Pulley-operated, mechanical-lifts descend into the earth below the Arena. The Abandoned Mines pre-date the Galactic Empire by thousands of years. Once used as mining routes, the long forgotten network of interconnecting tunnels has held stalwart against the sands of time. After exiting, the lift begins its retreat back to the surface. Sporadic crystals protrude from the walls to quietly radiate ochre light like naturally-forming torches. The small alcove gives birth to a maze of wide tunnels supported by old, steadfast wooden beams.The tunnels spider and split off into various directions, some leading to dead ends while others ultimately lead back to the central Mining Shaft.

The central Mining Shaft is square pit that descends into a deep pit that radiates a luminescent, cerulean glow from the horde of crystalized shards still growing below. The air hangs with a cool, windless chill. Stone stalactites hang ominously overhead, flanked by jagged jutters of rock and sediment that line the ascending walls.

To reach the surface, blocks of stone wide enough for two humans to stand side by side on, shift back and forth in a combination of a lateral and ascending patterns. Each cubic platform is controlled by a mechanical pulley and each cubic platform will eventually pass close enough to step over to another. The spacing and timing is not attuned to any formal pattern, giving equal balance to both Force users and Mundanes. Whatever your talents, the shifting cubes are the only way to ascend back to the Arena.

Holocam Drones flit about the caverns, recording a live video feed that is transmitted back up towards the surface and projected over two large holodisplays for the crowd to observe. Progress will be watched as members are tried and tested.

The Grand Master’s only concern is the resourcefulness and resilience of his members. Reaching the surface will be no easy task, and doing so will be the only way for fighters to move forward in the Tournament.

Like a tot of the sun, the deep pit of the shaft illuminated and resonated a sweet lullaby while the cerulean crystals pulsed. Sprinkles of fine powder, moss, and jewels rained down upon the grounds, as a dome rose from the back of the room. Resting in a meditative state upon the risen stone, the lithe Quarren was in absolute silence, his expression calm as the blooms of roses in the midday high. Jets of silt floated from his gills, as the Battlemaster took a step into the farsight. His mind ventured deep into the secrets of the Dark Side, crawling his way through visions of the future and of a light cast by an unknown. Garnered with the Light Side, he could detect the slender female was a Togruta of almost certain Jedi descent. Whether this was a morale choice or a forced decision remains to be seen.

Whatever the choice of this strange combatant had been, he could see a grim lesson as clear as the sunlight. He still crawled across the bloodied and sanded mines, while she became the victor and rose to the next round. A resenting growl left the amber lips of the Quarren, the well of anger breaking his silence. Opening his eyes and finally meeting the Togruta Seer, Lexiconus snapped a name to her face and nodded gracefully in respect.

"A'lora," the Quarren spoke, quietly, as if the broken silence could somehow be mended. The Consul froze silent on the spot as her body face sideways, her tigress eyes fixated on his every movement. He locked eyes with the Seer who stood a few meters away, as a constellation of moving stones danced above their heads.

“Relax please, if I wanted you dead you already would be,” the Quarren said, before drifting back into his meditation, the Consul of Odan-Urr shook her head in disbelief and tapped the hilt of her double-bladed lightsaber in beckon.

“What makes you think…” Respect for the Seer dissipated as the Battlemaster struggled to his feet, rolling from the mound with gasps and grunts of pain, until fully upright. He kneeled on the ground and with a quick whip of his arms, clapped his hands, which emitted an echoing sonic wave. Apprehension, anticipation and wonder slowing her stride, the Seer felt and saw no reaction. Caught unawares, serpents of sand bubbled out of the ground and slithered around her legs, climbing upwards and constricted her movement as it spun into a whirl. The winds howled and whipped at her body, scouring her violet skin as the twisting terrors finally enveloped her entire body. Lexic rose to his feet and stretched his arms out wide, straining with tension. Two boulders from the debris at the bottom of the shaft wobbled slightly, and floated towards the pair, bracketing the Seer.

