Chapter 449 - My SI Stash #49 - World's Worst Sith Master by Chastity (StarWars)

-W/

Synopsis: ???

Rated: M

Words: 11K

Posted on: forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/worlds-worst-sith-master-star-wars.13582/ (Chastity)

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Chapter 1

Beneath a loosened wallplate in the storage area of the Solace and Refuge lurked a single solitary figure. She was a vision of beauty, and death alike; blood red hair flowed down her body, reaching past her waist, and she wore her battle armor, a cursed smile on her lips. A weapon was in her hand, the simple device called a lightsaber, and though it was not yet activated, it soon would be.

She heard the engines whine, felt the thick force of acceleration as the ship left the atmosphere of Ashiqa. The effortless jerk and cessation of entering hyperspace, and then her lightsaber came to life.

A single man was present when she emerged, letting out a yelp of surprise at her appearance and dropping the datapad with which he had been double-checking the cargo. She drank in his eyes as she approached, locking her gaze to his, the Force aiding her in holding his body in place. She wanted to savor the moment - she could chase him down, but she would much rather kill him like this, slowly approaching and eyeing up her prey before a single swift slice carved him in twain, the fresh burn running from hip to shoulder and seeing his body simply slide in two.

The wet noise of his torso hitting the ground brought her little joy. Her delight was in the moment that the person realized their life was utterly in her hands, and they had no choice but to suffer or expire, as the case may have been. For those aboard the Solace and Refuge, it would be expiration.

So it was that she swept through the ship's corridors, her victims occasionally drawing a blaster that she effortlessly snapped aside with a simple flick of the wrist. She didn't parry: these ones were beneath such efforts. Her eyes would always lock on theirs, and she would drink in their panic as death came for them. Race, task, gender, none of them mattered, as she slaughtered her way through the crew.

Such was the price of treachery - these smugglers were carrying weapons to the world of Drenaaj, which was currently in rebellion. They should have known that the Sith would not tolerate it.

With an idle flick of her wrist she decapitated the pilot a moment after he relieved himself, grasping his body by the collar and yanking it out of the seat in the hopes of avoiding the thick scent of urine staining it too badly. She settled into the seat he had just left, feeling invigorated and yet unsatisfied, the quiet pleasure of putting the fear of the Sith into these wretches having no proper apex, like intercourse that never achieved ecstasy. They had seen, they had understood, and they were nothing to her.

She did not feel the presence that approached, and she knew the crew of the ship counted nine - and nine had she killed. All that ought to have remained was deciding where to take the ship she now was sole proprietor of, but instead she heard soft footfalls, heard the distinctive whine of a blaster powering up.

Within a heartbeat, her lightsaber snapped in the space between her and the noise, and when the bolt fired forth, it was deflected.

There, standing before her, was a young boy, skin a pale red from whatever particular near-human race he was derived from. At her estimation, he was perhaps ten. With shaky hands he held the blaster, and he swallowed before firing again. She deflected once more, smiling viciously down at him. She could feel him, faintly, through the Force, now that she knew he was here - more than that, though, she could see the fear in his eyes, yet the courage that made him continue to pointlessly fire the blaster. She did not bother to block all the shots, since only perhaps one in three ever had a chance to strike her.

When the boy winced and dropped the blaster, it having become too hot for him to hold, she made her move. She approached, grasping him by the collar, hefting him easily into the air; in the other, the red glow of her lightsaber was accompanied by its hum. The boy swallowed, his expression defiant for a moment, and she stared him in the eyes, let him truly understand his position, the truth, the reality.

He lost the defiance. She let his body descend to the floor, her breath hot in the air at the rush. The boy was Force sensitive, and her heart was pounding in her ears, her mouth feeling as if it were simply drenched with spit, so much she almost worried she would drool. This was the moment, the perfect ephemeral moment, when a strong and courageous person knew they had to suffer whatever she would do to them. She lived for these moments.

"You are now my apprentice," she told him, as she stared down at the piteous little thing. He stared blankly up at her. It wasn't fear on his face, but acceptance of the fact he no longer controlled his fate, and ignorance of what she would ultimately do to him. She didn't care, though; the point was that he understood that he was powerless. "I am your master now. I will teach you in the ways of the Force. If you fail to learn, I will extinguish your life."

* * *

That was how I met Darth Rakali. She is, to put it simply, crazy. She decided that I would be her apprentice, after killing my whole family, and she has, in fact, kept to that particular promise. She even gave me a training saber and fought me again and again, over the course of our trip together. If there's one thing I learned from that, it's that I had no chance whatsoever in a fight against her.

