloated mass of meat piloted by your addiction to things you can't comprehend and don't care to."
Goren chuckled happily at me finally engaging with him, "OH, FRIEND, THERE'S NO NEED TO FLATTER ME. I'M WELL AWARE OF HOW BEAUTIFUL AND LOVELY I'VE BECOME. BUT EVEN BEFORE THIS… 'GLOW-UP', I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A HUTT. NOW, THE HUTT. WE ARE SUPREME, MEANT TO RULE OVER YOU LITTLE SPECIES, LITTLE SENTIENT, LITTLE SOULS. IT IS SIMPLY THE NATURAL ORDER OF THE GALAXY, ONE IGNORED FOR FAR TOO LONG. I SHALL… RECTIFY THAT~…"
"How many of you 'supreme' Hutts have I flatlined?" I asked, rhetorical and cutting.
Goren tried to reply, but he didn't get far. As I spoke, the first strikes from above began to arrive. A burning beam of focused light that drilled through Goren's mass and a physical projectile falling at relativistic speeds that struck the hole being drilled. Both from David's SPECTRE, the opening ortillary cored a hole straight through Goren's mass. Then, turbolaser bolts followed, smiting down from the heavens and turning solid metal to liquid, flesh to glass, and gloriously purging rot in purifying plasma.
I kept talking through the bombardment, projecting my voice through the Force to be heard over the catastrophic sundering. More and more turbolaser bolts fell like stars upon the world, upon Goren's twisted mass.
Quickly, they became a consistent, almost solid stream of descending plasma. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of eviscerating slices of the sun, from our three capital-class corvettes, but mostly from the hundreds of Oni Gunships with their mounted turbolasers that the Gonk Fleet had at its disposal.
"How many of your 'supreme' sluggin' kin have I zeroed?" I repeated my question. "How many slugs have others zeroed, following in my footsteps?"
Reality shook, "Hard to claim supremacy when your kind flatlines like anything else. Tough as you are, 'supreme' as you are, a Gonk with a gun and enough determination can still end your existence."
A terrible, twisted scream from one bloated throat and a billion more chittering mandibles rang out across Nal Hutta. I kept speaking over it, my tone casual.
"And I'll tell you something: we've got no shortage of determination on our side. You and your 'supreme' kind have brought this on yourselves. Turns out, no one likes to be preyed upon, used, crushed. All they needed was a spark, a sign to tell them that they could, and look at that? Your supremacy falls apart real fuckin' quick, doesn't it?"
The Force roared back at the scream from Goren and his infestation: victorious, vengeful, and ever-so-slightly vindictive. Every pound of fucked-up flesh that was vaporized, the Force made sure to put down for good. It wasn't just vaporized, but annihilated, banished, erased — conservation of mass be damned. The Force wouldn't suffer its existence for a moment longer.
"Bit hard to maintain that claim of 'supremacy' when anything, anyone, challenges it," I said. "For all that you, your species, your culture rely on it, it's a fraggin' fragile thing. All it took was one man, one failed clone, to say 'fuck this' and stand up. The rest snowballed naturally.
"And now, you've lost so much already. The beating economic heart of your space. The 'jewel' world of your people. That illusion of 'supremacy' that you've been relying on for so long. You're not just losing. You've already lost. 'Cause I can promise you this is only the beginning. The rancor's out of its pen, and there's no putting it back.
"Your cartels, your cruel and depraved culture, your inherent corruption…? I'm coming for it all, out of Spite and for Freedom. And I'm not coming alone. Know this as you ascend to your death, Hutt. Everything you are and represent, every ounce of 'supremacy' you embody, it'll go out just like this. Just like you. There's no kill like overkill, and the Hutt Cartels are going to learn that fact well so long as I'm still kicking."
I sensed the killing blow in the Force as it was fired. Our Jedi allies, in their Tengu, swooped down and let off a crippling stream of proton torpedoes. Each one flew with its trademark pink light and shone even brighter in the Force. When they struck true, the detonation of nuclear fire wasn't alone, joined by Force-fire, nigh-holy and blessed by Fay.
The Force-fire spread, purging everything it touched, both physical and Anti-Force. Goren and his infestation couldn't even scream anymore. Force-fire stole the sound straight from their souls, scorching away the black hole in the Force with pure light. The abominable mass burned with an eerie silence.
I signaled the orbital bombardment to stop. Reality itself seemed to stop and hold its breath to watch Goren burn, to revel in the purging Force-flames. They burned gold — splendid and brilliant and the healing antithesis to the infested void in the Force.
But something was still missing as the mass burned away to utter nothingness. Guided by the Force, I approached the dying mass. There was still something there. A concept of persistent decay that carried a scorched sliver of Goren's bloated soul.
A massive, glaring eye swiveled to focus on me as I neared. Everything it had left went into resisting the Force-fire that was annihilating the rest of it. It desperately struggled to linger so it could at least rot. I wasn't about to allow even that much.
Big Red and I were one. It raised its Gauss pistol. I called upon the Force-fire Fay had shown me, imbuing it into the frame, down the arm, and into the weapon. The Force surged with my action, backing me completely.
"Shame you won't feel a thing. There's only oblivion where you're going. Don't worry, though," I told the dying abomination. "You won't be the last. Your species so-called 'supremacy' isn't going to shatter itself, after all."
As one, me, Big Red, and the Force pulled the trigger. Gauss barked. The desperately glaring eye imploded. And finally, the last abominable remnant of kyber-spice burned. So fell Nal Hutta. So fell the Huttest Hutt, a herald of so many more to fall…