I opened my eyes as my chrono chimed. The third day had come. It was time, whether I was ready or not.
Despite the magnitude of the task before me, my heart did not race. In fact, it was slower than what should be healthy for an adult human male. After the initial rush of energy, it had taken me nearly half of yesterday to remember that having too much oxygen pumping into my body was a bad thing and that the concept of oxygen poisoning existed.
I grudgingly reset my heartbeat to something slower. But I risked lowering my blood pressure too far if I allowed it to go too slow, which would cause the opposite issues. Nausea, blurred vision, general weakness. All things I didn't need, especially right now.
I didn't want to admit, even to myself, that I had made a potentially lethal mistake, if a long term one. Worse, I had wasted precious time in both enacting said mistake and fixing it.
Augmenting myself was much different from augmenting my armor. I couldn't just throw things at the wall and see what stuck.
It was much more…intricate. Aumenting an individual piece of armor wasn't going to affect the rest of the suit. Augmenting a bone in my body could cause bone deficiencies to spread to the rest of my skeleton if I wasn't careful or affect blood production or kill my body's ability to heal naturally.
With that, I swore to myself that all future auto-augmentations will be performed in lab conditions with proper equipment and a fully stocked library of medical texts, not in a dusty cave with only my intuition to guide me. As it was, I was going to pay a visit to the medical ward when I returned to make sure I didn't screw myself up even more than I thought.
At least I made use of the temporary burst of energy constructively. My preparations were as complete as I could make them.
I slowly sat up and pushed myself to my feet, carefully working out the kinks from my muscles from sleeping on the cold, hard dirt. There had likely been intact beds inside the ship, but there was an eerie feeling that clung to the vessel and wouldn't leave me alone. Made it too uncomfortable to sleep. Probably because it was effectively a mass grave.
Awake was another matter entirely.
The cold chilled me even through the bodysuit of my armor as I dropped down into the engineering bay. What little remained of my supplies was packed up in the bag on my back. I had indulged a bit in the food yesterday to get back the calories I'd burned augmenting my body and from the work I'd done after that.
With only a reflexive look around, I made my way to the main control console.
The trap was set. Now all it needed was the bait.
My main issue was waking up the nearest Leviathan and bring it to my position without drawing in the rest immediately.
Thankfully, I had a solution right under my feet.
I placed my right hand on the console and concentrated. My power surged through the aged circuits as I gave it a single order.
Reactivate.
Lights flickered on across the bay as equipment, which had been rusted into place for thousands of years, groaned and slowly started moving. The aged secondary power core gave out a whine. I doubted it would be able to support what I wanted it to do for long, but that was fine.
The system sluggishly went through check after check. I was forced on occasion to override a failure to make it to continue.
Finally, the ship began to rumble beneath my feet as the millennia-old sublight engines roared to life, not unlike the monsters that stalked the surface. In the distance, I could hear groaning as the weakened superstructure slowly began to be crushed under the weight of the rest of the ship as it tried to push itself further and further into the earth.
Soon, a loud rumble drowned it out as the mountain that had built up around the crashed vessel finally cracked apart and began to collapse. Loose dirt poured into the engineering bay from the hull breach far above my head.
All in all, it made enough noise to wake the dead.
Or a Leviathan.
After a few more moments to make sure the sound carried, I killed the engines. I was going to need the power for something else.
...
The conditions were perfect for the fight. Dark clouds loomed overhead as the storm was raging in full force, preventing even a single beam of sunlight from touching the ground. Fat, black droplets of rain fell from the sky, soaking the dead earth with toxic water, and howling winds whipped at my outer robe, threatening to knock me off the ship.
I was seated on top of one of the cruiser's heavy turrets holding my Force Presence tightly when I felt it.
It was easy to tell when the Leviathan was getting close. Long before it came into sight, I could feel the screams seeking out my mind. Small tendrils of awareness grasped at whatever they could find, intent on tearing it apart.
Mental constructs formed by will were the basis of mental defenses. Before, I had used walls to block everything out. When that failed, I had switched to canals, to trap those seeking a way into my mind and limit what they saw. I cast them aside when they failed.
A thousand failures for a single success.
In their place, a perfect sphere. There were no entrances, nor exits. No way over, no way under, and no way around. No edges to grasp and tear at.
A simple, solid object.
But the sphere was just that: an empty construct. A distraction to keep it away from my mind. While it scratched uselessly at the orb, my will was scattered in the void around it, each of the countless far off stars a memory, a thought, or an emotion.
I didn't doubt that it had the spirits of hundreds, if not thousands, of Jedi trapped inside of it, possibly dozens of them Jedi Masters. Any one of them might have been able to maneuver around my defenses or at least try to think of another way. But few animals had the capacity for abstract thought, or at least not in the way that humans understood it.
As its will scratched and skittered relentlessly off the sphere, it seemed that the Leviathan was not one of those animals. It was like a library run by an illiterate librarian. All the knowledge in the galaxy…and it was completely incapable of using any of it.
Incapable of realizing that I was the void.
