As Republic reinforcements arrived on Chad. Daimon and Progenitor Kaevor had finished their plans and were in the middle of launching their own invasion of the Killik system. This would be their first battle with the Killiks, and they would use it to collect as much information as they could about their tactics, appearance, and more.
The Imperial fleet emerged from hyperspace at the edge of the Killik system in a staggered formation, designed to minimize the initial sensor footprint while still allowing for a rapid transition to full combat posture.
Daimon stood on the bridge of the Luminary, watching as the tactical display populated with contacts, dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of small organic vessels swarming outward from the three hive-worlds.
"They know we're here," Progenitor Kaevor said through the holographic link, his own fleet arrayed alongside the Luminary's formation. "No attempt at stealth on their part. Either they don't fear us, or this is just how they react to unknown ships in their space."
"Both, most likely," Daimon replied.
"Kaelduun," Daimon said, addressing the dragon whose massive form drifted alongside the fleet in the vacuum of space. "Can you sense him?"
"I can sense his shadow," Kaelduun answered. "He is not here himself. Not yet. But his will moves through every hive-mind in this system. He has essentially made himself their god."
Daimon had always thought of this scenario. A hive-mind species already predisposed toward collective consciousness, now bent entirely toward the will of a being who had existed since the dawn of the galaxy. It painted a picture of an enemy that would not break, would not retreat, would not surrender in any conventional sense. Every Killik in that swarm would fight until its body stopped functioning, because it possessed no individual will to do anything else.
"Order the fleet to engage the swarm at maximum range," Daimon commanded. "I don't want a single Imperial vessel within boarding distance of those hive-ships until we make it to the planets."
The Imperial capital ships opened fire at a range that made Killik's vessels' own short range weapons useless. Turbolaster batteries picked apart their organic hulls before they could close the distance. Each hit produced a strange effect: rather than exploding cleanly, the Killik ships seemed to convulse, their bio-luminescent hulls flashing bright green before rupturing outward, spraying ichor and shattered chitin in the void of space.
"Casualty reports incoming from the swarm," Cortana reported. "They're not adjusting tactics despite catastrophic losses. Current estimate: forty-three percent of engaged vessels destroyed within the first six minutes."
Hearing this, Daimon was a little surprised that such a short amount of time had passed already and how much they had destroyed. He also knew that this wasn't the full might of the Killiks as they had yet to see any capital-sized ships.
What they were firing on now was just a swarm of frigate sized ships. The Killiks were testing them, gauging their tactics before facing them head on.
Once the Killik attack fleet was destroyed, the Imperial fleet moved forward into position over the first planet.
The surface of the first planet came into view through the Luminary's forward sensors, a canvas of dense jungle canopy crawling with Killik hive structures.
"Ground defenses?" Daimon asked.
"Detecting energy signatures consistent with organic-based weapons platforms," Cortana reported. "Nothing approaching Imperial standard, but numerous. The Killiks appear to compensate for individual weakness with overwhelming density of fire."
Progenitor Kaevor's voice came through the link again. "My Lord, I'd recommend orbital suppression before any ground deployment. If Aruun has embedded himself in the collective consciousness of this species, every hive worker, every drone, every soldier caste will fight to the last regardless of losses. We should thin their numbers from orbit first."
"Agreed," Daimon said. "But selectively. I want the central hive structure, the one matching Celestial architecture, left intact. If there's information to be gathered, it will be there."
The order went out, and within minutes the Imperial fleet began a methodical bombardment of the outer hive clusters, careful arcs of turbolaser fire designed to collapse the organic structures without triggering the kind of planetary devastation that would erase whatever intelligence might be gathered from the ruins.
————
On Chad, Progenitor Nyssa was leading the planetary militia and the reinforcements she brought.
The fighting had settled into the grinding rhythm of urban warfare, street by street, building by building, the Sith remnants using the ruined capital's architecture to slow the Republic advance at every turn. Nyssa cut through a squad of black-armored troopers who had entrenched themselves in what remained of a government archive building, her white blade leaving scorched arcs across broken stone.
Behind her, the ten agents watched from a distance, patient as predators who understood that patience was the only thing separating success from failure. Ferrin crouched behind the husk of a burned-out speeder, his borrowed face betraying nothing as he studied the Progenitor's movements through a stolen set of macrobinoculars.
"She fights alone too often," he murmured to the agent beside him, a hulking figure disguised as a Republic heavy trooper. "Her honor guard struggles to keep pace with her advance. That gap will widen as the battle continues."
"When?" the other agent asked.
"When she pushes into the old administrative sector. The rubble there will slow her guard further. That is when we move."
They did not have to wait long. Within the hour, Nyssa had advanced far enough ahead of her own lines that the gap between her and her honor guard had stretched to nearly two hundred meters, filled with collapsed masonry and the smoke of ongoing skirmishes. She was pursuing a fleeing Sith Knight who had wounded three of her troopers. She was aware of the wondering eyes of the 10 agents as she could feel their gaze upon her every second that passed.
She cut the Knight down in the shadow of a collapsed archway, and it was there, in the momentary stillness after the kill, that she felt it.
The ten agents presence in the Force, converging on her position with a coordination that no ordinary soldiers could manage.
"So that's where you went," she said aloud, igniting her lightsaber fully and turning to face the ruined street behind her.
They emerged from the rubble and shadow almost simultaneously, ten figures each with their borrowed faces on full display. Though the disguises weren't enough to hide their true faces from Progenitor Nyssa.
Their movements were too fluid, too synchronized, each step falling in perfect rhythm with the others despite the uneven terrain. That combined with their faces, and the Force energy around them made her mutter a name.
