Chapter 11: I fucking hate Korriban

Pulling aside my scarf for a moment, I spat out the bits of sand that had managed to slip through. As bundled up as I was, it wasn't perfect protection from the desert. As it was, I was sweltering, but it was nothing new.

I had been venturing out into the dunes for the better part of five days now, though I was still within the Valley of the Dark Lords. Due to Lord Renning's bounty, I had to venture farther and farther from the camp to both find tuk'ata and avoid other acolytes.

My search was slow and deliberate, intentionally so. I picked from loners, rather than deal with the roving packs. While I didn't want to risk fighting a whole group, there was another reason for it. The longer they roamed, the more chances that outliers were exiled from the groups.

Aside from the elderly and the diseased, there were vicious brutes that had a stronger connection to the Dark Side than their kin, which made them more aggressive and prone to turning on their own kind. Since setting out, I had found and delivered another two lone tuk'ata hounds, though neither were the size of the first beast.

Every time I brought my prey back alive, Lord Renning rewarded me with a bit of knowledge. Eccentricities aside, he was, at the very least, knowledgeable about Sith Alchemy. Indulging him meant that he would help me decipher the rituals and recipes from Ajunta Pall's treatise.

The fruits of my second lesson hung on my belt. My first experiment with Sith Alchemy was to strengthen the cheap durasteel that made up the short blade that Iren had given me nearly a month ago. The procedure had gone off without a hitch, though it caused the metal to darken to the same color as storm clouds.

Despite the increase in density, it actually felt lighter. I was still getting used to swinging around an ultra-light weapon. Good practice for lightsabers, I suppose.

However, it wasn't a true Sith sword. Ajunta Pall had taken decades to craft his final sword, which meant a lot of experimenting with what he could do with the Force. While he took the final process to his grave, he had apparently left a detailed account of what he had tried to get there.

Most were benign, focusing on things such as strengthening the metal or warping its nature to give it properties it didn't naturally have. The rest, however, got…dark, for lack of a better word. Even for Sith standards.

One example broached into Sith Magic and involved seizing the soul of a living Force Sensitive beast and forcing it into the still-molten blade. While he had technically succeeded, it had caused horrendous pain for the subject in question, which had unknowingly been aware during the entire procedure.

Following the application of the process, the blade Force Screamed endlessly, destroying everything within a certain radius before eventually shattering itself. Ajunta had ultimately labeled the process as a failure and moved on.

Suffice it to say, I would not be using that one.

I knelt down and closed my eyes, using the Force to reorient myself. This morning, I had stumbled across a pack of tuk'ata in the process of exiling one of their own. Before being forced to flee, the brute had managed to kill three others. Since then, I had followed it from a distance, waiting for it to settle into a lair and fall asleep.

Though footprints were impossible to find in the shifting sands and hard rock, the Force could be used to track living beings based on the impressions they left on the world in their wake. To my senses, it was a wispy trail floating above the sands, one that would disappear in a few hours. I nodded and resumed course with a slight alteration.

On Earth, it would have been a simple thing to just pursue it until it dropped from exhaustion. It was a tried and true tactic of ancient human hunters. However, tuk'ata could draw sustenance from the Force itself, enabling them to survive while trapped in places like a sealed tomb.

It didn't need to stop for food or water and could replenish its strength just as I could. The only real advantage I had over it at the moment was that it couldn't shake me from its trail.

This tuk'ata had proven craftier than the other two and had lead me on a merry chase through the rocky canyons of the far part of the valley. I had tried to ply its mind with suggestions to find a place to rest, but it was just out of my range.

The sun had started to set an hour ago. As the sun's light disappeared over the horizon, I knew I had to find shelter soon. Nighttime on Korriban was just as dangerous as its daylight hours, maybe even more so.

My danger sense screamed just a moment too late as the sand beneath my foot shifted. Pain shot up my right leg just before total sensation left it, causing me to tumble to the ground. Growling, I fumbled my sword from its sheathe and stabbed down into the sand. Through the hilt, I felt something crack before the blade slid into something soft.

Shifting my grip on my weapon, I heaved whatever it was out of the sand. The insectoid creature impaled on my sword was still writhing, snapping its pincers at me. It was the size of my arm and covered in chitinous plates the same color as the sand below us. To my eyes, it looked like a giant, tan ant.

"Shit!" I spat before wrenching my blade out and killing the pelko bug.

Pelko bugs were Korriban's only native species of insects. And they travelled in swarms.

