It didn't take long for Saryn to reach the top of the stairs leading outside of the Sacrificial Chamber.
'This has been interesting. That old man was indeed strong in the Dark Side.' Saryn couldn't help but sneer at his father's shortsightedness.
'What can I even expect from my Father?'
'He has been away from Korriban for more than twenty years and still barely became a Lord by becoming someone else's servant. Of course, he wouldn't know how to recognize who is strong and who is weak.'
The humid chamber Saryn now found himself in had four different paths.
One led to the main hall, where Saryn had killed the tomb looters, and another was toward the Sacrificial Chamber, where he had just met Spindral.
Of the two remaining paths, the one in front of Saryn led upward and was probably the path toward the tomb's exit.
"The path on the left looks like it leads deeper into the tomb." Saryn pondered for a while.
"I'll go check it out." He wasn't interested in exiting the tomb just yet. He wanted to see if he could find something useful in the depths of this place.
Following his instinct, Saryn descended into the depths of the Tomb of Ajunta Pall once again.
Well, calling it the depths was really overstating things. The stairway turned out to be only a few tens of meters deep.
Though on the way down, Saryn had discovered that on either side of the hall, some ancient, rusty droids were kept, obviously deactivated after the millennia they had spent there.
When he finally reached the chamber at the end of the stairway, Saryn couldn't help but smile.
"Indeed, the Force is never wrong. To think an armory could be found in this place." Looking at the five remaining Ancient Sith Warblades that had been left on a now rusty weapon rack, Saryn directly took one in his hand and swung it around a few times.
The warblade was still in prime condition despite the centuries she had spent down underground. Its body from the handle to the tip of the blade was entirely gray, even approaching black in some areas.
It looked simple but deadly.
"This will do just fine." Content, Saryn did one last quick scan of the room, and, seeing nothing else in the room, he departed.
This had been a short trip, but he had gotten his hands on a powerful Warblade, so he was in a relatively good mood.
While the blade, obviously, couldn't compare to modern lightsabers, it should still prove much more helpful than his training saber.
Saryn didn't linger in the next room and went directly up toward the exit.
"Would you look at that?" When he arrived at the top of the stairs, Saryn found himself in a large chamber filled with a group of k'lor'slugs.
Probably some of those that were out hunting too far away to come back in time when he had blown up their egg chambers.
With a sadistic smile, Saryn quickly crushed the few remaining bugs.
Two paths now stood before him. One in front, obviously leading to the exit, and one to the left.
"Right, I still need to find the stolen artifacts before I leave the tomb." He took the left path and once again went down toward the depths of the tomb.
This time, the stairs were much longer, and Saryn had to walk for half an hour until he finally reached the bottom.
There, another giant hall opened up before Saryn's eyes.
With a quick scan of the hall, Saryn discovered a large camp of tomb looters at the very end of the room.
This camp was much bigger than the one he had decimated earlier and was filled with tomb looters.
The infrastructure here was much better, and most of the barricades were likely made of durasteel.
From a quick count, Saryn estimated that the camp had, at the very least, fifty people, and this only included those he could see from his position.
The camp consisted of six large tents, which Saryn guessed could hold about ten men each.
'So they are probably around sixty or seventy… It is a perfect opportunity for me to try this Sith Warblade.' Saryn didn't hesitate much.
He had never doubted himself in his life. He was proud and mighty; such a lowly bunch of tomb looters wouldn't pose any danger to him, no matter how many of them there were.
Having said that, Saryn let his intense hatred and pride consume him. The air around his body seemed to wrap under the pressure created by the dark side of the Force.
He burst out into a sprint toward the still unsuspecting mercenaries keeping guard on the defensive barricade surrounding the camp.
When he arrived in range of the barricade, Saryn executed a force-powered jump, easily landing on the barricade just behind one of the still clueless mercenaries.
His newly acquired Warblade easily decapitated the tomb looter closest to him as if he had just cut through paper.
"Thud." The head fell on the durasteel floor with a low thud, causing the tomb looter closest to the one who had just died to turn around in surprise.
"One of the Acolytes is attacking the camp! Call the leader!" The mercenary directly opened fire at Saryn and screamed to alert the camp.
"Yes! Go ahead, call him! It will make my job easier. Now die!" Saryn didn't even let the man fire more than three times before cutting him in half with a slash of his Warblade.
'This thing really is nice to use.' Saryn thought as he jumped down from the barricade and killed another one of the tomb looters.
'No wonder the ancient Sith Lords were so fond of using warblades. It cuts through skin without having to put any strength behind the slash, as he continued mowing down the mercenaries.
Compared to the training blade he had brought with him from Kaas City, the Warblade resonated deeply with the dark side and allowed him to exert much more power.
It was probably due to the amount of time it had spent in the middle of this tomb, where the dark side permeated every single corner..
After having killed the fifteenth mercenary, Saryn finally saw the leader appear.
He wore durasteel armor and was much larger than the other men around him.
Surprisingly, the leader was also a blade user.
"Finally decided to join the party? I was about to finish without you!" Looking at the man fuming with anger at the sight of his decimated men, Saryn couldn't help but let out a jovial invitation.
"I will kill you painfully, Sith! You will beg me for death once I am done with you! Men! Attack! We are killing a Sith today and avenging the others!" The Leader cursed loudly and ordered his men as he charged toward Saryn.
"Your subordinate leading the other camp was the same." As he endured the mercenaries' reckless assault without difficulty, Saryn started taunting.
