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My highschool adventure as a Sith is wrong, as expected (Stage 1.7)
🕑 Added 2020-01-16 15:32:52 +0000 UTC*Pssshhew*
I flinched at the sound of Padawan’s beam sword being ignited, casting the dark, looming shadows a light blue. Whipping around on her, half expecting to see her beam sword on a collision course with my neck, only to find that she was holding it above her head. She caught my look and offered a gentle smile, probably having no idea that I just assumed that she was about to murder me.
“Do you know which way to get out of the city?” She asked as we were forced to walk straight ahead since the way behind us was collapsed. Judging from the amount of sand that filled the cracks, I’m guessing it was hundreds of years ago.
“No, I don’t think anyone does. No one has been down here in ages,” I answered, happily letting JR-1 lead the way. It looked like he was playing a game of the floor was lava because instead of stepping on the black sand that filled a central trench where I’m guessing waste used to flow, he hopped from rock to rock. From what I could see of the sewer tunnels, they looked very similar to the ones back on Earth. Except larger and more futuristic despite being thousands of years old.
“Then the Force will guide us there,” Padawan said with the kind of certainty reserved for observable and proven facts. I chose not to comment on that simply because I didn’t know enough to argue. I could get my explanations on what exactly the force was when we weren’t fleeing for our lives.
“Bo-boop!” JR-1 beeped at us, flashing his flashlight to get our attention. He brought our attention to a fork in the road before looking back at us, tilting his head as he made a chirping sound that sounded like a question.
“We should go right,” I told them. Going right would take us towards the edge of the city. Padawan nodded in agreement, following after me. Hm. I'm really hoping that I had missed some defense mechanisms in JR-1 in case we ran into anything nasty down here because otherwise our party’s defensive capabilities came solely from Padawan, and she was bringing up the rear.
But...I reached out with the force, searching for anyone or anything nearby. I could feel the people above, like a tug at my attention, but now that there were about twenty feet of solid steel and sand between us, it was a lot easier to tune out their presence.
"Your presence is rather odd, youngling," Padawan commented as I searched for anyone nearby, but found nothing. Thankfully. I glanced over my shoulder at her, wondering what that meant, only to have her shrug half heartily. Oi, you can't say mysterious stuff like that then not follow it up. You don't even have the excuse of something dramatic happening to cut you off so that your statement would be left as a cliffhanger for another three episodes.
"You hide yourself rather well. When I hide my presence with the force, I become a void, more or less. It works great when no one knows I'm there, but it becomes very obvious if another force-sensitive can see me," she explained, earning a blink out of me. I was hiding my presence with the force? "With you, it's like...you blend in so well that I doubt I would ever give you a second glance in a cloud, and...I can't sense what you're feeling."
What? The force made people empaths too? Seriously? That sounded...kinda terrible, actually. In middle school, it would have absolutely killed me knowing how little everyone thought of me. That was one force ability that I was glad I didn't have.
"I can't pick up anything from you, at all," Padawan explained, frowning ever so slightly. "It's almost like you're a steel wall or something. Can you tell what I'm feeling right now?" She asked, her frown deepened when I shook my head. "How odd. It's one of the most basic abilities of the force…" she trailed off, trying to put together a puzzle that was missing half the pieces.
But, still, I guess it was nice to know my abilities with the force were so lacking I couldn't pull off one of the most basic techniques.
"Can you tell me what you did just now?" She questioned as we walked through the sewers. Thankfully, whatever waste was down here was long since dried up, so there was only the stench of stale air. I pushed my radar even further, feeling like I was stretching some unseen muscle, but there was still nothing. Only us.
“I was searching for people,” I answered, giving her a lingering look to see that she seemed puzzled by that as well. Then she blinked as something clicked into place.
“You were feeling the presence of sentients?” She guessed and I figured that summed up what I was doing well enough, so I nodded. However, that made her frown even deeper. Seriously, what was with my ability? “That’s-” she started, only to fall silent when a noise echoed through the tunnels of the sewers.
It was a low hiss, belonging to some kind of animal. Or, as I knew, an insect-like creature. I fumbled to pull out my blaster, “JR, get back here!” I hissed as I took aim in front of me, the low light making the shadows seem that much darker.
“What is it?” Padawan asked, taking a stance as JR-1 made a quick retreat to climb up on my shoulder, making a series of beeps that echoed Padawan’s same question.
As if to answer their questions itself, I picked up on the creature as it entered the fringe of my radar. It moved incredibly fast, the sounds if it practically flying over the black sand. We caught our first glimpse of it as it came to a stop, hovering at the edge of the light that Padawan’s beam sword offered.
