The natives see it as an obstacle to their lifestyle, whilst outsiders perceive it as a diamond in the rough. Regardless of the opinion, Menat Ombo is the most technological settlement on New Tython. Crammed with tall and slim towers, alleys and market squares have randomly developed where the necessary room is. You might turn a corner and see a vendor selling smoked meat from the indigenous animals, and the next corner could be a home. The merchant stalls are almost always temporary, folding easily with several clippings or a really good show of strength. Above the awnings of the stalls, buildings of various shapes and sizes crafted of sand and stone and earth create a set of interconnecting rooftops in some parts with wide gaps in the others.

It is easy to get lost in the crowds of people. As you leave the central market, countless alleys splinter out and lead to quieter sections of the city. The streets are kept tidly by maintenance droids. and the air is clean. At night, the city and marketplace are well lit, and the lights from the scattered inns create a welcoming ambiance to the twilight air.

A warm breeze brushed beautiful, glamorous locks of raven hair as Selika entered her hidden sanctuary. The very small apartment was ugly, smelly and nowhere near her prefered accommodations, but it would have to do until she could safely escape New Tython. The Plageian agents on New Tython had already contacted her to lay low until the Sentinels stopped searching for her. Her display of grandiose murder several nights prior left eleven dead bodies and a very injured Odan-Urr Councillor.

The Plagueian Proconsul had risked a very open war with another Clan just to play her foolish games. The Dark Council already had her under a microscope, and any false move now would cost her more than just her position. Still she chuckled remembering Turel’s reactions to her artsy displays. It was glorious. She reached for the kitchen counter, grabbing a cup of caf already prepared for her in the caf-machine. All she had to do was lay low. That was best for now. “Just lay low.”

Her senses tingled as the cup fell from her hand. Glass shattered to her right.

The window exploded with such intensity that it made her stagger forwards. She stretched for her lightsaber but it was out of reach, on the far counter. Invisible tendrils grasped and pulled it towards her just as her assailant rolled in. A flash of yellow and black manifested in her field of vision before a Force-enhanced punch rattled her jaw, teeth, tongue and all. Selika slammed into the floor, nose first. A sickening crack and sharp, unyielding pain followed closely.

She gasped and crawled, instinctively fleeing from her assailant even with tearful eyes and partial vision. Something grabbed her from behind and straightened her in mid-air. The Proconsul felt her body flung around like a ragdoll, crashing into appliances and walls. Then, just as suddenly, she stopped. A pressure around her neck made her eyes snap to her attacker. There, in front of her, in all her righteous fury, stood Vorsa.

Before either could utter a word, Selika flew back through the side window onto the street. She slammed onto the ferrocrete with a loud thud, serpentine hilt sliding several meters away. The Neti jumped out of the same window and issued some order or other to her agents gathering around. The Sentinels scattered the crowd around the duo, sending them away as quickly as they could.

The Plagueian licked her lips as her gaze met the Herald’s. They had had quarrels before, in the office and outside it: mostly around Vorsa ordering her around like she was some sort of servant girl, or Selika denying Vorsa access to the Holocron libraries. Bad blood had grown between them of late, and it all came to a head. They were far beyond games this time.

“Selika Roh,” Vorsa started as she walked intently towards the Plagueian. “You are under arrest for the murder of eight Council agents, two law enforcement officers, a father of two, and for assault and injury of a Council member of Clan Odan-Urr.” The Herald stood over her opponent, arms loose and ready to strike, if need be. “Your sentence is life imprisonment. But since I cannot carry out a sentence on one of the Brotherhood’s leaders, I may just hand you over to the Justicar and see what the Council has to say about your attempts to incite a war against Odan-Urr.”

Selika gave a defiant grin as she stood up, wiping her bloody mouth in the process. “Nothing would give me more satisfaction than to see your Clan burn, but the truth is I did all the for fun. And to see your pathetic apprentice squirm.”

Vorsa’s deathly stare betrayed no emotion. The anger and frustration were caged with strong and firm locks deep inside her psyche. All that was left was her unforgiving side: the one that killed indiscriminately on the battlefield. She would not be so easily moved as her apprentice had been. “Then your crimes are doubly worse. Pick up your weapon.”

The Sentinels, who had by now moved most of the people away from the duo and kept them at bay, gave the General space. She had ordered them away, in case Selika decided that taking hostages was a good idea.

