It was late night, or early morning, one could never tell in the perpetual dark of Nar Shadaa, when Darth Firias touched down in his starship. He punched a few keys into the navigation console and initiated the ship’s auto defense systems. No matter how powerful in the force he was, no Sith or Jedi had ever figured out how to fly through space at light-speed.

The last broken informant had told him that Karr had fled to this moon city, right before his heart gave out from the fear. He ground his molars in frustration. Another damned all encompassing city, and this one seemed dirtier than the last somehow.
Firias gathered his thoughts inward and drew upon the Dark Side, seeking his prey yet again through a veritable forest of fears and hatreds. Again frustrated that he could find nothing, he vented his rage on a nearby Gungan that had wandered too close to his launchpad than was advisably safe. His outstretched hand formed a grip on the air and the Gungan’s neck seemed to implode. A pitiful squeak escaped its lips as it writhed its death throes on the cold bitter deck of the star-port. Somewhere far off a protocol droid laughed in triumph.

Not a single soul looked his way in admonishment. He allowed himself a smirk before setting out into the dimly lit city in search of a trail to follow.. It wasn’t long before he found an informant that had the information he wanted. To say he had a knack for getting information was a sad and sore understatement, and practice made him all the more ruthlessly efficient. With renewed vigor he turned to follow this new path, or tried to as powerful hands clamped down on his arms and attempted to wrench them around backward painfully.

Enraged that anyone would be so bold, he resolved to find out how exactly the assassin crept up on him despite his heightened Sith senses, but not before crushing this would be assassin. He drew upon the latent force around him, bolstering his strength and broke free of his attacker’s iron grip. With a flick of his wrist, his lightsaber flew from his belt to his hand..

At the exact moment his adversary pulled a vibrosword of his own. With a shrill whirring noise the blade activated. The man wore a jet black uniform with piecemeal armor covering various vulnerable points. He had a black helmet with a reflective face shield hiding his visage and giving off an air of cruel anonymity. Without so much as a whisper the man sliced downward at Firias’s off hand, but feinted for a stab to the neck at the last instant. Firias anticipated the move and lined up his lightsaber accordingly. There was another shrill screech when the vibroblade met the amber energy of the lightsaber, but the metal blade did not break or melt.

Unfortunately for Firias, his lightsaber extinguished on its own accord when it came in direct contact with the blade. Cortosis! It was a cortosis blade! This fight just got interesting. The vibroblade descended down onto Firias’s shoulder, havn deflected from his neck. Firias launched himself into a backward somersault but not fast enough as the blade bit into his trailing forearm, splitting the ceramic plate and muscle underneath like butter.. It was Firias’s force assisted speed and reflexes that saved the limb altogether.

With a grunt of pain, Firias summoned up his renewed fury. Bolstered by rage, he reignited his lightsaber and stood at the ready, daring his opponent to attack. Again, wordlessly, the assassin charged right in, and caught a force blast to the chest. The man was sent sprawling backward into some cargo crates thirty feet behind him. They smashed into splinters and bent nails. His left arm bent at an awkward angle at the elbow, the man in the black mask stood back up defiantly.

The fight was back to an even keel, or so it would have been had the assassin known anything about the Dark Side that Firias had access to. Though obviously trained to fight force sensitives, the man simply had no other defense against it beyond his incredible stealth and agility. So as the man rose fully he nearly caught a blast of force lightning to the chest. It was his turn to show incredible reflexes as he dove forward under the arcs of lightning streaming from Firias’s fingers. Unrelenting, the man dove forward again at a different angle, closing the distance and dodging a second blast. He came to his feet to the left and behind Firias, who turned with an underhanded slash to the assassin’s knee. The assassin lifted his leg out of the arc of the saber and slashed down again, confident that his cortosis blade would finish the job.

He had underestimated Firias’s fury. The blade bit into Firias’s shoulder as his lightsaber crossed under and into the vibroblade’s hilt, ceasing its matter ruining vibrations. With the blade embedded firmly in his shoulder, Firias turned his torso savagely, ripping the blade from the surprised assassin’s hands. The amber blade of superheated energy whipped through the assassin’s torso above the waist and continued out through his ruined left arm. With a grunt, Firias kicked the man in the chest in a pushing motion, and still augmented by his rage and the Dark Side. The man’s top half flew again into the broken crates and was still. The legs continued to teeter slightly until Firias, nearly consumed by fury, hurled them with the force as powerfully as he could. It would be a strange day for whoever discovered a pair of legs had landed in their vehicle.

Firias fought to control his emotions warring within him, and slowly the air around him ceased to ripple and shake with his fury and power in the force. He calmly walked over to the assassin’s top half and raised him out of the rubble with the force, suspending the lifeless body in the air. He walked forward and searched the myriad of pockets on the man’s person, halved as though it was. Firias briefly thought his act of launching the legs might prove to have been foolish as was finding nothing in his top half.

At last he found what he had been looking for. A small data chip in a pocket in the man’s armored bracer of his remaining arm. Firias dropped the body unceremoniously to the deck and pulled his cloak up around his head.

It would be a long walk back to his ship. But now he had another lead…