99 Chapter 89
Gut Tidolt, skilfully piloted his speeder to the side of a window of one of Coruscant's numerous fancy apartment complexes.
The rich got many advantages that Gut, and his fellow undercity dwellers never got. Like nice buildings, clean air, and sunlight.
But that would soon change.
The Corellian bounty hunter that had hired Gut, and his gang had flashed enough credits for them all to retire to the nice fancy apartments in the upper city, or even on a luxurious resort world.
All they had to do was break into an apartment and kill it's the person who lived there, something they had done plenty of times in the undercity and they hadn't even been paid for it those times.
The corellian had even given them a special device to disable the security system around the window to their targets bedroom, a device that one of his gang was currently fixing to the upper corner of the window.
"All right, security's disabled boss. We got five minutes before it comes back online." One of Gut's crew said from the back of the speeder.
Gut pushed the control allowed the speeder to hover in place and rose to his feet and hefted a large scattergun to his shoulder.
"Well then, let's have some fun!" Gut shouted before firing a blast through the window, shattering the glass, and allowing his gang to swarm into the apartment.
-
Renn crashed into Padme's bedroom right behind Anakin, just in time to see a blue painted astromech going apeshit and trying to simultaneously electrocute, burn, and slice up with a saw, a scruffy looking gangster who was bleeding on the floor and crawling away in terror.
They had heard the boom of a high-powered blaster followed by the window to the bedroom break, moments before they entered the room.
And they had instantly realised that the gangster being brutalised by R2-D2 wasn't the only threat in the room.
Three gangsters were stalking towards Padme, who had rolled of her bed and was now hiding behind it in fear.
And two others were advancing towards R2 in the hopes of saving their friend from the angry droid.
A seventh gangster was stood on a speeder just outside the smashed window, and he was sporting a large scattergun and a confused expression, as though he hadn't expected any resistance to his assault.
Anakin and Renn reacted instantly. The jedi padawan darted across the room, igniting his lightsabre as he did, and slaughtered the three gangsters approaching Padme before checking on the girl to make sure she was okay.
At the same moment Renn raised his blaster pistol and fired two blaster bolts into each of the gangsters attempting to inconvenience R2's torsos before finishing them off with a shot to the head in case they had any armour under their clothes that might have saved them from his other shots that had ripped through their vital organs.
Renn left R2 to continue torturing the sixth gangster and swivelled to aim at the man holding the scattergun, just as the man dropped into the pilot's seat of his speeder and began racing away.
Even though the shot was now far more difficult Renn still would have managed it if Obi-wan hadn't decided to take that opportunity to dive headfirst out of the smashed window and onto the back of the speeder.
Renn resisted the urge to facepalm as the speeder began disappearing into the distance with Obi-Wan clinging desperately to the back of it in the attempt to not fall of.
He then turned to see Anakin looking anxiously from Padme to the smashed window, and back again.
Renn sighed and gestured towards the window, "Go on. I've got things covered here."
He'd barely finished talking when Anakin rushed past him and out into the corridor in search of a speeder so he could go rescue his master, and barely managed to avoid colliding with a burly Naboo security guard who was running towards the bedroom along with several of his fellow guards.
Opal, Shae, and Seela were also racing towards Padme's room, but they were skilful enough to avoid the sprinting jedi on their own.
Renn didn't wait for Anakin to disappear from sight however, and he stalked across the room towards the last living gangster, who was still being tortured by R2.
"Alright then mate, drop him," Renn patted the angry droid on the head and gave him a command as though he was an attack animal.
R2 beeped indignantly before grudgingly rolling back away from the wounded gangster, and Renn stepped past him his blaster pistol raised.
"One chance, who hired you?" Renn asked as he levelled his blasters barrel with the gangster's head.
The gangster coughed in pain before glaring defiantly towards Renn.
"Go t-to he—" The gangster was cut of mid-sentence when Renn fired a blaster bolt straight through his brain, turning his head into a smouldering mess.
"I did tell you… one chance." Renn muttered as he lowered his blaster.
By the time Renn had finished off the last gangster Padme's room had filled with concerned people.
Opal and one of Padme's handmaidens, named Dorme, were by the senator's side checking to see if she was okay.
Five Naboo security forces security guards were stood defensively around the room, with two more out in the hallway guarding from any threats, and Captain Typho, the leader of Padme's security detail, was hovering protectively near the senator while barking orders to the rest of his men over his comm link.
Shae and Seela had also entered the room and Seela was crouched next to one of the dead gangsters and was searching through his pockets looking for anything that might prove to be a useful clue.
Shae was hanging back near the doorway and was scanning the street outside warily with a blaster pistol in each hand.
It was when the danger seemed to be over, and everyone was beginning to feel safe when Renn felt an overbearing sense of doom.
He didn't even need to look at Opal, Shae, and Seela to know they felt the same danger but decided to call out just in case.
"EVERYBODY GET DOWN!"
-
Yin Eness grinned as he watched the two jedi speeding away from the senator's apartment.
Those street thugs had been well worth the credits, they'd made for an excellent distraction.
"Get ready," Yin ordered his crew, all hardened mercenaries he had worked with in the past, and all unquestionably loyal to Yin.