Selika spared her lightsaber a glance, enough time for the Neti to move. With a resounding snap the crimson blade came to life as the Herald charged her opponent. Selika’s feint worked well enough as she reached for the Neti’s mind with her own, and Vorsa stopped dead in her tracks, eyes momentarily closed in pain. The vision of Turel, cut up and dangling from the Omboan ramparts, flashed in her mind and shocked her so hard she couldn’t even perceive what Selika was doing.

Lightning, pure and powerful, arced from the Proconsul’s fingers and licked the Neti’s bark, sending her spinning backwards into the building wall. Vorsa recovered just enough to sense Selika make a run for it. The Neti reached out as an invisible force grabbed Selika by the ankle. Vorsa pulled hard as, once again, the barely-clothed Human found herself face-down on the floor.

Vorsa straightened herself and made a strong leap, landing in front of the Plagueian Proconsul. “You are not going anywhere this time.”

Selika spit some of the road dust from her mouth as she looked up at Vorsa from where she lay on the street. Coming here to New Tython was supposed to be easy - a bit of prodding the Odanite Proconsul, acquiring some information, and then back out quickly. A conflict between her and the warrior-woman serving as Herald was not on the agenda. Apparently, the connection between V’yr Vorsa and Turel Sorenn was stronger than Selika had assumed. Either that, or the Neti Councilor had just happened to be on planet whilst Selika was pushing Sorenn around, and now Selika was suffering from a case of deadly coincidence.

Whatever it was, Selika decided that the razzle-dazzle play was not going to deliver her from the Neti’s clutches. Neither was trying to distract her with false images of her apprentice’s suffering. Selika couldn’t count on being lucky enough to force her way into the duracrete bunker of Vorsa’s mind more than once. Playing into the cliched expectations of the bloodthirsty Sith was doing her no favors, either. Wanton murder wasn’t something she did for fun; it was merely a means to an end. The value of a mundane simply did not hold the same sacred place in Selika’s heart that it did for many of those who failed to see the true value of the Force. The walking topiary standing before her was one of those, using the Force as a mere tool and protecting the thrice-damned mundanes instead of recognizing the true order of the universe...

“Well?” Vorsa asked, holding her blade outstretched and pointing it squarely at Selika’s forehead.

Selika silently cursed, realizing that her thoughts had worked themselves off along a tangent and that she still found herself at her enemies’ feet.

Another application of lightning? she thought. A direct application of telekinesis directly to her smug, self-righteous face?

That’s when she remembered one of Darth Plagueis’s lesser known maxims. It came not from his work with the dark side, but instead his time as a Magister of the Intergalactic Banking Clan: Every once in a while, declare peace. It confuses the hell out of your enemies.

“I surrender,” Selika replied.

It had obviously not been what Vorsa had been expecting, given the nonplussed look on her face and the quick blinks of her eyes.

“You surrender,” Vorsa repeated, sounding like she trusted the statement about as far as she could throw the planet upon which she stood.

Selika tossed her inactive lightsaber to land next to Vorsa’s feet. “It doesn’t look like I’m getting out of here otherwise. At least, not in one piece.”

Vorsa’s only response to this was a frown as she bent over to pick up Selika’s weapon.

“I’ll take my chances with Cotelin,” Selika said casually as she pulled herself to her feet, her hands held out in front of her ready to be cuffed. “Besides, you are only here at the Grand Master’s pleasure. I doubt that they’re going to come down all that hard just because a few Force-blind citizens happened to come to abrupt ends.”

The Jedi’s frown only deepened, suspicion and doubt working in equal parts behind her features. Selika continued to speak as the Neti slapped a pair of stun cuffs on her wrists, filling the air with more talk as to how she would probably not see the full force of the Brotherhood’s justice: how she had been sent here on a direct and sanction mission by the Dread Lord, how the Dark Council generally let the Clan’s struggle amongst themselves without intervention, and how a few murders were hardly grounds for open war even if they were inclined to involve themselves. Selika could almost feel Vorsa’s teeth grinding all the while.

