Chikma vs. "SRF-1M" Elyrphiel

You had arrived on Arx after hearing word of a fighting tournament. It had been set up by the Combat Master and had been advertised as a Revival of the long held tradition of naming a Champion of the Antei Combat Center. As you had arrived at the signup table after waiting in line, you were met by a Trandoshan who looked you up and down, said nothing, and slid a form attached to a clipboard to you. A cheap chain linked a pen to the clipboard.

You read it over and it was a standard legal waiver noting that you could not hold the Combat Master or the Brotherhood liable for any injuries or even potential death that occurred during the tournament. You were entering this tournament of your own free will. Any and all repercussions of doing so were at no one’s fault but your own.

You signed, and the Trandoshan hissed with delight as he pointed to a door behind the table. A cheap paper sign was taped to the door that read “ACC Championship Introductory Meeting” in what looked to be felt-tipped black marker. You stepped inside the dark room and that is the last thing you remember until you woke up just now.

The world around you was dark… and soft. The area that you lay on felt just a bit more firm than a standard pillow. A quick check of yourself revealed that you still wore and carried everything you had when you had signed the waiver. While vision was extremely limited, you could tell that someone else was in the room with you. Four ceiling lights clicked on, one at a time, giving the room a bright glow beneath the four lights, but an eerie darkness outside of their radiance. You were in a padded room with a barred and sealed door. Every surface of the room was covered in thick, firm padded square tiles. You lay on a bed made of the same material in one corner of the room, while someone laid in another bed in the opposite corner. It was too dark to make out their figure well.

A holoprojection dropped from the ceiling, giving the room a pale blue glow. It was Combat Master Vincent Brujah. The Sith smirked as he began speaking.

“So, you’ve signed up for the tournament? Where I come from, that makes you a little crazy. I’ve taken you to a more appropriate environment for someone with your condition.”

As he smiled, pink mist began spraying from the ceiling at the same location as the lights. Slowly, what little you could see of the full room began to tint pink. The Combat Master’s smile grew wider.

“And if you weren’t crazy before… well… we can fix that. The effects of this drug will be pleasant… at first. You must be careful, though. Take too big of a dose and things can get downright terrifying, or so I’ve heard. Prolonged exposure will result in death.”

He shrugged slightly.

“The only way out of this room and into safe air is when I tell my crew to open the door, and I’m only going to do that when there is one of you left capable of walking away. Until then, enjoy the ride.”

The holoprojection blinked away. There was no starting whistle. No horn. No audience. Just silence, dim light, and the realization that the longer you sit there, the closer you would come to death.

The odor of old sweat and antiseptic roused Chikma from unconsciousness. His head throbbed, no doubt a side-effect of whatever chemical agent had put him under. He pushed himself upright and reflexively patted himself down. The wooden spear remained lashed across his back, blades and blasters hanging from his belt. The familiar weight of his armor, the jetpack between his shoulders, and the rocket launcher mounted on his wrist reassured him. And, most importantly, the beskar pendant still hung from the twine around his neck. Whatever the smiling Sith had done to him, he hadn't been stripped bare or robbed of his birthright.

Pink mist curled low in slow ribbons across the wall's padded tiles. It had thickened since the hologram blinked out, but Chikma's groggy inventory-taking prevented him from noticing until a putrid sweetness reminiscent of rotten fruit reached his tongue. Warning, atmospheric contaminant, type unknown, flashed an amber telemetry warning at the edge of his heads-up display. Scrunching his face in disgust, he flipped the pressurization toggle at the base of his helmet with a gloved thumb to lock the hermetic seal, activate the rebreather, and dismiss the visual warning.

Across the cell, someone else stirred. As the last light flickered on, the cold glow refracted off metallic… feathers? Yes, feathers of silver and gold on twitching wings folded behind narrow shoulders. The woman's skin, as much as he could see it, gleamed like molten metal. Something felt off about her. She woke slowly, deliberately, like a machine power cycling one system at a time. Her eyes opened to reveal twin coins of fluorescent gold eerily lacking pupils.

