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.