Chikma watched the thermal detonator tumble through the fog. It reminded him of the mattberries he and his friends would drop from sanctuary tree branches, only this projectile wouldn’t pop into a jammy mess when it hit the ground. Not the kind he’d want to scrape up and eat, anyway.
Kadrol’s hand snapped up, calling upon the Force to hurl the explosive back out over the water. Mitchu. Veek, Chikma thought. Smart. Fast. But, ultimately, half a heartbeat too slow. The explosive detonated about eight yards out and four feet up.
A deafening crack and white blaze flattened the fog into a ring. The bog answered by throwing a wall of water and pulverized mud and dragonsnake viscera across the shadows. The overpressure shook the bough under the Ewok’s boots. Down below, Kadrol seemed to simply lift off the ground, his body folding limply as the blast flung him backward into deeper water.
Chikma watched his opponent surface, coughing up brown water as he dragged himself through the mud with one hand. Before averting his eyes, he’d seen two hilts spin away into the murk. One vanished, undoubtedly eaten by peat and silt. The other must not have gone very far, since Kadrol blindly thumbed the activator with his other hand.
The lightsaber coughed and sputtered. A stub of violet flickered mere inches out of the emitter, then sparked and died. The Pantoran’s repeated button presses called forth only a thread of smoke. Watertight construction hadn’t accounted for a thermal detonator blast, and the bog had gotten inside. Chikma suspected the bog got inside everything, eventually.
Kadrol stared at the dead weapon for one full second before dropping it. Then he reached down to draw the hunting knife from his belt. Di too moktok, Chikma thought as he pulsed his jetpack to drop out of the tree. Now it’s a fight.
He drew his amethyst kukri into a reverse grip as he came down, aiming to land on the blue man’s shoulders and ride him into the muck. But he never got there. Something invisible wrapped around his chest mid-fall and swatted him sideways like a bug.
The bog spun. Chikma slammed into a moss-slick tree trunk hard enough to blow the air out of his lungs. He plopped flat into a foot of mud. The jetpack’s left intake whined and went quiet.
The Ewok came out of the wet ground like a monster birthed from the muck, a familiar old heat rising behind his eyes. This fight had gone on long enough. He lunged, swinging his kukri low and fast at Kadrol’s knee. The Pantoran dropped a forearm across its path and the amethyst edge skidded off armored plating with a shriek of sparks. Fistgaunts. The researcher had come to the duel wearing armored gloves. He knew how to use them, too; Kadrol swept a second cut aside with the back of his wrist, driving his knife straight at Chikma’s throat. The whole maneuver was economical, no flourish to be found.
Chikma slipped it by a whisker, though the blade opened a line across his body glove at his shoulder. They broke apart, circling one another. The muck sucked at their feet, each step marked by a squelching noise. It would only matter to one who had much more body mass and spent far less time surrounded by trees.
The Ewok gave up one step, then another, and another, letting Kadrol believe he was driving him back toward open ground. The scholar’s boots came down heavier with each advance, sinking deeper into the mire. The diminutive Mandalorian’s barely broke the crust. Finally, Kadrol’s movement slowed enough to allow Chikma to pull out his whip. A single flick of his wrist and fibercord wrapped twice around Kadrol’s ankles.
Chikma pulled with all his might, firing what was left of the jetpack at the same time. The thrust was ugly, jetting the pair sideways for maybe a second and a half. But it was enough. Kadrol’s legs went out from under him, and he went down on his back. Hard.
Kadrol thrashed, pushing himself upright to his waist. His blond hair now lay flat against his head, plastered with sweat and grime. Having dropped his knife, he groped through the silt for anything useful at all. For the first time all afternoon, the careful veneer of academic composure vanished. All that remained was a man whose carefully thought-out plan had failed him, whose improvisation posed no threat.
Chikma let the whip go slack, his ribs burning where the tree had hit him. But he powered through the pain, loosing his spear with a soft rasp of leather. Its redwood haft, worn smooth by years of regular handling, reminded him of the primal power pulsing through his veins. He turned it once in his grip, leveling the point at the man who called his legacy a cult.
Panic flooded Kadrol’s face. He gathered himself for one last stand. Chikma felt it build like he felt an oncoming storm, a subtle change in barometric pressure causing his fur to stand on end. A similar pressure rolled off the grounded researcher as he raised both shaking hands. Azure sparks sputtered off his spread fingers, a physical manifestation of his ragged exhaustion and shuddering breath.
Before real lightning might have had the chance to arc across the last three feet between them, Chikma planted one boot on the man’s chestplate and drove the spear’s wooden point through Kadrol’s throat. He leaned his whole modest weight into the weapon, waiting to feel it sink into the mud underneath.
The fight faded out of Kadrol’s now singed fingertips. A moment later, they fell lifelessly to the ground.
Fog drifted slowly across the water as silence yet again overtook the bog. Wrenching his spear free, Chikma stepped back and took a deep breath. He slung the spear across his back and sat on a root, stubby legs dangling just over the water. Then he pulled out his flute and began to play a sprightly tune from his childhood.
