Chapter 54: My Turn

My fingers instinctively curled into "claws" in anticipation of throwing a blast of Force Lightning as I waited to see if the monster would strike again. As the seconds ticked by, the only sound I could make out was that of the ichor on my knuckle-spikes dripping down onto the deck plating.

But no attack came. I slowly eased my guard but didn't drop it entirely. While I couldn't see or hear the creature, I could still sense it was nearby.

I'd hurt it and losing an eye was not a minor thing, even if you had eight. In all likelihood, I had bought myself some time while it nursed the injury in some hidden crack of the ship.

But that was all I had done. Though it was now down an eye, I hadn't managed to hurt it anymore. It was still hungry and now it was angry on top of that.

Another attack was all but inevitable, only this time it would be more cautious in its approach…or more ferocious. And just because it wasn't sapient, that didn't mean it couldn't plan.

But now I had more time. Fortunately, I had made it to my intended deck, so I didn't have to try my luck with the turbolift shaft again. The armories should be nearby. One was on the port side of the ship, while the other was on starboard. The spider monster had fled down towards the starboard side, so it was pretty easy to decide which way to go.

As I started walking, I began to feel the spider's presence lessen, likely from distance. Made sense that it wouldn't immediately chase me when it was actively bleeding. However, that also meant I'd have a harder time keeping a figurative eye on its movements. The farther away it was, the less clear its presence was…and it was already murky and difficult to sense to begin with.

My footsteps echoed in the dark ship as I turned my attention inwards. Off the top of my head, I couldn't quite remember if I knew what this creature was. The Sith were nothing if not prolific when it came to coming up with new warbeasts and the bestiaries I'd read easily contained hundreds of entries.

Many of them were obscure, one-off creations that only saw use in one or two conflicts before being killed off or lost but were considered noteworthy enough by a particular author to be included. Obviously, there wasn't as much detail about them as, say, Tu'kata or K'lor'slugs, and most of those barely warranted a single page.

To the misfortune of every arachnophobe in the galaxy, there were actually a lot of giant spiders scattered across the stars.

The Energy Spiders of Kessel were among the more famous due to their role in the production of Spice, but there were also the Knobby White Spiders of Dagobah and the Ginntho spiders of Utapau. And those were just the ones I knew about.

The creature had obviously been altered with Alchemy. I could feel it when it had gotten close, a lingering sense of wrongness that clung to it.

All Sithspawn possessed it on some level as a sign of just how unnatural their existences were, though it was stronger in creatures freshly made with Alchemy and weakened as they bred.

Tu'kata and K'lor'slugs notably lacked this trait as their explosive breeding rates rapidly created generation after generation and distanced them from their more unnatural ancestors.

The fact that I could still sense it on the spider meant that it wasn't too far from the first generation that had been changed. But was it something I had read about before?

Unfortunately, I had paid more attention to the entries on the more common or more powerful monsters on account of my likelihood of encountering them. However…

Beneath my helmet, I idly chewed on my lip as the mental gears started turning.

The Sith never revisited Corbos to my knowledge, so any creatures made after the Hundred Year Darkness were unlikely at best to be present on this planet. That eliminated a lot from the running, narrowing it down considerably.

It obviously wasn't a Leviathan. Too small and it didn't match the description of a larval Leviathan. The impressive creatures were Sorzus Syn's pride and joys, but they weren't her only creations.

And the road to creating them had taken a lot of trial and error on her part as she took bits and pieces from her earlier creations to incorporate into her masterpiece monsters.

Three were recorded, though only as small footnotes in the section on Leviathans and only because Syn had specifically mentioned them in the chronicle she had written. Shamblers. Howlers. Pit Horrors…

If the Leviathans were any indication, Sorzus Syn had been very straight-forward with her naming schemes and stuck to describing their main traits. So since the spider didn't shamble and it screeched instead of howled, it was possible that I was dealing with a Pit Horror.

However, I had no idea what exactly a Pit Horror could do. The only thing written about them…was literally just their name. All I had to work with was what I had seen.

It could spin webs like a normal spider, if on a much larger scale, but the silk it produced was only visible under Force Sight. Set up in the right place, that stuff could and probably did catch whole squads before they realized it was there.

The Force Wave I'd thrown at it hadn't been all that gentle, so I could probably assume it could tank a good bit of damage thanks to its exoskeleton and its natural toughness. The only real "soft" spots I'd found so far were its eyes, though the joints might be another weakness.