Her continued prattle, however, was almost reflexive, coming from a level just below her conscious attention to serve as distraction. Her attention was focused outward through the Force to probe the minds that surrounded them, specifically on those Sentinels that were serving to keep the crowd back. Each one, in turn, seemed to display the same kind of well ordered thoughts that were almost an imitation of Vorsa’s mental bastion. Then, suddenly, she found it. At the periphery of the crowd, there was a mind that would allow her entry. A middle aged human distracted by gambling debts and family illness. He would be like clay in her hands.

It took only a simple application of the Force to redirect the vigilant attention he was paying to the task at hand more directly on one of the bystanders the Sentinels were holding back. Selika imposed the idea that the man was out of place, a sense of danger centered on the bulge under his dark, vaguely Imperial looking coat. As the thought Selika desired began to take the form of action, Selika pushed her Force influence out onto the crowd as well.

The man is a Sith agent, she directed to the Sentinel agent. He’s here to extract the Sith woman, and he’ll kill anyone who gets in his way. He’s going to kill you, your family, **everyone.

His mind clouded by fear and Selika’s mental trickery, the agent ripped his blaster pistol from its holster and pumped four shots into the man he perceived as a clear and present danger to everyone in the crowd. What many of the assembled sentients thought they saw, however, was the remorseless warrior Jedi order the man to fire into the crowd a moment before he did so. Selika’s illusion didn’t affect even half of those assembled, but it took hold in a sufficient number of the crowd. Everyone panicked, many of them seeing the Sentinels and their Jedi commander as having committed cold blooded murder. Even the assembled agents couldn’t stop the once passive crowd of bystanders from dissolving into a full on mob.

The chaos around the two Force users intensified as several of those in the crowd pulled out their own blasters. No matter how peaceful it seemed, Menat Ombo was still an Outer Rim city with all the hard luck smugglers, street toughs, and grifters who came with it. Those who had fallen victim to Selika’s illusion, already distrustful of authority, began to open fire on the agents and the Jedi. Vyr pushed her prisoner to the ground and readied her saber to stop any stray bolts as the open area that the two combatants had once enjoyed dissolved under the rush of crazed citizens.

Lamenting that she had, for the third time, ended up face down on the ferrocrete, Selika rolled to her left and into the running crowd. Pulling herself to her knees to avoid getting trampled by the throng, Selika sent a quick but powerful jolt of electricity into the mechanism of the stun cuffs. She was rewarded with the smell of overloading electronics as the restraints popped open and dropped to the street. Scrambling to her feet, Selika began pushing her way quickly along the direction that the crowd was moving and towards a large square the street fed into. The sharp realization that she felt through the Force meant that Vorsa had noticed her escape, but even the tall Jedi couldn’t spot the shorter Selika within the surging crowd.

Moving into the Square, the throng began to thin slightly as the space containing them opened up compared to the narrower street. The panic hadn’t really spread; rather, it was confined to those who had witnessed the conflict. Moving quickly, Selika sprinted across the square trying to make her escape.

“ROH!”

The scream echoed through both the air and the Force as Vorsa finally saw her quarry across the square. Once again, Selika jerked to a stop as her arm was caught in the Neti woman’s powerful Force grip. Turning, Selika fought down the feeling of momentary panic that threatened to overwhelm her.

Is there no way to escape?

Selika’s eyes caught sight of the bright red labeling on the cargo containers carried by a speeder delivery truck that had just lumbered into the square behind her pursuer. Spelled out in at least three different languages, including Basic, were the words, “Rhydonium: Highly Volatile”.

“I’ll be damned,” Selika murmured under her breath, a slight smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “I love it when a plan comes together.”

---

V’yr was very careful not to let her emotion get the better of her. Her problematic subordinate had now killed more of the Omboan citizenry, actions that V’yr’s own carelessness had contributed to. This time, however, there would be no escape. Her vice-like grip would hold the woman, and there would be no more manual restraints for the Sith to escape from. The Councillor would be seeing to her long incarceration personally.

V’yr’s strong focus on the woman allowed her to feel her calling upon the Force, once again readying Force driven lightning to try to make her escape. V’yr raised her own hand in response, ready to deflect the energy away before her opponent could strike. The bolt leapt forth from the woman’s hand, but its path arced well to the right of V’yr’s body. Almost without thought, the Odanite’s gaze turned to follow the blast with just enough time to see the purple-tinged energy intersect with red and yellow clad fuel canisters atop a flatbed speeder.