About the only nice thing she did for me was not force me to clean up the dead bodies from the Solace and Refuge; no, that honor went to a couple poor schmucks on Ashiqa, which she returned to within a few hours of having killed everyone except me on the ship. She apparently decided that the ship was hers now, and I guess she did kill the previous owners. Is that how it works if you're Sith? I know it's not how it works for normal people, but if there is one thing I was very, very sure about, it was that Darth Rakali is not a normal person.

During the long hyperspace journey to Korriban - it wasn't anywhere near Ashiqa - I once stood at the threshold to the place she'd claimed as her quarters. It belonged to Mr. Gevlasho, who had been the ship's cook, a nice old man with three grandchildren and an ex-wife that hated him. I never saw his body in particular, but I knew she had killed everyone.

I had a blaster. I silenced my hesitation, did my best to calm my mind, to will myself to do what had to be done with the utmost stealth. If she was asleep, she wouldn't have a chance - that was my thinking at the time.

As I stood there, mentally preparing myself, she opened the door and kicked me in the head hard enough to send me to the ground. The only thing I was aware of for a moment was the flashing colors and lights in front of my face as my brain and eyes struggled to cope with the devastating blow. When I recovered, I heard her speak, her voice bored. "If you want to kill me, you will have to learn how to properly use the Dark Side. Until then, or I get tired of you, you are my apprentice."

When I finally arrived on Korriban after what felt like years - but was actually just a week or so - she practically huddled me against her side, pressing my cheek against her ribcage. (And certain other parts that I didn't appreciate in the least at the time.) Given the way that people looked at the two of us, I could almost imagine it was… protectiveness.

Baffling as it seemed, she was doing it to ward strangers off, to protect me from the riffraff that coated Korriban. I followed her obediently, definitely not interested in pissing her off on the Sith homeworld, and she took me to out of the space port, headed to what looked to be some kind of temple. That made even more people pay attention to me, and I could tell many of them were Sith - others were slaves or servants of various strides.

"As a young Sith, it is considered important for you to visit the tomb of a fallen Sith," she explained to me. It sounded like she couldn't give less of a f.u.c.k about it if she tried. "However, you are certainly too weak to survive such a task without supervision. Korriban has excellent training facilities for young Sith - but if you die, you will be dead, so use your discretion in taking advantage of them."

I bit my lower lip, tension making every muscle in my body freeze up. It almost sounded like she planned to leave me alone, but… this was Korriban. The heart of the Sith religion. Weren't they all murderous psychos? I barely knew anything about how to fight with my stupid training saber, and it didn't actually cut things. Excitement hit me as I realized that, on the other hand, if she was leaving me unsupervised-

"If you flee, I will track you down, and-" she paused, reaching for my cheek, forcing my eyes to go to hers. Her red eyes seemed to bore directly into my soul for a long couple seconds. I swallowed, trembling before her gaze, and her finger gingerly slid up my cheek, until her nail just teased at my eyelid. She smiled, then, and I could feel a pressure in my brain, like someone was directly stabbing a needle into it and injecting fear. "Hm. I suppose I don't know what I would do," she said, more to herself than me, but my brain was imprinting every last word. "I haven't had an apprentice before, much less one who fled from me. I think…" she trailed off for a moment, tilting her head gently, "I would probably permanently disfigure you," she decided upon, as if she was simply answering a question on some HoloNet interview. "Let's not find out though."

I nodded rapidly, and she smiled at that, patting my head as she released my cheek and let me move as I willed. She was playing at the role of my mother, after having killed my actual mother less than two weeks ago. "What am I supposed to do, then?" I asked.

"Don't die," she said, a stern warning that I didn't particularly need. "Avail yourself of the facilities at this temple; I will be checking in on you regularly, to ensure your safety and continued learning. I'll likely have fresh work within a month, and we'll depart then."

With that, she left my side; people parted for her, clearly quite intimidated merely by her presence. I couldn't blame them. For a moment, the attention of various people in the area came to rest on me - curiosity, envy, confusion. Even if it took what felt like an eternity, my breath held beneath their withering gazes, they lost interest, and returned to going about their days.

That's how I was left, alone, in a Sith temple, with zero supervision or protection, at the age of eleven.

* * *

Being as small as I was helped me keep a low profile, ducking below the sight lines of people, easily being lost in the crowd. The occasional shove or kick to get out of someone's way wasn't anything compared to getting hacked apart by a lightsaber. I had no real destination in mind - at first, I was thinking of some place to hide, a library or a closet or something - but I soon wound up finding the training facilities.

They had combat droids, dozens of them, armed with heavy sticks and the occasional blaster set to stun. They were these thin, wiry things, stretching up a good two heads above me, all arranged in a tight pack like a quiet phalanx. When you wantedone, you'd just take it from the mass and drag it to a training room, something I picked up by quietly watching a Sith do as much.

"Come with me," I said to one.

