On the fringes of the Outer Rim territories and famous as the one-time location of the Rebel Alliance, Hoth is a frigid world marred with fissures created from the tidal pull of Hoth’s three moons. Blanketed in a frozen ocean, massive oceanic currents beneath the southern hemisphere are the cause of constant seismic activities that result in a constantly shifting landscape of tunnels and caves.

Buried into the side of a fissure reaching hundreds of meters into the core of the planet is a network of tunnels leading into a cave. Its sole entrance is suspended within the wall of the fissure, requiring one to rappel down the dangerous crevasse and into the tunnels; one small miscalculation could send explorers descending the rest of the unmeasured height deep within the planet’s core.

Insulated under several hundred meters of ice in all directions, the cave is protected against the gale force winds and the intense snowstorms that sweep along the planet’s surface. As a result, the cave is warmer than most of Hoth’s unforgiving cold with melting icicles dangling precariously overhead. In turn, this allows for more life to grow in addition to being a promising habitat for the hulking Wampas that have been trapped this far below the surface. Beginning to thaw, it is obvious that this cave will eventually fall victim to seismic activity to disappear into the sheets of ice that surround it. Illuminating the cave’s interior with a dull blue glow, a luminous form of lichen has taken up residence among the bones of the creatures unfortunate enough to be trapped here.

Caution must be exercised if one is to navigate the slippery slopes of the cave as melted icicles drip onto the cavern’s floor surface. In one corner of the cave, the ocean water has accumulated to form a large pool, providing sustenance to the rare lumni-spice growing within the crystalline complex, never to see the blue-white sun.

Of all the planets I've been to, this is the suckiest planet ever, Kant Lavar thought to himself. Of all time.

Hoth would never be a tourist destination, to say the least. Driving winds, subzero temperatures at all hours even on the hottest day, and the snow. By the Force, the snow. It was bitterly cold even with the cold-weather outfit the ex-bounty hunter was wearing, and he mentally cursed Marick for handing him this mission.

The Combat Master had summoned him to one of the many briefing rooms in the Arconan Citadel and laid out the situation in cold, blunt terms. A former Arconan, Turel Sorenn, had left the Shadow Clan and joined Clan Odan-Urr, a faction of Light Side adherents in the Dark Brotherhood. The senior Arconans had pressed Consul Atyiru Entar to have him eliminated, as a threat to the Shadow Clan's security, but she had been resistant to the idea for reasons of her own. "I am done fighting with her over this," Marick had hissed. "You will hunt down the traitor Sorenn and eliminate him. I don't care how you do it, as long as it is done."

Being an ex-bounty hunter, Lavar had picked up Sorenn's trail away from the sector and into the Hoth system, of all places. Why there, Lavar couldn't even begin to guess. He was here, though. The Grey Jedi had tried to disguise his knowledge of the Light Sider's location as much as possible, trying to affect the air of someone following a purpose of his own. That vague sense had lead here, where Lavar was busily setting up a piton and rope to rappel into a chasm.

The chasm itself was enormous. The drips of water echoed endlessly, and the bare half-light from reflected sunlight and... lichen of some sort, he thought, kept the cavern in a blue-green gloom. Once the Grey Jedi had both feet on the ground he unhooked himself from the rope, pulled off his gloves and drew his blaster pistol. Taking a moment to focus, Lavar pulled the Force up around him, distorting light around his body and letting him move almost invisibly - albeit very slowly - deeper into the cave.

Minutes of agonizingly slow movement later, Lavar saw a shape ahead of him. It was definitely humanoid, not the shaggy form of a wampa. Lavar was pretty sure the shape was facing away from him so he dropped the Force Cloak, focused again and gestured. An intense burst of light appeared at head height right in front of the other man, and Lavar used the precious moments of disorientation the burst of light would give him and fired a quick burst from his pistol at the being - two shots to the torso and one to the head.

