Jedi Temple, Coruscant | 19 BBY
The Force convulsed.
I had sensed disturbances before. On Christophsis when the droids overran the refugee camp. On Rhen Var when Master Drallig and I stumbled into that Separatist ambush and three Jedi Knights died screaming. The Force rippled with every death, every act of profound violence, like dropping stones into still water.
This was not a ripple.
This was the ocean itself turning inside out.
My hand found my lightsaber before conscious thought caught up. The weapon practically leapt into my palm, answering some primal alarm that resonated through my bones. Blue plasma ignited with that familiar snap-hiss as I spun toward the Temple entrance, boots sliding across polished stone still warm from the afternoon sun.
Senator Organa's speeder hovered three meters behind me, repulsorlifts humming their mechanical song. The Alderaanian diplomat leaned out slightly, confusion creasing his features. He'd come to speak with the Council about something. Relief efforts, maybe. The war had ground so many worlds to dust that I'd stopped keeping track of which ones needed saving.
"I'm sorry, sir." The voice came from Sergeant Crest, leader of the security detachment. Good man. Solid. I'd served with his company on Felucia when we'd extracted those colonists from the fungal forests. "No one is permitted to enter the Temple at this time."
I felt the wrongness before I saw it.
Crest's DC-15 carbine angled toward the Senator's speeder. Not lowered, not holstered. Aimed. Behind him, eleven more troopers adopted firing stances with the kind of mechanical precision that spoke of drill and repetition rather than thought.
"Sergeant?" I stepped forward, my free hand raised in what I hoped was a calming gesture. "Stand down. The Senator is cleared for..."
The blaster swung toward me.
My mouth went dry. Crest and I had shared ration packs in the trenches. He'd pulled me out of a collapsed bunker on Christophsis, dug through rubble with his bare hands until he found me half-crushed and gasping. He'd told me about his son back on Kamino, how the kid was already showing promise in the training sims.
The bolt screamed past my ear close enough that I felt my skin blister.
Form IV responded before my mind could process the betrayal. Cin Drallig had beaten Ataru into my muscles until the movements became reflex, until my body knew the forms better than my conscious mind ever could. Sai tok, the diagonal slash, caught the bolt mid-flight and sent it careening into the permacrete wall where it left a smoking crater.
More shots followed. The world contracted to simple mathematics: twelve shooters, rate of fire, angles of attack, probable trajectories. My blade wove patterns of light and survival as I flowed left, a Hawk-bat Swoop that carried me clear of the kill zone.
"Zett!" Organa's shout barely registered beneath the whine of superheated tibanna gas and the Force's continued howling.
I landed in a crouch, ligthsaber humming its defiant song as my eyes found the Temple entrance.
Master Shaak Ti stumbled backward through the doorway, her blade a crimson blur against incoming fire. Temple Guards collapsed in pools of their own blood, their ceremonial pikes clattering uselessly against stone. And beyond them, deeper in the halls I'd walked every day since I was seven years old, I heard screaming.
Children's voices.
The younglings.
Something broke inside my chest. Not metaphorically. I felt it, a physical sensation like ribs cracking under pressure. The Force didn't just scream anymore. It shrieked, a sound beyond sound that threatened to shatter my mind from the inside out.
And then everything went white.
Not the white of light. The white of absence, of something fundamental being ripped away from reality. Text blazed across my vision in sharp, angular letters that had no business existing anywhere except maybe a tactical display.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZING...]
[DETECTING CRITICAL THREAT]
[SURVIVAL PROTOCOL ACTIVATING]
I tried to blink it away. Couldn't. The words hung there, superimposed over the real world like some kind of faulty HUD. A blaster bolt clipped my shoulder and pain exploded through my arm, bright and immediate and viciously real. The phantom text flickered but didn't fade.
Twelve clones advanced with the mechanical precision of men following orders they didn't question. Good soldiers. That's what they'd always been. Good soldiers following orders.
I moved.
Ataru is not a defensive form. Master Drallig used to say it was a confession of intent, an announcement that you planned to tear through your opponents with speed and fury until nothing remained standing. The Way of the Hawk-Bat. Aggressive, acrobatic, overwhelming.
My blade found Crest's carbine and sheared through the barrel before he could correct his aim. I registered his shock through the Force, felt the ripple of fear from the troopers flanking him. Good. Fear meant hesitation. Hesitation meant survival.
I spun, became a whirlwind of blue light and desperate motion. Two more carbines fell to pieces. A trooper lunged with a vibroblade and I caught his wrist, used his own momentum to hurl him into his brothers. They went down in a crash of plastoid armor and curses.
The text pulsed brighter, demanding attention I couldn't spare.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZATION: 47%]
[WARNING: HOST HEALTH DECLINING]
[ANALYZING COMBAT DATA...]
Get out of my head. The thought came savage and primal. I had bigger problems than hallucinations. Like the three clones regrouping behind cover, or the gunship I could see approaching from the upper traffic lanes, or the fact that the Temple was burning and I could feel Masters dying through the Force like stars winking out of existence.
I vaulted over a ferrocrete barrier, landed behind the clone formation. Low sweep, textbook Ataru. Two troopers collapsed with severed legs. Their agony hit me through the Force and I swallowed bile. These were Crest's men. Good men who'd bled beside me in a dozen campaigns.
What had happened to them?
Senator Organa's speeder retreated, engines screaming as he pulled away from the massacre. Smart. He had no weapons, no armor. He'd just be another casualty if he stayed. But I saw more speeders incoming, more white armor, more death.
