The Liberator/Part 1

1,386 BBY

Day 3 of the Liberation of Milagro

Blaster fire rained down on Mali Darakhan from the top of the stairwell, but his blue blade sang in the air and turned back every shot. Chips of duracrete splintered off the walls under the force of reflected blaster bolts and the air filled with smoke. One by one the shooters dropped as their own shots returned home; two recognized the futility of their assault and launched themselves at Mali, trading death by blaster fire for death by lightsaber. A shooter vaulted the railing above, but Mali didn't even turn; he heard a choke and a crunch from behind him. Glancing back only once he had struck down the last gunman, he saw Aldayr holding the dead man by the throat with his cybernetic arm, the back of the shooter's head crushed against the wall. Aldayr pitched him over the railing to obstruct the stairs below and gave Mali a nod.

Mali took three more flights up, then almost ran Aldayr over in his scramble backward—the next line of defense was not a desperate rearguard of sentients, but war droids packed in as tightly as their bulk and armament would allow, all firing much faster than sentients ever could. Clomp, clomp echoed down the hall as they advanced.

"Bring 'em down!" Mali ordered.

Aldayr's lightsaber snap-hissed to life and hummed upward, but rather than the whirling, dopplering boomerang of a spinning double-bladed lightsaber and the sizzle of split electronics, Mali heard a persistent hisssssssss and caught an acrid smell that accompanied the smoke descending from above. He looked up in time to see Aldayr's lightsaber hovering in midair, cutting out the metal stairs themselves; before he could do anything but widen his eyes, they buckled under the weight of the droids and came down in a squealing, smashing commotion. A few sparking, blaster-tipped limbs stuck out of the ruins two floors below; they fired aimlessly until Aldayr's lightsaber swooped down to silence them.

Aldayr brought his weapon home to his hand and deactivated the blades.

"By 'bring 'em down', I actually meant the droids, not the stairs," Mali noted.

Aldayr shrugged. "Didn't you say inclarity in orders has been the ruin of too many battle plans?"

Mali rolled his eyes and grinned. "Let's go."

He looked up; Aldayr's lightsaber had torn down two floors of stairs. Getting a running start, Mali immersed himself in the Force, thinking up. A wind roared in his ears and gravity's hold on him weakened, his boots barely touching the ground. He hit the wall like a green-robed rocket and sprang, and the vertical duracrete turned into a horizontal, laser-pocked sidewalk. Forceful momentum carried him up the two stories until a kick-off jump carried him to a landing that had survived Aldayr's lightsaber.

Mali looked down for his apprentice and found Aldayr on his wrist comlink. After a moment Aldayr took the wall at a jump, bouncing off and leaping up to the broken stairs below Mali; he caught the railing with his replacement arm and hauled himself clear over the rail with one tug. "Surveillance has a Sith transport incoming."

"Air support?"

"Repulsors can't get through the Sith artillery, and fighters are at least five minutes away."

Mali grimaced. "He's running for it."

"And he's going to make it if we don't hurry."

They took the stairs at Force speed, but as they closed on the door, there was an explosion below, and voices echoed up.

"They've gotten through!"

"After them!"

Mali rolled his eyes, but Aldayr took the lightsaber from his belt. "Go get him, I've got this."

"Good luck."

"You too."

As Aldayr jogged back down the stairs, Mali slashed the lock on the rooftop door and shouldered it open. Sunlight shone down on the rooftop and the sounds of fire and explosions drifted up from below. Mali saw the man running for the far end of the roof, but the more immediate problem was the two Sith between them. One was a blonde Human woman with a look of determination bordering on mania and a collection of scars marring her looks; the other was a green-skinned Rodian wielding a lightsaber in each hand. Mali raised his blade, but shook his head. "I just want him. Stand aside and live."

The Rodian didn't deign to respond, but the woman bared her teeth. "You shouldn't have come back here, Darakhan. I won't lose twice!"

Mali hardened his face. "Me either."

The four blades snapped and cracked. The Sith came at Mali from the front together, trying to turn him so the sun was in his eyes. He concentrated his attack on the Rodian to beat through the man's one-handed grips. As the hum of a repulsor and the report of air defense artillery grew louder, Mali leaned harder on the Force to lend strength to his muscles and speed to his hands. The Rodian slashed with the blade farther from the blonde and Mali slapped it aside; rising to the bait, the Rodian slashed back on reflex, and Mali caught his wrist. Jerking the Rodian in, Mali elbowed him in the armpit to paralyze the arm, then snapped the elbow over his shoulder. The Rodian gave a wail through his snout before Mali turned into a two-handed blow that cut him in half.

Mali had a sense in the Force that the blonde woman was not without fear, though she charged him with such ferocity that he actually had to give ground; on the contrary, he had the oddest sense that she was terrified, just not of him. The scars that twisted her face gave him some context, and he felt a twinge of pity, but his compassion for the thousands of lives he could feel around him had to take precedence. Too many lives, here and elsewhere, were riding on today. He singed her sword arm, and as her hand spasmed open, he swatted her blade out of the way and stabbed her in the chest.

