Seated within the Glorious Jewel of the Hutts, the Winter Palace is situated on a remote island near the planet’s equator. Although blanketed with the pollution from Hutt industry, its location makes the climate hot and humid. Surrounded with trees and vines, it could be considered to be a paradise, even among the barren wasteland of Nal Hutta. Outside of the Winter Palace, a network of sewer pipes transfer the waste from the palace to wherever seems far enough to dump into the oceans surrounding the island. Flora and fauna that have adapted to the Hutt’s environmental changes thrive in the polluted forests surrounding the Winter Palace.

Stepping through its gilded gates, the lavish interior greets your presence with the main audience chamber. Once belonging to the wealth of Jiliac Desilijic Tiron, the gleaming stone of the main aisle leads up to a Hutt’s dais lined with an expensive carpet. Beautiful tapestries line the high walls, telling of the sordid histories of those who woven them, awaiting execution in Jiliac’s dungeons.

Finally, the antechamber to the throne room is illuminated from above with high-skylighted ceilings. Constructed from lightly colored stone, the antechamber might have been where the late Hutt entertained his guests before an audience with spice and exotic dancers. In the hands of the Hutt Kajidics, however, these traditions have continued as the Winter Palace now serves as a front for criminal and business ventures.

People jostled with each other, oblivious to the gaudy finery surrounding them. The Antechamber was a bustle of criminal activity, some enterprising individuals having set up covered stalls in an area once used to receive and intimidate important guests. What had once been the realm of dignitaries became host to a gang of hawking merchants and mercenaries, the iron gaze of the Hutt’s guards raking over them all.

A tall, slender figure stepped out of a room given over to the rancid baths the Hutts tended to enjoy. He looked about himself before stepping into the crowd, his towering form able to blend simply due to the sheer variety of people thronging the antechamber.

A squat, middle-aged man took a swig from a hip flask, stomping towards one of the stalls. Clan Taldryan had sent him here, and he obeyed his new Summit quickly, eager to show his loyalty. He had come to make contact with an information broker, to gain an edge on the other Clans in the Brotherhood. He had been told about this place, but the disgusting reek of alien caused the ex-Imperial to wrinkle his nose, face twisting into a sneer. He would much rather be back with his wife...

His family were his life now, Kookimarissia, his wife, his twin children, and Saskia, his adopted daughter. They had come with him to Taldryan, to start a new life away from Arcona. He had found some small measure of happiness with them, his disgusted sneer relaxing slightly as he thought of them, taking another drink.

“Addiction is weakness, traitor.” A voice hissed, the last word delivered like a whiplash. Andrelious immediately recognised the voice, and realised with a start that they had taken advantage of his distraction to get close without his notice.

“Valtiere.” Andrelious responded, putting the flask away before looking up into the man’s eyes...well, eye. One was a crude cybernetic, the other the colour of pale jade, filled with hatred and disgust, the same emotions he had been feeling himself regarding the alien dross surrounding him. Even if they had been the same height, he was sure the Commander would be looking down his nose somehow.

Valtiere turned without responding, looking at the stand of some small-times arms dealer hoping for a quick credit. He smoothly picked up an E-11 blaster rifle, ignoring the wary look the arms dealer gave him. Calmly, he pointed into the crowd and squeezed the trigger, obviously at some ease with the weapon. An individual screamed and was suddenly silenced, the bolt slamming into their body. He placed the rifle back on the table, attempting to grab Andrelious by the arm, the shorter man pulling it away before Valtiere had even moved an inch. “He shot him! Murderer! Guards!”

Though any number of the individuals here were used to death, killing someone obviously, on the hallowed grounds of the Hutts was taboo. Guards began swarming to the area, a motley array of hardened fighters. Individuals loyal to the Hutts also crowded forward, maybe hoping for scraps of favour from their chosen Lords.
Andrelious whipped his head about, the lanky form of Valtiere already powering away, dodging around the angry tide heading for the Sith. He saw the weapons brandished, the snarling faces, the violence lighting their eyes.

Eyes flashing with unsuppressed anger, Andrelious drew his lightsabers.

“Back off, scum!” Andrelious roared, holding his lightsabers high into the air. Rarely did he fight with both lightsabers at once, but his intention in that moment was more to threaten than to act. The threat worked, at least in part. On seeing the twin crimson blades, many of the less brave among the throng turned tail and ran away. However, a large group remained, forcing the Sith to put away his black handled ‘killing’ lightsaber.

After doing so, he extended his left hand towards his aggressors, calling forth the lightning that was so closely associated with the Sith. The Warlord was careful to control its effect: he made sure that only the nearest few were hit. His targets fell to the ground, wounded and still furious, but a few more peeled off from the crowd out of sheer fear of what Andrelious could do to them.

