I came back to the real world with six glowing red eyes staring down at me.
My brain took a moment to process that I'd fainted. One second I was watching my first live-action lightsaber duel and the next everything went dark. Great way to spend my Tuesday.
The image registered second: hexagonal arrangement of photoreceptors, sleek black chassis silhouetted against smoke-stained sky.
Arachnae.
Then the pain arrived.
The slow kind. The "let me introduce you to every single injury individually" kind. My ribs went first, screaming like a banshee with every shallow breath. Sharp, grinding ache that made me want to stop breathing entirely. Fantastic plan, really well thought out.
Then my left arm. It hung wrong. The weight pulled at my shoulder socket in a way that made my stomach turn. My chest felt like someone had used it as a tenderizing board for bantha steaks. And the blood pooling in my mouth? Copper taste, thick and warm. Disgusting.
Ugh.
The helmet's HUD was completely fucked. Half the display dead, the other half strobing error messages in angry red text. Temperature warnings. Structural integrity alerts. A cheerful little notification that my medical sensors had given up entirely and stopped trying.
Real encouraging stuff.
I tried to say something. What came out was a wet, gurgling sound that would've embarrassed a dying wampa.
Arachnae made a noise.
She sounded worried.
Which was weird. She was a droid. A tool. Sophisticated programming and precision engineering wrapped in a spider-shaped frame. Droids did worry.
And yet.
Piing piing.
The sound was gentle. Almost tentative. Her frontal limb shifted, adjusting her weight distribution, and something caught the dim light. Metal. Medical-grade steel.
The syringe.
My eyes focused on it through the cracked visor. The injector port was still extended, a single drop of clear liquid clinging to the needle tip like a tiny, transparent pearl. The reservoir chamber sat empty, its contents already delivered into my bloodstream.
The emergency adrenaline shot.
I'd installed that months ago as a backup failsafe. A worst-case scenario feature. The kind of thing you added because the parts were cheap and you had space in the chassis and what the hell, might as well. Never actually expected to use it. Figured if things got bad enough that my spider-droid needed to inject me with combat stims, I was probably already dead or close enough that it would matter.
Turns out I was wrong about that.
"Good girl," I managed. My voice sounded like gravel being dragged across duracrete, but the words came out mostly intact.
I lifted my right hand. The left was useless, but the right still functioned. Barely. My fingers trembled as I reached up, patting the smooth surface of her chassis. The metal was warm. Heat from her processors, probably. Or maybe the ambient temperature of Tatooine's perpetually angry atmosphere.
Piing.
The sound she made was different this time. Softer. Almost pleased.
Then she moved, her legs shifting in that precise, mechanical way as she skittered off my chest.
The absence of her weight was immediate and agonizing. Without the pressure holding everything together, my ribs shifted. Something inside my chest cavity ground against something else. I gasped, and the gasp turned into a choked, wheezing cough that sent fresh spikes of pain radiating through my torso.
Everything hurt. Every single part of me hurt.
For a few seconds, I lay there, trying to remember how to breathe without wanting to die. Shallow inhales. Short exhales. Do think about the broken bones or the internal bleeding or the fact that I'd gotten my ass handed to me by a Tusken with anger management issues and a lightsaber.
Then I heard it.
SIZZZZZ
The sound cut through the ambient noise of distant fires and settling debris. Sharp. Metallic. Unmistakable.
HUMMMMM.
Lightsabers.
I turned my head. Slowly. Very, very slowly, because apparently fast movements were no longer in my operational parameters. The world swam a bit, my vision blurring at the edges before stabilizing into something resembling focus.
Twenty meters away, maybe twenty-five, two figures moved through the clearing smoke.
Hett pressed forward, his crimson blade carving wide, brutal arcs through the air. Each strike looked desperate. Aggressive. The kind of technique that prioritized power over precision, rage over control. That had been enough to kick my shit in.
His movements were sharp but sloppy, driven by something uglier than discipline.
Obi-Wan met each attack with the kind of economy that came from decades of practice.
He was trying to overpower Hett. He was matching intensity with intensity. He was there, his blue blade intercepting red at the precise moment and angle required to deflect the strike. Minimal effort. Maximum efficiency. His footwork was clean, his posture relaxed.
He looked like a man handling a training session with a particularly enthusiastic Padawan, fighting a fallen Jedi Master.
Hett swung high, a vicious overhead chop meant to split Obi-Wan from crown to crotch.
Obi-Wan stepped offline, angling his body so the red blade passed through empty air. Then he brought his own saber up in a lazy backhand parry, catching Hett's follow-through and redirecting it with a casual flick of his wrist.