There is nothing. Only me.
In a way, it made sense. Sorzus Syn had crafted them to be weapons of war. Intelligent enough to react to danger and kill, but not enough to think beyond that and be a threat to her. And like a truly opportunistic bookworm, Syn had made them into mobile repositories of information.
There was a subtle genius there that I could appreciate. No need to take or interrogate potentially troublesome prisoners when you could just pull the information you need from the willing mind of their killer after the battle. Pity that adult Leviathans were utterly hostile to anything that wasn't their handler.
I could still hear the screams…but they had no hold on me.
Soon, I saw the distant fog part as it drew closer, a vague black shape against the gray and brown landscape. Each step it made was a miniature earthquake. Every breath exhaled from its massive lungs was a hurricane. Four, bright red orbs stood out from the gloom as it stared ahead at the source of the noise that had awoken it from slumber.
Lightning cracked. In that moment, I could see it in its full glory.
Despite the light, its dark purple skin still nearly blended in with the background. Massive fangs poked out of the gumlines of its mouth, which itself had a pair of long tentacles extending from the corners. Beneath its head, two pairs of small arms were held at the ready, each tipped by huge pincers.
From atop the cruiser's half-buried hull, I was standing nearly at eye level with the monster. My best estimate was that it was approximately four hundred feet tall from the bottom of its feet to the top of its head.
I probably should have been at least a little more concerned about fighting something the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza. But I had a plan.
The roar it let out signaled that it had, in fact, spotted me atop the ship, likely in the same instance that I had seen it. The ground shook as it charged forward, covering ground much more quickly than a creature its size should be capable of. Suffice it to say, Leviathans also broke several laws of physics, most notably being the Square-Cube Law.
But I did not leap to my feet. Not yet.
I released my hold on my Force Presence, directing my will to the runes I had placed yesterday.
The number three featured heavily in folklore around the world, taking the form of triads, repeating names in threes, etc. Simply put, it was a number of Power. It may not specifically be the case with the Sith, but belief went a long way with the Force and Sith Magic.
Across the valley, eight arrays of three carvings of Jen'dzwolut had been etched into the stone in an equidistant circle. The ninth had been carved in the center of it all.
But the ritual needed a sacrifice. For one of this scale, it would take more blood than I had in my body. Fortunately, there was an alternative, one I had planned around.
Corbos was a dead world, but the Force was still here, just in a different form. Torn from the earth, it traveled the skies in dark clouds, dropping tainted rain and corrupted lightning.
As each droplet touched the ground, the miniscule amount of power inside of each was drawn into the arrays. Individually, they were nothing. But thousands of droplets descended every second, providing all the power it needed.
The ritual activated in an instant, sealing off this corner of the planet from the rest and effectively rendering it invisible to the senses. Until it was broken, it would be just me and the Leviathan.
But it hadn't even noticed. It continued barreling towards me, its legs crushing any obstacles in its way. Still I did not stand.
Instead, I raised my left hand. Clutched in my fingers was a length of spider silk. Drawing as much power as I dared, I unleashed it as Sith Lightning into the strand.
The effect was instantaneous. All across the valley, great tentacles of blue-white webbing sprang up as the wet strands suddenly contracted from the heat and electricity running through them, seeking the nearest and largest source of static electricity.
I had been a busy little bee yesterday, after all.
The result was that the hundreds of "tentacles" wrapped themselves around the charging Leviathan. Despite their appearance, normal spider webbing had nearly the tensile strength as steel. Sith Alchemy-enhanced spider webbing?
The Leviathan's legs were tangled up in the sticky web, causing the titan to crash to the ground. The impact nearly jarred me from my spot.
I didn't stop. I placed my hand down on the turret beneath me and pushed my will into it.
The weapon of war was ancient. Its gears and parts were rusted and corroded and the focusing lenses were cracked. Mud was packed into the cracks between the plating.
But the cruiser's tibanna gas tanks weren't empty and its secondary power core was online.
Under my direction, it moved, the gears rotating the turret groaning in protest with every inch. Unseen hands operated the controls, angling its double gun barrels down towards the trapped Leviathan.
Deep in the superstructure, I could hear the mechanisms whine as the shot was charged. The cannons roared as they discharged their shots, sending two massive red bolts downrange.
But the Leviathan was just entangled in the webbing, not completely held in place. The creature tried to lurch to one side, snapping many of the webs binding it, but only partially succeeding as one of the bolts missed completely, sailing off behind it before detonating and destroying a hill.
The other, however, slammed into the monster's shoulder. The force of the resulting explosion tore one of its massive arms from its body and burned the immediate area around it.
It roared, this time in pain and anger rather than hunger. One great heave snapped the remaining webs keeping it down and its head started to rise. Its chest expanded as it took in a titanic breath.
Then, a colossal cone of flames erupted from its open maw, heading straight for me.
====================
The first book of this fanfic has been completed on Patreon, you can look it up in the collection alongside the second book. You can visit Patreon if you want to read in Advance.
p@treon.com/Rage_moon