The Quarren swiftly clapped his hands together once more and the rubble slammed into the twisting sands, exploding with a hail of shrapnel rock flying in every direction. Lexic covered his face quickly with a piece of fabric from his shirt, feeling the sting of slate shards etching their aggression into his auburn skin. When the dust settled and the chaos faded back into silence, he looked at his bleeding side and pressed an open palm against the painful scrapes. The Battlemaster looked into the detritus in order to find some remains of blood, organs or even snapped bone, but what he saw was far worse.

“I would be real?” whispered A’lora, as she swayed towards the Quarren, her tigress eyes glaring spears at the foolish Battlemaster. His heart sunk as the realisation dawned on him; that tricks could be played much easier upon him than on her. Lexic didn’t realise this game of intellect would be so challenging, but he enjoyed a truly difficult opponent. With a rapid flick of her wrist, she ignited the double-bladed lightsaber in her hand. The Togruta had had enough of their menial tricks it would seem, but so had the Battlemaster. A cursory gesture with his hand commanded his lightsaber to jump from his belt and the pit walls were illuminated in a beautiful white glow. The Quarren’s growl turned into a hiss as his tongue flickered in anticipation.

“Illusion isn’t a real trick anyway,” Lexic mocked dangerously and dug his toes into the ground, prepared for the worst.

Lexiconus caught the glint of something metallic lingering in the furthest reaches of his peripheral vision, “Now it’s my turn for a trick.”

Clawed fingers extended towards the mess of electronics sighted from the corner of his eye, causing a faint flicker of life to be drawn from its dormant existence. Crimson lights turned to emerald, bathing the bottom of the shaft in a glow that seemed much brighter in the otherwise lightless pit. He shot what could be a passable grin at the Consul before the ancient construct resumed its duties.

Gears strained against the corrosion of several decades, groaning in protest as the machine beckoned to life. Misaligned but functional, these mechanisms clanked against each other with reckless abandon. Sparks shot from between the serrated teeth of the cogs rotating in clockwork fashion along the ceiling, showering both combatants in filings of molten metal that burned like fire against exposed skin. Blanched mandibles chattered against each other in an imitation of amusement as Lexiconus witnessed the Togruta’s visible irritation.

The sensation was tolerable, but no less discomforting when A’lora felt the incandescent particles sear into her flesh, blanketing her shoulders in freckles of darker shades where the sparks fell and burned. She blocked the worst of it from her mind with some concentration, and focused the rest on getting through this mechanical nightmare.

“Regretting your choice of attire, A’lora?” The Quarren scoffed.

“Remember, Quarren—cloth can catch in the smallest crevices; besides, the air down here must be quite different from that of Dac.” She remarked, having noticed the Battlemaster’s own misgivings long before their confrontation. Dust settled on the moist surface of his auburn skin, blocking the pores that drew in the moisture he needed to survive; however, it also served to seal in what little remained—so long as it could last him this one fight.

Grinding to a halt, one of the gears burst from its arbor. Notched grooves caught into the hewn walls of the mine shaft, tumbling and bouncing between surfaces before it crashed through the beams supporting the northernmost wall of the shaft. A sickening “crack” echoed upwards throughout the shaft, just as the falling cogwheel shattered the horizontal beams into splinters. Lexiconus felt the cavern tremble around him, the sand falling from his feet into a rectangular rift that formed around the platform on which he stood.

Precognitive warnings sent off alarms in A’lora’s mind. Sands shifted in time with the platform beneath her adversary, giving form to a tendril that slithered beneath the cover of silt. Ultrasonic signals projected the pattern of movement to the hollow spaces within her montrals moments before the chain tightened against the pull of gears from the ceiling; its slack whipped around on a tangent that would have collided with the Seer’s chest. With the grace of a Twi’lek dancer in a Hutt’s palace, the lavender form twisted into a choreographed sequence of impossible angles—a dance in itself that allowed the Fallanassi to avoid being thrown into the oncoming barrage of debris falling from the shaft’s north wall when the coil passed over her horn-like features.