"Affirmative," it said, its voicebox crisp and clearly well-maintained. Its walking was somewhat jittery, and I could only hope that once combat mode was engaged, something a little bit better in terms of balance and mobility would be shown off.

As it turned out, it did. Unfortunately, the Sith were big believers in the school of hard knocks, so even though I only had the training saber that Darth Rakali had left me with, the droid was hitting me extremely hard with its own weapon. Since I was so young and, well, petite, I got my ass solidly kicked again and again. "Your fundamentals are acceptable," it declared, "but your ability to retain poise in the face of opposition must be improved upon." Then it immediately started beating me up again, and I could only just barely manage to block its strikes, with my arms aching each time its macelike melee weapon came down on my defense.

I gave ground, making a circular movement as I did, just as Darth Rakali had taught me. It let me avoid getting pinned against one of the walls. Still, I couldn't find any hole in its offense to attack myself, and the pain that shot up my forearms every time it hit my training saber was starting to make my fingers numb. "Stop, I'm done," I said.

"You are not done. You must complete the program." Its attacks got more intense then, as if it were angry at my cowardice. I had to grit my teeth to keep my fingers on my training saber. I didn't have any strength whatsoever to give it a kick or anything like that, and I couldn't spare my attention from it to find something else in the room, lest I get beaten black and blue by the robot.

I spotted some discarded, damaged bit of old droid as it fought me, tried to maneuver myself to it, hoping that it would f.u.c.k up the droid's footing. Instead, the shiny chrome skull cap of some forgotten droid got easily crushed underfoot, the sound of its deformation audible. If it changed the droid's footing at all, it was to make it push forward, making an extra step towards me, slipping past my guard with its whole body. One desperate, flailing swing of my training saber was all I got in, and it brought the mace down on my stomach, sending me collapsing to the ground, gasping for air.

It stopped then. "Training program complete. You are free to go. I can provide training information in the unlikely event that your future Master wishes to have it."

"F.u.c.k.i.n.g, thing," I spat out. I didn't have much else to say, nor could I manage it, with the pain in my side.

"This unit is not capable of s.e.x.u.a.l intercourse. If you would like to have s.e.x, please speak to a fellow student. Please, vacate the training room so that another student may use it."

I managed to drag myself up to my feet, giving the droid a hateful last look, and limped outside, clutching my side as I went. It followed after, rejoining the mass of combat droids to await its next request.

I went right back in the training room once it had done so, naturally. There were more bits of broken combat droids than just the skull cap that it had stepped on, and I started picking them up, piling them together, getting more pieces from another room.

On the Solace and Refuge, I'd learned to be a pretty deft hand with machinery, and it seemed like, when one of the Sith kids broke a droid, they pretty much just tossed its bits in the corner and left them there. There weren't complete sets, but I could get a decent variety of pieces. There didn't seem to be any torsos, though, I mused, as I quietly started toying with the bits I had, trying to see if I could build anything useful out of them.

My arms ached too much for any physical fighting, but the numbness in my fingers didn't impair my mind, as I looked through this power converter, that electrical twitch engine, and on and on. I couldn't put back together a complete droid; there weren't any main energy cells or cognitive modules, presumably because they were valuable enough that they'd actually be recycled. Still, I could make a simple electrical disabler from the bits I had on hand. It'd be better than a training saber - the thing was basically a warm baseball bat, for all the damage it did.

It wasn't as fast as all that. It took a while for the numbness in my fingers to fade to the point where I could put something together, then even longer for the ache in my side to reduce to the point I felt comfortable standing up. I had made a device about the size of a small blaster that would - hopefully - stun someone for a few seconds when I hit them with it. I doubt that my "Master" would fall victim to it, given her preternatural danger sense, but it could help if I got attacked by one of the Sith on Korriban. One of the many, many Sith on Korriban.

I stepped out of the training room, rolling my arms, stretching my back, now that I could walk free and under my own power.

Outside, there was a tall, slender, buglike alien, with a complicated carapace that surrounded a roughly humanoid body, currently being surrounded by a pair of humans, both armed with training sabers.

"Can you believe aliens really think they can be Sith?" The apparent leader - a blonde-haired human girl with a smile exaggerated by a scar across her lip - asked her friend, entirely rhetorically.

"It's how low the Empire's fallen," the other one said in a dull voice, as if he was bored and disdainful of the whole thing, like that was just how it was, the Empire was doomed, what can you do? Of course a dying Empire makes aliens into Sith.

"That just makes it our responsibility as good Sith to help clean up the detritus, doesn't it?" She battered at the aliens leg, making it wince and step back, clearly in pain, its mandibles erratically twitching in the air. "Hey, you should get the f.u.c.k off Korriban, bugman."

