The hydraulic hiss of the landing ramp echoed across the scorched battlefield as you descended, each measured step ringing against durasteel with the precision of a death knell. Smoke curled upward from a dozen burning AAT tanks, their twisted metal skeletons casting jagged shadows across the rust-colored sand of Geonosis. The twin suns beat down mercilessly, turning the air into shimmering waves that distorted the horizon where thousands of battle droids stood in perfect formation—a sea of tan metal bodies waiting, watching, weapons primed.

Your boots touched solid ground. The texture of pulverized rock crunched beneath your soles, each grain grinding against the next with a whisper that spoke of ancient stone reduced to dust by endless war. The heat rose from below, baking through the leather of your combat boots, but you barely noticed. Your focus had narrowed to a singular point of crystalline clarity.

This is what they fear, you thought, feeling the Force ripple outward from your presence like a stone dropped into still water. Not the Republic's armies. Not the Jedi Order. Me.

The droid army stretched before you like a mechanical plague—commando droids in their sleek, predatory forms; standard B1 units with their skeletal frames and vacant optical sensors; super battle droids with their broad shoulders and integrated wrist blasters. Thousands upon thousands. The servos in their joints created a constant low hum, a mechanical breathing that rose and fell in perfect unison.

One of the commando droids broke formation.

Its photoreceptors—twin orbs of burning yellow—locked onto you with targeting precision. Hydraulics whined as it strode forward, each movement calculated for maximum efficiency. The droid's chassis was painted in urban camouflage patterns, blacks and greys designed for infiltration, but here under the twin suns it looked like bruised metal. Its right arm came up in a smooth arc, the E-5 blaster rifle clutched in its three-fingered grip pointing directly at your chest. The weapon's power cell hummed, fully charged, ready to punch a hole through durasteel—or flesh.

"Surrender, organic," the droid's vocabulator crackled, its voice synthesized and emotionless, each syllable clipped with mechanical precision. "You are in violation of Separatist airspace. Lay down your weapons and submit to immediate—"

You smiled.

It wasn't a pleasant expression. It was the smile of a predator who had just spotted prey too foolish to run. Your lips curved upward at the corners, revealing teeth that seemed too white, too sharp in the harsh sunlight. The Force sang around you, a symphony of violence waiting to be conducted.

They always talk too much, you mused, your right hand drifting to your belt with languid grace. As if words could stop what's coming.

Your fingers closed around the lightsaber hilt—cool metal, perfectly weighted, worn smooth in places where your grip had polished it through countless battles. The activation stud depressed beneath your thumb with a satisfying click.

SNAP-HISS.

The blade ignited in a blaze of azure light, the kyber crystal within singing its ancient song. The electromagnetic containment field crackled and hummed, twenty thousand degrees of pure plasma held in check by technology older than the Republic itself. The blade cast dancing shadows across your face, painting you in shades of blue and white, transforming you into something ethereal and terrible.

The commando droid's optical sensors widened—a programming quirk meant to simulate surprise.

It was still calculating probabilities when you moved.

Your body became liquid motion, muscles and tendons working in perfect harmony as you closed the distance. Three meters became two became one in the span of a heartbeat. The Force amplified your movements, turning human limitation into something transcendent. Your lightsaber swept upward in a diagonal cut, the blade moving so fast it left afterimages burned into the air.

The commando droid's head separated from its body with surgical precision.

There was no resistance—the lightsaber passed through the reinforced durasteel neck joint like it was vapor. Sparks erupted from severed circuits, showering down in a cascade of orange and white. The droid's photoreceptors flickered once, twice, then went dark as its central processor tumbled through the air, spinning end over end. Its body remained standing for exactly 1.3 seconds, servos locked in position, before crumpling to the ground in a heap of twitching metal limbs. The head landed a meter away with a hollow clang, rolling twice before coming to rest, its yellow eyes fading to black glass.

The remaining droids shifted. Thousands of blaster rifles rose in unison, barrels gleaming in the sunlight, all aimed at you.

Good, you thought, feeling the familiar rush of combat euphoria flood your veins. I was hoping they'd try.

Then the sky screamed.

A shadow fell across the battlefield, vast and terrible, blotting out one of the twin suns. The temperature dropped ten degrees in an instant as something massive descended from above, its wings spread wide enough to cast darkness across a hundred droids at once. The air itself seemed to vibrate with power—not the mechanical hum of droids, but something primal, ancient, alive.

Tempest.

Your dragon dove from the clouds like vengeance given form, his scales rippling with color—deep midnight blue that shifted to purple where the light caught them, each scale the size of a dinner plate and harder than durasteel. His wings, stretched to their full thirty-meter span, caught the air with a sound like thunder, the membrane between the bone struts translucent enough to see the sun through them, creating patterns of light and shadow that danced across the ground. His eyes—molten gold with vertical pupils that contracted to slits in the bright sunlight—fixed on the droid army with predatory focus.

The droids had no time to react.

Tempest's tail, thick as a tree trunk and lined with blade-like spines, swept through their ranks like a scythe through wheat. The appendage moved with impossible speed for something so massive, each spine sharp enough to cleave through armor plating without slowing. Droids exploded on impact, their chassis torn open, limbs sent flying in arcing trajectories. The sound was catastrophic—a grinding, shrieking cacophony of metal being rent asunder.