“Being buried beneath rock can be a slow death, Jedi. Better run off to higher ground.” Lexiconus offered with a chortle, feeling the durasteel box beneath his feet hang above the ground without much aside from a taut cable to support its weight.

Bubbles formed from the sand, tangled bundles of cords rising from the unswept cavern floor revealing several more cubes rising from the depths. Granular sediment parted into a grid around each of the metallic containers before each rose in succession, creating a floating staircase.

Leveraging the end of a quarterstaff into the fallen debris, A’lora Kituri hurled her weight forward while maintaining a grip on the opposite side of the staff’s length. Holocams caught a blur of motion—both from the acrobatic maneuvers of the woman and the tremors running along the walls of the mineshaft. Neither combatant was aware of being monitored, but both were giving the audience a performance not soon to be forgotten.

“Can we clear the feed?” Asked Valhavoc, straining to deconstruct the tactics of each individual—moreso for his own gains, in case he found himself in the position to use that knowledge. Outside of the Dark Council’s viewing booth, the cheers and applause from the audience became something of a nuisance to his efforts. It was nauseating.

James gave the monitor’s controls a line of commands, finishing with a flourish before reclining back his chair, “The drones are repositioned, but I’ll wager that one gets hit with a rock before this is over.”

“That’s fine,” Pravus chimed in, “We’ll see what we can learn of the High Councillor.”

Tugging and yanking the cords of the monitor into strangulation, Valhavoc growled bitterly as the feedback flickered in and out of life. His face scrunched up like a Kinrath pup, it showed the Fist’s displeasure in the drones and their usefulness. “James! Your bots are ruining the show! They simply cannot get the right angle, this one is facing the frakking wall!” The uproars and booing from the audience chiselled away at his impatience, he wished to start his own duel here.

“This isn’t my problem, the drones are manipulated this way. Drone #3 is completely unresponsive and hasn’t responded to my shutdown commands,” James leaned over onto his datapad, ebony fingers a blur on the control panel-- the Master slipped into his metier.

Pravus reclined in his chair as his fingers rolled around the rough features of his chin while a smirk grew on him-- there was a potential the Grand Master noticed from this drone issue. Something only a Techweaver could perform.

Leveraging his feet on the rocking durasteel box, Lexiconus saw difficult encounters ascending the staircase of entropy. The cast-off cables gave the Quarren enough support to pull himself into the south side of the next box. His firm heartbeats and unshakable arms gave him the aid to tug onto the sediment covered surface, the Dark Side augmenting his body where his mortal capabilities couldn’t. Sanguine about a happy ending for himself, Lexic walked steadily across to grasp the next box as it descended slowly within arm’s length. Lurching over the lip, his weak jaw caught the cold metal as the box rejected him and ascended swiftly.

Juxtaposed by the falling silt and sandstone, the Seer coursed through a sandy curtain and dug her quarterstaff into the South wall. Nerves twitched slightly out of proportion as the Consul hung for her life, her lavender fingers dug into the sedimentary rock while her willpower battled the raw nature of her body. An aggressive snarl left between her gritted teeth which served as a warning to her darker natures, the Fallanassi resisted. Ultrasonic vibrations warned the Togruta of a descending saviour, which she swiftly scurried up the nooks and rolled onto the durasteel box. Her tigress eyes then locked onto the stumbling silhouette of the Quarren. “I am faster, therefore I will catch up,” the Seer confided in her own words, confidently hopping up and onto a rising platform.