Chikma's target acquisition system pinged against her form in a futile attempt at identification. Unknown organic-mechanical hybrid proved the best possible reading. The Ewok went still. He knew droids, but this wasn't a droid. Droids clanked and whirred and looked like machines. This person, this thing was something else entirely, something that had once been alive and now wore its own corpse like a shell. It reminded him of the stories clan elders used to tell around the campfire to keep the woklings in line, tales of malevolent forest spirits that wore different faces but weren't what they seemed. Whatever his enemy in this tournament was, a single word hung in the back of his mind: trap.

Still, he didn't reach for his amethyst kukri or blaster pistol. Not yet. Instead he stood and lifted both hands, palms out, and clicked his tongue three times. The sound carried oddly in three bursts through the helmet's vocoder. Whether directed to a forest predator or a stranger on the trail, the gesture from Endor meant the same thing. I see you. I'm here. I mean no harm. Yet.

Elyrphiel tilted her head with the faint whine of servos. "Designation: SRF-1M," she said, flat and precise. "Database contains no record matching biometric signature. Species: Ewok. Armor: Mandalorian, non-standard. Threat classification unconfirmed."

Chikma jabbed a finger at his own chest, then at her, followed by a short chopping motion with his hand. Me, you, no. A promise that this hadn't been his idea either. But she didn't seem to care for nuance. Elyrphiel unfurled her wings, filling the room with a sound like swords sliding from sheaths and parting the mist around her in a slow eddy.

"Your intent is irrelevant," she said, showing she understood the gestural communication. "Exit parameters require one combatant. I calculate an eighty-one percent probability it will be me."

Before Chikma could scoff, Elyrphiel dove at him, a fist crackling with a burst of repulsor force aimed at his chest. He threw himself sideways just in time. The mechanized Diathim instead struck the wall behind where he'd stood with a muted thud. The pad's stuffing burst out from the contact point in a small white cloud.

Beecha wawa, he thought. If that had landed square, his plasma shield would have burned through and then some.

The Mandalorian popped up fast, blaster pistol clearing its holster before he'd even found his balance. He wasted no time in putting three bolts into her center mass. Each shot scattered off Elyrphiel's armor plating in a spray of white-hot sparks. She didn't stumble or flinch, despite the three scorch marks smeared across the chromium of her chestplate. She simply cocked her head again and narrowed her eyes by some fraction of a degree that on anyone else would have read as annoyance but on her came across simply as clinical observation.

"Ballistic energy weapon. Standard output. Damage mitigated."

"Dee fratta choo doo!" exclaimed Chikma, shaking his head in a gesture his opponent understood. That's enough. Blaster still warm in his hand, he dropped into a crouch and palmed an ion grenade from its home on the mag-lock clip at his side.

The ion grenade had barely cleared Chikma's belt when Elyrphiel moved in a silver blur of speed. The chrome forms of her wings snapped outward just enough to catch the air, articulated feathers scraping close to the padded walls as she drove herself forward in a low glide. With no room for a proper launch based on her calculations, and no additional height to exploit, it was her own momentum that she relied on to carry her across the cell.

Before Chikma's thumb could find the grenade's activation, Elyrphiel swung one metallic arm forward. The repulsor engineered into her glove discharged one precise blast from her palm, in a surge of white light. “Feech!” Chikma yelled, as the ion grenade tore free of his grasp and spun across the room, bouncing once against the padded ceiling before disappearing into the growing pink haze near the far wall. The rest of the blast struck the small Ewok squarely, lifting him from his feet and throwing him backward. His small armored body hit the cushioning with a muffled thump, sinking into it for an instant.

Elyrphiel hovered several meters away, feet lowering back to the floor as her wings folded inward against her back with a series of metallic clicks. Her calculations urged her to advance, to seize the opening before Chikma could fully recover, and yet something buried deeper beneath those precise directives failed to carry the command through.

Instead, Elyrphiel's pupilless gaze drifted to the barred door, surveying the windowless room. The chamber seemed smaller than it had only moments ago, the padded walls somehow pressing inward despite every measurement in her mind insisting that such a conclusion was improbable. Beneath her layers of programming, shards of memories began to flicker through… White walls that were strikingly similar to the ones in the arena where she currently was, only filled with organic test subjects strapped to tables surrounded by broken fragments of mechanical matter, and the sterile odor of antiseptic mixed with blood. And then there were the screams, followed by Collective attendants who sought to carefully remove the bodies of those who were no longer deemed viable. For one brief, disjointed moment, Elyrphiel froze.