I knew Obi-Wan was the master of defense and Hett's fighting style was aggressive as fuck, but was this difference too much?
Like, damn. This was embarrassing to watch. For Hett, I mean.
"Are you alright, Ezra?"
The question came out conversational. Even. Like he was asking if I wanted tea, checking on my vitals in the middle of active combat.
He did even look at me when he said it. His eyes stayed locked on Hett, tracking the Tusken's next move before it happened.
I stared.
That was all I could do. Stare.
This man was having a conversation while fighting someone who'd nearly killed me three minutes ago. He was asking about my health. Checking in. Multitasking like some kind of Jedi customer service representative with exceptional time management skills.
What the actual fuck.
I raised my right hand and gave him a thumbs up.
It was all I had left. All I could offer.
Obi-Wan's gaze flicked toward me. Half a second. Maybe less. Long enough to register the gesture, to catalog my condition, to make whatever assessment Jedi Masters made about broken teenagers lying in the sand.
He gave a short nod.
Then he pivoted, flowing into a spinning deflection that sent Hett's next strike wide, the red blade hissing past Obi-Wan's shoulder with maybe five centimeters to spare.
"You should have stayed hidden, Kenobi," Hett snarled, recovering his stance. His voice carried over the distance. "The Order is dead. The Republic is dead. You are a relic."
"Funny," Obi-Wan replied, his tone dry as Tatooine sand. "I was about to say the same about you."
Cool. Totally normal.
Two old colleagues trying to kill each other while discussing philosophy. Standard Tuesday on Tatooine.
Piing!
I turned my head—still slowly, because apparently my neck had opinions about sudden movements now—and found Arachnae positioned near my torso. One of her multi-jointed limbs extended, and a cold mist sprayed across my side.
Bacta. The medical-grade kind, from the compressed canister I'd installed in her storage compartment.
The sting was immediate but brief, followed by a numbing sensation that spread through the burns and lacerations like anesthetic fog. Her limbs moved with precision, applying the spray in controlled bursts, targeting the worst of the damage with the kind of accuracy that made me grateful I'd splurged on the medical subroutines.
"Thanks, girl," I muttered.
She chirped once. Acknowledgment, maybe. Or her processor confirming task completion.
I planted my right hand against the sand, braced myself, and tried to sit up.
Bad idea.
Very bad idea.
My ribs screamed their protest immediately. The world tilted sideways, colors bleeding together as my vision swam. Something inside my chest shifted with a grinding sensation that bones definitely, absolutely should make. For a second, I thought I might pass out again. Fall right back into unconsciousness and let future-me deal with the consequences.
But I stayed upright.
Barely. But upright counted for something.
I looked down at my left arm. The gauntlet was ruined, half-melted slag fused to the underlying fabric. But that was cosmetic damage. The real problem was the angle. The very, very wrong angle my wrist was sitting at. The hand dangled loose, fingers unresponsive, the whole joint cocked at maybe thirty degrees off true.
I pushed my Hyper-Perception inward, directing it through my own body instead of outward into the environment.
The feedback arrived instantly. A three-dimensional map of damage rendered in my mind with the kind of detail that would make a medical scanner jealous.
Hairline fracture along the ulna—minor, stable. Radial dislocation at the wrist joint—major, but fixable. Moderate soft tissue swelling. No arterial damage, thank whatever gods watched over stupid teenagers with hero complexes.
Three cracked ribs on the left side, one of them sitting dangerously close to something that looked lung-adjacent and important. Burns, lacerations, contusions, and enough subcutaneous bruising to paint a medical textbook.
The wrist had avoided a fracture. The bones remained intact. The joint, however, was dislocated
I could work with that.
"Okay," I said to myself, the words coming out breathy and unsteady. "Okay. Just like that speeder crash on Lothal. You did this before. It sucked then, it'll suck now, but it's doable. It's fine. It's totally—"
I grabbed my wrist with my right hand.
Clenched my teeth hard enough to make my jaw ache.
And pulled.
CRACK-POP.
"FFFFFFF—"
The curse dissolved into a hissing inhale, air sucked through gritted teeth as white-hot pain exploded up my arm. My vision whited out for half a second. My whole body went rigid, every muscle locking up in sympathetic agony.
Then the joint seated itself with a final, sickening click.
The pain did not disappear. That would've been nice. Instead, it settled into something duller, more manageable. A constant, throbbing ache instead of the sharp, wrongness of misaligned bones. I could flex my fingers now. They responded, sluggish and protesting, but functional.
