As Ithron moved closer, he could tell the figure was in the process of getting to its feet.

Hold!

The figure activated its lightsabre. Ithron carried on walking.

In the name of the Light, I command you! Come no closer! This is sacred ground, and you will not defile it!

"You... command... me?" Ithron replied, his voice radiating puzzlement. "And what's more, you command me in the name of the light? Here and now, when you can feel the dark reaching out to smother what's left of your order here? What power do you think your light has?"

Ithron stoppped now he was no more than twenty metres from the other man and laughed. He could sense the power of the Jedi in front of him, but surrounded by the gathering dark of the Sith invasion, he felt no need for fear.

"You'll forgive me if your command doesn't fill me with terror." He turned to the soldiers. "Kill him."

As the soldiers clattered passed him and began to open fire on the Jedi, Ithron shrugged the black cloak off his shoulders to allow him to move more freely. In another instant, he had activated his lightsabre. He held it at his side.

"You'll have to excuse the cliché of black clothes, red lightsabre and ordering my soldiers to kill you." He shouted as the Jedi reacted to the blaster bolts flying through the air. The soldiers of the Inquisition, in fact, were performing admirably. As their training cut in, they spread out and covered the plaza in laser fire. The theory went that because each soldier was so far from his neighbours, it would be more difficult for the Jedi to kill any of them - he would be shot as soon as he took his attention away from defending himself, making it impossible to strike out. That was the theory, at least. Ithron doubted it would work.

Still, it's interesting to watch, he thought. I wonder if any of those goons called for support.

With no passengers this time, Demonakos made his way back to Theed quickly and was soon searching the streets for victims. He quickly found some: a squad of Imperial soldiers doing double time down the main street. With a grin he dove, aiming for the middle of the squad.

One man in the middle of the squad died instantly as Demonakos landed on him, while most of the others got knocked back from the sudden invisible ‘thing’ in the midst of them. Before the squad could really react he lashed out. His tail struck out at those behind him while his forearms and jaws attacked those in front of him. Scarlet wounds seemed to appear out of nowhere on the soldiers and he randomly twisted about to reach other targets: tail striking over his head or between his legs for instance. Within a moment all of this squad were dead and Demonakos chuckled to himself, wondering what they were thinking as their squad mates fell around them.

He heard voices and he turned to see another squad approaching, no doubt to investigate what happened to this one. With a smile he leaped high and toward them. Midway he removed the invisibility spell, though the fools didn’t bother looking up until the last moment. Again he landed in the middle of them, only this time he just managed to break the legs of one that didn’t move out of the way fast enough. He looked at them, looking for reactions but was disappointed to see helmets hiding their faces. Oh well.

The dance started again, just as they decided it was a good idea to shoot him. He twisted about in ways that would have been impossible for a mortal being, which he was not, resulting in some of their shots hitting their fellows. His tail slashed and bashed, at one point sending a head flying: did it just fly toward the Jedi Temple? Oh well.

One of them got lucky, or at least the mortal no doubt thought he did. A brief annoying pain hit his skull and Demonakos paused a moment in his destruction to finger the wound curiously. “Good shot.” He told the man, whom had quickly realized he was the only one still alive. “But it did you no good.” The wound healed itself before the man’s eyes and Demonakos grinned at him, just before his tail struck out and impaled him in the face. “A blow for a blow….” Demonakos said. “But unlike me….you didn’t survive it.”

That old, familiar dance.

Laser blasts hammered the Temple staircase all around him. He glanced down at his lightsaber, almost as if noticing for the first time that it had already begun to deflect any shots on the path to strike their intended target. He returned his gaze to their leader, now quite obviously the Sith. Did the man have any idea how many times Zark had done this before?

“You'll have to excuse the cliché of black clothes, red lightsabre and ordering my soldiers to kill you.”

As the last word left the Sith’s mouth, Zark arched his saber, sending a blaster bolt flying back toward the Imperial who had fired it. The man crumpled to the ground, felled by a shot right between the eyes. His placement was precise, mechanical. One eye saw the staggered formation of Imperial troopers standing, and falling, before him. The other saw the face of every innocent victim he had ever taken the life of. In the middle, they blended, and the Jedi was at peace.

For every Imperial life he took, the pain lessened. These men had come to burn Naboo to the ground. And though some of them might have good inside them, just soldiers following orders, they made up one piece of the pendulum swinging in the direction of the Darkside. There was no other way, he knew. Their lives must end for his to go on, and for the first time in a long time Zark wanted his life.

The whirlpool of emotions he had felt within the Temple, during his trial, faded away. All that was left was serenity, as if a storm raged all around him and he was the eye of it. He was no longer the troubled spirit, no longer the Fallen Jedi. He was no longer the sinner, the parasite. He was Zark Ekan once again, Arix Askrima at long last. He was Jedi.

