staircase, the blades of their lightsabers visible through the smoke and dust, a forest of green and blue oriflammes. The Jedi did not shout as they charged, but the rumble of their boots and sandals on the floor sounded like rolling thunder.
“Stay near me,” Malgus said over his shoulder to Eleena.
“Yes,” she said, her blasters already in hand.
Malgus’s Sith charged out of the carcass of the drop ship, their collective roar the sound of a hungry, rage-filled beast. The red lines of their blades cut the dust-covered air. Lord Adraas, a political favorite of Darth Angral and constant irritant to Malgus, led them. Like all of the Sith warriors save Malgus, a dark mask obscured his face entirely.
Malgus used his distaste for Adraas to further feed his anger. He had requested that Darth Angral allow him to lead the attack alone, but Angral had insisted that Adraas lead the drop ship team.
Discarding his cloak, discarding the remaining restraints on his rage, Malgus joined the Sith charge, taking position before Adraas. Emotion fed his power, and its swell fairly lifted him from his feet. He felt the power of the dark side around him, within him.
Blaster bolts crisscrossed the battlefield from left and right as two platoons of Republic soldiers emerged from somewhere above and to the side and fired into the Sith ranks.
Malgus, nested deeply in the Force, perceived the dozens of bolts and their trajectory with perfect clarity. Without breaking stride he whipped his blade left, right, angled it ten degrees, and turned three bolts back on the soldiers who’d fired them, killing all three. A soldier had exploded a grenade in his face in the Battle of Alderaan, so he enjoyed killing soldiers when he could. Behind him, Eleena’s twin blasters answered to the left and right with bolts of their own, picking off two more soldiers.
The Sith and Jedi forces closed, Sith battle lust facing the calm of the Jedi, the floor of the Temple the arena where centuries of indeterminate strife would at last reach a conclusion. Those strong in the Force would survive and their understanding of the Force would evolve. Those weak in the Force would die.
Malgus sought Master Zallow but could not make him out from the crowd of faces, dust, flames, and glowing blades. So he chose a Jedi at random from the crowd, a human male with a blue blade and a short beard, and targeted him.
Waves of power distorted the air and dopplered sound as the Jedi and Sith forces crashed into one another and intermixed in a chaotic, roaring tangle of bodies, lightsabers, and shouts.
Malgus augmented his strength with the Force, took a two-handed grip on his blade, and unleashed an overhand slash designed to split the Jedi in half. The Jedi sidestepped the blow and crosscut with his blue blade at Malgus’s throat. Malgus got his blade up in time, parried, and slammed a kick into the Jedi’s mid-section. The blow folded the Jedi in half, sent him reeling backward five paces. Malgus leapt into the air, flipped, landed behind him, and drove his blade through the Jedi. Roaring with battle lust, Malgus sought another opponent.
A flash of lavender skin drew his gaze—Eleena. She ducked under a saber slash and dived to her side, firing half a dozen blaster shots as she did so. The Padawan who’d tried to kill her, a female Zabrak, the horns of her head gilt with colored pigments, deflected the shots as she closed in for another blow. Eleena flipped to her feet, still firing, but the Padawan deflected every shot and drew nearer.
Malgus drew on the Force and with a blast of power drove the Padawan across the hall and into one of the towering columns of stone, where she collapsed, blood leaking from her nose. Eleena continued firing, her eyes darting here and there over the battlefield as she sought targets.
The battle turned ever more chaotic. Jedi and Sith leapt, bounded, rolled, and flipped as red lines intersected with those of blue and green. Blasts of power sent bodies flying through the air, against walls, pulled loose rocks from the ceiling and sent them crashing into flesh. The hall was a cacophony of sound: shouts, screams, the hum of lightsabers, the intermittent sound of weapons-fire. Malgus walked in its midst, reveled in it.
He watched Lord Adraas leap into the middle of a squad of Republic soldiers and punctuate his landing with an explosion of Force energy that cast the soldiers away