Now that I knew what to look for, I could just barely make out hundreds more tiny disturbances in the sand behind me. There were only three ways to avoid an attack by a pelko bug swarm. The first was to not be around one at all. The second was to be too powerful for them to consider food.

I immediately dampened my presence in the Force. I held my breath as one bug nearly touched me. When the swarm passed me by, I finally let out that breath but kept my presence reigned in.

The third way was to hide and sic the swarm on someone or something else. Pelko bugs were drawn to Force Sensitives. Unlike clever predators like tuk'ata, they were instinctive predators and followed their senses. As soon as I dropped off their radar, they started making a beeline for the only other nearby Force Sensitive.

While it was a shame to lose the tuk'ata, I wanted to live more than I wanted to capture it. Facing down a pelko bug swarm wasn't worth it.

Using my sword as a cane, I levered myself to my feet, so to speak, and took a hobbling step forward. My right leg dragged bonelessly behind me.

I growled in frustration. Pelko bugs were covered in microscopic barbs that transmitted a paralytic neurotoxin into their targets. Two and a half thousand years from now, Kaan's Brotherhood of Darkness would put the barbs on Sith training swords to simulate the debilitating effects of lightsaber strikes.

While I knew it would wear off eventually, it still left me down a leg for the time being. And now that I knew there was a swarm nearby, I couldn't use the Force or else be overwhelmed.

I eyed the dead pelko bug for a moment before sighing in disgust, "Screw it, might as well have something to show for the trip."

Removing my outer robe, I knelt and carefully wrapped up the corpse, making sure to avoid touching it. That done, I eased myself back to my feet and started dragging it behind me.

As I was, I wasn't going to get far. Thankfully, this part of the valley was rife with caves, so finding a place to bunker down for the night wouldn't be a problem. Whether or not said caves were already occupied was a different problem altogether.

"I fucking hate Korriban," I muttered to the not-so-empty desert around me.

Well, I wasn't going to get anywhere by bitching about it. I hobbled into the first cave I could find, dropping the pelko bug corpse at the mouth of it. As I wasn't going to be using my sword anytime soon, I pulled out my blaster pistol.

"I'm so grateful I kept this thing," I commented to the hopefully-empty cave as I limped further in.

Unfortunately, my prayers went unanswered as something shrieked and flew at my face. I whipped the pistol up and fired three times. The first shot went wide, but the second and third hit home. The shyrack crashed to the ground with a loud thump with glowing holes in its head and abdomen. I stared at it for a moment.

"Crap."

Deeper in the cave, more screeches echoed up to me.

I had some frag grenades that I looted from the looters but flinging around explosive devices in a confined space was a really stupid idea. As more shyrack started pouring in from whatever larger cavern they were nesting in, I started gunning them down as quickly as I could. However, I knew that unless I wanted to be devoured by a flock of what amounted to frenzied meat grinders with wings, I'd have to use the Force.

When it started to become too many for my single-shot weapon, I started slamming groups of them against the walls of the cave with telekinetic pushes. Gore spewed from the mess as their fleshy bodies burst on impact from tons of pressure. Others I crushed with Force Grip, filling the air with sickening cracks as bones broke.

At some point, I let myself drop to the ground to relieve my off-hand from the task of holding me up, instead using it to direct my telekinetic assault while my other hand was occupied with my progressively hotter blaster.

Thankfully, shyrack weren't nearly as cunning as tuk'ata. A pack of them would have torn me apart by now. The tunnel I was currently in was just wide enough to allow groups of ten to stream in, but not be large enough to accommodate the whole flock.

Eventually, the waves started to die down before halting altogether. I dragged myself to one of the walls and propped myself up against it as I ignored the smell. Though I was extremely tired from the effort, I managed one last big Force push to shove the mounds of dead shyrack further into the cave.

I was safe for the moment. Shyrack were extremely territorial. As soon as something entered their territory, the entire flock would attack the intruder and keep attacking until either the intruder was dead or they were. With them dead, there wouldn't be anything else in the cave.

Exhausted, I relaxed against the wall, but didn't try to fall asleep. Without anyone with me, I would have to stay awake to keep watch. While all the shyrack inside the cave were dead, that didn't mean another predator couldn't come along while I slept.

Hauling my right foot onto my left knee, I removed my boot and sock so I could inspect the limb. As I was expecting, the bottom of my foot was now covered in blisters, courtesy of the pelko bug's neurotoxin.

That was going to hurt like hell when the numbness wore off.

"I fucking hate Korriban," I hissed again as I slumped back against the wall to focus on hiding my Force presence again.

As I settled in to wait until morning, I knew without a doubt that this wasn't going to be the last time I said that.

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