Its chitinous exoskeleton was a flat black, almost a dark purple in some places down its segmented long neck. Its head almost looked like an ant’s -- the razor-sharp mandibles jutting out of its angular head, two eyes that seemed too small for how big it was. Only that was where the comparison ended. Its body was longer, its four legs were underneath it -- the front legs coming up, shaped like praying mantis arms, while the back legs hung further back.
I had no idea what the species was actually called, but I knew what everyone called them: Dune Bugs.
“They spit acid!” I warned as I squeezed the trigger, a red blaster bolt, so similar to the one that had nearly killed me earlier, leaped from my gun. There was deceptively little recoil for how powerful the weapon was. The bolt raced towards the dune bug, hitting it somewhere since it let out an ear-piercing screech that echoed throughout the tunnels before it started to charge.
It was bigger than I thought it would be. Of all times, I recalled a saying about the movie industry about horror films -- never show too much of the monster. Let the audience fill in the blanks because everyone is afraid of different things. This monster that rushed towards us, half crawling, half slithering with its large segmented body, proved that saying wrong. It was bigger than me, its mandibles large enough that it could fit my head between them and…
I should really stop thinking about how that thing could kill me while fighting one.
I fired again, managing to hit its torso, the chitinous exoskeleton breaking with a flash of steam. It screeched again, throwing its head back before it launched a torrent of yellow mucus. I heard enough horror stories about what that stuff did to know that I didn’t want it anywhere near me.
Throwing myself to the side, I dodged the acid spit, hearing the sand where I once stood bubble and hiss. I didn’t look over to see the outcome in favor of watching Padawan rush to meet the dune bug head-on. It lunged at her with its mandibles, throwing its weight behind the attack, only to be greeted halfway with Padawan’s beam sword.
The stench of flash-fried dune bug was indescribable. I gagged despite being a dozen feet away as the two halves fell apart. The ends glowed so intensely that they offered up some light, but, thankfully, it looked like it was dead.
“What was that?” Padawan demanded, covering her nose. I scrambled to my feet, reaching over to pat JR-1 to make sure he was still on my shoulder to find that he was. He booped, asking what it smelled like, but I ignored his question in favor of the far more pressing one.
“It’s a dune bug,” I told her, pinching my nose and trying to breathe through my mouth. I could taste the acidic carbon on my tongue. Then I felt it. “They hunt in packs.”
Padawan’s eyes widened as she whipped around just in time to illuminate another five of the oversized bugs. Two of them were the same size as the first, but the other three were much smaller. Like giant cockroaches. The worst kind of cockroaches. She lashed out with a hand, knocking them back with the force.
All the while, I took aim with my blaster. The smaller ones were lost in the darkness as the bigger ones managed to stay upright to continue their charge. I let Padawan focus on them. My ability was imprecise, but when I pulled the trigger, with no other choice, I was forced to trust that it was right. The bright red bolt rushed forward and in the shower of sparks that kicked up illuminated a now dead cockroach. The only good kind of cockroach.
The one remaining larger dune bug spat a torrent of acid at me for my transgression, forcing me to jump away. This time, I watched what the acid did to the ground as Padawan beheaded the bug. Black sand bubbled, steam rising up as it started to form pockets in the smooth metal floor. I’m going to go ahead and guess getting hit by a blast like that wouldn’t exactly feel nice. I’d be a puddle of Hikigaya in no time.
The other two cockroaches rushed towards me, seizing the chance to jump on a fallen foe. I fumbled with my blaster, firing off a shop but missing. The closest one lunged at me, but before it touched me, I saw a flash of blue above the bisected the disgusting insect. The second pressed on, undeterred, right up until Padawan lifted on of the fallen rocks, or petrified waste, and slammed it onto the roach.
“Thanks,” I breathed, pushing myself up as JR-1 beeped his thanks as well. Death by carnivorous insects was not how I wanted to go if I died again.
“Don’t mention it, young one,” Padawan dismissed as she searched the darkness for more of them. I didn’t sense anymore nearby, but there was a sound echoing throughout the tunnels now that my heartbeat wasn’t thundering in my ears. If I had to guess…
“There’s more of them,” I announced, breaking out into a sprint with Padawan lagging behind me for only a moment. It was the same sound as before, only multiplied by a hundred. Or a thousand. Or hundreds of thousands. Regardless, there were way too many acid-spitting bugs for comfort and I wanted out of here now.
“Do you know where we’re going?!” Padawan exclaimed as I took a sudden right, still aiming to try to get out of the city.
“If there’s a nest of these things this big, then there has to be a way that they’re getting out for food,” I reasoned. “Somewhere outside of the city, otherwise someone would have done something about them already.” The populous of Elephant was apathetic, at best, but even they didn’t want to have acid-spitting bugs crawling into their homes.
