5 Chapter 4: Breathe in

Finding the looter camp wasn't difficult, just a long walk. Most of the interior of Ajunta Pal's tomb had collapsed from wear and tear, only leaving a few open pockets. The majority of the little winding corridors that split off from the main hallways ended in fallen stones and foul smells.

My capture and interrogation of Bodybuilder Man only took maybe twenty or thirty minutes. But I had to assume that they were somewhat intelligent and knew a patrol went missing.

Not wise because, you know, they decided raiding Sith tombs was a brilliant idea.

Contrary to my earlier assessment, Gaarurra was eerily silent and hard to see as we stalked through the dark with only a dim glowrod to guide us. I'd only half-hearted suggested we take out as many as possible from stealth, part of me expecting him to eschew hiding as soon as possible.

Wookiees are a mixed bag when it comes to this. I wasn't sure if Gaarurra was a hunter or a berserker, so I would withhold my thoughts until I'd seen him fight. But based on this? I think we stood a good chance of effectively whittling them down before he went nuts.

And we did. We encountered three more patrols, made up of three or four each. In total, we killed ten looters. That left seventeen in the camp, including the boss.

We didn't use our blasters, as the sound they make would carry. No, we used blades and the Force.

Necks snapped in my grasp. Crisp, clean and with no mess.

Gaarurra literally tore a guy in half. Blood and guts everywhere. Less said, the better.

I killed a lot of people, probably enough to give me a life sentence back home. Maybe I was expecting to feel something, to have an existential break at breaking a taboo. But I didn't. At least I didn't feel pleasure from the act.

I could only describe what I felt as…mild irritation. They were in my way. Nothing more, nothing less.

With a trail of broken bodies behind us, we made our way to the camp. They were based out of one of the remaining central chambers, a cavernous room supported by pillars as wide as a locomotive.

Honestly, it kind of looked like something straight out of Moria. The camp was protected on three sides by collapsed pillars, which they had turned into an improvised palisade.

Given that they had to sneak onto the planet and how small the corridors were, they could only bring what they'd be able to carry themselves. With their numbers, this translated to dozens of sleeping bags and a few tents, food for a small army, and enough gun to make problems for a pair of potential Sith. I spotted four toting blaster cannons.

Pistols, rifles, and blades? Easy enough to get. Heavy weaponry? That suggested someone with cash or influence was bankrolling them.

Glancing at Gaarurra, it seemed he was connecting the same dots. His furry "eyebrows" were furrowed as he scanned the camp.

"Yeah, I see it too," I muttered, to which he replied with a low woof, "This is a bit more complex than we thought. Let's keep an eye out for datapads. Might tell us who their backer is."

I looked around at the higher elevated spaces. If they had heavy guns, they might have had snipers too. When I didn't spot any, I turned my eyes back to the camp itself, noting to keep my head down just in case.

With nearly half their number missing, the looters were definitely on edge. While only half of them were actually on guard, none of them were out of arm's reach of their respective weapons.

Despite the openness of the chamber, the rubble strewn across it gave a lot of cover.

"You see anything I don't?" I asked quietly. At the Wookiee's shake of the head, I continued, "Alright, way I see it, we'll have to take out the heavy gunners first.

They haven't seen us yet, so we can probably take down at least two of them before the bolts start flying. After that, I guess we just go wild and move from cover to cover."

With the setup of their camp, there really wasn't a choice beyond a head-on assault. The pillars were too big to climb over without dedicated climbing gear.

While Gaarurra might be able to do it, that would leave me to handle the "frontal" part of the assault solo and weather the majority of the blasterfire. Not an option I liked.

My furry companion looked over the situation himself before shrugging. With our inability to communicate beyond body language, I suppose it would be a bit difficult to elaborate on anything he disagreed with.

I slung my rifle off my back and lightly slapped Gaarurra's shoulder, "Good luck."

I soon found myself face-first on the ground, air blown out of my lungs and back stinging.

"Ow," I wheezed..

Gaarurra had a sheepish look on his face when I got up. I quickly waved it off and got moving.

I shifted to another piece of cover so that if one of use got bombarded, the other could fire and take some of the pressure off. I slowly peeked over it and levered my rifle so I could look down the sights. A glance back showed Gaarurra doing the same. I nodded when his eyes darted to me.