The phantom text blazed.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZATION: 89%]
[CRITICAL THREAT DETECTED: ORDER 66 EXECUTION IN PROGRESS]
[MANDATORY QUEST ACTIVATED]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
QUEST: SURVIVE ORDER 66
Rank: EMERGENCY
Description: The Grand Army of the Republic has been ordered to eliminate all Jedi. Survival probability: 3.7%.
Objective: Escape the Jedi Temple alive.
Failure Condition: Death
Reward: SYSTEM FULL ACTIVATION
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Three point seven percent. The number sat in my brain like a shard of ice. Not three percent. Not four. Three point seven. Specific. Calculated. As if something had tallied every variable and determined with mathematical certainty that I was already dead.
The cold clarity that followed surprised me. Perhaps I'd already accepted death the moment I ignited my lightsaber. Perhaps I'd been dying slowly for three years, ground down by war until the prospect of oblivion felt more like rest than terror.
But I wasn't dead yet.
I reached into the Force, felt the clones' positions like points of heat against my awareness. Not individuals anymore. Not Crest and his brothers. Just targets. Threats. Obstacles between me and survival.
The thought disgusted me even as I moved on it.
Time stretched. My perception accelerated, found the spaces between moments where decisions crystallized into action. A clone's finger tightening on his trigger. Another raising his carbine. A third reaching for a thermal detonator at his belt.
I flowed between them like water through cracks, my blade singing its lethal song. One carbine bisected. Another's power cell punctured, sending the weapon sparking to the ground. The trooper with the detonator took my boot to his chest and flew backward into two of his squadmates.
My shoulder burned where the bolt had grazed me. I could feel blood soaking into my tunic, warm and sticky. The adrenaline flooding my system kept the worst of the pain at bay but I knew from experience that wouldn't last. Soon the shock would wear off and the injury would start screaming for attention.
The text flared again.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZATION: 100%]
[WELCOME, PLAYER]
[YOUR SURVIVAL BEGINS NOW]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
STATUS DISPLAY ACTIVATED
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
HP: 967/1,200
FP: 518/650
DEBUFF ACTIVE: [SHOULDER WOUND] | HP regen reduced by 30%
BUFF ACTIVE: [ADRENALINE SURGE] | AGI +15% for 60 seconds
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
HP. FP. Buffs and debuffs. The terminology belonged in a training simulation, not reality. Not here, not with the Temple burning and Masters dying and the clone army I'd bled beside for three years suddenly trying to murder me.
Behind me, something exploded. The shockwave hit my back like a physical blow and I stumbled, nearly lost my footing. Master J'oopi Shé had emerged from the Temple, her twin blades carving through the clone formation with furious precision. Hope flickered in my chest.
A thermal detonator arced through the air.
The explosion turned everything orange. Heat washed over me, searing and absolute. I threw up a hand on pure instinct, reaching desperately into the Force for something, anything to shield me from the blast.
Skill Usage: Force Barrier
Chance = 34%
~~~
Success!
-87 FP
+15 XP
The shockwave hit my barrier and stopped. I felt it like catching a freight speeder with my bare hands, the impact reverberating through my entire being. The Force tore out of me, ripped away in a sudden hemorrhage that left me gasping. My knees buckled. Black spots danced across my vision.
But I was alive.
Master Shé was not.
Her presence in the Force snuffed out between one heartbeat and the next, there and then gone with such finality that my mind refused to accept it. I'd trained with her. Sparred with her. She'd been old when I arrived at the Temple as a child and seemed immortal in the way all Masters seemed immortal.
Senator Organa's speeder swung back around, passenger door sliding open. "GET IN!"
I didn't think. Couldn't afford to. Three running steps, a Force-enhanced leap that carried me across ten meters of empty air, and I crashed into the passenger compartment hard enough to crack my ribs against the seat frame. Organa punched the throttle before I'd even grabbed the crash webbing.
The speeder screamed into Coruscant's skylanes.
I twisted in my seat, watched the Temple recede below us. Smoke poured from shattered windows. Gunships circled in holding patterns, their searchlights cutting through the gathering dusk. And through the Force, I felt them. Every death. Every extinguished light. Every Master and Knight and Padawan dying in the halls I'd called home.
Master Drallig. My teacher. The man who'd shaped me from a clumsy child into something resembling a warrior. I reached for him through the Force, desperate for any sign of life.
Nothing. Just void where his presence should have been.
My lightsaber was still ignited, humming in my white-knuckled grip. I couldn't remember deciding to keep holding it. Couldn't remember half of what had just happened. Everything felt distant, wrapped in cotton, as if my mind had decided reality was too sharp and needed dulling.
Organa was talking. Asking questions. Where should we go. Was I injured. What in the name of every god in the galaxy had just happened.
I couldn't answer. Couldn't find words for what I'd just witnessed.
The text appeared again, softer this time. Almost gentle in its clinical detachment.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
QUEST COMPLETE: SURVIVE ORDER 66
+1,000 XP
+1 PERK POINT
TITLE UNLOCKED: [Survivor of the Purge]
SYSTEM FULL ACTIVATION COMPLETE
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[Welcome, Zett Jukassa. Your journey begins in ashes. But from ashes, even stars are born.]
The words hung in my vision for three heartbeats before fading. I slumped against the seat, suddenly aware of every injury, every bruise, every place where my body had been pushed past its limits and found wanting.
Below us, the Jedi Temple burned.
And somewhere in the smoke and fire and death, the galaxy shifted on its axis. The Republic I'd sworn to protect had murdered its protectors. The soldiers I'd called brothers had become executioners. Everything I'd known, everything I'd believed, everything I'd been for sixteen years had just been incinerated in the span of minutes.
The Force still screamed.
But quieter now. Fading. Like the last echoes of a funeral dirge disappearing into silence.
I closed my eyes and tried not to hear it.