The Nu-class shuttle touched down softly on the landing pad of Sundari's royal palace, washing Obi-Wan in a blast of superheated air as he stood waiting. When the boarding ramp hissed open, two figures emerged from the haze — the very two Kenobi had been expecting with growing impatience.
Anakin Skywalker walked with long, purposeful strides, his dark cloak billowing in the wind still stirred by the fading engines, his blue eyes sweeping the perimeter in an instant. Behind him, doing her best to keep up, came Ahsoka Tano — spinning around twice along the way, trying to take in as much of the city as she could on her first visit.
"Master, you look like you've spent a week in the Archives without light or air. I hope it was worth pulling us off the front lines." Anakin gave a brief nod and stopped a few steps away.
Obi-Wan managed a tired smile and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Standing beside the boundless energy Anakin radiated, he really did seem like a shadow of himself.
"If only it were just the Archives, Anakin. We're dealing with someone who plays politics better than I do, and who wields the Force with enough precision to slip past my perception. Zarek Von — the man I believed was the brains behind Death Watch — has been officially declared dead. And the one accused of killing him..." He paused. "Is me."
Anakin raised an eyebrow, and that familiar, easy smirk crossed his face.
"Well, well. Is that professional envy I'm hearing, Master? Don't worry — I still think your lectures are the most mind-numbing thing in the galaxy. No one beats you at wearing out an audience. Not even a Sith." Obi-Wan exhaled heavily, long accustomed to his former apprentice's antics.
"I'm glad the fighting on Christophsis left your sense of humor intact. But the situation is more serious than you think."
"Death makes for a convenient cover story. You actually fought this Sith — what else can you tell me about him?" Anakin's expression shifted, his arms folding across his chest. The metal of his glove gave a quiet creak.
"Yes. And when our fight ended, he was very much alive. The fact that his 'body' turned up so conveniently afterward is far too elegant a move. He shed his old skin and simply walked away."
"So despite the corpse, the Sith is still out there. Then why all this business with conferences? Why not just sweep the city? My boys from the 501st could turn every stone in Sundari over in a couple of standard hours." Skywalker said it without a trace of irony, genuinely puzzled.
"Because this is Mandalore, Anakin. One wrong move by Jedi here could easily become the spark for an uprising. Satine is already on the verge of losing control of her own Council. We're here as observers and protectors — not as an army. That's precisely why we're going to use the Bio-Scan equipment." Obi-Wan gestured back toward the duchess's residence.
Ahsoka, who had been quietly listening while getting her fill of the view, finally chimed in.
"Master Kenobi, do you really believe the scanner will detect a Sith? If he's that skilled, couldn't he fool the technology as well?"
"It's not quite that simple, Ahsoka." Obi-Wan turned to her, adopting a measured, instructive tone as he absently stroked his short beard. "Deceiving a Jedi's mind is difficult, but possible. Biology, however, is far more stubborn. Concealing one's presence in the Force demands enormous concentration. We won't be looking for the Dark Side directly — we'll be looking for biological anomalies: a heart rate that's too low, an unnatural breathing rhythm, spikes in neural activity. Even a Sith cannot fully suppress his own physiology when he's under stress."
Anakin gave a skeptical snort but didn't argue. He preferred to solve problems with a lightsaber — though his instincts told him, as they always did, that things would almost certainly end in a fight regardless of whatever plan his Master had cooked up. So, really, did the details matter?
"And what exactly is our plan?" he asked anyway, mostly out of formality.
"Ahsoka — you're going to the technical hub above the reception hall. Your job is to monitor the biometric readouts of every delegate. If anything goes red, you signal us immediately. Anakin and I will be in the hall itself." He turned back to Skywalker, and his voice took on a more serious weight as he placed a hand on his former apprentice's shoulder. "Anakin — I mean it. No sudden moves. We need him to feel safe. Only when the trap has closed and we have the scanner data can we act."
The private chambers of Duchess Satine were wrapped in half-light, softened only by the gentle glow of holograms. Satine Kryze stood at the window, her elaborate upswept hair and embroidered gown seeming almost too heavy for such a slight figure. She didn't turn when the Jedi entered.