There wasn’t even enough time for V’yr to experience regret before the Visulu Marketplace was rocked by its second explosion in a week. Unlike the downed police speeder, however, this one was a monster. The fireball blasted out just behind the shock wave. The speed differential was probably the only thing that saved the Jedi from the scorching heat. The wave took V’yr off her feet, driving her across the square as it shattered the transparisteel windows on all sides. The blast shook the entire sector of the city, and a pillar of smoke began to rise over Menat Ombo.

It took a few moments before V’yr could force her eyes open, her vision still blurry from the impact of her landing against one of the storefronts. She could barely make out the form of Selika across the square, the woman offering a mock salute with her serpentine saber.

Looking down at the empty place on her belt that the saber had occupied, obviously retrieved by its owner’s Force ability, V’yr let loose a stream of particularly heartfelt invective.

She had been running for well over an hour now, moving with the crowds of panicked and angry people. The Tribune was so perfectly intertwined with their bleak and inconspicuous faces that no one could really take notice or even bother to look her way. Those that did were swiftly dissuaded with a wave of her elegant fingers or a simple distraction. She had escaped again, for all intents and purposes, and this time only barely. Vorsa was a vronskr when it came to running her quarry down. She wouldn’t relent or give her enough time to breathe if she caught her again. The Plagueian had to lay low again, and blend in.

The raven-haired seductress took a turn into one of the many abandoned alleys in Menat Ombo when her comm unit blinked silently. She reached for it, clicking the button deftly before a voice came through, cracking and staticy.

“Mistress, we have a vehicle available for extraction...” He left the the last word afloat in the air.

“But?” Selika inquired, low on patience and time.

“You will have to double back towards the marketplace.”

A moment of silence passed between them before Selika replied with enough venom in her voice to kill an overgrown bantha herd. “Are you out of your mind?”

“Mistress, the skies are being watched and much of the city is locked down for anything but our transport. We have no other way to get you out safely.”

Selika sighed in frustration, finally swearing her idea to come to this Force-forsaken, rotting planet in the first place. “What’s the transport?”

Another moment of silence followed as the operator chose his words carefully. “It’s...a garbage truck, ma’am.”

The Proconsul’s knuckles whitened around the commlink. Had she seen the operator in person, she would have probably killed him with her frightening glare alone. She, a noblewoman of the Empress Teta bloodline, in a garbage truck? She wanted to scream in frustration and punch someone to vent her anger, but all she could really do was calm down and think clearly.

“Fine.” She rubbed her temples, trying her utmost to sound less angry than she actually felt. “I will meet you there. You better bring backup this time. Out.” She keyed the commlink again, breaking the connection, and headed towards the Marketplace again.

---

Six Sentinels and a couple of Marshals remained in the massive marketplace, mingling with the crowds, well hidden to the uninitiated, but she could feel them easily enough. No sign of her pursuer, however. At least as far as she could tell. ”The vronskr lost the trail. Hah. Some great General you are. This’ll be a fun story to laugh about back home,” she thought as she noticed a very inconspicuous garbage truck come into view from one of the side streets. True to their cover, the agents did their fake job with expertise. Expected and commendable, even for mundanes. Selika smiled and mingled with the crowds again, aiming for their rendezvous.

She neared the truck with an even step, trying her utmost to look unobtrusive under the ragged semi-cloak she had grabbed from a beggar not too long ago. It stank of piss, rot and garbage. Not her most dignified moment but she had to bear it.

Suddenly there came a ping through the Force. She sensed an all too familiar presence somewhere close. Selika stopped several dozen meters from the vehicle, frozen in place by the sheer amount of hostile intent she felt from her foe. Sweat gathered on her brow as her wide, shocked eyes jumped from face to face, trying to find the object of her anxiety, and find it she did — up above her.

Selika’s eyes darted toward the nearby roof, not ten meters away. There, on the edge, stood the grizzled General, like a falcon scoping out her next prey. Her golden, intimidating eyes pierced the raven-haired woman, and the sudden realization that she had entered a trap became all too clear to the Tribune. Did the Herald know she would come back? Could she have organized her troops in such a way to make her return here on purpose? Did she know about the Plagueis agents or did she only assume there would be some?

Of course she would. No sane Proconsul would enter enemy territory without backup. Nor would she follow the path of greatest resistance, and Vorsa used that to her advantage. Like a game of Dejarik, the General moved her pieces behind the scenes to force Selika to where she wanted her to be. The perfect position. Checkmate.