Carefully, I took aim at one of the burly fellows lugging a blaster cannon.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

Two flashes of red light briefly lit up the room, followed by a pair of bodies slumped to the ground with smoking holes in their throat and chest, respectively. Contrary to my expectation, blasters actually do have a bit of recoil since they fire magnetically-contained plasma bolts instead of lasers, so they do have some mass. Not at the same level as firearms, but noticeable nevertheless.

I readjusted and downed the third heavy gunner before I had to quickly duck as the guards on duty sent a hail of blasterfire across the cavernous chamber.

Three down. Fourteen to go.

Instead of sticking my head up out of cover, I sent some blindfire back at them. Someone screamed in the distance.

Thirteen.

A closer-sounding blaster sounded off. Gaarurra was doing his part.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

I tumbled out of cover and broke into a sprint to the next pile of rubble. A stream of red lights followed me the whole way. Molten chips of rock flew in all directions as bolt after bolt slammed into my cover.

Alright, I wasn't sticking my head out into that. Looking around, I spied a particularly large rock, around ten feet wide and twice as tall. I grinned. That would do.

Taking a hand off my rifle, I stretched out a hand to it and willed it to move. Slowly, the stone rose into the air. Grimacing, I placed my weapon on the ground so my other hand could be brought to bear. I underestimated how heavy this was, though it still wasn't the heaviest I'd lifted. I rotated it so that it was horizontal.

With a grunt, I sent it hurtling towards the source of the blasterfire. I couldn't count how many panicked shouts there were, but a lot of them went real quiet, real fast as the boulder crashed into them. The ones that were left knew what was coming.

"SITH!" One of them cried before being silenced by Gaarurra.

I leaned against my cover to catch my breath for a moment. I didn't know what power category I was in, but I definitely wasn't Skywalker tier. Moving stuff that big was tiring as all hell.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

Edging around my cover, I counted six visible looters. The boulder had carved a trench through their camp, crushing a quarter of the tents under it before being stopped by the downed pillar. I grimaced and hoped that hadn't destroyed anything important. Thankfully, it missed the most expensive looking tent.

My rifle fired two more times, dropping two more looters. Before I came to Star Wars, Dad used to take my brother and I shooting when we were younger. He'd gone through Secret Service training since he used to work at Camp David as a park ranger and he figured we should know how to use a gun. I was a decent shot, but I never expected to actually use those skills.

I wasn't military trained, but neither were these guys, apparently. Their shots were going wild now, more so that before. They were just shooting randomly and hoping they hit something.

I hadn't been keeping track of Gaarurra since I moved, so I was a little surprised when he roared and charged out of cover, vibroblade in hand.

…Fuck it.

I walked out from behind my cover and steadily moved forward. By this point, my large companion had their full attention, so the four that were left pretty much ignored me in their mad scramble to get away from the furry juggernaut.

Only one managed to move fast enough to avoid getting carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey, but I quickly put him down with a bolt in the back before he got very far.

As the cavern fell silent at last, I gave Gaarurra a wide berth. Wookiees have a tendency to enter blood-rages in combat and I didn't know if he was in one. After a few minutes, he seemed to calm down.

We picked through what was left of the camp. It was…gruesome. The boulder had crushed five and injured a sixth before rolling through the tents. The sixth had been quickly put out of his misery since he was too far gone to talk.

Looking over them, I thought it a bit odd that all the looters were human. Given that they were likely Outer Rim folk, I was expecting at least a few aliens among their number.

Putting aside that mystery for the moment, Gaarurra and I policed what gear was still intact. Eleven blasters of varying sizes and the blaster cannons were piled up on a grav sled, which the looters had helpfully brought with them.

There were some bits and pieces of Imperial equipment too, but not as much as I thought there would be. Still, I managed to find a matching vambrace to put on my unarmored arm and a mostly intact breastplate.

My assumption about the boss's tent being the fanciest one was right, though I have no idea which one of the corpses was him.

Relics, ranging from statues to shards of murals, were haphazardly piled up in the middle of the tent, which angered my inner historian greatly.

With Gaarurra's help, I carefully packed them up using blankets scattered around the camp.

Surprisingly, there wasn't much else in the tent besides a cot and a locker. I frowned at the latter object.

I didn't have the code to get in and crushing the mechanism seemed like a poor idea. Shrugging, I decided to load it onto the sled with everything else.

At the very least, Iren might be interested in its contents. Maybe there's a datapad inside.

All in all, it only took us an hour, most of which was getting the artifacts ready for transport. That was one task done. Just one more to go.

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