"Pre Vizsla is already in the city. He brought an entire delegation of tacticians and advisors with him." She paused. "Obi-Wan, do you understand how close to the edge we are? If your sensors are wrong, I won't just lose my position — this entire sector will lose its last hope for peace." Her voice wavered slightly; she had been about to say something else entirely, but Obi-Wan understood her perfectly and moved to reassure her.
"We won't be wrong, Satine. We were just reviewing the security footage — Vizsla arrived with a man he's introducing as his 'new military advisor.' A Tallos Vain." Kenobi stepped closer, putting as much quiet certainty into his voice as he could manage.
"Vain... I've never heard that name before," the duchess said, frowning.
"Vizsla is calling him a hero of Concordia — someone who saved numerous lives during the 'attacks on the mines.' The story appeared quite recently, but even so... The people are already whispering about him as a 'new protector.' In the footage being circulated across every network, it's him pulling the wounded to safety."
"A convenient legend. A hero from nowhere, right on cue." Anakin offered from the doorway, one shoulder leaned against the wall, arms still folded across his chest.
Obi-Wan closed his eyes and reached out through the Force, searching for the currents flowing through the palace. The city, usually calm and orderly, now felt like a sky gone still before a storm. Darkness seemed to seep through the cracks, draping itself over Sundari like an invisible shroud.
"The clouds are gathering. I can feel someone pulling at the threads. And that someone is walking into the hall right now. It's time." Kenobi said it quietly, almost to himself.
The Jedi moved to their positions. Ahsoka slipped away toward the technical sections, while Anakin and Obi-Wan made for the main entrance to the hall. Delegates had already begun filing past them through the corridor — representatives of the neutral systems, arriving one by one.
Obi-Wan felt the familiar cool of his lightsaber hilt settle into his palm. He knew that somewhere in that crowd walked the one who had outmaneuvered him at the mines. The one who had produced a body to clear his own name and cast a shadow over the Order. The trap was set and waiting. All that remained was to hope that the snare would prove strong enough to hold whatever it caught.
XXXXXXXX
Brute (Taalas)
The same time.
The helmet settled onto his shoulders with a dull, distinctive click, sealing shut with an airtight hiss. In that same instant, the world stopped feeling real: the sounds of the command post were cut off by the filters, leaving only the steady, barely audible whisper of the oxygen system and the thud of my own pulse echoing in my ears.
The interface grid flickered to life before my eyes. The narrow T-shaped visor of a Mandalorian helmet is more than a slit in metal — it's a fully functional tactical display. Symbols in Mando'a scrolled along the edges of my vision, analyzing air composition and room temperature. I touched my chin strap with one gloved hand and adjusted the fit. The weight of the armor still felt unfamiliar. Whether it was beskar or simply a high-quality alloy didn't matter right now. What mattered was that this armor gave me more than physical protection — it gave me a new identity.
Tallos Vain. A hard-edged tactician from Concordia. No more of Zarek Von's polished speeches, no more careful pleasantries. There was no face to see behind the visor, which meant the mask of this new persona was absolute.
I breathed in deeply — the sharp smell of new padding and synthetic materials. The enclosed space had a strangely calming effect. It helped seal off the chaos that had been churning in my head since the meditation.
Skywalker is here. The thought arrived cold and clear the moment I glanced at the palace's hacked camera feeds, a portion of which were streaming to the edge of my helmet display in real time.
Obi-Wan had already been a problem — but a calculable one. He operated within the bounds of his morality and was careful by nature. Anakin, however, was something else entirely. Pure chaos. In the series he hadn't been a Jedi who cut down enemies with a single blow, but here, in reality, his presence in the Force felt like a storm rolling in — the kind that raises goosebumps across your entire body before the first crack of lightning. Standard deception wouldn't work against him. He was too instinctive, too reliant on the Force — or so I suspected.
"Still the flesh. Become stone. Don't let emotion take the surface." The Echo of Taalas surfaced in my mind — not a voice exactly, more like a thought-image rising from the depths of memory.
It was an old technique, developed by the Empire's Inquisitors for deep-cover operations behind enemy lines. I closed my eyes and focused on my heartbeat. One beat. Another. Too fast. Slower. I began deliberately dragging the rhythm down, commanding my body into a state of conservation. My skin temperature dropped by a degree; my breathing grew shallow and sparse. If Kenobi had actually brought those biometric scanners our scouts had reported, what they would read would be either a droid or a dead man somehow still on his feet. It hurt — the Force inside me resisted being compressed like this — but it was my only option.