Selika made a run for it.

With a whistle of command from their commander, the Sentinels and Marshals ran after her as the agents of Plagueis pulled out their weapons to protect their Summit member. Blaster bolts flew in all directions as the two forces engaged in what soon turned out to be a slaughter. In mere seconds bodies littered the ground as panicked mobs of people ran from the market, trampling over each other or otherwise falling to shots. The Plagueians purposefully aimed for the civilians, creating even more panic and making the battlefield a gore-filled massacre.

Selika jumped for cover behind one of the many stalls on the market, covering her head as plasma burned and disintegrated pieces of wood and metal around her. To her right, the Proconsul noticed a mother and child huddling together under a nearby table, screaming over the echoing sounds of battle. To her left a husband protected his wife as blaster bolts ripped through his cover and seared through his back, turning him limp almost instantly.

The Tribune steeled herself, pulled out her serpentine hilt and, with a flick, ignited the blade. The purple saber danced in beautiful pirouettes, deflecting bolts of fire and death as the Tribune stood up elegantly. She angled her blade, deflecting one of the blaster bolts into a Marshall, felling him, a gaping, smoking hole replacing his left eye socket. Another deflected bolt hit one of the Sentinels in the chest, incapacitating him even through his armor.

Her men fared no better. A scene of gore was all that was left of one of her agent’s heads. Two more lay on their backs, gripping their wounds and bleeding in droves. “Come on!” one of the agents yelled as he took out another Marshall. A Sentinel’s rifle sounded as the man’s head exploded against the ugly truck behind him.

This was getting out of hand to fast. Selika darted from cover to cover, running a serpentine path between the stalls and through the crossfire. She was so close to her goal. So, so close.

“ROH!” thunderous roar came from above as Vorsa jumped into the fray with Force-enhanced speed. She slid several meters between the stalls and launched a massive telekinetic attack against the Proconsul. Selika steeled herself as best she could but the attack was too powerful. It pushed her back with enough force to slam her into one of the smaller stalls, breaking it in the process.

Vorsa’s red blade shimmered to life just as she dispersed several bolts of energy coming her way. One of the agents slammed into the side of the truck, carried by invisible hands. Another suffered a headshot from his own blaster as the Neti deflected the bolt back. She could feel the pain and suffering across the battlefield. It was chaos that she was used to. Death she was steeled against. Had she a heart, it would have broken a thousand times over at the scene before her, and it all came down to her quarry.

Suddenly it was all too clear to Selika that she was up against the wrong Jedi. Vorsa walked towards her intently, blocking and deflecting blaster bolts with her saber and her free hand. her eyes were locked on the Proconsul, intent as ever to rip her apart. Selika realized that she would have to charge through the Neti somehow to get to her escape route. She stood up from her prone position, deflecting another bolt haphazardly to the side just as the Neti jumped on her. Blade clashed against blade in the most gracious and deadly dance the mundanes around them had ever seen.

The two women bent and twirled perfectly around one another, deflecting, blocking, slicing, chopping at each other, neither hitting their mark at any point. Stalls were cut down as blades sliced through them, the ferrocrete underneath their feet showing burn marks where the plasma scorched it. The air filled with ozone and smoke as the battle escalated and fires spread over the burning wood, jumping from stall to stall. The stench of burning flesh filled their nostrils as the bodies burned as well.

It was utter ruin that looked as much a battlefield as any open war.

What little attention Selika could spare from the fight directly before her revealed that the battle was not going well. The Plagueian agents seemed to be falling just as quickly as their Odanite opponents, but the latter was not the limited resource that the former was. Selika’s extraction depended on her underlings being able to overwhelm their adversaries, and a pitched battle between equally matched sides didn’t lend itself to that outcome.

Suddenly, her enemy’s red saber blade was slashing toward her face, leaving Selika less than a heartbeat to duck away from the strike. Even so, the blade’s tip sliced through Selika’s hair, and the acrid stench of the burn warred in her nostrils with the smell of blaster-burned flesh.

Keep your attention on the threat, Selika, she chastised herself silently.

