Star Wars: Rise of the Battlemage - Chapter 100 (Patreon)

Hard to believe this story had already reached 100 chapters! I hope everyone has enjoyed the story so far and is looking forward to the next 100!

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Lieutenant Soran, his troops, and the engineers showed up not long after we went out to wait for them. They arrived on two of the same transport vehicles we had ridden around on, as well as a small speeder truck. The speeder was carrying what looked like tools and equipment, which I probably should have anticipated. I reached out and shook Soran's hand after he disembarked and made his way closer. I couldn't help but smirk as quite a few of the new arrivals looked over our new uniforms.

"Hello, Lieutenant. I assume these are your troops and engineers?"

The Rebel soldier nodded and introduced his subordinates, including the engineers. After shaking hands with the second-in-command and lead engineer, I nodded.

"You guys will be staying on Intervention, it has plenty of room for everyone," I explained, getting Nal's attention, the Duros nodding and heading off, climbing into the warship. "Does your gear have any special storage needs?"

A short conversation later and we were loading the engineer's tools and equipment up into the hold of the Intervention before Tatnia left to show the Rebels their quarters. I felt a bit bad that some of them would end up in the barracks, but all things considered, there were much worse places to sleep. Before they left, I gave them a stiff warning that the forge room, engineering, and bridge were all off-limits without an escort, which they accepted with a nod.

As they found their rooms and the labor droids started loading up their gear onto the cargo lift that Nal had sent down, Ahsoka and Luke arrived. Both of them were carrying small packs, but beyond that, they had no other gear.

"Interesting look, Deacon," Ahsoka said as they climbed off their ride. "First, you settle on a name, now uniforms? Impressive."

"They look well made, the style is unique as well," Luke commented. "Where did you get them?"

"Pola made them for us," I answered. "He and Vaz are the crew's official armor specialists."

"Armor, huh? They certainly look better than Republic fatigues, but how protective are they really?" Ahsoka asked as Tatnia, and I led them into the Intervention.

"Surprisingly effective, at least according to Pola," I respond. "They are woven with a special wire alloy mesh that should tank multiple blaster bolts before failing."

"Thats… That's incredible!" Luke said, his eyes wide.

"It better be, with how much each set is worth," I explained. "I'm currently wearing nearly forty thousand credits worth of materials."

"What?!" Ahsoka asked, her calm well and truly broken. "How... what is it made out of?"

"You think that's crazy? Wait until you see our actual armor," I said, winking at Ahsoka, who seemed at a loss for words.

Both Luke and Ahsoka tried to get me to explain my statement a bit more, but I only shrugged them off, showing them the two bedrooms I had reserved for them. They were both clearly interested in continuing the conversation, but I simply waved and walked away, leaving them to their own devices.

"We will be lifting off short, probably less than fifteen minutes. Once we make the jump to the coordinates that Doralik gave us, we will have about three and a half days until we arrive," I called back. "Try and relax. Vakim will keep you updated on what's going on with the triangulating, and Dazem keeps plenty of holovids stocked in the lounge area."

True to my word, we were lifting off about ten minutes later, both the Talos Chariot and the Intervention lifting off together. After a few minutes of flying, we were free from the planet's gravity. A quick check of the coordinates later, and we made the jump to lightspeed, starting our decently long trip to the last known location of Station Omega-17-G. Even before factoring in the triangulation process, it was going to be a long trip.

The crew passed the time doing maintenance and preparing for the mission, which basically meant cleaning blasters and testing equipment. Since we took pretty good care of our stuff, maintenance didn't even take a single day, leaving us with a lot of free time. The crew spent some time relaxing while I made a strength amulet to use when I was wearing my armor.

I also spent a considerable amount of time getting used to my new armor. I would have liked for everyone to get a chance with it, but Pola was over in the Intervention, finishing up the last few pieces. He assured me they would be done by the time we landed in the station hangar bay. Thankfully, the armor's learning curve was shallow and short, with the most complicated part being the helmet.

I spent the rest of my free time learning magic. I was solidly back in the part of the cycle where I was learning spells just in case. I had already learned all of the spells I needed and really wanted, so I was learning everything that was left. I focused on learning Rally and Waterbreathing, both of which took longer than I would have liked since they were from branches of magic I struggled with, Illusion and Alteration specifically.