The passage of time slows to a crawl when one is hit with a surge of adrenaline. Pupils dilate, blood rushes to the brain, seconds feel like minutes as every single sense is perceived in excruciating detail. Turel was in such a state in the bowels of the ice cave. One moment he’s absently waiting for the DIA contact he was supposed to meet, and the next every cell in his body is screaming danger in a warning from the currents of the Force. Before he had a chance to heed the warning a flash of light blinded him. Instinctively, the Jedi dove to his right side for a defensive roll.

Turel’s response saved his life, but wasn’t quick enough to avoid damage. As he dove a blaster bolt winged him in his left shoulder. The impact of the blast sent him spinning to the rocks and snow of the cave floor. Still blinded and now reeling from the blaster wound to his shoulder, he rolled behind a nearby rock for cover. The agony in the Odanite’s left deltoid intensified as he was forced to roll on top of the wound to get to safety. He gingerly sat up and propped his back against the rock as his would-be assassin took a few more pot shots from the far side of the cave. Turel made a mental note of where the sounds of the blaster fire were coming from.

The Jedi unclipped his lightsaber from his belt as he waited for his vision to return. He heard the sound of crunching ice as his opponent slowly approached. It would only be a matter of seconds before the assassin had the right angle to shoot over the rock and finish Turel off. He had to be ready. The stars and red hue faded from the Odanite’s vision. It’s now or never, he thought as his muscles tensed, like a coiled spring ready to bounce.

Relying on the Force, Turel ignited his saber, lept up and spun around to face his target in a single fluid motion. True to form, his would-be assassin fired a few bolts which the Jedi easily deflected with some tight saber orbits. The pair stood face to face for a tense moment as the soft hum of the Odanite’s saber echoed in the cave.

“Are you quite finished?” Turel inquired with his usual sass, trying not to wince at the flaring pain in his left shoulder.

The Arconan assassin said nothing as his mind raced with how to handle the Jedi. His initial attack did not go as planned. The gray Jedi’s eyes darted around the room, searching for something in the environment to use to his advantage.

Turel could sense Kant’s connection to the Force and the Arconan’s unsuccessful efforts to hide said connection. Nothing in the assassin’s clothing or demeanor betrayed his affiliation. “Who sent you?” The Jedi waited for a few seconds before asking again, this time he raised his free left hand in an almost mystical gesture directed at his failed murderer. “I said, who sent you?” The question echoed over and over in Kant’s mind as he could feel the Force pushing against his mental defenses like a tide.

The Arconan winced and brought his left hand up to his temple while aiming the pistol with his right. He fired the blaster in a vain effort to resist, but the Jedi calmly deflected the bolts while maintaining intense, unblinking eye contact. Turel repeated himself slowly, emphasizing each word. “Who sent you?”

“GET OUT OF MY HEAD!” Kant cried out as he could no longer hold back the tide.

“Who. Sent. You?”

The Arconan lowered his pistol in a gesture of resignation. He spoke without emotion or inflection, like a person absently remembering an old dream. “Marick Arconae sent me on behalf of several Arconae to kill you.”

“Why did Marick send you?”

“You are a threat to the Shadow Clan and must be eliminated without the Shadow Lady’s knowledge.”

Turel lowered his left hand, suddenly feeling a sharper pain in his heart than his seared shoulder. He knew this day would eventually come, but it didn’t take the sting out of having one’s former comrades sign your death warrant. He wondered exactly how many were involved in this conspiracy. The Jedi’s eyes began to water involuntarily before he regained composure. This revelation had cut him deeper than any blade. A single tear rolled down his face and fell to a patch of ice below. He didn’t care if the gray Jedi saw the unintentional display of emotion or not.

Kant shook his head as his target’s mental hold over him receded. The full horror of the extent and ease of Turel’s intrusion hit the Arconan all at once. Nothing in the former ex-Arconan’s dossier indicated that level of mental prowess. No time to dwell on that now, he still had a mission to complete.

“Marick betrayed you when he sent you after me.” Turel remarked with a twinge of sadness in his voice. He could sense the Arconan’s momentary confusion. “Go home and tell Marick if he wants me dead he’ll have to come do his own dirty work.”