Now, with the numbers reduced a little, Mimosa-Inahj started swinging his lightsaber around. With so many enemies, virtually every attack cut something off. Heads were quite literally rolling along the floor as the Taldryanite worked his way through. Eventually, Andrelious reached the rear of the crowd, but instead of chasing Valtiere, he turned and kept up his killing spree. Though fairly slow, he was still easily faster than any of the lumbering Gamorrean guards, whose Arg’garoks offered nothing when faced with the power of a lightsaber.

Andrelious actually found that the task got tougher as he continued to whittle down numbers. As he killed pure amateurs, the more skilled individuals, perhaps even some who knew a little about fighting a Force user, began to attack with far more accuracy. The Warlord assumed that they had been holding back for fear of killing the wrong man, but now had a much clearer way in. He cleaved through a Rodian that came a little too close clean in half, but was actually hit by a blaster fired by none other than the dealer whose E-11 had started the ruckus. Andrelious roared in pain, before hitting the dealer with another burst of lightning, this time concentrating its entire power on a single target. The man fell to the ground, begging the pain to stop, but Mimosa-Inahj moved away to finish off the last of his new enemies.

“Those of you that survived. Be grateful that you’re not my primary target. I don’t have time for secondary objectives,” Andrelious hissed as the blaster fire finally stopped. His only answer was a groan of pain from somewhere in the heap of bodies.

Healing his blaster wound up a little, the Warlord moved away from the scene, searching the area for a hint to where Valtiere had gone. He could sense him somewhere nearby – the Commander’s presence, whilst nowhere near as obvious to him as a fellow Force sensitive, was still very familiar to him from their days serving in Void Squadron. Andrelious thought back to the day that he had allowed the younger man into his previously entirely Force using squadron. He’d taken a lot of flak for that decision, but he knew any kind of favour went out of the window the second that he’d left Arcona. With that in mind, he entered a nearby corridor, his senses fully focused on finding Valtiere.

As he rounded a corner, the Warlord came face to face with his quarry.

“I really never thought I’d ever find you at the wrong end of my weapons. So many traitors these days,” the Commander declared, before firing several shots from his slugthrower. The shots were well aimed and spaced out, making them difficult to parry with a lightsaber.

Andrelious waved his lightsaber around like a madman, swatting the individual slugs out of the air, one by one. As he neared Valtiere, the Arconan Rollmaster threw his SH-9 to the ground, its ammo exhausted.

“That was a pretty good move back there, my old friend. I always said you could have been a Sith,” the Warlord declared, no hint of sarcasm in his tone.

“I could never be a Sith. You always destroy yourselves,” Valtiere spat in response.

Waiting until Andrelious was in range, the Commander acted out of pure instinct. He slammed his hand hard into the Taldryanite’s right wrist, lightning reflexes allowing him to avoid harm. The force of the blow caught the Warlord unawares, causing the grip he had on his weapon’s hilt to loosen just enough that the lightsaber dropped to the floor, its crimson blade almost instantly sliding back into nothingness.

“You’ll regret that, boy!” Andrelious snarled, stepping back. Valtiere was already arming himself with his Tulwar.

The bloodshed was far from over.

Valtiere’s brow furrowed as he drew his weapon back, readying for a strike...

...And threw his Tulwar.

The curved blade shimmered as it spun through the air, aimed directly for the Warlord’s head. As it moved on a deadly parabola, Valtiere scooped up his pistol and turned, moving off at full clip. Andrelious sputtered, moving deftly out of the way from the anachronistic weapon. As he recovered, he noticed Valtiere running away, around another corner. He cursed under his breath as he set off after him, pulling out his other Lightsaber.

Nikola ran through the supporting corridors, conscious of the layout he had memorised earlier. He knocked over anything that could be, twisted and turned, always hearing the thrum of the lightsaber behind him. He put another magazine in the pistol, keeping it in his hand as he kept moving, surprised servants pushed aside yelling back at him. He smiled, a tight-lipped line, as he kept twisting and turning.

Andrelious kept striding forward, sensing his quarry. Valtiere was no longer moving and seemed to have stopped somewhere ahead. Odd, that he wasn’t putting any more distance between them now. The Sith advanced carefully into the light ahead, the muggy heat washing over him.

He stepped into the disgusting ‘baths’ the Hutts enjoyed. Great steaming pools, some bubbling with mud, others with clean water, that had to be regularly filtered. Great chandeliers hung from the ceiling, casting it in a warm, low light. This, it seemed clear to Andrelious, was very obviously a private place for Hutts.

And yet there was Valtiere, stood by one of the bubbling mud pools, pistol held in one hand. His face seemed impassive again, stance confident and relaxed. But it was a dead end, there was no escape. “That was a fancy trick, boy. And you’ve given me a good chase. But this is it. Looks like the traitor lives on.” Andrelious injected the same venom into the word as Valtiere had when they first met. He began to charge forward...