"Full of courage and splendor, but at the end of the day, I remained standing while he cowered and begged for mercy. Do you think you'll be any different?" Being surrounded by ten or so mercenaries, Saryn, who had been fighting without form since he arrived on Korriban, quickly assumed the opening stance of Form VII: Juyo.
"IT WAS YOU! I WILL KILL YOU EVEN IF IT IS THE LAST THING I DO!" The Leader's anger flared once again.
Saryn, with the same smile, rushed to meet him, and their blades clashed, sending sparks flying everywhere.
"Will you now? I can't wait to see it!" Saryn quickly retracted his blade only to have it come back in a savage slash from the left, making the mercenary leader helplessly fall on his side.
"See! How are you going to kill me now!? You can't even stand properly anymore, and I barely used any of my powers." Saryn taunted once again.
"Tsk! How boring. Once again, I only get weaklings to fight. Time to say goodbye." Disappointed, he looked at the leader, preparing to finish him off.
"Help the Leader!" As Saryn's slash came down on the leader, one of the remaining mercenaries blocked the strike with his C52-Assault Enforcer Rifle. The result, as one could expect, was the weapon being cut in half.
"That's it! struggle till the end, it will only make my anger grow stronger!" Seeing the courageous action of the loyal mercenary, Saryn's boredom disappeared from his eyes, and the excitement came back.
Sith Purebloods were, for the most part, an extremely sadistic species.
They had been hunters since their earliest recorded history, and even back then, they had enjoyed toying with their prey.
That could be because the entire species was attuned to the dark side.
The loyal man tried to punch Saryn, but before he could even touch his clothes, a force-powered kick blew his head off his body, killing him on the spot.
Blood began to spurt from where the man's head had previously been located, covering the face of the mercenary leader who had been trying to get up.
All of the men who had started charging toward Saryn once again came to a stop in terror. Two of them even started running away right away.
"Is that it? I guess I got my hopes up for nothing once again…"
"Well, I shouldn't expect anything from tomb looters."
"That was a pitiful display." Under the remaining mercenaries' terrorized eyes, Saryn approached the stunned leader.
"See, isn't that what I told you. Always the same with people like you."
"You were full of courage before, but now look at you. All alone, abandoned by those you led, trembling in terror, being suppressed by the might of your better."
"Too bad you couldn't avenge the other guy, huh?" Saryn looked pitifully at the now trembling mercenary leader. The man's face was now full of tears caused by his own powerlessness.
"How pathetic." With a sigh, Saryn directly pierced the leader's brain with his warblade, ending his miserable life.
After having killed the leader, Saryn took around an hour to find all the remaining Tomb Looters and killed them all.
Once it was done, he quickly arrived back at the camp and finally got a look at what the Imperial Military had described as 'priceless artifacts'.
"Are those really considered precious artifacts?"
"The only special thing about them is the fact that they are thousands of years old. They barely touch on the dark side… "
"Well, at least I'll make some money, I guess." Saryn was disappointed. At most, those were ancient pieces of junk, ancient, sure, but still junk.
"I guess it's time to leave this tomb." With one last look at the camp, Saryn shook his head.
"I'll come back once I'm officially an Acolyte of the Academy. I'll have more time to explore this place then." He quickly departed from the camp.
He was still only halfway through the Tomb of Ajunta Pall despite having been inside for half a day already.
'The Dark Lords sure knew how to enjoy themselves even in death.'
As Saryn walked through the tomb's chambers toward the exit, he tried to recall what he had learned about Ajunta Pall in the family archive.
Despite being a minor noble house, House Seak had been around for nearly two thousand years.
They never produced a true powerhouse, only a few Lords, but even those were at the very bottom of the hierarchy amongst their peers.
The only way they managed to remain nobles this long was through their incredible luck.
No matter what generation of the head of the house, from the first till his father, they had always managed to serve the correct masters.
An example of that was becoming one of the first noble houses to follow the current emperor when he established dominance over the Sith.
Thanks to that, they enjoyed the next thousand years without worry. Most recently, his father had also pledged himself to Darth Vowran.
And he had managed to do so even before the Dark Lord ascended to his seat as a Dark Council Member. This allowed their family to stay unbothered once again.
This was maybe the only advantage to being some of the weakest Sith Lords.
You were mostly unnoticed by the people with enough power to annihilate you, something Saryn was grateful for, seeing how weak the members of his house had been.
It is unclear whether or not he would have ever existed in this galaxy had it not been the case.
'Ajunta Pall, the first Dark Lord. He was the one who created the Sith Code and one of the most revered masters of early Sith Alchemy… '
'From what I gathered in the family archive, it's said that before his death, he created a Sith Holocron recording everything he learned about Sith Alchemy.'
'If I could find that, I would be able to get insight into the purest and most primitive form of Sith Alchemy.'
'There is also his famed Warblade... There is a record of it having been found by Darth Revan a few hundred years back, but it hasn't been seen since then…'
'I also remember some texts about a mask and maybe an armor, but nothing really concrete about those two items.'
'Anyway, if those things exist, they should still be in the undiscovered chambers of this tomb.'
'Well, except for the warblade, since Darth Revan took it.'
As he was thinking about how useful it would be if he found even a single one of those items, Saryn was interrupted by the sounds of an ongoing blaster exchange ahead.
When he walked into the chamber, surprise appeared briefly in Saryn's eyes.