Kant grew angry at the Jedi’s implied arrogance. The ex-bounty hunter quickly took aim at the cave ceiling above Turel and fired. The Jedi was forced to dive to avoid a block of ice from hitting him in the head. When the Odanite stood up, shoulder flaring up again, the Arconan was nowhere in sight. Turel still sensed the assassin nearby. The hunt was now on.

Kant Lavar was not happy.

Firstly, his best chance to finish this mission quickly, an ambush, hadn’t worked. Of course, he reflected, ambushes rarely work against Force sensitives. But that was beside the point. Secondly, there had been the mental intrusion, which had been… unsettling was too weak a word, but the Gray Jedi did his best to push past it. It had happened, but it was over. No point in dwelling on what couldn't be changed.

Dipping into the Force, he kept up a fair pace, enhancing his body’s strength and agility as he ran down tunnels, jumped over ice formations, and generally tried to put as much distance between him and the more powerful Jedi as possible. He didn’t like admitting that he was weaker than his opponent, but underestimating said opponent would be a quick way to get himself killed.

Finally, Lavar found a good place to wait. The dim light that had suffused the other chambers he’d passed through was far, far dimmer here, and stalactites and stalagmites of both ice and rock turned the chamber into a virtual maze. There was a small outcropping of rock hanging above the entrance, and Lavar gathered himself and leapt up onto it, holstering his blaster as he did so and pulling two devices from his belt. He cradled them in his hands as he closed his eyes.

Turel was minutes away, and Lavar immersed himself in the Force. This time he was not truly attempting to hide his presence but rather… fuzz it, making it harder for his target to get a good location on him. Slowly drawing more deeply on the Force, he bent light around himself again. It was much easier, as the darkness of the cave worked for him in this instance. He laid belly-down on the ice-slick rock, allowing him to concentrate more on the Force and less on keeping his footing.

Time passed. Sweat started to bead on Lavar’s brow as he kept his concentration. It wasn’t easy to do, manipulating the Force to do two separate things like this. The only thing that made it even possible was that he had had a lot of practice disguising his Force signature during his days as a Bounty Hunter. Even then, though, he knew it wasn’t perfect, and he hoped the blurring effect he was going for would make up for the sustained effort he was putting out.

Finally, Lavar heard the scrape of boots on ice below him, accompanied by the characteristic buzzing hum of an active lightsaber. Muscles tensing, Lavar focused his energy as much as he could, nearing the point of exhaustion and gambling on one last ambush turning the tide of this fight. If it didn’t work… he pushed the thought away.

Even afterward, Lavar was never quite sure what gave him away. Maybe his focus wavered for just a moment and the Jedi pinpointed him, or he was simply able to pierce the ex-hunter’s efforts to fog his location. Regardless, the rock he clung to shuddered as the Jedi gripped it in the Force and yanked it down. Lavar jumped off of it, tumbling to the ground as he landed. Miraculously uninjured, Lavar jumped to his feet and tossed one of the two grenades he held at the Jedi, followed by the other.

Turel’s senses screamed warnings at him, and using the Force, he swatted aside the first grenade, and placed a barrier between him and it. It hit the stalagmite wall to his left, exploding as it did and peppering his barrier with fragments. The second grenade wasn’t as immediate a threat, and Turel simply casually swiped at it with his lightsaber, as if by reflex.

The moment the blade came in contact with the grenade shell, however, his precognition screamed anew and he leapt to the side as the adhesives in the glop grenade sprayed out, the lightsaber having pierced the glue reservoir in the grenade as easily as the grenade’s own mechanisms would have. Turel tumbled back, trying to clear the glop grenade’s effective radius as Lavar charged toward the Jedi, blaster in one hand and lightsaber ready in the other.

Time to end this, the Arconan thought to himself.

Glop grenades were nothing to mess around with. Turel breathed a small sigh of relief that he had pieced the device with his saber, vaporizing most of the gel with the searing plasma of the blade, instead of the grenade triggering as intended. The remaining amount of glop which now spurted onto the floor of the cave still presented a significant hazard.

