Her eyes widened until I could see the whites all around the irises.
The psychological fog I had been carefully weaving around her for the past five minutes shattered like cheap glass. The sudden shift from high-stakes political intrigue to a gutter insult short-circuited her processing speed completely. She stood there blinking while trying to reconcile the cold, authoritative figure of the last few minutes with the crude question I had just thrown in her face.
It gave me the opening I needed to end this.
My hand moved from behind my back in one smooth motion while the needle extended from my wrist guard with a faint mechanical click.
I felt the Force coil around her instantly. A sharp, jagged spike of warning flared in her aura as her precognition screamed that something was wrong. She started to twist her torso away because her instincts tried to override her confusion, but I was already inside her guard.
I jabbed the needle directly into the gap between her torso armor plates where the flexible bodysuit offered minimal protection.
The sting made her flinch violently against the metal.
"What—"
I felt the surge of energy in the Force before I saw it physically manifest.
I abandoned the injection and kicked off her hip, firing my servo-assisted legs to jump backward just as her lightsaber ignited on pure reflex. The crimson blade screamed to life and swung toward my head in a wild, panicked arc where my neck had been a microsecond before.
At the same time, a weight detached from my back.
The plasma blade passed close enough to superheat the air near my helmet.
I landed three meters away while balancing on the balls of my feet, and at the same time, felt a weight detached from my back. Not paying attention to that, I immediately checked the readout on my wrist HUD.
50% discharge.
"Tch." I made a sound of annoyance behind my mask.
She had moved too fast for the full payload. I only managed to pump half the solution into her bloodstream before her counterattack forced me to disengage. A full dose would have stopped her heart in seconds and dropped her like a marionette with cut strings, but half a dose meant her metabolism would fight it. It meant she had minutes rather than moments.
Reva stared at me with one hand pressed to her side where I had stuck her. Her breathing came rapid and shallow while her eyes darted from me to the needle mark, then to my relaxed posture.
"What... why..." She struggled to form coherent sentences through the shock. "You were helping me. You said you'd help me fix this. Why would you—"
"Help you?" I tilted my helmet to the side. "Heh, I wouldn't help you find your ass with both hands and a map."
She stammered for a moment there.
I could have tried to gut her with a vibro-blade, but Force-sensitives were tricky prey to hunt. Their precognition acted like a radar for lethal intent. If I had drawn a blade with the intention of severing her spine, the Force would have screamed a warning in her ear long before I connected.
But a needle offered a distinct advantage. A tiny, medical-grade delivery system barely registered on the threat scale until it broke skin. It slipped past the "fight or flight" radar just long enough to deliver the payload. Plus, I had spent the last five minutes flashing my lightsaber hilt on my belt to convince her that if a threat came, it would come from that weapon.
Misdirection remained the oldest trick in the book for a reason.
"My... my past," Reva whispered, her voice trembling with a mix of confusion and violation. "You knew about the Temple. You knew about the younglings. You knew my name. My real name." She took a staggering step forward, her face twisting. "How? E-Even the Grand Inquisitor doesn't know the full details. Who are you?"
She looked genuinely terrified now. It wasn't just fear of death; it was the horror of being perceived. I had stripped her naked in a metaphorical sense, and the violation clearly rattled her more than the physical stab wound.
"Oh, that?" I waved my hand dismissively. "Yeah, I was wondering when you'd ask. It's actually pretty common knowledge if you know where to look."
Her brow furrowed deeply. "Common knowledge? That is impossible."
"You really need to get on the HoloNet more often," I said with a shrug. "There's this guy named the Bendu. Big guy, kind of hairy, lives in the middle of nowhere. He does a weekly podcast on encrypted frequencies. Great production value, honestly."
Reva just stared at me with her mouth slightly open.
"He actually did a whole deep dive on the 'Failed Padawans' demographic last Tuesday," I continued, pitching my voice to sound like I was discussing the weather. "You were the featured guest star. 'Reva Sanders: From Temple Brat to Imperial Doormat.' It was a fascinating listen. He really went into detail about your inferiority complex."
"You... you are lying," she hissed, her grip tightening on her saber until the leather creaked. "You are insane."
"And you are gullible," I shot back. "Seriously, how have you survived this long? Is the bar for Inquisitors really this low? I thought this job required critical thinking skills."
The sheer whiplash of my tone compared to the cold authority I had been using earlier seemed to break something else in her brain. She looked genuinely lost, resembling a child who had been told the rules of a game only to discover halfway through that everyone else played something different.
Which remained accurate, now that I thought about it.
Reva possessed a monumental stupidity in a very specific way. She remained so fixated on her trauma, so consumed by her obsession with Kenobi and her desperate need to prove herself, that the bigger picture escaped her completely. She was the kind of person who would mouth off to Darth Vader himself if she thought it would get her closer to her goal.
In canon, she had literally tried to kill Vader. The man who could choke people to death through a viewscreen. The walking war crime in a cape.
That took a special kind of delusional confidence.
Right now, I had managed to overwhelm her through a combination of factors. She operated off the books, which meant guilt and paranoia already plagued her. I had demonstrated knowledge that should have been impossible for a random bounty hunter to possess. I had struck directly at her trauma and insecurities to systematically dismantle her self-image until she felt too off-balance to think straight.
But that state was temporary.
Give her an hour alone to process, and the questions would start. She would investigate. She would realize that nothing I had said actually checked out, and that my entire authority stood on a foundation of bluff, intimidation, and her own psychological vulnerabilities.
And that created a massive problem for my long-term survival.
