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Zhou Zishu felt the dark sider coming before he saw him. The world changed, warping to accommodate the arrival of such overwhelming darkness; the light of the twin suns overhead dimmed, the temperature dropped, and the shadows at his feet grew longer, thicker, not unlike the bubbling tarpits a few klicks away. Even the wind blew harsher, buffeting Zhou Zishu with an onslaught of scrapping sand and tiny rocks, as the clouds overhead darkened and pooled above him. He didn’t let any of it move him, focused on the swing and hum of his saber.
There was no time for hesitation, not with waves of droids surging towards him and his downed ship. His mission was well and truly fucked; while he had secured the information Senator Jin and the Council had sent him to retrieve he’d been discovered in the process. For all that he had researched and watched, accounted for the comings and goings of the Beggar Gang’s members to this force forsaken planet they called a safe haven, some things were just beyond his control. For example the presence of a young woman in purple robes suddenly crashing into the very control room he’d been downloading information from in a tangle of blaster fire and melted droid parts.
She’d been bursting with the Force, dark and chaotic and strong enough to make the air shimmer around her. A saber had been clipped to her side but she’d seemed in hurry to go for it, relying on complicated hand forms and force manipulation to both deflect threats and attack. She threw it around in wide vibrating arcs that cracked like a whip when they made contact with the pirates and droids trying to take her down, slicing metal and gouging the thick stone of the walls as if they were so much flimsicard. It was interesting, a technique he’d never seen before, and if not for the circumstances and all the dark power she was pouring out he might have wanted to watch longer.
It wasn’t often Zhou Zishu saw something new these days.
It was even less often that anyone encountered those who used the dark side. The Sith had been wiped out in the last Jedi-Sith war, or so his studies had always told him, and the small pockets of dark side worshippers who didn’t follow sith practices had all been wiped out in the aftermath. On occasion a person or group might show up, claiming to follow the Dark Path, but they never lasted longer than it took to become a two or three line footnote in a history holo.
This girl was no footnote though and, curious as he was, his mission was clear. He’d torn his date cube from its place on the main base terminal and, just as the girl noticed him and shouted in alarm (“Hey! Old man!”), slapped down explosive charges instead. He’d gone out the same way he came in, through a hole in the roof he’d obscured with a holo, and was already on the speeder he’d hidden and well on his way to escape by the time the charges went off.
He should have been able to board his ship and be off planet before the Beggar’s regrouped to follow but it seemed that their forces had already been scrambled together and ready to give chase.
Zhou Zishu was sure he had the girl to thank for their alertness.
His speeder was now so much steaming metal, the victim of ground to air strikes. He hadn’t actually been hit, his shielding was more than good enough to prevent that, but the resulting shockwaves had been another matter.
And now here he was, slicing his way through the Beggar Gang’s droid forces, which were far too sleek and well maintained for a backwater pirate group like them to have access to but that was part of the reason he was here, to make it back to his star ship and off this planet. Or, if that was as impossible as he suspected it was to be, to upload and transmit the information he’d gathered.
Dying here was far from ideal but if it happened then he would at least finish his mission first. The Republic needed to know how the once scattered and frankly pathetic small-time groups of pirates under the Beggar banner had begun to come together and gathered so much tech in the process. He would see the information into the right hands, no matter what, for the good of the Republic. If he had to die to do it then so be it.
Just another thing he’d sacrificed for the Jedi, the Senate, and keeping as much peace in the galaxy as could be hoped for.
The dark presence came in his direction with impressive speed, crashing over the land like an out of control wave. It was a huge force signature, unrestrained and unshielded, and as deep and dark as space itself. While the girl had crackled and surged like fire this presence was cold and so calm it was almost...reflective. Zhou Zishu prodded at it curiously as he reflected a blaster bolt and shoved his saber through the polished hull of yet another droid, and the signature didn’t so much as ripple. He felt only the cold and his own energy, suspended within the dark.
One moment he was alone, bracing himself for the arrival of that presence, and the next a blur of red was descending from the sky, into a group of droids. He heard the panicked brr of the droids, felt the darkness recede, snapping back into the red clad figure as if it had never been untethered at all, and saw a flicker of something white arcing across the battlefield. Zhou Zishu could only follow it’s progress briefly, attention pulled back to his own fight by the hot sear of a blaster bolt coming close enough to singe his hair and blister his skin, but what he saw was destruction, droids falling into pieces marked by molten edges.
He turned, pushing away the enemies closest to him and lashed out with his saber, removing robotic limbs, severing heads, watching the flickering lights in the scanners that acted as the droids eyes shutting down. They came in droves, dozens of them, marching over the remains of their fellows; Zhou Zishu pushed back. Pivot, turn, strike, jump, strike again, weave between to the heart of a group then slice them down in one continuous motion. He used the force to block when he had no choice but he’d never been much for defensive forms, if he was being honest.
He’d been scolded often after the death of his master for his reliance on offense, on speed and agility and the unstated belief that if an enemy was down there was no need to defend, but it rarely failed him.
It suited his needs as an agent of the First Knowledge Council, even if it made others outside of the Shadows eye him warily.
From the corner of his eye he saw red, moving in graceful arcs as the other force user fought. Sometimes he saw them better, long dark hair flowing behind them, flashes of pale skin, but what caught his eye was the way they fought. No saber in sight, but instead with open palms, a white flickering object that left thin smoking lines in the droids, and pure Force. The style was sloopy at first glance but as their paths brought them closer together, the droids thinned out at the edges to leave one last clump between them, Zhou Zishu could see there was more to it.