A super battle droid raised its wrist blasters, servos whining as it acquired target lock.

Tempest's jaws opened.

The dragon's plasma breath ignited deep within his gullet, visible as a rising glow behind his teeth—first orange, then yellow, then white-hot. The air around his maw shimmered with heat distortion. When he exhaled, it wasn't fire—fire was a crude, earthly thing. This was plasma, superheated gas reaching temperatures found in the core of stars, compressed and directed with biological precision.

The stream of incandescent death erupted from Tempest's throat in a concentrated beam three meters wide. Where it touched, matter ceased to exist in any recognizable form. The super battle droid vanished, vaporized so completely it left only a glowing afterimage on your retinas. The droids behind it suffered the same fate. Then the ones behind them. The plasma carved a trench through the mechanical army, melting sand to glass, turning metal to vapor, creating a channel of devastation that stretched fifty meters before Tempest closed his jaws.

The dragon landed beside you with earth-shaking force, his talons—each the length of your forearm and sharp enough to pierce starship hulls—gouging deep furrows in the rocky ground. His massive head swung toward you, and you felt his consciousness brush against yours through the Force-bond you shared.

More? His mental voice rumbled with barely contained eagerness, like distant thunder promising a storm.

You reached up, placing a hand on the scales of his snout. They were warm, almost hot to the touch, radiating heat from the plasma he'd just expelled.

"More," you confirmed aloud, your voice carrying across the battlefield with absolute certainty.

Seven hundred meters away, in the temporary observation post built into the cliff face, Captain Rex pressed his macrobinoculars tighter against the visor of his Phase II helmet. The magnified image brought the battlefield into crystal clarity—every detail sharp, every movement tracked.

"Holy—" The word died in his vocabulator before he could finish it.

The observation post was cramped, durasteel walls on three sides and a reinforced transparisteel viewport on the fourth. The air recyclers hummed constantly, fighting a losing battle against the heat and the smell of too many soldiers in too small a space. A dozen clone troopers packed the room, their white and blue armor gleaming under the harsh glow-rod lighting.

Commander Cody stood beside Rex, his own macrobinoculars trained on the same scene, his orange-marked armor reflecting the light in warm tones. Behind them, Fives and Echo crowded close, trying to catch a glimpse through the viewport with their naked eyes.

"Sir?" Fives ventured, his voice carrying the distinctive accent all clones shared—Jango Fett's Concord Dawn drawl, filtered through Kaminoan training. "Permission to speak freely?"

"Granted," Rex replied absently, still watching through the macrobinoculars. His hands had tightened on the device's grip, knuckles pale beneath his gloves.

Fives let out a low, appreciative whistle—the kind of sound soldiers make when witnessing something that rewrites their understanding of possible. "The Chancellor is kriffing terrifying."

Several of the other troopers murmured agreement. Echo nodded so vigorously his helmet wobbled.

Through the macrobinoculars, Rex watched Chancellor Nyra move through the droid army like death choreographed. Her lightsaber was a blue streak of light, each movement economical, precise, devastating. A B1 battle droid raised its blaster—she was already there, blade passing through its torso horizontally, bisecting it at the waist. A commando droid lunged with its vibroblade extended—she sidestepped, her free hand extending, and the droid crumpled inward as if crushed by an invisible fist, armor plating buckling with a shriek of tortured metal.

And above her, Tempest circled like a nightmare given wings, plasma breath reducing entire squads to atomic vapor.

"I've fought alongside Jedi Generals for three years," Rex said, his voice quiet but carrying absolute conviction. "I've seen General Skywalker do things that shouldn't be possible. I've watched General Kenobi talk his way out of situations that should have been death sentences, then fight his way out when talking failed. I've served under General Windu, and that man is a walking weapon."

He lowered the macrobinoculars, turning to face his brothers. His helmet prevented them from seeing his expression, but his body language spoke volumes—shoulders squared, spine straight, the posture of a man stating an uncomfortable truth.

"Not even Master Skywalker could challenge her," Rex finished. "Not the Chancellor. Not with that dragon. Maybe not even without it."

Cody grunted, a sound that managed to convey agreement, respect, and a touch of apprehension all at once. "The Separatists picked the wrong planet to make a stand."

"The Separatists picked the wrong war," Echo corrected, his voice dry. "The moment she joined our side, this was over. They just don't know it yet."

Through the viewport, they watched as Tempest descended again, his tail sweeping through another wave of droids, his plasma breath turning the battlefield into a hellscape of molten metal and superheated glass. And in the center of it all, untouched, unstoppable, moved Chancellor Nyra—the woman who had taken the Republic's failing war effort and turned it into a juggernaut.

Fives whistled again, softer this time, almost reverent.

"Yeah," he murmured, speaking for all of them. "That's our Chancellor."

Rex turned back to the viewport, raising his macrobinoculars once more.

On the battlefield below, you smiled, your lightsaber humming its deadly song, and advanced into the sea of droids.

The battle had only just begun.