"Who are you?" the Twi'lek girl asked, her voice tinged with tears.
"My name is Amir. The warship is in danger right now. We need to gather at the hangar!" Amir answered her question automatically.
"I'm not going. I have to wait for Mona to come back."
Amir frowned. Mona? Then this girl must be Milisen.
"Where is Mona?" Amir asked.
"She just went for testing. She hasn't come back."
"Where is the testing?" Amir had a guess, but he asked anyway.
"In one of the smaller labs!" Milisen raised her head to look at Amir.
"Follow me. I'll take you to her." Amir stepped forward.
"Okay!" Milisen jumped off the bunk and ran barefoot toward the door.
It must be the auxiliary lab, Amir thought to himself, following behind Milisen. He was heading there anyway.
"Right, my name is Milisen!" The Twi'lek girl's eyes were a little brighter than before.
"Do you want to leave this place, Milisen?" Amir suddenly asked.
"I hate this place! I have to leave here, but I have to be with Mona."
She hasn't been brainwashed... Amir confirmed his guess. Or rather, she hadn't been successfully brainwashed.
Amir had used Force persuasion to get the other children to head to the hangar because he was worried they had already been indoctrinated. Telling them directly that he wanted to save them would likely backfire and be met with resistance. Giving orders under the guise of authority or brainwashing would be more effective in this situation.
And the result proved just that. The children were very obedient to the commands, which proved they had indeed undergone conditioning.
Milisen was special. She was thought to be a non-Force-sensitive but possessed a latent affinity for the dark side. And she was the only one among the children who hadn't been completely broken.
Along the way, they encountered two squads of stormtroopers, but no one paid any attention to Amir and Milisen. They were all rushing about in a panic to deal with the ship's crisis.
There weren't many stormtroopers on this cruiser to begin with. Most of the security detail consisted of combat droids. Other than that, there were only the pilots and researchers.
The two arrived at the door of the auxiliary lab without issue. Two security droids blocked either side of the entrance.
Milisen stood warily at a distance from the droids, clutching the hem of her clothes, her lips trembling slightly.
She was terrified.
Amir walked forward. The two droids immediately extended their thick arms to block him.
Snap-hiss!
Vwoom! Vwoom!
With two piercing sounds, the green blade flashed, and the two droids were sliced into scrap metal.
Amir let out a long breath. It really was stress-relieving.
"Whoa!" Milisen cried out in surprise from behind him. "I want one of those!"
She stared at Amir's lightsaber with wide eyes.
"First, let's find Mona," Amir said, deactivating the blade and pressing the door control.
The blast door hissed open.
This lab was much smaller, mostly filled with bulky monitoring equipment. A person in a white researcher's coat was standing in front of a bacta tank.
"You're here?" John Morley looked up at Amir, as if he had been waiting.
Amir didn't speak, looking past him.
"Mona!" Milisen shouted and ran toward the tank.
"Tell me everything you know. I don't want to waste time." Amir held his hilt and walked toward John Morley, step by step.
But this ordinary, middle-aged researcher showed no sign of panic.
"I'm the one who searched you when you were brought in," he said suddenly. "I found your weapon, but I didn't take it."
"You think that will make me spare you?" Amir closed in. He didn't have time to chat with this person.
"Hehe, I don't care about life or death." John Morley spread his arms wide. "Countless lives were born in my hands and then killed by my own hands. And those babies we captured... I continuously drew their blood, read the data. Those who met the requirements, I arranged stimulation training for them. Hahaha, that's right! I had them besieged by droids, only able to defend themselves with alloy scrap metal! I strapped them into neural interrogation chairs, watching them suffer in agony! As long as they could awaken a powerful Force, they were heroes! Otherwise, they were disposed of like trash!"
The emitter of Amir's lightsaber hovered inches from his neck.
"Mona... Mona..." Milisen, standing by the bacta tank, seemed to have lost her soul, staring blankly as if trapped in a nightmare.
"Hehehe... Yes! And this child! A piece of trash with no sense of the Force! She got the ending she deserved. Eliminated!" John Morley seemed to have fallen into a frenzy, laughing and shouting madly.
Amir's eyes grew colder. The desire to extract information from him faded bit by bit. He just wanted to kill this animal!
"Yes, you're angry! Think about everything I've done! I deserve to die! Come on!!! Use your anger to kill me!! Let me see just what results all our efforts on you have produced!!!"
Amir looked at Milisen, who was so overcome with grief by the tank that she couldn't even shed a tear. He looked at the frail corpse floating inside. He thought of the interrogation chair, and the pain-filled emotions still overflowing from 032, even in his coma.
Rage rushed uncontrollably to his brain, urging him to strike.
Amir swung the lightsaber in an arc to the left.
This wasn't an attack! It was gathering power!
Suddenly, the air around them seemed to freeze. John Morley felt as if he had plunged into the bottom of a glacier. Darkness! Pain! He couldn't help but tremble! And none of it could be stopped, as if he were falling into an abyss! The instruments on all sides groaned under the pressure. The lid of the bacta tank cracked with a piercing screech!
Suffocation!
The feeling of suffocation flooded John Morley's mind. His throat felt as if it were being gripped by an invisible hand. He struggled desperately, his hands clawing madly at his neck, but he couldn't touch anything.
At this moment, he finally knew what despair tasted like.
But he smiled. It was a sick smile. It was as if, in his madness, an emotion that shouldn't have been there had blended in. It was... gratification.
It was as if watching his child grow up, fulfilling his expectations.
But in the next second, his expression vanished, replaced by sheer disbelief.
"Wh... Wha...?!"
As if trying to pop his eyes from their sockets, he desperately raised his right hand and pointed in Amir's direction.
The gray-robed youth, after raising his sword, had simply retracted the blade. He was watching Morley with no expression.
How could he? How could he!
He had clearly fallen to the dark side, obtained powerful strength! The work I spent my whole life creating had clearly achieved its most perfect form!
John Morley suddenly realized something. He snapped his neck to the side, looking at that piece of trash next to him—the one of the same nature as the dead Mona!
That little girl was raising her right hand, her fingers curled as if crushing something unseen.
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