The other moved between forms with an ease that was dizzying, the defense of third form as the white object in his hand spread out, fan like, and with a flick of the wrist spun around and around to form a circle that bolts bounced off of. The fourth form Zishu favored as the object thinned to scalpel like precision and left more of those ruinous wounds behind in the droids, into fifth form as the object closed and become an object to be brought down in crushing blows. And then the barely contained frantic seventh form where each strike of hand and foot exploded with the Force, throwing droids backwards with cracked hulls and eerie strangled whirs as they powered down. Then back around again, randomly shifting with dizzying speed but, somehow, always firm and confident in each.
It was ridiculous. Messy. Zishu’s saber instructors would have wept to look upon such a fighting style and promptly purged the memory from their minds.
Beautiful, he thought as they crossed so close that he saw the sweat on the other’s brow and felt the whisper of heavy red fabric against his cheek when he ducked below the swing of an arm to slice his saber up through the ‘gut’ of a droid. How could something so ugly and haphazard be so stunning?
He heard laughter, bright and tinkling with madness, as they spun away from each other to clear out what was left of their enemies.
Zishu was sweat drenched, limbs heavy and shaking as he used a wild tendril of the force to crush the last droid before him into a screeching ball; exhaustion weighed him down. But he was still quick to turn, guard up and feet planted in time to catch an open palmed strike aimed at his back. The air parted and rippled from the power behind the blow, his hair blown back and the sweat on his skin drying tacky. Zishu felt it down to his knees.
He didn’t budge, didn’t falter, and instead pushed back, hand slicing through the air for the man’s neck. A block and push into another teeth rattling blow that Zishu caught then brushed aside as he brought his saber around, colorless blade singing as it singed the air. He didn’t connect, the man bending back to avoid the arc then responding with a flurry of blows. Zishu didn’t react with his mind, the movements were too fast for that, but on instinct.
There was something familiar about it, the parry and deflection of strike after strike, in the way he attacked back only to be blocked, stopped, guarded against, in the way his feet moved to match the man in red.
Dark eyes lined with red were bright with some emotion Zishu couldn’t name, but matched the way red painted lips were quirked upwards just so.
“Master Jedi,” The man said, voice warm and husky, barely winded. “You nearly blew up my apprentice, yet I helped you survive. Don’t you think I deserve a reward?”
Zhou Zishu scoffed even as he filed away that the girl had survived the blast. Another force user was somewhere nearby then. “Who asked for your help?”
The man laughed. “True true. But I thought it would be a waste to let one so beautiful die here, on this awful tar planet.”
He didn’t exactly falter but Zhou Zishu couldn’t deny that he was startled (His disguise was flawless, his own innovation built on the back of his master’s nanotech, and the face he had worn to infiltrate the Beggar Gang was far from nice to look at) and that as a result the man glided past his guard. He tensed, expecting a blow but instead he was grabbed by the front of his tabard and yanked even closer, other hand catching Zishu at his hip and holding with bruising strength.
The kiss was like being punched in the face, hard and furious, a mashing of teeth against lips, the copper tang of blood and a stab of tongue sweeping into his mouth. Wet, sloppy, demanding. Consuming. Invading, piercing him as effectively as any blade; the Force trembled around them.
A hand squeezed his ass and with that it was over as quickly as it began, the man dancing away from a wild swing of Zishu’s saber, head tossed back in raucous laughter. His lip was dribbling blood as red as the paint smeared over them.
Zishu felt it, sticky and cloying, on his own lips.
The clouds parted overhead, spilling a sleek black ship silently from the sky. “ Zhuren !” A whining female voice bellowed as the back of the ship opened and a length of rope tumbled down. “ Are you playing with that old man who almost killed me?”
“Ah.” The red clad man shook his head, face the picture of regret. “It seems my apprentice has finished her work. If destiny wills it, I look forward to meeting you again.”
Zishu lunged forward but knew before his feet left the sand that he wouldn’t make it. The man jumped, blanketed and bolstered by the force, to grab the rope dangling from the ship already rising back into the thick cloud cover. Zhou Zishu watched, teeth grinding, stewing in his inability to do anything.
It wasn’t until he was back at his own ship, eyeing the scanners showing that the entire Beggar compound was nothing but smoking slag now, that he realized the hidden pocket he’d placed the data cube in was empty.
Rage leaked past his shields, oily and noxious. It took much longer than Zishu was used to to grasp the emotion and will it back into the force, to smooth the shield that kept his emotions separated from his conscious mind back into place.
---
“Have you heard of the Ghosts, Zhou Zishu?” Master He Yifan, one of the Four Great Sages who sat on the High Council, asked after Zhou Zishu’s debrief.
“Of course.” He said but didn’t add that he knew there was more to the Ghosts than was commonly known because that would be admitting that Senator Jin had made him privy to classified information shared between the High Council and High Senate. The Ghosts weren’t so different from the beggars on the surface, a group of thieves, mercenaries, and information brokers who sold their services to the highest bidder, with no loyalty to any government or planet.
But something had happened to bring them onto the radar of the council and senate recently, though Zishu wasn’t sure what it was.
“There is a rumor that their leader is a force user of some power and that he’s been training others for some time; it is likely the pair you encountered are among those he had trained.” Master He Yifan said. “It seems the Master has begun to make moves outside of Ghost territory, beyond mercenary work, though to what ends we do not yet know. Whatever it may be, we are certain it cannot be to the benefit of the galaxy.”
Zhou Zishu thought of the man, with his wild laughter and unpredictable fighting form and the warmth of his mouth and silently agreed. There could be nothing good lurking behind that man’s intentions.