"Then we have to find their nest first," Padawan reasoned, getting an agreeing nod from me. If we found their nest then we learned what paths they took and, eventually, we could get out of the city without anyone being the wiser. And what was the simplest way to do that?
To go the way that they were coming from.
Padawan seemed to come to that same conclusion because she came to a stop. Both of us turned around to start going the other direction-
Oh.
In the low light cast from Padawan’s beam sword, I saw reflections. The only kind of reflections that came from light reflecting from an eye. Almost like stars in the night sky, down the tunnel behind us were countless small pricks of light in the oppressive darkness. Only instead of being distant stars thousands of light-years away, those pricks of light were bug eyes. Assuming each pair was one bug, then I could safely conclude there was were too many bugs behind us.
“No!” I started, going to run the hell away -- I’d prefer the Empire over bugs any day of the week.
Padawan seemed to have different ideas. She lashed out with a hand, hitting the roaches with an unseen wall of force that blasted them back. The sound at that was indescribable -- before, the sound had been there but compared to just how many there were, it was practically silent. The sound of hundreds of bugs chittering away, their exoskeletons clicking as they rounded up to make Padawan pay for her transgression. The sound was nearly deafening as it echoed through the tunnels.
Undeterred, Padawan pulled her hand back and pushed again. More bugs were blasted back, surging like a wave, crawling over each other to be the first one that took a bite out of us. “Stay close to me,” Padawan shouted as she pulled her hand back again before thrusting it forward. The wave of insects was knocked back again, the pile becoming so thick that the insects practically became a wall.
“We need to find a map of this place,” Padawan shouted, lashing out again. She moved forward, undeterred and fearless, which was a lot more than I could day for me. “And warn me if we’re getting surrounded. Keep your eyes peeled for the big ones too,” she said, striding forward as she pushed the wall of insects back again. Each time the wall got moved back less and less, the sheer number of bugs bearing down on us, but she pushed them back each time with the certainty that they would move.
I swallowed thickly, barely able to hear her over the sound my heartbeat thundering in my ears and the sound of countless furious insects. There were just so many of them. I was proven right that they had to have a way out of here for food in the worst possible way because even cannibalism couldn’t explain a population this big.
I smelled the stench of burning insect fill the tunnel, a small spurt of acid managing to escape the steadily pushed back wall of insects. The bigger ones must be behind it, trying to burn a hole through to get to us. So, in a way, having hundreds of cockroaches trying to eat us was a good thing. From a certain perspective.
Even still, my eyes swept the dimly lite tunnels for some kind of map. There had to be one for safety reasons, otherwise, someone could get lost down here. If someone got lost, they could sue the city and as different as alien cultures were, there were some similarities that all had. Namely, the government liked not being sued and did whatever it took not to be a fault.
“JR, look at the walls. Can you see anything?” I asked the robot perched on my shoulder, looking behind us, dreading that I would see those pricks of light. Thankfully, behind us was bare, so either there wasn’t a way around, or if there was, then it had collapsed some time ago. Or, worse, it meant they just hadn’t made it around just yet.
The Plot seemed to be on our side because JR-1 beeped at me not a moment later as his flashlight function zeroed in on an extremely faded marking on the wall. I looked at it, barely able to see what it was, but JR-1 had a trick up its sleeve. The light cycled through several colors, with each one the picture became clearer. It was a map.
With a nest this big, for it to go unnoticed underneath everyone’s noses…It had to be someplace big. A central nest. Someplace…
“Take the next right,” I called out as Padawan pushed the wall of insects again. I seared the map into my memory, unsure if we would find another one. A right, then a left and then straight for what could be miles. “There’s a waste treatment planet underneath the city, I think that’s where the nest is.”
“Okay,” Padawan answered simply, strain clear in her voice. She pushed another time, and it was only then that I noticed the problem. We had no idea when the next right was coming up. Worse, each time she pushed against the wall of insects, it barely budged a couple of feet. Even worse, in the split second that she took to push again, the wall surged forward, nearly erasing any progress that she made.
I couldn’t do much to help. My ability was useless here. I doubt I could push away one of the roaches, much less push back a literal ton of them. Sweat poured off Padawan, her face twisting into a grimace and despite how she controlled her breathing, it was easy to tell that she was starting to flag. We wouldn’t make it much longer, much less all the way to the main nest to find our exit.
So much for being the Protagonist. But, even as a Side-Character, I could at least do something.
Taking aim with my blaster, I fired away at the bottom of the wall. My aim was never great with this thing, but it was actually impossible for me to miss. As soon as I killed one of the cockroaches, I reached out with the force and pulled the one that I had killed out of the wall. At most, I had a hundred shots, but dealing with nine hundred bugs would be easier than dealing with a thousand, if only by a little.