Her wings shifted sharply behind her, striking the padded wall with a dull thud. Elyrphiel turned toward the sound as though another person had made it, the motion accompanied by the faint clicking of her articulated metal joints correcting themselves. Her processors flashed the notion that despite the similarities in appearance, this was not some Collective holding cell like those she had once been so familiar with, but somewhere else entirely… And yet not entirely unsimilar. Even still, Elyrphiel could remember the restraints that had once encircled her wrists for so many years. Could feel the sensation of her once glowing wings being ripped off one by one, replaced by cold metal.

A familiar voice spoke through the room’s intercom, “Again.” Her head snapped toward the empty corner, only to find no one there, but the faint pink haze of the mist. The glow of Elyrphiel’s golden eyes almost seemed to flicker, as she calibrated her attention back to the present. The Combat Master was not one of them, as far she could tell. Chikma was not a handler. These were facts, and facts were something that proved measurable.

Her armor’s integrated intelligence had already been sampling the pink mist, and a warning flashed across her vision as the hallucinogenic airborne compound registered as potentially toxic. Almost immediately, the suit’s re-entry systems began to fully engage. Seals tightened around the joints of her armor, as the internal circulation now redirected the airflow through its filtration components with a faint mechanical hum.

Across the room, the Ewok was already pushing himself upright. Elyrphiel's focus immediately sharpened. Her gaze tracked him as her tactical calculations automatically began to resume, judging the distance and available space for maximum wing extension. Her usual preferred method of attack was one that was not a likely possibility, in her own assessment.

Even still, she squared her shoulders in preparation as her gaze narrowed on the small form of the Ewok. Chikma reached over one shoulder, readying himself and drawing his spear. The base was wooden, worn smooth in places while still uneven in others, with the subtle imperfections of something crafted by hand rather than manufactured by machines. Elyrphiel’s gaze fixed on the rudimentary object.

It was the unusual grain pattern that registered first, with a particular coloration similar to that she’d glimpsed of trees that preferred planets with damp climates. A collection of archived environmental imagery filtered silently through her mind… Temperate forests laden with heavy rainfall, vast canopies, and persistent fog. Endor. Places that she had been shown, yet never permitted to visit underneath the Collective’s orders. Orders that were still heavily embedded into her system.

Chikma aimed the spear point towards her. Her cybernetic arm extended in response, as her gaze lowered in momentary concentration. Heat began to shimmer just above her palm, until a small flame appeared on her gloves. It began to swell, curling around her gauntlet in bright golden ribbons of heat that began to spread over the rest of her armor.

Elyrphiel focused her gaze on the wooden spear and flicked her wrist, hurling the flame forwards. It crossed the narrow chamber in a twisting arc and wrapped around the end of the spear, the surface darkening almost instantly under the searing heat. Fire caught along the dry grain and raced upward, beginning to spread rapidly along the dry wood.

Old and dry from its owner’s fastidious care, the spear caught fire fast once Elyrphiel's Force-generated tongues of flame reached it.

Chikma's fist tightened around the smoking shaft. He'd fashioned it himself, stripped the bark from the tree on Endor with his bare hands. He could still smell the wet moss from that day five years ago when he harvested the wood and painstakingly whittled it to a sharp point. Now, watching it burn felt like watching his entire homeworld burn. The same sadness and anger and grief his grandparents felt upon witnessing Imperial forces extract the planet's natural resources, he reckoned, now washed over him in waves.

Across the room, Elyrphiel hadn't moved since her pyrokinetic gambit. Not pressing whatever advantage her mechanical brain had surely calculated, instead she stood rigid, wings only half-spread, gaze fixed somewhere entirely past the Ewok's diminutive form. Her vocabulator crackled as she repeated a single word in a tone significantly less modulated than before. "Again. Again. Again..."

The grenade should have ended this, Chikma thought as char ate halfway up the weapon's grain. It should have scrambled every kriffing servo and dropped that abomination to her knees. But it was wasted, uselessly discharged in that saccharine chemical mist. The blaster had proven ineffective, and his blade wouldn't fare much better against a durasteel exoskeleton and cybernetic body. All he had now was the spear, a symbol of his people's connection to the environment that nurtured them and their refusal to capitulate to the Empire's occupation to build an artificial superweapon.

Another artificial superweapon stood before him now. And, just like his venerable ancestors, he would not yield.

