[Legacy Of The Force] - 01(141)

He came to a stop just at the edge of that outcropping, several meters from Jacen and Brisha.

“So you’re the Sith,” Jacen said.

The dark figure bowed.

Jacen gave him a scornful look. “How am I supposed to take you seriously? You’re not even here.”

The hooded man’s voice came back as a whisper. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you walked. As if we were in Coruscant-standard gravity instead of a tiny fraction of it. You’re an illusion.”

“Yes, I’m an illusion. But I’m also here. Right here.”

“Care to explain that?”

“No.”

“Ah.” Jacen thumbed his lightsaber into life. “Well, I suppose I should be cutting you in half now.”

“I am a Master. You are a Jedi Knight. Do you know what that means?”

“That I can’t win?” Jacen punctuated his question with a mocking laugh.

“No. That you must go through my subordinates to get to me. Allowing me to test you, to evaluate you. That’s tradition, you know.”

“If you say so.”

The reflection of the Sith’s gold-orange eyes disappeared-and then the Sith himself vanished, ghost-like.

But there was a sound from beyond where he had stood, a slight scrape, and another figure moved forward into view. This one walked, as the Sith had, in a fashion appropriate for a standard-gravity environment, and stepped out to stand where the Sith had stood.

He was not tall, but he was well muscled and agile. He wore black pants, tunic, boots, and gloves, and held an unlit lightsaber.

His features were those of Luke Skywalker, but rakishly bearded and twisted into a grin that was all malice and scorn.

“Not nice,” Jacen said.

Nelani reached the bottom of the cavern first, taking the minor shock of impact on bent legs and being propelled a few meters back up into the air. On his way down, Ben passed her on her upward bounce, but he had eyes only for the creatures clustered on the stone wall above. He hit stony floor, bounced upward a few meters, passed Nelani again as she descended. Soon enough, both had their feet none too firmly on the surface beneath.

Now Ben could hear rustling, hissing that sounded like muffled, sibilant speech, from above-from hundreds of sources above.

“They’re going to swarm us,” Nelani said. She sounded rattled.

As if her words were a cue, a form of permission, the eyes above suddenly descended en masse, pouring downward as if carried by a waterfall. Nelani’s lightsaber snapped into life, adding a yellow-white glow to the proceedings. Ben raised his own blade in a high defensive stance.

The first wave of descending creatures broke before it reached the Jedi, splitting into two streams, each headed a different direction parallel to the stone face. But two of the creatures did not veer away. One came at Ben, one at Nelani.

Ben darted to one side-or tried; despite having some experience in low-gravity environments, he wasn’t accustomed enough to them for appropriate movements and tactics to be instinctive. He pushed off but floated mostly upward, straight toward his attacker.

No matter. The creature-revealed in the light of Ben’s lightsaber to be a fleshy stretched wing with eyes at one end, a tail at the other, and a wet mouth toward the center of its underside, something like a mynock-flew straight at him. Ben swung, felt his blade cut into skin and meat, and was propelled back down by the impact as the two halves of the beast hurtled lifelessly past him, one to either side.

The soles of his feet hit stone again. He absorbed as much of the impact as he could with his knees and did not bounce up very far this time.

The two mynock halves were partly embedded in the stone, and as he glanced at them, they slipped beneath the stone’s surface like two halves of a boat sinking. They left nothing behind-no blood, nothing.

“They’re not real,” Ben said.

“Projections of the Force,” Nelani answered from behind. “So they can’t really hurt us, right?”

“Wrong.” Her tone chided him. “You know better than that. It’s like saying A laser beam can’t hurt me-it’s only light, right?”

“I was just hoping.”

“Oof.” Nelani sounded as though she’d taken a shot to the gut, and her lightsaber winked out instantly.

Heedless of the swarms of mynocks overhead, Ben spun, the motion bouncing him a couple of meters up.

Nelani was gone. In her place stood Mara Skywalker. Her eyes glittered with anger and her body language suggested punishment to come. Her lightsaber, in her hand, was unlit.

Ben floated back to the ground. “You’re not my mother,” he said.

“Good,” she said. “Then it won’t be a family crime to cut you down.” She ignited the lightsaber, and its blade glowed red.