Another aimed deflection, another trooper dead. He began to descend the stairs. As the blaster fire intensified, so too did the calculated saber strikes, and soon the Imperials were ducking and dodging as they had expected him to. His arms moved in a blur, faster than any human being was capable of. Another trooper fell to his retaliation.

He reached the bottom of the stairway, and halted. His saber continued to work its dance, deflecting blaster shots, but they became less precisely redirected. The Imperials no longer had to duck in fear of returning laser blasts. His concentration left his arms and redirected itself within his mind. He gathered himself mentally, and finally…

His maw opened unnaturally wide, a beam of the purest white light spewing forth from within him. His eyes glowed white, and soon they too lanced out in beams. The Imperial troopers, staring at him as they fired their weaponry, caught the beams full on. Their retinas overloaded, causing no physical damage but blinding them temporarily.

Several screamed, confused and unable to see. Some stumbled and fell. The blaster fire continued, albeit sporadically and not with any direction to it, and then stopped. Zark charged forward, blinking away the blurriness of his own vision after unleashing such a magnitude of raw Force energy from his own pupils. He made a dash for the Sith, hoping to compensate for his blurred vision with the element of surprise.

Lightsaber swinging, he lunged.

The Jedi reacted, returning the Imperial blaster bolts with almost perfect accuracy. Ithron was unimpressed. Any experienced Apprentice could manage what the Jedi was doing. Soon though, the Jedi's accuracy started to waver and his speed decreased.

Ahh. Tiring Already? Ithron thought, taking a pace forwards.

Suddenly though, he felt a massive disturbance in the fabric of the Force. Throwing himself to the ground just in time, he was aware of massive sheet of light and Force energy filling the space above him.

"....the hell?" he murmured, leaping to his feet. Looking around, he could see that the Imperials that weren't dead were badly dazed. Some seemed unconscious; perhaps they would come round later. Ithron had no idea what had just happened, and no time to think - the Jedi was already running. He seemed somehow off-balance though, Ithron noticed. Almost as if the performance with the light had affected him as well.

Feeling the familiar cycle of anger, fear and hate energise his soul for battle, Ithron leapt to his feet almost as the Jedi was on him. Parrying the initial confused blows hurriedly, he was forced to step backwards to orient himself.
The Jedi was recovering fast, clearly. Using the last few moments of his enemy's confusion, Ithron went on the offensive. Striking hard and striking fast, he attempted to push his enemy back.

As lightsabre met lightsabre, the thought hadn't yet occurred to Ithron that he had never fought anyone of this calibre before.

His eyes burned and stung, blurring and refocusing sporadically. The hazy form of his Sith opponent was just about all he could make out. Squeezing them shut, he called upon his sixth sense to aid him, and the Force replaced his eyesight. It was a sensation that was difficult to describe to anyone who hadn’t before experienced. Zark saw the incoming lightsaber slashes in feelings rather than eyesight, his opponent’s movements were reverberations in the world around him that translated somehow into a sort of perception.

He could feel the rage burning within his enemy, for the most part wild and uncontrolled, but on a more base level harnessed into strength and power. Shuddering to himself, he vaguely recalled the feeling of giving into that hatred, although he still could not place exactly when on the still jumbled timeline of his life. It echoed out of the apprentice’s body in pulses, clashing invisibly with the pulses of calm Zark’s own presence in the Force, his own aura of sorts, emanated.

As Zark slowly regained his sense of balance, the desperate blocks he had been offering in response to the Sith’s concentrated attack subtly morphed into more precise, skillful deflections and parries. He maneuvered his opponent’s weapon with every connection, offering little in retaliation but making it more difficult for the apprentice to continue his successive strikes, slowly but surely lengthening the time it took the Sith to recover from each parry in order to strike again.

Zark’s eyes opened, blinking away the last of the blurriness and adjusting to taking in both visual and Force-enhanced perception. None of the Imperial soldiers around them had yet recovered from his assault. Most of them, in fact, were out of the fight for good, unconscious or near it. He had underestimated the power of his own abilities. He would only have to worry about his Sith opponent for a while yet, perhaps enough time to finish the fight, depending upon how skilled in lightsaber combat his enemy truly was.

He didn’t have much time to draw things out with this particular Sith. There were bound to be more of them in the area, and he had no way of knowing when reinforcements of any sort would arrive at the lone Force user’s aid. He could not afford to be reckless, but he would have to end this combat quickly. There was much to be done on this day, he knew.

His artful deflections of his opponent’s assault continued, but he knew that he would have to strike again soon. First, however, he would have to test his enemy. The Sith came in with a hard thrust, intended to pierce Zark’s stomach if he did not prevent it. Slashing across with his own weapon, the Jedi knocked his enemy’s lightsaber off wide to the side. It was not enough time for him to score a hit with his saber, even an apprentice would recover too quickly for a successful strike to occur, but he wasn’t looking to strike with his saber.

Lashing out low with his right foot, he aimed a slamming kick at the Sith’s kneecap, hoping to either take the leg out from under the man or, at the very least, knock him off balance enough for Zark to capitalize on a moment of weakness and find an opening in his opponent’s defense.