A knock down, drag out brawl with a single minded warrior was not where Selika would have wanted to find herself. Vorsa was an accomplished warrior, skilled with both the chosen weapon and tactics of a duel. Selika, on the other hand, while just as skilled with her chosen form of combat, was not herself a true duelist. Misdirection, trickery, and Force-driven goading were her forte, but the determined Neti Councillor refused to rise to the bait. Taunts were ignored. The increasing amount of death that surrounded them was pushed aside. Nothing seemed to penetrate the consciousness of Vorsa, focused as she was on the task at hand.

As blow after blow rained down from where Vorsa loomed over her, Selika knew that something needed to change. Then, as the Plagueian deflected another of her enemy’s strikes, Selika felt a wave of telekinetic energy slam into her chest. The Neti had not even appeared to channel it, no gestures serving to help focus the Force. It had simply burst out from the Vanguard like water from a bursting dam without a second thought.

Selika was knocked down by the blow as her lightsaber spun away from her hands, and she landed flat on her back. Once again, she found herself facing the crimson blade of her opponent as Vorsa stood over her. This time, surrender would likely be futile, as it appeared Vorsa was uninterested in offering her opponent quarter. In any other circumstance, Selika would have been fascinated by how the other woman could show in her eyes the absolute determination to kill without any of the bloodlust that normally accompanied it. With only a second to react, as Vorsa’s red blade slashed down to cleave her in two, Selika reached out wildly through the Force to try to find something to serve as her salvation.

Her Force grip closed around a body, one of the Plagueian undercover agents, and pulled it through the air a few feet from where he had falling. The body interposed itself between the two combatants just in time, and Vorsa’s blade cut cleanly through its chest. The blade would have continued on to its intended target, as the body itself offered little resistance, but the weapon also drove itself through the grenades that were strapped to the man’s chest under his hastily-obtained sanitation worker’s coveralls.

Shielded somewhat from the resultant explosion, Selika was merely battered by the force of the detonation and the body that rammed down on top of her. Vorsa, on the other hand, came out far worse. Exploding unexpectedly, the grenades had offered no time for the Neti to deflect their fury. Standing within arm’s length of the blast, the warrior woman was only thrown through the air to land awkwardly amidst the broken stalls that lined the square.

Selika rolled the body of her agent, now burned beyond recognition, off of her and pushed herself into a sitting position. Her ears were ringing from the explosion, the sound of the market around her reduced almost to silence. She saw one last Odanite soldier running towards her, apparently the only one remaining from the two warring sides. Selika reached out her hand and seized the man by the neck with the Force, her grip raising him up so that his toes were only brushing the ground. She could see his mouth working, not knowing if he was screaming or not as she couldn’t have heard him in any event. Holding out her other hand, she wrapped her grasp around his head and, holding his neck motionless, twisted his head around sharply until she felt the telltale snap of his vertebrae. The now-lifeless body of the Sentinel dropped to the ground like a sack of tubers when Selika released her grip.

Looking around the scene, Selika’s gaze finally found Vorsa lying in the rubble. She was obviously injured, bits of shrapnel embedded in her bark-like skin. There was even something like blood, probably sap or the like, oozing from the open wounds that were visible upon her. Selika began to move towards her, noticing for the first time a limp that was the result of some leg injury sustained in the duel.

The slow pace she was limited to simply served to reinforce the decision she had already made. She wasn’t going to run anymore. It was time to put an end to this chase, and, if that end was Vorsa’s death, she would deal with Pravus and Cotelin’s wrath when they found out that she had killed one of their Councillors. After all, a tongue lashing was highly preferable to a literal one.

Did you feel that, Vorsa? You could have let me go, Selika sent with her mind. All of this is your fault, all of this death. And now, because you couldn’t leave well enough alone, you’ve added yourself to the pile of the dead.

Selika pushed herself down into the energy that was flowing around her, subsuming herself into the dark Force itself. Raising her hands above her head, Selika sent a powerful torrent of Force lightning against her opponent. Vorsa screamed, something that Selika felt rippling through the Force even though she could not hear the sound itself. A second burst of electricity arced between the two women, this one leaving Vorsa’s robes smoking as they smouldered from the onslaught. Selika called once again on her last reserves of energy, intent on making the third blast one that would finish off her adversary once and for all. The blast leapt from her fingers and surged towards the prone Jedi, but it never reached its target.