"Ready, Vain?" Vizsla's voice broke into my mind through the helmet's internal comm, making me flinch.
I opened my eyes. The helmet's display helpfully highlighted the silhouette of the Death Watch leader. He was pacing the command post in tight circles, his grip tight around the hilt of the Darksaber. The news of reinforcements arriving for Satine had rattled him.
"Skywalker and that girl apprentice of his are already in the palace," Vizsla growled, stopping directly in front of me. His face beneath the helmet was almost certainly burning with fury.
"Satine has broken every agreement! She's practically marched Republic troops into the capital under the cover of 'personal guests.' It's a transparent trap — they're expecting me to walk right in so they can arrest me in front of the whole sector!"
I held the calm that was now enforced not just by willpower but by the physiological state the technique had locked me into. My voice, filtered through the vocoder, came out flat and measured:
"That's precisely what we wanted. Settle down, Pre."
Vizsla spun toward me.
"Settle down? Do you have any idea who Skywalker is? He's not a diplomat like Kenobi. If he catches even the shadow of a threat, he won't stop to ask questions."
"And that's not as bad as it sounds." I moved to the table where a hologram of Sundari glimmered above the surface.
"Satine has made a mistake. She believes that having Jedi present will frighten us into the open — force us to expose Death Watch's ties to the CIS for everyone to see. But to the people of Mandalore — the part of the population we're counting on — it will read very differently. As occupation. As a betrayal of the very neutrality she's spent years championing so loudly."
I pointed to the conference hall.
"We walk in there. We are the picture of courtesy and restraint. And when your moment at the podium comes, we show them the truth. Let the Jedi stand behind the duchess. Let them be the ones to draw their blades first. The moment Skywalker or Kenobi moves against you — the leader of a legitimate opposition — inside that hall, Satine Kryze ceases to exist as a political figure. She becomes a Republic puppet who attacked one of her own subjects during peace negotiations. The entire sector will see it."
Vizsla went still. I watched the fury in him cool and harden into calculation. He was a warrior — but he was not a fool.
"You're asking me to stand there and take the hit?" he said, quieter now.
"I'll keep you alive through it. Your job is to provoke them until they have no choice but to act. Call them killers. Bring up Zarek Von's death. Invoke the blood of 'our brothers.' The explosions across the planet will begin the moment you give the signal. By the time they understand what's happened, Sundari will already be burning — and the people will be with us. I've prepared a holorecording for you with everything you'll need."
Vizsla gave a short nod. The argument had landed.
"Fine. But if this plan of yours falls apart..."
"It won't." I cut him off, turned on my heel, and headed for the exit where Kem was waiting.
Dasheid stood at the bottom of our Kom'rk's ramp, running through his equipment checks. In that armor, he looked even more imposing than usual.
"Kem." I stopped beside him, making sure Vizsla was out of earshot.
"Final instructions. What's the status on Keir?"
"Exactly where we expected, little Sith... Those excuses for fighters from the Watch are tracking his movements." Kem rumbled.
"Good. His double is our contingency. If the Jedi somehow manage to seize the initiative, or if Skywalker decides to gamble and blows my cover ahead of schedule, we play that card. A former Jedi who can testify that the Order used him to destabilize Mandalore — living proof of the Republic's dirty game. But for now, keep the original as far out of reach as possible, and the double stays quiet. He cannot fall into Obi-Wan's line of sight before the time is right."
Kem nodded, and in that single motion I felt the silent loyalty I needed from him right now.
"And Kem — keep an eye on the headquarters biometrics. If the palace scanners start throwing a critical error on my sector, jam every frequency. I'll only need a few seconds to move out of range."
I felt the technique beginning to press against my consciousness. Dark spots swam briefly across my vision, but I forced the nausea down.
We boarded. Within minutes, the Kom'rk had lifted off from the surface of Concordia and was banking toward the gleaming dome of Sundari. Through the viewport I watched dust clouds drift past far below.
Everything I had done up to this point — every scheme, every sacrifice — was converging now into a single moment. Today I would come face to face with a legend. And I had to do it while ensuring that legend saw nothing but the blank, expressionless mask of a Mandalorian tactician, and not the person behind it.