The Arconan gave his opponent no time to recover as he charged headlong in an attempt to seize the initiative. Kant took aim with the blaster in his left hand with the saber trailing behind him in his right. Placing all his focus into steading his left arm while on the move, the ex-bounty hunter let loose a hail of blaster fire at the Jedi. Turel was still trying to recover his footing after evading the glop and struggled to deflect the bolts. The unbalanced Odanite was too slow and caught a single bolt directly to the outer edge of his right thigh. He cried out in pain.

Bloodlust took Kant as the Jedi’s yelp signaled victory was within the ex-bounty hunter’s grasp. The Jedi dropped to a knee, involuntarily nursing the fresh wound with his right hand while awkwardly deflecting with the saber in his left. The Arconan lowered the blaster and switched to his blazing ruby blade as he neared striking distance of his target. Soon the mission would be over and the Jedi traitor would be dead.

Just as Kant was about to strike Turel, he collided with a translucent wall of Force energy. It was like running face first into a brick wall, the barrier shattered but the Arconan’s momentum was halted and he bounced back. Unable to control his fall backward, Kant fell back first into the glop on the cave floor which he had avoided during his reckless charge. The Jedi had managed to not only throw up a obstacle of Force energy but angle in such a way that Kant would reflect back into the glop hazard.

Turel slowly rose while Kant struggled to sit up and extricate himself from the glop. The Jedi kept his saber ignited as he limped a few steps closer to gloat. “Normally I take a guy to dinner before trying to spay grayish goo on him, but I’m old fashioned like that.” The Arconan winced in disgust, wondering if his target was a Jedi or an immature teenager.

The ex-bounty hunter raised the pistol in his left hand and aimed as best he could while stuck in the glop. Turel shook his head in response. “Do you know what the definition of insanity is? Doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.” His cocksure grin was interrupted by a wince of pain. “Gotta hand it to ya, you got some licks in but you’ll have a hard time killing me with a blaster old man. Now put the blaster down before I’m forced to do something very un-Jedi-like and send you back to Selen missing a hand.” Kant, realizing the futility of his current position, tossed the blaster aside.

“That’s a good lad.” Turel quipped in a patronizing tone. The Arconan deactivated his saber as it occurred to him that only his outer coat was stuck to the glop, if he were able to slip out of it he could resume his attack. He plotted for a few moments, allowing his opponent to think he had won the day.

“You do realize that Marick ‘this is only a test’ Arconae probably didn’t actually want me dead right? He was probably just trying to test your mettle as an assassin or something knowing I wouldn’t actually kill you.” He paused for a moment and closed his eyes to focus. “I’d applaud your effort but I can feel your malice so I’ll just keep my saber up thank you very much.”

Kant tried to hide his frustration at Turel not letting his guard down. “What do you expect me to do? I was given a mission and I’m going to carry it out.”

“A mission in defiance of the Shadow Lady’s decree, remember that. Killing me is the same as killing a member of the Clan, not to mention the war it would start with Odan-Urr. If Marick really was sending you on this mission, you’d be party to a mutiny.” The Jedi glared at the Arconan as that thought sunk in. “Shadicar loyal to her and Jedi Sentinels loyal to me would hunt you down. Is that really what you want?”

Kant remained silent as he mulled over the Odanite’s words; he did not want to face the combined wrath of the Shadicar and Sentinels. Turel sensed the Arconan’s doubt and pressed his point. “Just go home, you’ll see this was all one of Marick’s tests. Now I’m going to leave you here, if you try to follow me I won’t be so nice. I may just capture you and turn you over to the Shadow Lady and Arcia for punishment.”

The ex-bounty hunter tossed the saber aside. Satisfied, Turel deactivated his own saber and turned to leave. He had no idea if Marick’s mission was a serious one or not, but it had served as a useful bluff to end the current situation. As he walked back to his shuttle, the Guardian wondered exactly who he could trust anymore. He’d have a lot to think about on the flight back to New Tython.