It was big, strong, and much faster than a creature that size had any right to be. And since it was here, it was either descended from Pit Horrors that had survived the war…or it could hibernate like the Leviathans could.

As much as I didn't want to think it, I'd put my money on the latter. Syn did use traits from her previous creations when she made Leviathans, after all.

I suppose there wasn't much point continuing that line of thought until I had some weapons.

Soon, I found myself stopping before where the armory was supposed to be...only to find the doorway had been stretched and scrunched up into a…well, the only way to really describe it would be that it looked like a puckered anus.

I quickly throttled that juvenile thought and tried to focus.

This had been done deliberately and in a way that was physically impossible to pull off without industrial power tools. Something had happened here, as the walls around it were torn by claws and stained with old carbon scoring. Above, even the lights had been shot out.

Well, it appeared there was only one way inside really.

The ruined doorway shrieked like the damned when I pulled it outwards with the Force. I'd honestly thought about simply blasting it inwards, but then I remembered there were likely volatile explosives inside that might get set off by the concussive force.

Once I'd made just enough room to slip through, I stepped inside. Almost immediately, my helmet registered a number of dangerous bateria in the air and automatically activated the filters. Even with that, the air I breathed in still had a smell I was quickly becoming familiar with thanks to Korriban.

The armory wasn't large as it wasn't meant to service much more than the engineering crew. Weaponry was scattered across the floor. Old blasters, slugthrowers, grenades, and even some vibroblades were here, along with what I assumed to be some other kind of explosives.

But that wasn't what drew my eye at first.

A long trail of black led from the doorway to the far side of the room, where a form was slumped against the wall.

I quietly navigated the room, stepping around the fallen weaponry, and knelt in front of the corpse.

Dark skin was pulled taut over bone, appearing more like paper than flesh. Lids were closed over dried out eyeballs beneath and lips pulled back from white teeth, their owner appearing pained even in death. Tattered black-stained cloth covered the spot where a leg should be, tied off haphazardly above the knee.

Enough features remained intact that I could tell they had been a human or Near-human woman. The nearly sealed room had mummified her almost as well as the arid climate of Korriban would have. Even her black hair had survived.

In life, I would guess it used to be around her shoulders. But as her skin had dried and drawn back, it had "grown" to well passed that and became as dry and brittle as straw.

Part of her hair was made into a braid, looped behind the shriveled remains of her right ear.

"I wonder which side you fought on," I wondered aloud, my voice given an electronic edge by the helmet's speakers.

The Hundred Year Darkness hadn't been a conflict between Jedi and Sith, but between two sects of Jedi. This Padawan could easily have belonged to either side. Though at this point, I don't think it really mattered.

Then, the realization that my voice was the first heard inside of this room for nearly three thousand years made me pause for a moment as I processed it.

I shrugged the feeling off soon after and looked down.

Her hands, now long and skeletal, held on desperately to a dull silver cylinder, as though she had hoped it would save her. The black cable attached to one end looped down to a square pack on her tattered belt.

The dead woman's finger bones snapped as I pried the hilt from her hands, her death-grip weakened by millennia. It took equally little effort to retrieve the power pack from her belt.

After being on Korriban for a year, I had very little compunctions against stealing from the dead, save for when they could fight back.

Of course, I actually did pause to see if she was about to get up and try to punish me for my thievery.

She didn't. Because not every corpse in existence needed to have a ghost attached to it. Or be reanimated by foul magics.

Turning my attention to the device, I scanned it with the Force, checking that all the mechanisms and wires still worked. Thankfully, the only thing wrong with it was that the power pack had degraded over the centuries. But that was a problem that could be easily fixed by cannibalizing the power pack from my glowrod.

When I finished with that, I started policing the other items in the armory.

I decided not to bother with the blasters, as their power packs would be just as dead, instead focusing my attention on the slugthrowers. They were low-tech compared to their counterparts, but they were more durable and I was more familiar with their care.

Thankfully, the same stale air that had preserved the corpse had also kept most of them from degrading. I soon found a rifle and a pistol that didn't need more than a good cleaning, which was easily taken care of with a maintenance kit stashed nearby.

After finding holsters and straps, ammo, and a few other useful goodies, I walked back out into the corridor. A press of a button heralded a sound near and dear to every Star Wars fan's heart.

*Pssshhew*

As the hallway was dyed blue, I grinned, baring my teeth beneath my helmet.

"My turn."

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