"It's time," I whispered to myself, feeling the cold of the armor seep through to my skin and merge with the cold of the Dark Side.
The Kom'rk began its descent — smooth, almost silent — but inside me everything was pulling taut, like a wire stretched to breaking. Sundari gleamed beneath its dome with a blinding, sterile whiteness that made me think of an operating theatre. We were like a foreign body — a virus slipping into the heart of a system that was desperately trying to produce antibodies.
When the ramp lowered, the palace's conditioned air hit my face — filtered, neutral, antiseptic. Palace guards stood in a living wall. Blue armor, perfectly dressed ranks, ceremonial pikes. Beautiful, imposing, and utterly useless against what was going to happen today.
The moment I took my first step across the polished floor, I felt it.
A buzzing. Small, unpleasant, barely perceptible at the edge of my senses — like an insect that had crawled into my ear. The Bio-Scan units. The sensors were everywhere: behind decorative wall panels, embedded in the bases of columns, tucked beneath ceiling fixtures. I could almost physically feel the invisible beams probing my armor, trying to push through to skin, to peer into my pupils, to count my heartbeats.
The concealment technique was running at its absolute limit. My pulse was steady and unsettlingly slow — somewhere around forty beats per minute. My body temperature held at the lowest edge of normal. I walked behind Vizsla, keeping to the gait of a Mandalorian warrior: heavy footfall, squared shoulders, none of the fluid economy of movement that might betray someone who was, if not the finest duelist in the galaxy, still a duelist. Kem walked a half-step behind me, also in a fully enclosed suit, though of a different cut — nothing resembling Mandalorian armor. His massive presence in the Force was like a solid wall, partially shielding me from the sensors.
We entered the hall.
I had expected pressure. I had not expected this. Obi-Wan Kenobi stood to Satine's left, his presence in the Force calm and measured, steady as a tide. But to the right...
To the right stood Anakin Skywalker.
The games and the series had conveyed perhaps a tenth of this. It wasn't simply a powerful presence — it was like staring directly at the sun. The air around him seemed charged; the Force didn't flow near him so much as churn and bend, bending to his will. His gaze — blue and cutting — locked onto our procession the instant we crossed the threshold.
I felt Skywalker hit. Not an attack in any conventional sense — more of a blunt, shameless probe. Like someone trying to pry open your skull with a can opener. The blow landed against my composed mind and radiated as a dull ache through both temples.
I compressed my inner self into the smallest possible point, burying everything: the fear, the adrenaline, even the awareness that I had noticed his probing at all. I left only a cold, empty surface. Another strike came, heavier than the first. Anakin frowned — visibly uncertain why his instincts were coming up blank against what should have been an ordinary mercenary, and equally unable to detect a Sith. I was balancing on the edge of blacking out. The air inside my helmet was running desperately thin, and every impulse to draw a deep breath threatened to hand me over to the scanners.
The conference began. Satine spoke at length — of peace, of the future, of trade routes and the "necessity of unity in these dark times." Her voice was beautiful, but to me it registered as background noise. I watched Kenobi glance down at his wrist display at regular intervals, no doubt receiving data from the scanners. They were waiting for a spike. Waiting for "Tallos Vain" to betray his true nature.
Anakin kept pressing. It had taken on a rhythm now — like a hammer striking the same point over and over. He was trying to provoke me, to draw out some emotional response, to make the Force inside me flare in answer to his aggression. Sweat was stinging my eyes beneath the helmet; a metallic taste spread across my mouth — I had bitten through my lip to stop myself from gasping for air.
Time. A few more minutes of this and my mind would simply fracture under the strain.
I made an almost imperceptible gesture, my hand brushing Vizsla's shoulder. Pre understood me instantly. He shoved back his chair and rose, cutting off one of the other delegates mid-sentence. His voice, amplified by the hall's acoustics, rang out like a thunderclap:
"Enough empty words, Duchess! You speak of peace while your friends — your Jedi — murder my people!"
The hall fell silent. Vizsla activated the control on his wrist, and the central holographic projector — which had been displaying sector maps — cut to a grainy, heavy piece of footage.
The death of Zarek Von. The edit was seamless: Obi-Wan Kenobi, blue blade ignited, a flash of light — and the "advisor's" body crumpling lifelessly to the ground. From this angle, it looked exactly like a cold-blooded execution.