And noted the tripwire in front of the pool as Valtiere’s other hand yanked on the handle, pulling the simple trap taut with a whipping sound. It had all been set up from the beginning, before he had even clapped eyes on Andrelious.

But Inahj, gifted with the superhuman gifts of the Force, leapt over the wire adroitly and sailed over the mud bath, a vicious grin splitting face.

Valtiere matched the smile as he fired upward.

Not at the Warlord, but at the huge, ornate chandelier above. Three shots landed, one on target, and the huge piece groaned and fell with a sharp retort, slamming into him and driving Andrelious into the thick mud bath with a wet, unbecoming ‘plop’ sound. Valtiere fired the pistol into the mud again, the shots losing momentum as they hit the viscous liquid. As he finished the clip, he reloaded again, scanning the shifting brown mud for the angry retort of the Talrdryan.

The warmth of the mud took very little away from its unpleasant qualities. Andrelious fumed as he struggled against the mud’s viscosity. After a few moments, he forced his head above the surface, spotting Valtiere nearby, ready to fire. Instinctively, the Warlord held his lightsaber in place to block, but noticed that it was no longer active. He thumbed its activation switch, cursing when nothing happened. The mud had created a short circuit somewhere within the weapon’s intricate workings.

“Always valuing tricks. Never any substance,” Andrelious stated, sounding more like a disappointed teacher than an angry Sith.

Valtiere ignored his former commander as he quickly adjusted his aim, pumping the trigger in a single, fluid motion that soon sent half a dozen deadly slugs directly towards the Warlord. Without a lightsaber to block the attack, Andrelious was forced to resort to other methods of defence. He ducked, dived, and dodged, even used the Force to flick the projectiles slightly off course. With each manoeuvre, he inched closer to his opponent. As soon as Valtiere stopped firing to correct his aim, Andrelious extended his mud encrusted hands at the Arconan, commanding the Force to tug at the slugthrower.

Frak, Valtiere thought as he began to wrestle with his own weapon, his grip tightening in an attempt to stop the Warlord from disarming him. Closing his eyes, the Rollmaster fired another three times, letting go of the slugthrower moments after the final shot. Andrelious was again compelled to dodge the discharged payload, taking his concentration away from confiscating the Commander’s weapon.

Making the most of the Warlord’s distraction, Valtiere breezed in, flaying knife in hand. Even without the aid of the Force, the Arconan was fast enough to out manoeuvre Andrelious. As soon as he was in range, Nikola stabbed his knife into the Sith’s still slightly sore blaster wound. Mimosa-Inahj cried out in pain; the stabbing attack had been expertly aimed, allowing the knife to cut through nerve, tissue and artery alike. And unlike a blaster or lightsaber, the low tech weapon did not cauterise the wounds it made. The Warlord needed to act fast or lose a lot of blood.

Extracting the knife with painful difficulty, Andrelious quickly put his hand straight over the cut, wincing as mud made its way in. The Force patched up the damaged blood vessels as best it could, knowing that in doing so he’d risked infection. Once the pain was a little more manageable, the Warlord looked around for Valtiere, who was stood against the far wall, smirking.

“As you can see, not everyone needs the Force,” the Commander stated. Andrelious noticed that the Arconan had recovered his slugthrower.

“If you believe that, Nikola Valtiere, then you’re truly a fool,” the Warlord hissed, moving a little closer. As he approached, the Commander aimed his slugthrower again, this time aiming at his former ally’s legs. “One step closer and you’ll need a hoverchair,” Valtiere warned.

Andrelious’ lips curled into a thin smile. “I don’t need to be one step closer,” he declared, rage building up as he spoke. With little warning, he threw his arms outward, lightning spewing from his fingers. Caught by surprise, Valtiere rolled away as the attack hit, apparently having avoided all but a minor shock. He returned to his feet, and noticed that his vision was a little off. He blinked a few times in an attempt to restore normality, but still, something wasn’t quite right. Then he realised. The Force lightning, as brief as it was, had affected his cybernetic eye. Andrelious watched with amusement as the prosthetic flickered on and off, playing havoc with Valtiere’s depth perception. The Commander fired the remainder of his weapon’s magazine at the Warlord, but found his aim was hampered by his malfunctioning eye.

With an almost contemptuous sneer, Andrelious raised his arms again, but no lightning came forth. Instead, the Force lifted Valtiere, throwing him hard against part of the wrecked chandelier.

Andrelious headed away from the room, turning as he exited to see Valtiere dusting himself down, his eye still flickering.

“You fought well, Valtiere. But let’s do it in space, next time,” the Warlord hissed, disappearing from view moments later.

“In space, then,” the Arconan replied.