Plops of warm and rich blood patterned the grains beneath Lexic’s feet, while a drizzle garnered his violet robes red. The Quarren couldn’t spare time to effectively treat it so he just ran a hand over the cut and the Dark Side stitched it closed. Illumination embraced the next semi-sentient platform and this pleased Lexic-- light meant safety and the conclusion of this terrible ordeal. He however witnessed a slight problem once he turned, his eyes widened in surprise to see the lavender Togruta dashing swiftly past him and leaping onto the high platform. “Gotta be faster than that, Battlemaster. Leadership demands leading by example,” the Consul echoed from above, her words soulless.

Demonstrating the meaning of haste, Lexic gambled his own life and leapt onto the ascending box after A’lora who was superior in obstacles and found herself close to the shaft lip. The Quarren was uninterested in her words and kept his own pace up to the next rising block, an eerie silence grew around him that made the Togruta slightly uneasy. Her dealings with the Sith of his stature were bossy, confident and implore to explore the stories of their plans with you, but the dead silence from the Xenophobic Quarren became unnerving. Showering the arbitrary boxes with silt and pebbles, the taut cables began to buckle as the ancient concretions broke apart and struck the cables with a vicious thrash. Launching his body with a weedy hop, Lexic caught onto the lip of the final box and rolled across the dirt ground above the mine shaft. Frozen in her place as her montrals picked up miniscule vibrations from an alcove of void before her, she speared her gaze towards the Quarren. “I thought you weren’t allowed to bring cohorts. What is this?”

The Battlemaster forced his frail body up onto his knees and wiped the blood away, grinning gleefully as he slowly approached and embraced the darkness. “I am a great leader, and this is my example of why,” shooting his hands into the air, pistons hissed as engines began to ignite into life from the alcove. Burning a bronze hue across the area, gridded shapes were cast across the sandstone while a chrome hull shone brightly. Four pairs of ruby eyes ignited into life and rose into a great size, while Lexic’s distorted chuckle sent shivers down A’lora’s spine.

“Variety is the spice of the life, and you will learn to recognise this. Either through my victory, or his,” the Battlemaster brought his hand up and aimed towards the roof where a blue shimmering appeared, he yanked the source from it’s position directly into his hand and crushed the metallic body with his Dark Side abilities. The corpse of what the Consul could discern as a drone, rolled in front to her feet. By placing her strong feet onto the hull, she accidently caught a metal fragment which tore her orchid sole. “That being destroyed your drone, remind her a lesson of why that is frowned upon here,” an order came directly from the Quarren as he jumped onto one of the final blocks ascending close to the surface. All the while the purrs of the chrome beast vibrated through the Jedi’s body, who unpretentiously stepped from it’s alcove and into confrontation.

Nightmarish chrome appendages carried the mechanical construct to its full height. Gleaming, but corroded casing surrounded its hull, having accumulated rust along the edges of each section of the segmented plates serving as its armour. Energies surrounded the monster, giving form to its otherwise defective horror. Once serving as a droid commissioned to unload blocks from the mines, its servo-brain deteriorated to leave it without function or purpose.

That was, until Lexiconus’ control over the dark side of the Force gave reason for its existence. Now it served as a slave to his command—sentient, but dominated to follow the orders of a Techweaver with little regard for its original programming. Under the influence of a Battlemaster, its goal was one-sided: the obliteration of A’lora Kituri. Regardless, the now-sentient and damaged servo-brain struggled with the directives that its creator would have considered to be an abomination and affront to the design on which it was made.

Crimson streams of light bathed the vertical field of battle in an ominous glow as the droid ascended the walls with relative ease. Claws darkened from the sediment clung to the hewn stone, elevating it to be level with the High Councillor’s struggle of tending to the punctured sole. The images Lexiconus had transferred to the monolithic beast funnelled through its brain; scans matched this profile in its database with the likeness of one Togruta woman. She stood before it while the beast’s photoreceptors scanned the features of her face.