"Mnggal-Mnggal," she said, the name tasting foul even as she spoke it. She had read the reports. Every Progenitor had. A parasitic intelligence that consumed and remade whatever it touched, patient beyond reckoning, hidden somewhere in the depths of the Unknown Regions. "I wondered when you would show your hand."
None of the ten answered her directly. Instead, Ferrin Dask's borrowed face split into something that was not quite a smile.
"The Emperor's pet Progenitor," he said. "My master extends his regards. He would have come himself, but you are hardly worth the personal attention."
"Flattering," Nyssa replied, shifting her stance, her lightsaber held loose and ready. "Ten of you against one of me. I'd have thought your master understood mathematics better than that."
"Numbers are not the point," another of the agents said, this one wearing the face of a Republic quartermaster she vaguely recognized from the supply manifests. "Attrition is the point. You will tire. We will not. Flesh remade does not know exhaustion the way yours does."
She could feel it now, the wrongness radiating from each of them, a kind of hunger that had nothing to do with the Force as she understood it. Not the seductive pull of the dark side, not even the alien menace of the Sith. This was something else entirely, appetite without ideology, consumption without purpose beyond the act itself.
Behind her, distantly, she felt the presence of her honor guard finally beginning to close the gap, alerted by the sudden cessation of her comm chatter. But two hundred meters of rubble and burning buildings stood between them, and these ten had chosen their moment well.
What they hadn't accounted for was the five shadows already moving through the ruins on either flank, robed figures who had trailed Progenitor Nyssa for weeks now, unseen even by her own honed senses, waiting for exactly this moment to reveal themselves.
Nyssa didn't wait for the agents to make the first move. She lunged forward, her white blade carving a brutal arc through the space where Ferrin Dask had been standing a heartbeat before. He dodged, his body twisting in a way that no ordinary human spine should have allowed, joints bending at angles that would make a normal person's stomach turn.
"Interesting," she muttered, pressing the attack anyway.
The agent who had worn the quartermaster's face lunged at her from the side, claws erupting from what had been ordinary fingers a moment before, flesh peeling back to reveal something chitinous and wet underneath. She caught the strike on her blade, the impact jarring up through her arm with far more force than the creature's small frame should have generated.
"You're stronger than you look," she said, kicking the agent back into a pile of rubble.
Three more closed in from her flanks, their disguises disappearing entirely now that subtlety no longer served a purpose. Beneath the stolen faces, their true forms were revealed. Mnggal-Mnggal's touch had unmade them down to the marrow and rebuilt them into something purpose-built for exactly this kind of violence.
Nyssa called on the Force, channeling it through her limbs, and met the first of the three head-on, her blade slicing clean through an outstretched limb. The agent didn't scream, instead dark ichor hissed where the plasma had scorched the wound shut, and they kept coming as though the loss meant nothing at all.
"No pain," she realized aloud. "No fear either."
"Fear requires a self to fear for," Ferrin's voice came from somewhere behind her, and she barely turned in time to block a strike that would have landed on her spine. "We surrendered that a long time ago. It is a small price for what we've gained."
She fought with everything her centuries of training had given her, cutting down two more of the ten in quick succession, but the remaining eight closed ranks with unnerving discipline, forming a loose circle that forced her to keep turning, never able to commit fully to one target without exposing her back to another.
A blast of dark energy clipped her shoulder plate, absorbed mostly by her armor but enough to stagger her half a step. She realized then what Ferrin had meant about attrition. Each of these things could take damage that would kill a normal soldier three times over and simply keep moving, driven by whatever remained of Mnggal-Mnggal's will inside them.
"You've made a mistake," she said, deflecting another strike, "Thinking that just because I fight alone doesn't mean I am alone."
Ferrin's face twitched with confusion in the half-second before the first Balance Keeper dropped from the shattered rooftop above, lightsaber already igniting mid-fall. The blade came down through the shoulder of the agent nearest to Nyssa's exposed flank, cleaving through the flesh beneath it in one motion. The creature didn't scream, but it staggered, and that was enough.
Four more Balance Keepers emerged from the rubble in near-perfect synchronization. They moved with the same disciplined patience that had let them shadow Nyssa across a warzone for weeks without detection, and now that patience has paid off.
"Reinforcements," Nyssa said, as she pressed the advantage against the agent she'd already wounded. "Daimon's doing, I assume." she said. She knew deep down that despite her please, Cortana was still going to tell Daimon.
"He does not trust easily," one of the Balance Keepers replied, a Zabrak woman whose twin blades were already carving through the ranks of Mnggal-Mnggal's agents. "Least of all when it comes to leaving you unattended."
The battle shifted immediately. What had been an encirclement had collapsed into chaos as the agents found themselves fighting on two fronts, Nyssa pressing from one side while the five Balance Keepers tore into their formation from the other.
The agents adapted quickly, some peeling off to engage the Balance Keepers while the rest stayed on Progenitor Nyssa.
Mnggal-Mnggal watched through the eyes of his agents, growing even more frustrated by the second. From his knowledge the average Balance Keeper was not stronger than his agents, and even some of the Guardians in the Order were still weaker than them.
He guessed that the ones fighting now were the best that the Imperium had to offer. He didn't know the internal structure of the Balance Keepers; no one did except for Daimon himself. Not even the Progenitors knew what the strongest Balance Keepers were doing.
Mnggal-Mnggal started to prepare himself as it looked like he was going to have to get involved personally. He had a feeling this would happen, and he was excited. He may not be able to directly attack Daimon, but he could do so through the agents.