Whatever thoughts or approximation of feelings arose in that chromium frame had spirited his enemy away. He didn't consult the targeting models in his heads-up display or think about the odds of victory. Ewoks rarely did, when it mattered. He planted his back foot firmly into the padded floor, drew the spear past his shoulder though the flames had almost consumed it entirely, and threw it with all his might. The flame trailed off the spearhead in a thin, dying ribbon as it flew through the narrow chamber.

The spear struck the Diathim high on the shoulder plate with a plunk. No wound. No spark. Just blackened wood that snapped on impact and fell unceremoniously in a pile of ash. Elyrphiel didn't so much as flinch, golden eyes never leaving whatever memory or reverie had swallowed her whole.

Yut ehda, he thought solemnly. Ani kaysh. Alas, it is finished. Something in his chest went hollow. Fighting a grotesque cyborg in an asylum cell for the mentally ill was not the glorious end for a sky warrior he'd envisaged, but he would fight to the last and accept his fate with honor. Ibac haar yust. That is the way.

Chikma raised his hands to chin level, balling them into fists as he tucked his elbows in and crouched slightly. He'd fallen into the Mandalorian Core fighting stance many times, but this one proved different. His ears had been ringing the whole time, probably from the strike that slammed him into the wall. His vision swam. He didn't quite know what to make of it until the same cloyingly sweet taste from earlier hit the back of his throat.

In his furor he hadn't seen the warning flash in his visor.

System failure. Hermetic seal compromised.

The armor's environmental sensors had never given a false alert before, but his gauntlet found his collar on reflex. The seam near the pressurization toggle, cracked from the earlier impact, gave under his fingers. Panicking and trying to breathe as little as possible, the Mandalorian returned his focus to his opponent. Elyrphiel seemed to be waking from her stupor, rubbing her wrist sockets. It was now or never. Fists raised, he charged.

Rather, he intended to charge. One step forward and the room tilted. He blinked, feeling something behind his eyes come loose. Those cold, merciless lights smeared into long, pink trails as he teetered. The Ewok reached out for a wall that, in fact, stood nowhere near him.

For a disquieting moment, he didn't recognize the gauntlets as his own. It didn't take long for the padding, soft and strange, to rise up and meet him.

Visions of Endor's forest, always misty with fog in the early mornings, danced before Chikma's eyes as he gazed up at the ever-thickening haze. "Meechoo weewa, he thought, fingering the heirloom beskar pendant before the pink dark folded over him entirely. Tyatee meechoo weewa. I'm home. I've finally come home.

Somewhere above the haze, a lock groaned against its housing and the door slid open. One combatant was capable of walking away.

Chikma yelped, recoiling sharply as the flames rushed to engulf his spear. His hands moved frantically against the weapon, first trying to smother the flames with one armored glove before letting it clatter to the ground. And yet beneath the Ewok’s panic, was something else that was foreign to Elyrphiel’s senses… He did not gaze upon the weapon with a look of calculated loss over a tactical asset as she would have, but with one of sorrow. Chikma’s shoulders sank, as a soft wounded sound escaped through the vocoder of his helmet while he stared at the fire consuming each ornate carving.

He knelt lower, one hand hovering slowly over the flames and then back against his chest. Just as quickly, he pointed back where the burning spear lay, then back to Elyphiel in one gesture. Her gaze tracked the minute tremor in his hands, the hitch of his shoulders, the soft sounds of crying that faintly came from beneath his helmet. The weapon had been fashioned from Endorian wood, presumably by hand. The construction had been inefficient, in her own observations, and the destruction should have represented nothing more than an inconvenience… And yet, the Ewok mourned it.

Elyrphiel rose to stand nearly twice his height, made only more imposing by the long metallic wings that rose behind her. Fire now spread freely across her chromium shell, clinging to the overlapping plates of her body and contours of dense muscles beneath her armor. Chikma looked impossibly small before her, from where he knelt. And yet, that did nothing to diminish the growing fury that he felt beneath his grief.

"Dee fratta... YAHWA!" He struck his own chest with one fist, jabbed it toward the burning spear, then pointed accusingly at Elyrphiel with more spite behind the gesture this time. She tilted her head, analyzing the small creature before her. The Ewok's answer was immediate, as he swiftly picked the spear back up and hurled it towards her.