I also spent a few hours learning how to make my Alteration magic more potent and cost-efficient. This process belonged in the same grouping as the tricks I had learned to get better at Conjuration, Destruction, and Restoration, but I had never bothered learning them since I didn't really use Alteration enough to warrant it. However, now that I was working with the Transmute spell and handling materials worth thousands and thousands of credits, I figured being a bit more precise and cost-efficient with my time, mana, and metal supplies was worth a few hours of my time.

Honestly, I would have done it earlier, but I completely forgot about it.

By the time we reached our destination, both my crew and our rebel guests were chomping at the bit to get to work. Unfortunately, we still had the triangulation to do. We dropped out of hyperspace on the outskirts of a debris field, where the battle that knocked Station Omega-17-G out of its position. Just a quick scan revealed something interesting.

"Did the Rebellion or the Empire not do any salvaging here?" I asked Calima, though it was mostly rhetorical. "There… there has to be plenty worth taking."

The field consisted of three broken republic ships, two C70 Consular-class retrofits, and an Arquitens-class light cruiser. All three ships were dark husks of their former glory, but the Arquitens, in particular, was almost unrecognizable. The two C70s, on the other hand, while definitely not salvageable enough to reconstruct, would absolutely have plenty of parts worth stripping down for the Intervention. Oddly enough, there were no CIS ships to be seen, at least none big enough for me to identify. The debris field was thick with smaller chunks, but most of it was unidentifiable from our distance.

"Comms, tell Captain Vakim to do a high-level scan of the debris field while we start the triangulation process," I said, looking at the droid sitting at the comms station. "We will definitely be coming back here to look for anything useful."

"Roger Roger, Boss!"

The droid responded while I looked back out into space through the viewports. After a moment, I turned around and headed into the lounge, where Racer was waiting, ready to help me plot out our triangulation. I sat down on the lounge couch and held out my hand, the droid stabilizing it by grabbing it with two of its actuating grips.

Just like when we were locating the pirate base, I cast Clairvoyance and used the hologram that Racer was projecting to get as accurate a reading of the station's direction as possible. Once Race took the measurement, he rolled into the bridge and hooked up to the ship's Astronavigator, calculating a new jump.

When we arrived at the new location, we repeated the process twice more before Racer did some more math and calculated a new, final jumping point, triangulated from all of the directions I had generated using Clairvoyance. When we arrived at our new destination, I cast Clairvoyance again, this time using to direct Calima.

"It's off slightly to the starboard side," I said. "No idea how far away it is, but it's that direction at least."

She nodded and rotated the ship slightly until I told her to stop before pushing the engines and moving the ship forward. I could see on her console that the Intervention was right behind us, slightly off to the side so that in an emergency, it could move past us to give us some cover.

It took nearly forty-five minutes for us to finally pick the station up on our most distant sensors, just barely a ghost reading.

"That's incredible. How hard did that ship collide with it that it pushed it this far out?" I asked rhetorically, leaning on one of the naval droids chairs. "How long until we reach it?"

"Another fifteen minutes, Boss," Calima answered. "I want to take it slow in case... there is a trail of floating debris behind it. Our sensors aren't reading any, which is... surprising, but better safe than sorry."

When we finally got within reasonable visual range, I rejoined the Tholothian pilot on the bridge. The second I spotted the station, my jaw dropped.

An undamaged Firestar-class station had two large spires jutting from the center, one on top and the other down at the bottom. These spires connected to two circular disks, which in turn were sunk into a square center. The circles overhung the square on each of its four sides, creating a recess on each side, which was where each of the four huge hangars were, as well as half a dozen smaller ones on each side.

Unfortunately, even with how far away we were, it was clear that Station Omega-17-G was very damaged. An entire corner had been blown off of the station, starting from close to another corner and cutting across. Not only that, but the top spire was missing as well, about from about two-thirds of the way down. There were other bits of damage spread throughout the station's surface, but as far as I could tell, those two spots were the worst.

Still, as we got closer, things started looking more and more strange. As we approached the station, the broken portion of the main section was angled away, meaning we couldn't see much beyond the lip. As we got closer and flew around, it became obvious that something was going on.