I stepped forward into the light. My voice, filtered through the vocoder, came out mechanical and stripped of all humanity:
"You invited us here to talk about trade?" I swept my hand toward the Jedi.
"You brought executioners into your own palace. Is this your 'new order,' Satine Kryze? Peace built on the bodies of those who dared to disagree with the Republic's dictates?"
I felt Anakin tighten. His hand dropped to the hilt of his lightsaber. He was furious — not because of our words, but because we had seized the initiative. Obi-Wan had gone pale. He understood: their biometric trap had failed. They had found no proof that I was a Sith, while I had just dragged them into the open — shown everyone in that room exactly who the self-proclaimed neutral Satine was keeping company with.
"The Republic has violated Mandalore's neutrality!" My voice rose, taking on an icy, commanding edge.
"Jedi spilled blood on Concordia, and now they stand behind the Duchess, ready to ignite their blades again. What comes next? Arrests for anyone who dissents? Occupation?"
At that exact moment, a dull boom rolled in from beyond the palace windows. Then another. Then a third. The blast waves made the glass tremble in its frames. Death Watch had come through — everything executed precisely on schedule.
The hall erupted into chaos. Delegates leapt from their seats, shouting and shoving. Satine's guards raised their pikes, uncertain where to aim — at us, or at the surging mass of panicked representatives. Anakin stopped holding back. His blue blade ignited with its familiar hum, casting a ghastly light across his face.
"Stand down, Vizsla!" he shouted.
"Exactly what we were waiting for," I murmured under my breath, well aware that every camera in the palace was capturing this moment. The Jedi had struck first. At a peace summit. In front of the entire sector.
Vizsla fired his jetpack and rose above the podium. "Free Mandalore will not kneel!"
Satine's guards surged forward, trying to seize both us and the Jedi, but Anakin was far too fast. Obi-Wan ignited his blade as well, but he didn't advance — he was positioning himself as a shield in front of Satine.
"We're leaving!" I barked at Kem.
I had no intention of engaging. My part was done. Strictly speaking, I shouldn't have been here at all — but Vizsla's nerves had made it a necessary risk. I triggered the smoke grenades built into my armor, and the hall vanished in an instant behind a dense grey curtain. Under that cover, I reached into the Force — not to attack, but to accelerate my movements. In the smoke, to any ordinary eye or camera, I was just another Mandalorian making use of his suit's capabilities.
A jump, a short burst from the jetpack. I cleared the heads of the disoriented guards. Anakin was shouting something, his blade carving arcs through the haze, but he had no target to lock onto.
At the threshold of the exit, I glanced back for a single moment. The smoke parted just long enough, and I found myself looking directly at Obi-Wan. He stood perfectly still, shielding Satine. There was no anger in his eyes. What was there was something far worse — a profound, glacial calm. He wasn't watching Vizsla.
He was watching me.
In that moment, everything between us was said without a word. He had no scanner data. He had no hard evidence. But he knew.
I didn't wait for Skywalker to fight his way through the smoke and the chaos tearing the hall apart. I turned, launched myself through the shattered window, and felt the cold wind of Sundari slam into my helmet. Below, administrative buildings were already burning. Death Watch speeders swept through the streets, and in the sky above, bursts of anti-air fire bloomed like flowers.
The Jedi's trap had snapped shut — but they were caught inside it alongside their duchess. And I... I had finally shed my old skin.
Obi-Wan Kenobi had become my personal enemy. And judging by the look in his eyes, he would spare no effort to ensure that our next meeting was my last. But for now, this round was mine.
I put distance between myself and the hall, dropped through an open hatch that had been marked on the minimap in my helmet display, and wrenched off my helmet, drinking in real air in desperate gulps — even if it tasted of smoke from the burning city. My face was on fire. My heart was hammering, frantically trying to make up for every beat I had forced it to suppress.
I looked down at my hands. They were still shaking.
"We did it," I rasped, looking at Kem.
Dasheid said nothing. He simply nodded and pulled the hatch shut behind him.
I needed time to breathe. I would have given anything to fly up to orbit and sleep for a week — but it was too soon. The work wasn't finished. The coup had begun, and Mandalore was almost ours. But the Jedi... Well. I had a few thoughts on that matter.