The burning spear spiraled through the chamber, casting embers into the pink haze, before striking Elyrphiel squarely across the torso. Flames erupted around her. The wood shattered against the plating, scattering glowing orange fragments across her shoulders and wings. Sparks rose around her, feeding the fire already coating her frame, until Elyrphiel disappeared into a column of white heat for several seconds.

Chikma did not wait to see if he had hit his mark. He soared upwards in a surge of speed on his jetpack, his small armored body rising until he was nearly level with Elyrphiel’s face. Chikma raised his wrist as his weapon locked onto its target. Her own systems embedded through her armor, instinctively focused on the wrist rocket. Projection weapon. Explosive impact. Critically reduced range.

The rocket fired. For an instant, the chamber flashed with light. The detonation erupted between them, swallowing the center of the padded room. Padded tiles tore free from the walls, igniting and blistering under a burst of flames. Elyrphiel’s burning silhouette buckled at the center of the impact, then began to ripple and distort, as the projection faded from view.

Chikma’s ears flattened underneath his helmet, in the realization that she must’ve placed it after he had thrown the spear. Metallic wings extended at a closer distance to him, as Elyrphiel glided out from the haze of mixed smoke in one short motion. Her arm snapped forward, chromium fingers closing around Chikma’s throat with enough focused strength to hold him firmly in place. His legs kicked wildly in protest, both hands clawing at her hand as he sputtered a series of growls. Finally, Chikma managed to twist enough to drive one boot against Elyrphiel’s armored stomach. The blade mounted along it scraped into her plating, sparks bursting along the gash.

“Doo chawa!” A high pitched yelp of alarm immediately escaped Chikma. The fire surrounding Elyrphiel had heated the surface of her armor enough that even the momentary contact sent a burning sensation through his boot. He recoiled instinctively, one leg curling upward as smoke faintly drifted from the edges of it.

She tightened her grip once again around his throat, gazing down analytically. “What a small, insolent creature you are…” Her voice possessed the strange melodic resonance that was one of the few remnants of her Diathim nature. And yet, there was a secondary tone to her speech, one that was faintly distorted by the electronic reconstruction of where vocal structures had once been. Her golden gaze held on Chikma’s. “And yet…” She continued. “You exhibited signs of grief, which visibly increased after the destruction of an organic weapon.”

“Chitta fee woc!” Chikma snarled in another curse. His fist struck lightly against her wrist once more, until his struggles began to grow less desperate as the pink haze filled the air. Even while hanging from her grasp, his attention flickered toward what little charred and broken fragments remained of the spear, as he feebly reached towards them once more.

Elyrphiel followed his gaze in momentary hesitation, as a remnant buried beneath layers of her conditioning registered the expression before her, as something more than biological response alone. Loss. Her grip slackened for a split second, only to be quickly corrected by her own sense of programming. Opponent still remains at an estimated sixty percent capability. Neutralization is required.

Elyrphiel’s organic musculature contracted alongside fused bundles of implanted synthetic cables. Electric impulses raced through the cybernetics of her limbs, triggering her fingers at his throat to twitch, before slowly beginning to close. Beginning to crush. Chikma’s curses stopped, replaced by a series of strangled gasps underneath his helmet. His legs kicked once more, their movements gradually losing force as the pressure increased.

Chikma's movements slowed until he seemed almost weightless in her grasp. Then one hand left her wrist, dropping limply back towards his armor. His fingers feebly closed around a thermal detonator. Chikma pulled it free with what little strength remained and wedged it into the narrow space between them. His head lifted, and somewhere behind the visor of his helmet, his brown eyes found hers.

“Yub... nub..." The words barely escaped him. A blast erupted between their bodies. For the smallest fraction of time, each edge became sharper, coated in searing light… The ends of Chikma’s fur as layers of his armor blasted away, the chromium shards of feathers as they tore free from Elyrphiel’s wings. Heat engulfed them both as the explosion burst outwards in a sphere of pressure, ripping loose what remained of the room. Smoke and pink vapors flashed within the turbulence as the chamber began to fill with charred padding, sparks, and shattered materials. For one suspended instant, the small creature of the forest and Elyrphiel’s machinery became indistinguishable within the blaze… For the destruction made no distinction between what had been born, and what had been built.