His crew, made up of ten mercenaries, where spread out across a rooftop overlooking the senators penthouse and they readied their weapons at Yin's order.
Seven of them were armed with a mix of sniper rifles or heavy repeating blasters, while the final three were preparing a little surprise that yin had managed to procure through come contacts, he had with shady republic procurement officers.
Yin was satisfied that there was no way that anyone left in the apartment building could stand up to the combined firepower of his crew.
"I'm going after that last street rat, gotta make sure he doesn't let any information slip." Yin said as he began walking towards his own speeder.
"You can start whenever you're ready, just don't leave anyone alive at the end." And with that final remark Yin hopped into his speeder and raced off after the jedi and the last remaining hired thug, just as the sounds of heavy blaster fires ripped through the night air.
-
"EVERYBODY GET DOWN!" Renn yelled, as he sensed the incoming danger.
Time seemed to slow down as he began to leap across the room. His attention was only on Opal, Shae, and Seela, nothing else mattered to him in that moment.
He knew that the girls had become powerful warriors and were more than capable of taking care of themselves, but he was unable to shake the need to protect them.
Shae had the best combat instincts out of the four of them, after Renn, and so she hadn't even needed to hear Renn's warning before she was throwing herself backwards and out into the corridor outside the room, her blasters raised and pointing to the window.
Seela similarly reacted instantly, dropping to the floor from the crouched position she was in as she rummaged through the dead gangsters' pockets. She flicked her hand as she dove to the ground and reached out through the force to unclip her lightsabre from her belt and send it rocketing into her waiting hand.
That only left Opal, who had focused more on her healing and force powers than her combat abilities, and although she was still a formidable force in a fight, she didn't have the same instincts as the others.
She probably still could have avoided the incoming danger on her own, but Renn didn't want to leave anything to chance.
He slammed into Opal driving her to the ground, with such force that it brought down Padme and her handmaiden Dorme who were next to Opal as well, seconds before a stream of blaster bolts began ripping through the room.
One of the Naboo security guards was struck in the head by one of the heavy bolts and the man's whole head disappeared as it was vapourised into a cloud of superheated gases.
Another Naboo security guard was hit in the chest and was nearly cut in half by the powerful weapon firing on them.
Chunks of masonry and shards of glass rained down as blaster bolts ripped into the building.
"Argh, who's firing at us?" Captain Typho hissed from the floor of the apartment, his hand clutching at a large gash that had been cut into his shoulder by a shard of glass.
Renn was still covering Opal with his own body, but he looked up to see the bright blaster bolts tearing the room apart.
He didn't know who was attacking them, but he was able to tell pretty easily what they were using to destroy the penthouse with, its noise and the destruction it was creating made it pretty distinctive.
"Don't know, but they've got an E-Web" He shouted back to Typho.
Renn had seen how much damage an E-Web could do from all the times he had watched them in action, during training sessions with Spoon and the other clones on Kamino.
The Naboo security forces however obviously hadn't had the same training or experience.
The two security guards who had been out in the corridor rushed into the room, despite Shae's shouted warning not to, only to be cut down by the E-Web.
And of the guards who had been in the room when the attack happened, including captain Typho, only three were still left alive.
"It's ten guys, I think, on the rooftop across the street," Shae shouted, her position out in the corridor allowing her to look out the rooms window from a place of relative safety.
"Which one?" A Naboo security guard asked, as he poked his head out from behind the overturned chest of draws, he was hiding behind to try and see the enemy.
"NO, wait!" captain Typho shouted in warning, trying to stop the man from showing himself, but he was too late.
A blaster bolt fired from a sniper rifle on the opposite rooftop blew off the top the man's head and his corpse dropped lifelessly to the grounds like a puppet with its strings cut.
Renn grabbed a shard from a broken mirror and used it to look across the street towards the opposite roof.
He counted the number of enemies on the roof and began judging the distance between it and the penthouse.
They needed to either move somewhere safer or destroy that E-Web, otherwise it was going to tear them apart.
Renn looked down at Opal and grinned as a plan began forming in his head.
"Hey, I've got a great idea" He said and Opal stared at him in confusion for a moment before a look of sudden realisation and horror came over her face.
"No" she instantly responded glaring at Renn.
"Oh, come on it'll be great," Renn insisted as he began crawling out from behind the bed they had been using as cover.
"NO!" Opal insisted again but Renn ignored her.
"What do you mean? What's he doing?" Padme asked in concern, her arms wrapped protectively round the terrified Dorme.
Opal and Renn ignored her though as they began engaging in a silent battle of wills.
"Ready?" Renn asked as he got up into a crouched position, as though he was a sprinter about to start a race.
"NO, don't do it. I mean it Renn." Opal said sternly, and Padme looked between the two in confusion.
"Wait, he's not going to—" But Padme was cut off when Renn shouted.
"NOW!" he yelled as he pushed off the ground and began sprinting for the open window before launching himself through it and into the night air beyond.
"Urgh, hate you so much!" Opal snarled as she rose to her feet at the same instant.
She braced herself before sending a massive shockwave of the force crashing into Renn's back, sending him cannoning across the gap between the buildings like a human missile.