Progress.
Behind me, the sound of lightsabers grew more intense. The rhythmic clang-hum pattern accelerated, the strikes coming faster, harder.
I glanced back over my shoulder.
Hett was losing ground. His form seemed to be breaking down, his strikes wider and sloppier. Desperation was creeping into his technique, the kind of recklessness that came when rage started burning through the last reserves of discipline.
Obi-Wan remained patient. He moved like water, flowing around Hett's attacks, deflecting when necessary, evading when efficient.
Waiting for the inevitable moment when fury exhausted itself and left nothing but a tired, broken man.
Yeah.
I needed to not be here when that happened.
Being within a dozen meters of two Masters dueling was the kind of stupid that got you accidentally bisected by a stray Force-push or caught in the backswing of a redirected strike.
Collateral damage with a lightsaber-shaped cause of death. No thank you.
I got to my feet. Slowly. Very slowly. Like a newborn bantha attempting bipedal locomotion for the first time. My legs shook. My balance was questionable. But I was standing.
"Piing piing?"
Arachnae skittered closer, her photoreceptors angled upward at me.
"I'm good," I lied. "Totally good. We're just gonna... strategically relocate. Far away from the scary laser swords."
I took stock of my surroundings.
The smoke had cleared. A lot.
Dead Tuskens littered the ground, collapsed where they'd stood when the paralytic hit. Some were still breathing—shallow, labored—but most weren't.
And the prisoners.
They were still there. Still bound. Still caged. Paralyzed now, slumped in their restraints like broken puppets.
The anesthetic properties of the agent meant they weren't feeling the worst of their injuries anymore. Small mercy, but I'd take it.
I checked my internal chrono. The agent would start wearing off in about ten to fifteen minutes for the healthier Tuskens. Five more for the others, accounting for malnutrition and injury.
I had maybe quarter of an hourbefore this place turned into a war zone again.
"Arachnae," I said, my voice raspy. "Open up."
She scuttled over, and her back panel hissed open with a soft click. Inside, the adrenaline vial was empty, rattling uselessly in its housing.
Mental note: increase capacity. Also, maybe add a second injector. And possibly a 'please don't let me die' button.
I swapped out the empty vial, pulling a fresh one from my belt storage. Not adrenaline this time—this one was filled with a pale yellow liquid.
The antidote.
I loaded the vial into Arachnae's internal dispenser, then pulled out a second vial and my syringe gun—compact, spring-loaded, designed for quick field injections.
Good thing I'd used plastoid vials instead of glass. Otherwise, the 'antidote' would've just been a handful of sharp disappointment.
"Alright, girl," I said, configuring her injector settings on my datapad. "I need you to move through the prisoners. Start with the ones in the worst shape. Inject them with the antidote, got it?"
Piing piing piiiing. Piing piing.
The sounds formed patterns in my head, and somehow—somehow—I understood.
Three more. Badly injured. In a tent. One Twi'lek. Lekku half-severed.
My heart stuttered.
"You found more?" I asked. "How bad?"
"Piing. Piiiiing piing"
Near death. Two of them.
She shared a grainy image she took in rush, showing an tuskan throwing in an Twi'lek into a tent. She was the one I had seen earlier in Arachnae's feed. One lekku half severed and the blank look in her eyes.
"Okay. Okay, change of plans." I pointed toward the tent's direction. "You go to them first. Inject the antidote and spray bacta on their wounds. As much as they need. I'll handle the ones out here."
"Piing!"
She skittered off, surprisingly fast for something with six legs and a payload of medical supplies.
I turned toward the two fighters.
The ones who'd been forced into that sick gladiator match earlier. They were slumped near the center of the camp, still bound but relatively uninjured compared to the others.
They'd do.
I limped toward them, my ribs protesting every step, and knelt beside the first one. Human. Male. Probably mid-thirties, though the desert and torture had aged him. Shaggy dark hair, scars crisscrossing his bare torso.
"Sorry about this," I muttered, pressing the syringe gun against his neck. "But I need you mobile."
HISS-CLICK.
The injector fired, delivering the dose directly into his bloodstream. A bit more than normal dosage to wake them quicker.
His eyes twitched. Fingers spasmed.
Good. It was working.
I moved to the second man—another human, this one broader, with a face that looked like it had lost an argument with a landspeeder—and repeated the process.
HISS-CLICK.
While they sobered up, I pushed my Hyper-Perception outward again, scanning the camp.
There.
A Rodian, collapsed near the central fire pit. Face brutalized. Breathing shallow but steady.
And next to him...