I couldn't let anyone know that a Force-sensitive had rescued Leia. That remained the whole point of this elaborate dance. If word got out that someone with a lightsaber and Force powers had interfered with an Inquisitorius operation, the Empire would investigate. They would backtrace through Bail Organa. They would put surveillance on Alderaan. They would start asking questions that led directly to Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Even worse, a non-zero chance existed that Emperor's Hands actually operated in this mashup timeline. If knowledge about them leaked because of Reva's investigation, if she started digging into secret operatives and asking the wrong people the wrong questions, the real ones might take notice. They might decide to track down whoever had been impersonating them. They might trace it back to me, to Bail, to everyone I tried to protect.
And without the canon events of the Kenobi show happening, this woman would just keep hunting. Keep making desperate plays. Keep creating complications that could lead her straight to the Lars homestead and the child sleeping there.
She had to go.
"The Emperor is very disappointed in you," I said, my modulated voice taking on a formal cadence again just to mess with her. "As his servant, it is my responsibility to cut problems at the root. A mutt pissing in our own house is not worth keeping, especially when there are so many more capable mutts available."
I paused for effect.
"That is what I would have said if I were actually the Emperor's Hand." I let the words hang for half a second. "Sike. Got you. Like, really? Are you a child or something? With how easily you folded, I probably could have made you suck my dick and you would have done it willingly."
The effect was nuclear.
Reva's face went through every stage of emotion at once. Shock. Humiliation. Rage so pure and incandescent it actually made the Force around her vibrate with heat.
"You fucking—" she started to snarl, taking a step forward.
Then the poison took hold.
A sharp, stabbing pain lanced through her abdomen. Her eyes widened. The dizziness came next, a wave of vertigo that made her stumble sideways into the alley wall.
She looked down at her side where I had stuck her, then back up at me.
Disbelief washed over her features.
I held up my wrist while angling it so the dim light caught the needle's edge. The tip still glistened with residue.
"Hemotoxin derivative," I said, inspecting it with exaggerated care. "Mixed with a neural inhibitor and a mild paralytic. Quite pricey, actually. Had to spend a decent chunk of my operational budget to acquire it, and it's a hassle to store properly. Temperature-sensitive, you know." I lowered my arm. "I heard Force-sensitives don't have any particular resistance to poison. Biology is biology, right? Count yourself lucky for being my first live test subject."
"You bastard!" She screamed it, her voice cracking with fury. "You fucking lowlife coward! You—"
Her hand shot to her belt because her fingers were scrambling for the comm unit.
It wasn't there.
I held it up between two fingers while letting the device dangle like a trophy.
"Looking for this?" I asked. "Man, I'm actually feeling kind of bad right now. Like I'm bullying a mentally disabled person. Is this what guilt feels like? Weird."
That did it.
Whatever fragile control she had been clinging to evaporated instantly. She launched herself at me with a scream of pure rage, lightsaber swinging in a downward chop that would have split me from crown to crotch if it connected.
Perfect.
Why would I ever fight fair? The most fun battles were the ones where every advantage was stacked so high in your favor that the outcome was never in doubt. Glory? Honor? The spirit of combat? That stuff was worth less than nothing in real life. Everything came down to who had the last laugh.
And I fully intended to be the clown at the end of this circus.
I ignited Hett's lightsaber.
The crimson blade snapped to life with that distinctive hiss, and the moment it did, I felt something else surge up through the hilt into my hand. Anger. Old anger, calcified and bitter, mixed with pain and betrayal and a hatred so deep it had soaked into the weapon's very structure.
My own emotions responded by rising to meet it like a wave answering the tide. Frustration. Fear. The simmering rage I had been suppressing since Vasha disappeared.
I forced it all down while slamming mental barriers into place.
This was inevitable. The weapon had been attuned to Hett, bled by him during whatever dark ritual Sith used to corrupt their kyber crystals. It had spent years marinating in his festering pit of dark emotions. Obi-Wan had warned me about this when he gave it to me, making it clear that this stood as a last-resort tool precisely because of how it would affect me.
Well, this qualified as a last resort.
I flicked the comm in my helmet to the encrypted channel with my free hand. "Master, had a bit of a roadblock. Might have to delay the flight."
Obi-Wan's voice crackled through immediately, tight with concern. "What happened? Are you compromised?"
"One Inquisitor," I said, sidestepping Reva's next swing and letting her blade carve a glowing line into the duracrete wall. "Don't worry, I can handle her."
"Ezra, wait—"
I muted the channel.
Reva came at me again, this time with a horizontal slash aimed at my midsection. Her technique was sloppy because it was fueled entirely by rage rather than any coherent strategy. I parried with Hett's blade, the plasma screaming as the two weapons met.
"Wow," I said, jumping back to create distance. "You really believed all that crap I was spewing earlier? About being the Emperor's Hand? About cleaning up your mess?" I laughed. "How does it feel knowing you got played by a teenager?"
She screamed something incoherent and charged again.
This was the plan. Get her angry. Get her moving. Get her heart rate up and her blood pumping faster, circulating that poison through her system at maximum efficiency.
Every second she spent trying to kill me was a second closer to her collapse.
___
A/N: So I had split the chapter into three parts as 2 way split was a bit too lengthy to read, at least from the feed back I got.
And after quite a lot of effort, I was finally able to make this layer by layer concept art of Ezra's Armor (I wonder why I even spent so long at it tbh)
Also there is concept art of arachnae, not the most accurate but kind of gets the tone right.
Meanwhile, keep the powerstones coming. Next chapter on Sunday night, and there's gonna be milestone bonus chapter too, so keep your stone wallet ready!
Support the cause and read advanced chapters(2) on Patreon: www.patreon.com/AbstractoX
Thanks for your support guys and gals(of any)!