He was getting bored.

Demonakos had killed a good score of soldiers by now and while their attempts to stop him were amusing, it was no challenge to him. Plus it wasn’t these soldiers that were the true problem in regards to what he believed to be his purpose in this galaxy. After polishing off the latest squad he cloaked himself in invisibility and went in search of something more entertaining. He didn’t have to search for long.

Ah….what do we have here? He thought as he came upon the duel in front of the Jedi Temple. The endless battle between darkness and light…though neither likely of them know beyond the threat of each other’s presence the danger the galaxy as a whole is in.

He sat down, content to just watch and to not interfere. The Sith was an apprentice he could tell, while the Jedi was at the top of his ranking. Unless the Sith got extremely lucky, he would no doubt lose this duel, though whether he would lose his life as a result even Demonakos couldn’t say.

Ithron was being pushed back and all his attempts to strike his opponent were being thwarted. The frustration was starting to set in and the Apprentice's mind began to cloud with the familiar red fog of battle-rage. The Voice, ever a companion to all Sith, began to speak for the first time since his duel with Mira, back on Xa Fel.

Release Me.

The voice was a mere whisper, an echo of his concious thoughts, but impossible to ignore.

His Jedi opponent knocked Ithron's lightsabre off course and the Sith prepared his own retaliatory strike. Seconds before it happened though, Ithron was aware that the enemy was going for his knee. The Sith moved, but too late. The Jedi's kick had connected to its target and connected well. The second's warning had, however, been enough for Ithron to come up with something: Absorbing the energy of the impact as best as he could. he launched himself into a Force-assisted forward flip over the head of the Jedi.

Ithron sliced his sabre below him, aiming for his opponent's shoulder, before landing on his feet. Now facing the temple with his back to his enemy, he had no idea if the blow had hit home, but didn't wait to find out. As he spun on his feet, he became aware that the Voice was fading - the Voice, the controller of raw aggression, was quietened by Ithron's use of controlled skill in his dodge.

You'll need me again soon; you'll call...

Taking a pace forwards, towards the Jedi, pain shot up through Ithron's right leg. Mentally blocking it out as best he could, Ithron brought his sabre to bear on his opponent, intending to launch a series of rapid strikes to break through his opponent's defences.

Palace, Theed


Plumes of smoke reached up into the morning sky, dancing about with the wind in the capricious style only nature could create. To gaze upon the many tendrils of black was both beautiful and horrifying; which depended entirely on your allegiance. To the Jedi whose arrogance had been paid for in blood, the view was terrible no doubt as teams of Sith Knights and even apprentices methodically searched the city, each Force-user accompanied by a squad or platoon or even company of the red tuniced men of the Inquisitoriate. To the Sith and their allies, the view was one of satisfaction.


" I believe we've done well, then. Seven days since we've arrived and it's all going very well indeed."


General Heydrich, commander of the Imperial detachment - an Inquisition-only detachment - smiled thinly to himself. Perched atop a spire on the Palace's south wing, he had an unobstructed view of the city of Theed and the forrests that surrounded it. He watched the smoke billow up into the sky and even faintly heard the cry of sirens as civil servants rushed to and fro extinguishing only those blazes the Sith allowed them to. Sure enough, the crash of the water fall on which the spire was built drowned out much, but the collective sounds of the city still greeted the man's ears.


" Almost, General. We have confirmed the neutralizing of over two hundred Jedi, apprentices, and family members who read with a high enough midi-chlorian count, but there are still fifty or so unaccounted for."


The General crossed his arms and turned; his red uniform shirt and whitish-blond hair were silhouetted against a panorama of rolling hills and tree-dotted plains that rose and fell up to the base of a tall mountain range on the horizon. He smiled anew, refusing to let his mood be dampened. " We all know, even our Sith friends, that this operation will not be completed over night. We have struck the greatest blow against the Jedi since the Purge itself. We are not done, gentlemen, not by a long shot."


" And those that are here, in hiding?"


Heydrich growled, under his breath. Colonel Axmann was a smart man, almost brilliant, and was the only Imperial Officer wearing the uniform of the Inquisition to wear the twin carmine stripes of the General Staff on his trousers. The short, thin man was, however, a considerable drain on the mood of triumph Heydrich so depserately wanted to maintain. " Colonel, send word to the Citadel we are requesting an additional regiment be detached and sent here. This is where we are needed most at the moment, thus it is here we should concentrate, no?"


" General, we have reports of several active pursuits at the moment - and rather disturbing ones about independent search squads slaughtered. What shall we do about the latter?"


" A guerilla it seems is seeking to stay and cause us some trouble. Until we root out who this is and eliminate this threat, all deployments will be in two-squad units at the smallest. As for the pursuits, there should not be an idle hand among our men. See that every pursuit is ended quickly; I want these scum dealt with so I can get back in time for the Shockball Playoffs."