Before the she could have even felt it coming, Vorsa was already weaving the Force to counter the assault. Coalescing into being just as the lightning arrived, the Neti’s defenses deflected the energy back from where it had come. The lightning struck Selika in her chest, the painful energy racing through her body before she could realize what was happening. She dropped to her knees as she felt the uncontrollable pain of it take her. Then it dissipated, leaving lingering pain throughout her body. Looking up, Selika had just enough time to see a steely-eyed V’yr Vorsa charging at her with Force aided speed.

The woman held no weapon, obviously having lost hers somewhere in the rubble after the grenade detonation. It hardly mattered, however, as Vorsa landed the first blow with a kick to Selika’s side. Rolling with the blow, Selika was still not skilled enough to really lessen it. Struggling awkwardly to her feet, Selika attempted to assuming a passable fighting stance to counter her opponent. While the Jedi wasn’t a highly skilled hand-to-hand combatant, Selika’s total lack of experience, coupled with the physical augmentation of the Force, more than made up for any of her shortcomings.

Blow after blow fell upon the Sith. As Vorsa pummeled her midsection, Selika moved ineffectually to protect herself. This left another opening, and so the Neti landed punches against her head and a vicious kick to her already injured knee. Always one step behind, Selika’s attempt to protect her head had merely left her torso open for attack again. The Herald battered the Tribune until the latter was prone on the ground, and so V’yr reached back for the final strike that would end it.

Before it could be dealt, however, the square shook with a sonic boom as the air echoed with the scream of ion engines. Passing overhead were a flight of Imperial-style starfighters, followed by a slow moving shuttle that carried the markings of the Dark Council. As Selika’s hearing began to return, she could hear an electronically amplified voice ordering the combatants to stop. V’yr stood as still as a statue, while Selika really had little choice in the matter.

The shuttle descended on repulsors, landing in one of the few areas in the square relatively free of debris. Four troopers descended the boarding ramp once it had lowered, followed by an officer wearing the insignia of the Justicar.

“By order of the Justicar, as requested by the authority of V’yr Vorsa, Herald of the Brotherhood, I am taking Selika Roh into custody,” the officer explained, shoving a datapad toward the Jedi while simultaneously not even looking at her.

Selika was helped to her feet as binders were once against secured around her wrists. Vorsa did not speak as the other woman was led away, but Selika couldn’t help but lock gazes with the other woman and smile.

“Just as I said,” Selika taunted, her voice close to a rasp. Then, raising her manacled hands to her forehead, she shot the Jedi a mocking salute. “Be seeing you.”

Selika could almost feel the force of Vorsa’s teeth (or what passed for such with Neti) grinding together like tectonic plates as she was lead away into the shuttle. As soon as she was up the ramp and behind the closed door, however, she dropped to the ground. What little energy she had been able to draw to her through the Force could only have maintained her bravado for so long. The telekinetic aid she had given to her injured leg and willing away of the pain had nearly failed her as she had ascended the ramp to be truthful with herself.

“They say pride goeth before a fall,” a male voice spoke from farther inside the passenger compartment.

Selika raised her eyes to where Aabsdu di Plagia, Master At Arms of the Brotherhood, leisurely sat in one of the seats. “I’m sure you’d know better than most,” she spat back.

“Come now,” Aabsdu continued, “there’s no need for that.”

“Let me guess, you’re the reason my extraction was delayed,” Selika accused.

“Guilty,” Aabsdu replied, holding his hands up to forestall her tirade. “I saw an opportunity to evaluate our new Herald, so I took it. Besides, as you yourself are fond of saying, it’s always easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.”

“Get me to a bacta tank and we’ll talk,” Selika said, her scowl softening only somewhat. “And impersonating the Justicar? That’s a new one even for you.”

“You wound me, dear. Jac was in on this plan of mine from the start,” Aabsdu explained. “He wanted to get a better read on this bit of flora we have on the Council, just as I did. And we were only going to get that through the bit of nastiness that I just pulled you out of.”

Selika nodded, but then her eyes widened as she came to a realization. Her head jerked upward to stare at Aabsdu once again.

“You sent me into that hornet’s nest, planned my ‘extraction’ with the garbage truck! It wasn’t some tactical brilliance on the part of her - you set me up for that!” she accused.

“Got it in one, Miss Roh,” Aabsdu replied to his fellow di Plagia with a smile.