"It's too smooth…" I said as Calima brought the ship up and over the closer edge of the station. "The edge, it's like it's been cut, not broken. What… bring us around the station, Calima. Comms, tell Intervention to scan the station for energy signatures while we investigate."

We got closer and closer to the station, finally passing by the completely dark wreck. As we passed by the damaged sction, we could see that it was oddly smooth, as if it had been trimmed away. As we passed, Calima pulled back and slid the ship sideways so we were looking "down" on the damaged section of the old station. There, affixed directly to the oddly trimmed damaged line, were the even more damaged remnants of a Munificent Class star frigate. 

"What the fuck…" I whispered under my breath as Miru ducked under my arm to catch a look at the bizarre sight.

The Munificent was clearly heavily damaged, with one side, the side now attached to the station, almost completely ripped away. Where it was torn from was covered in haphazard plating, some painted grey and blue, some painted white and red, an eclectic mix of scrap from the station and the ship. Following along the brutal and crude welding that attached the ship to the station, I could see almost the entire missing chunk was like that. What should have been the exposed inner workings of the station were instead welded plates, armor, and scrap.

"It looks like a blind Gamorrean tried to fix it," Miru said with disgust. "Why? Why would they attach the two? Who did this?"

Suddenly, before I could respond, the lights flickered across the ship, startling all three of us. Calima instinctively pulled back on the controls, moving us away from the strangely barbaric and chaotic "repair" job. As we moved, more of the ship came into view, showing dozens of lights from inside the ship flickering on, from fore to aft. Suddenly, there was a rumble, and Calima pushed the ship harder, our backpedaling speeding up by a significant degree. We pulled back just in time to watch the engines of the Munificent flicker on, a bright blue flare igniting in half of the broken ship's thrusters.

"Did it detect us?" Miru asked, turning to look over the sensors and comms station.

"Negative, no scans detected," The naval droids sitting there responded. "Our sensors are picking up the reactor and some sub-systems, but nothing else."

"Let me see," Miru asked, prompting the droid to bring the scans and lean back. Miru read over its shoulder for a minute, shaking her head, "Their reactor is going through a spin-up sequence… something must be really busted for that energy to go directly to the engines… not exactly surprising. Well, the good news is that-"

Suddenly, the ship went dark again. The thrusters cut out in a split second, the lights dotting the shop cutting out at the exact same moment.

"...The good news is that the ship's repulsors are keeping up with the thrusters," Miru finished, pulling back from leaning over the sensor droid's seat. "And the reactor only spins on for a few seconds."

"Why is that a good thing?" I asked, watching the now dark ship warily.

"Well, it's good the repulsors are compensating because otherwise, the Empire would have found the station ages ago, spinning in place like a top. Or it would have torn itself to pieces from the stress of spinning so fast," She explained. "And it's good the reactor only spins up for a brief period, or it could have broken down from wear and tear. Probably wouldn't have done anything, but it could have melted down and wrecked the station more."

After a few more minutes of examining the ship and station connection, the Intervention contacted us.

"Boss, everything alright over there?" Allum asked. "We are about a thousand meters off your starboard bow."

"Yeah, so far, so good," I responded. "You guys pick up the patch job?"

"Yes, we spotted the abomination of ship repair," He responded. "What do you think is going on?"

"At a guess? The maintenance and repair crew of a Munificent is mostly robotic, but they would have taken commands from organics. If the organics all died on impact…"

"The repair droids would have tried their best," He finished, not sounding particularly confident. "Still… this seems like a bit of a stretch."

"Once we get the station secured, we can plan out a trip to the Munificent and see what kind of records it has," I said. "What did the scan of the station pick up? I assume the power is out."

"Uh…. not exactly Boss. All primary reactor cores are offline, but there is one backup core running at an extremely low level," He responded. "No idea what it's powering, but it's a miracle it lasted this long."

"Okay. Here is the plan. Look at your scans and find the emptiest hangar that can fit both of the ships. That is our landing zone. The first mission is to get the life support working for that hangar. I want a secure LZ setup before we start delving any deeper," I explained. "I am starting to feel a lot less confident about this being an easy, in-and-out job, so we are going to cover all of our bases. No rushing."

"Alright, Boss."

"And tell Pola to get our armor ready," I added. "I don't want to jinx anything, but something is going on here, and I'm not about to take any chances."