A Twi'lek woman. Young. Her back was a canvas of carved symbols, still weeping blood. The wounds were superficial—deliberately so, meant to scar rather than kill—but she'd lost a lot of blood.
My breath caught.
Could it be...?
Herana. Lyra's sister. The one she'd been searching for when the Tuskens took her?
If this was her...
I rushed over, ignoring the protests from my ribs, and knelt beside the Twi'lek.
HISS-CLICK.
The antidote went in clean.
I grabbed the bacta canister from my belt and sprayed it over the carvings on her back. The foam hissed as it made contact with raw flesh, sealing and disinfecting.
"Come on," I muttered. "Come on, wake up."
Her lekku twitched.
But her eyes stayed closed.
Too much blood loss. The antidote would work, but it'd take time. Time I didn't have.
And if she wasn't Herana...
If the other Twi'lek—the one Arachnae found—was Herana instead...
That was bad. That was really bad.
I forced myself to move. Couldn't afford to wait. Couldn't afford to hope.
I moved to the Rodian, sprayed bacta on his ruined face, and injected him with the antidote.
Here
I moved to the Rodian, sprayed bacta on his ruined face, and injected him with the antidote.
Behind me, I heard a ragged gasp. Then a scramble of limbs against sand.
The two fighters were waking up.
I turned back, limping over to them. The first one—the shaggy-haired human—was curling in on himself, knees pulled to his chest, trembling violently. He looked up as my shadow fell over him, and his eyes widened in sheer terror.
"No... please," he whimpered, shielding his face with shaking hands. "No more. Please, I can't..."
"Hey," I barked, the helmet's vocalizer dropping my voice an octave, stripping away the teenager and leaving only the machine. "Quiet. I'm not with them."
The second fighter, the broad-shouldered one, dragged himself upright. He looked less coherent than the first, his eyes darting frantically around the camp. He saw the dead Tuskens. He saw the smoke.
Then he saw the flash of crimson and blue light twenty meters away.
The hum of the lightsabers cut through the desert wind. It was a sound that shouldn't exist here. A sound from stories.
"Is that..." The broad man stared, his jaw slack, all color draining from a face that was already pale. "By the Suns, are those... Je—"
"Hey!"
I snapped my fingers directly in front of his face. The sharp clack of my armored gauntlets made him flinch violently.
"Eyes on me," I ordered, leaning down until my cracked visor was level with his face. "Listen very carefully. You see that fight over there?"
He nodded dumbly, eyes trying to drift back to the glowing blades.
"No, you don't," I hissed. "You don't see anything. You don't hear anything. If you want to survive—not just get out of this camp, but actually live long enough to see another sunrise—you never ask about what you saw here today. You never talk about it. You bury it."
I grabbed his shoulder. His skin was cold, clammy with shock.
"Those are questions with answers that will haunt you until you die," I said, my voice low and hard. "Do you understand? Ignore it. Forget it. Focus on breathing."
He swallowed hard, looking from the distant lights back to the faceless mask staring him down. Fear warred with confusion, but survival instinct won out. He nodded.
"I... I understand."
"Good."
I pulled out the syringe gun and shoved it into the shaggy-haired man's trembling hands. He held it like it was a thermal detonator.
"This is the antidote," I explained, keeping my sentences short and punchy. They were in shock; they couldn't handle complex instructions. "Inject the others. Then cut them loose. Get them on their feet."
"We... we can't," the man stammered, clutching the gun to his chest. Tears were cutting tracks through the dust on his cheeks. "The Tuskens... they'll come back. We're in the Wastes. We're dead. We're already dead."
"Look at me," I commanded. I pointed to the dead Tusken guard nearest us. "They aren't coming back. I made sure of that. But we have five minutes before the ones I didn't kill wake up."
I leaned in, putting all the authority I could muster into my gravelly voice.
"You have two choices. You stay here, curl up, and die when they wake up. Or you do exactly what I tell you, and you walk out of this shithole alive. What's it going to be?"
The shaggy man looked at his friend. Then at the gun. Then at me. He took a shuddering breath, wiping his nose on his arm.
"Alive," he whispered. "I want to be alive."
"Then move."
I didn't wait to see if they followed through.
I turned and broke into a limping run toward the tent.
A piing echoed in my mind—Arachnae's ping, urgent and insistent.
I was in a race against time.
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[Image]
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A/N: Next Chapter gonna be a banger, from a certain point of view. Dunno about you guys, but I had a lot of fun writing that lol.
Throw in the stones and if we hit top 30 till tomorrow, I will update an bonus chapter!
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