Across the roof, the Sith transport swung into view, a ladder dangling from its passenger compartment. The distant figured grabbed it, and Mali knew he wouldn't make it in time. But he thrust out a hand, and the three fallen lightsabers flew through the air, their red blades activating on the way. Spinning like discuses in the way Aldayr's hadn't, one slashed through the cockpit viewport while another sheared through a lower repulsor. The third carved only a superficial gash in the upper armor, but that was all right, for the first had apparently killed the pilot; the transport listed hard and banked toward the ground, and the man on the ladder had to leap back to the roof to prevent himself being dragged to a fiery death below.

As the man straightened himself, Mali closed down his lightsaber, attached it to his belt, and drew off his Corellian green robe; he dropped the robe, and the wind carried it a few meters away before it came to rest on the roof. Mali took a few slow, deep breaths, letting the Force cleanse him, wiping away fatigue, fear, and fury. Then he started forward.

"Sorry to interrupt you in the middle of shamelessly fleeing for your life, Lord Karzded."

The Theelin Sith Lord brushed the roof's dirt from his tabard and flex-cracked his knuckles. "I wondered if you'd have the hubris to return, Darakhan. Your little taunt was rather galling to my master.  She'll reward me for your death."

"And I'll bet it'd be quite a reward; I've heard she's quite a looker." Mali grinned. "And I've heard a few other things, too."

Karzded curled his lip and gestured to the edge of the roof. "You must have worked quite a political miracle for this coalition."

"You can't begin to imagine."

Karzded shrugged and took the lightsaber from his belt. "Shall we? I'll need to catch the next transport to a more tenable command position."

Mali drew his own blade. "Let's."

He had not failed to notice the curve of Karzded's lightsaber hilt, and his suspicion was confirmed when Karzded offered him a salute before tracing an X in the air so fast that, just for an instant, both red bars of the cross were visible. Mali returned the salute—being enemies was no excuse for being rude—but his mind raced. In his experience, there were two types of Makashi swordsmen. The first category was filled with those who enjoyed the trappings of grandeur and prestige, pursuing Makashi because they felt it was the "style of nobles" and holding an altogether unjustified high opinion of their own swordsmanship. In the second category were people like Master Toldin and Tirien Kal-Di—the ones who moved faster than the eye could follow and fought like they were performing surgery, painstakingly precise.

They came together in a crash of blades, and after a few exchanges Mali realized that Halicon Karzded was not exactly Honsu Toldin or Tirien Kal-Di.

The duel ranged over the roof even as smoke drifted up from below and the occasional misfired piece of ordnance exploded in midair. Karzded was agile, but Mali pressed him back without remorse. Karzded took a Forceful leap back ten meters and raised his free hand, but Mali caught the flash of Sith lightning on his lightsaber, blue electricity coiling itself around his blue blade. Surveillance droids hovered, both the Sith kind with guns attached and the Republic models feeding holo footage back to the Army, and from there into the shadowfeed they had sliced into Milagro's domestic network.

Karzded tried to sweep Mali off the roof with the Force, but the light anchored Mali and he did nothing more than wobble before pressing the Sith Lord anew. Having fought for the better part of a year with Tirien's curved-hilt lightsaber, Mali understood many of its strengths and weaknesses, and he worked at the tip of Karzded's blade, trying to force the whole weapon against his thumb and twist it out of his hand. As he had hoped, Karzded fell back on a two-handed defense rather than risk losing his weapon, but Makashi was not a two-handed style and he lost ground.

"FIRE!" Karzded screamed.

The Sith droids shot at Mali, who deflected the first few shots at Karzded. He guessed that, like every other Makashi stylist Mali knew, Karzded would be competent enough to deflect fire but not enough to reflect it along a chosen course without plenty of time to warm to the idea, and Karzded did not disappoint. As the Theelin wasted time turning shots into the roof or the sky, he gave Mali ample opportunity to reflect the next shots back to their sources and blast the Sith droids into smithereens before resuming his assault.

The Force must have warned Karzded as his boots came within meters of the edge of the roof, because he pulled back and tried a stab; there was enough weight behind it that, when Mali deflected it outwards, Karzded could glide right past on momentum and have the whole roof behind him again. It was a decent theory that collapsed when Mali parried, then smashed his elbow into Karzded's jaw just as the Theelin brought himself almost shoulder-to-shoulder. He recoiled from the blow and Mali wound up before unleashing a two-handed swing; Karzded managed the block, but the force of it knocked him to the roof's edge.

He wobbled for balance, but pushed off his back foot into a lunge. Mali answered with two rising, sweeping slashes; the first knocked the one-handed lunge high overhead, and as Karzded struggled to keep his footing, the second opened him from hip to shoulder.

The blow swept Karzded clean off the roof, and he plummeted to the ground ten stories below. Mali stepped to the edge of the roof of the building, this monument to his own magnificence that Halicon Karzded had erected over the rubble of the Milagro Government Center that had burned to ash last year. Below he saw Karzded's remains in a spreading pool of blood on the pavement, and the nearby soldiers, Sith and Republic alike, stopping to take in the sight before their gazes turned upward. Mali saw the Republic recon droids sweeping in to record him from different angles.

The wind tugged at his Jedi tunic and tousled his hair, and as he raised his blue blade to the heavens in triumph, Mali called on the Force to amplify his voice for all to hear. "People of Milagro! I have returned!"