Not all of them died in a single shot, prompting JR-1 to hop off my shoulder and skipping towards the twitching insects. He reached out with a foot clamp, sparks flying free to warn what was about to happen next before he touched the dying insect. It spasmed, a jolt of electricity flowing into it that finished off the dying bugs.
Time passed in a blur as I routinely pulled the trigger and did whatever I could to support Padawan. I didn’t even know if I was helping or not. Was I making things easier for her, or was I only making myself feel better? Sweat poured off of Padawan, drops flying with every push, her face a determined grimace.
In spite of all odds, we made progress. A foot at a time, each one marked with the corpse of a bug, leaving a trail. I didn’t dare look back to see just how far we’ve come, only to stare forward and hope that the next push would reveal the right that we needed to take.
I pulled the trigger to my blaster, only for it to click empty. Either the energy pack or the ionized gas tube had run dry. It was a hunk of metal now. But that was okay since when Padawan took another step forward, I saw a door to our right. A bulkhead covered in grim, but hopefully free of insects on the other side.
“There they are!” I heard a voice shout some distance away, making me whip around to see the bright glare of flashlights. “We have contact!” A trooper announced, a squad of them taking position behind us. We were surrounded.
“Collapse the tunnel!” I shouted, pushing Padawan, who barely reacted to the troopers behind us. Her concentration faltered as I pushed us to take the right, trying to give us some cover just as the first bright red rays barely missed us and slammed into the wall of insects. “The roof! Bring it down,” I shouted, pushing Padawan one last time so we were tucked against the door, blaster fire slamming into the walls to get a lucky shot in.
Padawan looked down at me like she couldn’t understand what I was saying -- not like she couldn’t understand why I was giving the order, but like I was speaking in a language she couldn’t comprehend. She kept the wall of bugs at bay out of sheer force of will, but only now did I see just how badly that drained her.
“Bring the roof down on the bugs! I’ll open the door,” I told her, trying to keep my voice level even as my heart felt like it was going to jump out of my throat. Hoping that she understood that, I turned my attention to the door and reached out with the force. I felt the ancient machinery clogged by grime, dust, and sand, devoid of any power. Similar to an old-timey car that had a handle to roll down the windows, I manually turned the mechanisms. The door seal cracked open, the gears fighting for every centimeter, but at the very least I could do this. If Padawan could stop a horde of giant insects, then I could open a door. I couldn’t be that useless.
I was hit with a stench that made my eyes water, but I ignored it, forcing the door to open a little more- the tunnel rumbled, telling me that Padawan had heard me. I heard her groan from the strain, and that only drove me to push the ancient cogs that much harder. JR-1 peeked his head in first, illuminating a side maintenance tunnel that was thankfully empty.
“Now!” I yelled, grabbing Padawan and pushing her through the door. No sooner than I said that, the ceiling began to give way. Chunks of metal and rock fell on top of the insects that surged forward now that Padawan’s concentration was broken. It was like a domino effect, as soon as they started to fall, it seemed like the entire tunnel was going to collapse. I dove through the crack, swearing that I felt a roaches feelers on my leg before the ceiling completely gave way.
A cloud of dust and sand puffed through the crack, and JR-1 light revealed that the other side of the door was sealed off with rubble. Even still, I could hear the sounds of the bugs chittering and clicking. Just as I heard the sounds of blaster fire.
“We have lost the tar- contact, dune-” I heard one of them shout before he cut himself off with a gut-wrenching scream. It couldn’t be compared to the ones in the movies, it wasn’t drawn out or overdramatized, but short and conveyed the horror he must have felt as a flood of insects washed over him. I don’t know if his death was instant, but I hoped it was. Getting eaten alive...no one deserved that.
But, the sounds faded after a few short moments. The soldiers were dead, and the horde had either moved on or was feasting. As horrible as it was, we needed it to be the former. If the soldiers had followed us down here, then that meant that a way up was open. If it was open, then those dune bugs were going to be able to group into the city. If they were in the city, then the empire was going to have its hands full with an infestation.
A breath escaped me that I hadn’t realized I was holding. “They’re gone,” I said, turning to Padawan just in time to see her collapse. She fell forward, going completely limp and would have face-planted if I hadn’t caught her, forcing me to drop the hypermatter and blaster. “H-hey! Are you okay?” I asked, only to get deep and even breathing as a response.
She was out cold.
My lips pressed together into a thin line as I considered the situation. I was escaping the full might of the empire by traveling through the monster-infested sewers, I was down a teammate, and my only way to escape was through the monster nest itself.
Slowly looking to my right, I saw a barely lite maintenance tunnel with shadows so thick that RJ-1’s flashlight could pierce them.
It seems I was right to worry because I felt that the narrative of my life switched from Survival to Survival Horror.
