At the top of the arc, Saba released her lightsaber and raked her claws down in a vicious one-two slash, the first strike opening her prey’s face from temple to jaw, the second strike slicing an eye apart. He whirled away, still silent but screaming in the Force, and planted a spinning stomp kick in Saba’s belly. She went with the blow, rolling into a quick backflip and losing half a meter of tail to his lightsaber.
This time, the shadow man gave her no time to recover. A fork of blue lightning crackled from his hand and caught Saba square in the chest. Every nerve in her body became a conduit of blazing agony, and she dropped her to her knees, teeth gnashing, scales dancing, muscles clenching-paralyzed.
Continuing to hold the Force lightning on her with one hand, the shadow man limped forward. In the light of his red lightsaber, Saba saw her prey clearly for the first time. Dressed in an amalgam of black plastoid armor and blue Killik chitin, he was surprisingly gaunt, with a sinewy frame and a twisted posture that looked ready to collapse beneath his humped shoulder. His face was even more melted and shapeless than Raynar’s, just two eyes and a lipless slash in a scarred oval of flesh, and one of his arms was as much insect as human, turning tubular and chitinous at the elbow before ending in a hooked pincer.
Raynar and the Killiks had lied, Saba realized. Welk, at least, had also survived the Crash.
The Dark Jedi stopped a meter and a half away. Having learned the folly of hesitation, he brought his arm up quickly, swinging at Saba’s neck-then pitched backward as her Force shove buckled his injured knee. His lightsaber scraped along Saba’s skull, flooding her mind with a pain so hot and blinding that she could not tell whether the Force lightning had stopped. She sprang anyway and slammed into his chest, driving her prey the last half a meter to the ground, clutching blindly at his weapon arm, biting into his throat.
Her fangs barely sank two centimeters. She tried to rip the wound open, but lacked the strength to keep her jaw clamped and came away only with a mouthful of blood.
Still, the bite took her prey by surprise. She found herself in the grasp of the Force, flying back through the darkness. She reached out, calling her lightsaber to hand, and had it in her grasp when she hit the cavern wall.
Fighting off a black curtain of unconsciousness, Saba slid down the wall and landed on her feet. Her vision was blotchy at best, and she could not even hear the customary snap-hiss as she ignited her lightsaber. She sprang at her prey anyway, covering the distance in three short bounds, and nearly lost her balance when she landed in his blood.
Welk retreated two meters and leveled another fork of Force lightning at her. She deflected it with her lightsaber and pivoted past, sissing in excitement. It was turning into a good hunt, a very good hunt. She rushed to close the distance. He brought his lightsaber to a middle guard and retreated another step.
Saba attacked high, but her reflexes were fading and his lightsaber flashed up to block. He retreated another step. She launched a spinning advance, bringing her blade around in a shoulder slash, whipping her bloodied tail around at his legs.
She was smooth but slow. He blocked the shoulder slash and hopped over the tail sweep, then rolled his blade over Saba’s in an excellent block-assault conversion.
The attack might have opened her throat, had there been a way for him to block Saba’s trailing foot. As it was, she swept his feet from beneath him and continued into a second spin, bringing her lightsaber down across his pincer-arm, then planting a foot on his remaining arm and rolling her blade around to add a neck wound to the arm he had just lost.
That was when Saba’s blotchy vision proved costly. She sensed something flying at her from behind and turned to look, but saw only dark against dark.
The rock slammed into her head wound, and then she was kneeling on the floor, her lightsaber in a high guard, with no recollection of how she had landed there. Her sight was worse than ever, narrowed to a tiny circle, and her senses of smell and taste had gone the way of her hearing.
This was becoming a hunt to remember.
Seeing nothing ahead but a narrow cone of rock, Saba stretched into the Force and felt more danger than before. It seemed to have her surrounded, as though her prey had extended his presence over the entire chamber. She began to weave her lightsaber in a blind defensive pattern and rose. Something spongy and warm landed on her shoulder beneath her head wound. She hoped it wasn’t her brains.
Saba began to spin in a slow circle, and finally her narrow cone of vision fell on her quarry, fleeing toward the cavern wall at a fast limp, blood pouring from his neck wound, the cauterized stump of his severed arm waving useless in the air.
Good. The prey was weakening.