The insectoid chittered angrily, indignantly, in whatever language it spoke - I didn't speak it either. The two Sith students laughed at the comment. "Can't even speak Basic," the smiling girl spat. "Why do we let these things in? Are we that hard up for new Force sensitive recruits?"

"Falling empires throw good money after bad, always trying to rebuild themselves with whatever's on hand. Quantity begins to replace quality, and inevitably, you get this result."

"Tch, yeah. Pretty f.u.c.kin' pathetic, if you ask me." The training saber came down to bat at the alien's leg again. It let out a quiet squelch of a noise.

I'd pretty much just been quietly watching the whole time, trying to get my bearings on the situation. It was obviously a case of… whatever you call the Sith equivalent of bullying, I suspected that was probably too light a term to refer to this sort of thing. But there were two of them, and one of me. I had the element of surprise… on one of them. As the smiling girl started to really batter at the insectoid's legs, forcing it to dance backwards in a rather elegant and dexterous manner, I got up behind the other one and zapped him with my electrical disabler.

Honestly, I didn't expect it to work. I kinda figured he'd use… the Force, or however Sith do it, and I'd wind up getting beaten up again. Instead, the electrical bolt went right into his backside and he just collapsed to the ground. "The f.u.c.k?" The smiling girl turned my way, her lips twisting into a sneer. "You defending a f.u.c.kin' alien? Man, I knew you near-humans were basically just bugf.u.c.kers." The insectoid alien removed its own training saber - apparently it had been on his back, and made a heavy smack against the back of the girl's head before she could actually get at me, making her reel.

I tried zapping her with my electrical disabler, but it just fizzled - the battery was too small for a second pulse, it looked like. "Oh, you think it'll take two of you to beat me? Yeah, probably f.u.c.kin' right, except make it ten," she sneered, waving her training saber at both of us. Her moves were basically spastic, unpracticed, wild swings at open air.

I didn't much like it, but as I got into a defensive position, I felt some gratitude that Darth Rakali had spent the past week drilling the basics of saber combat into my brain. She seemed to think I was just copying what I'd seen my elders do, and laughed. "You think you can pull off a real defense, kid?"

I just grit my teeth, ignored the way the throbbing in my arms had started back up, and pushed back against her. I didn't have the endurance for a real fight, but I managed to block and parry her first couple strikes before making a thrust directly at her throat, making her gag and fall back at the pain of the strike. She actually dropped her own training saber. "Li'l, fug, you shoudm', maeg enemies, of shomeone laik me. Nefer get a mashder." Her words were thick and malformed, like something was caught in her throat - then she puked, clearing whatever the obstruction was in the simplest way possible. I winced as I saw a hint of red in the vomit. It could just as easily be something red-colored that she'd eaten as a bit of blood, though.

"I already have a master," I told her. That was important, Sith were all about hierarchy, if you f.u.c.k.i.e.d up, they came after you.

She let out a choked laugh, wiping away bile from her lips with the back of her hand. "Yeah right. Who?"

"Darth Rakali."

She laughed at that, sneering. "If you're going to lie-" she paused to cough, "-come up with a better one. Darth Rakali hasn't taken any apprentices in all the years I've been here. And believe me, people have tried." Her friend started to rouse, groaning. She seemed to consider just taking a second chance at the fight, then thought better of it. "Come on, Tyber," she said, jerking her head and dragging him along. "Let's go."

I let her go. What else was I supposed to do? Kill them? This was Korriban, dark heart of the Sith. There was no law here, I knew about the Sith well enough to understand that.

After they were gone, the bug spoke up, chittering excitedly, energetic as it spoke. I still couldn't understand a single word it was saying. "I don't speak your language," I told it, hoping it understood Basic, even if its mouth parts couldn't let it speak it.

It pulled out a datapad, hurriedly clicking away with its fat fingers, typing out something in Basic. [I'm Xig! You must be new here! We should help each other out!]

"...sure," I agreed. I gave him a gentle smile, though I have no idea if he understood the meaning of it. "I'm Soleil. Let's be friends."

[Don't say that word! Sith think friendship is weakness! You have to call me an ally of convenience!]

I chuckled and nodded. "Sith sure are f.u.c.k.i.e.d in the head." It made a hissing noise of anger, hands gesticulating wildly. "Sorry, sorry. I just got here."

[I figured as much! Otherwise you wouldn't be pretending to be Darth Rakali's apprentice! That woman is only interested in killing for the Empire! If you're going to lie about something like that, I'd suggest Darth Nethos, at least he isn't here very often!]

I just sighed. "Okay." I let it go. How was I supposed to convince him I really was Darth Rakali's apprentice? For all I knew, she'd already forgotten about me. "Hey, I'm feeling worse for wear. Where do we sleep?"

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