“Organics detected. Commence with extermination subroutines,” it bellowed from damaged vocoders. The baritone of its imitated voice bounced through the caverns above and reflected back with earth-shattering force. Stalactites shuddered in time with each of its analytical confirmations, stone falling as tall lances when the inverted spikes tore free from the ceiling. Both A’lora and the Quarren had little time to react while the stone came crashing down onto the lateral platforms with enough momentum to rip the platforms from their cables.

Lexiconus was forced to press on to higher ground while A’lora remained facing the construct looming on the rock face before her. Servomotors strained against their limits off their hold on the cliff, chrome glinting red in the lights of its photoreceptors as a serrated arm lunged for the figure. Twisting around, she dodged the onslaught of its cumbersome limb without much effort. However, the tension of the cable was weakened from the clawed appendage. Chain links became deformed enough to be on the verge of breaking.

Disoriented, she didn’t notice the arm circling back around. It caught onto the tail end of her staff to unbalance her from the unstable platform. Knuckles turned red around the midsection of its length while she tumbled over the edge, still holding the staff that now rested with an end on two platforms while her feet dangled into the abyss. Blood from the punctured sole formed rivulets to her heel. Droplets cascaded into the darkness to splash onto debris littering the ground.

Applause and gasps came in equal measure from the spectators observing the live recordings from underneath the area. Pravus shifted in his seat, as if awoken from slumber at an exciting scene from a favorite holodrama.

“It looks like the High Councillor won’t be our problem from now on, Grand Master.” Valhavoc jested from his own seating above the audience.

Lexiconus chuckled at the sight; one of the core threats to the Brotherhood now dangled on a thread at his whim. “I’ll soon be recognized as the one who brought the Jedi to their knees. The High Councillor of Odan-Urr, pleading for her life over the pit of despair. Pathetic.”

“Who’s pleading, Sith?” the Togruta spat, directing her weight perpendicular to the quarterstaff. Each time she swung around its axis, the chain tightened. The links holding it together fractured, spreading further into a straight line. Lexiconus almost toppled over, when the direction of her jump carried her lavender form to the adjacent platform and within striking range of the staff that now trailed over her head. Its end broke through the curtain of silt falling between them—dust fell aside as its ligneous shaft collided with the Quarren’s skull.

Nerves screamed against his prideful nature. One of his feet trailed back on instinct—he almost forgot about the edge of the platform on which he was standing. He gripped the suspending cable with auburn digits that locked onto it like a vice to keep from falling. Blood streamed down his face from where the staff made contact. It pooled below the protrusions alongside his mouth to run along the tentacles dangling lowest on his russet exterior.

With its servo-brain dysfunctional and now without guidance, the mechanical monstrosity fell harmlessly from its position horizontal on the east wall of the mine shaft. Parts turned to scrap when the chrome hull was sundered against the shaft floor, leaving what was once whole little more than fragments of cables and dented metal.

“One of us will reach the exit, Jedi. None will come looking for the corpse of a feeble being after this cavern collapses. Once this is over, I’ll be in a greater position of influence in the Brotherhood to crush that planet you call home.”

Cracked lips contorted into a smile; the Seer had allowed her opponent a sense of accomplishment as he leapt between platforms. One more was all that remained between him and freedom. Afterwards, he would seal the exit to leave the Consul with time to reflect on her failings before meeting a slow death by suffocating. Bent with sheer will to best his greatest opponent, his cloak billowed each time his legs carried him to the next height.

Freedom was within sight. Coiling muscles launched him diagonal to the final rising obstacle. He laughed in glee as his figure soared through the air while the winds blowing from the tunnel cascaded over his face.

That elation fell short; too fast, too soon. Solid ground shimmered into non-existence. What was once there had vanished without a trace. Brown cloth wrapped itself around his squid-like head while he plummeted down along the cavernous walls. Fear overwhelmed Lexiconus’ moment of pride when he realized the mistake. After the folds caught onto the corner of a broken support, he would have time to reflect on that error.

“I am no Jedi, Quarren. Remember this.” A’lora chastised gravely before ascending to the exit.