Revan watched dispassionately as the headless body of the last Cerberus trooper she encountered slumped to the floor, the edges of his neck armor glowing a soft orange from where her lightsaber had cut through.

  That was the seventh squad she had cut her way through and yet there had been no discernible attempts to either properly engage or avoid her. And in her experience that meant there was either no plans to deal with any disruptions that didn’t risk their main objective, or Revan was about to walk into a trap.

  She triggered her comms, “Shepard, how long until you’ve secured the krogan?”

  “We’re moving as fast as we can but Cerberus damaged the lift. We’re dealing with two squads at least and a heavy mech!” Shepard yelled back over the sound of gunfire. “If you’re not busy we could use a hand!”

  Revan was about to reply when the sound of several lightsabers igniting at once cut her off.

  “...it appears something just came up. You will have to deal without me.” The Sith Lady ended the call and turned to look at her opponents.

  “Well, isn’t this an unpleasant surprise?”

  -o-

  “Revan? Revan!” Shepard bit back a curse and ducked as more gunfire whizzed over her head.

  It looked like they were on their own. If it had just been Cerberus soldiers it would have been one thing, but they had managed to sneak in an Atlas mech somehow! The machine had her whole squad pinned and if they didn’t take it out soon, it was going to destroy the krogan’s pod and any chance they had at a genophage cure!

  She made a motion at Liara and waited a moment as her squadmate tossed a singularity at a few of the remaining Troopers before collapsing back behind cover. Shepard distantly noted that Liara had been throwing around advanced biotics almost nonstop and was hitting her limit. More actively she was barking orders at Garrus. They had a limited window of time to act before they were fully boxed in and picked off. “Burn it’s shields now!” She yelled, already firing at the Atlas as quickly as her M-23 Katana could cycle.

  “On it!” Garrus called back and opened fire with his blaster rifle. “How you plan on getting through the armor though?!”

  Shepard was still working on that part. They had been expecting a quick escort mission, not a heavy assault against heavy-class mechs. They didn’t have anything meant to punch through that level of armor, dammit!

  “Not yet! Just try aiming for the canopy!”

  She didn’t have high hopes of even Garrus’s rifle melting through the heavily reinforced material unless the Atlas decided to stand still for a while, but hopefully the flashes of red would disorient the pilot a bit. Now she needed to find a way to kill it.

  Her eyes scanned the battlefield. If Cerberus was serious about breaching the pod before it reached the landing bay, they would have needed heavy weapons. There! A dead trooper that had been carrying a rocket launcher!

  A quick biotic Pull had the weapon in her grasp but the bad news was there were only two shots. Enough to damage the outer armor, but extremely unlikely to completely shut down the mech unless she scored a direct hit twice in the same spot.

  Actually, that gave her an idea.

  “Liara, you doing okay?” Shepard asked as she planned her next move.

  “I’m fine, Shepard. But I don’t think I have many more Singularities in me.”

  “That’s fine, what about a precision Warp?”

  “Easily, but that won’t be enough to destroy such a heavily armored…” Liara trailed off when she saw what Shepard was doing with one of the remaining missiles. “Shepard, no. That’s insane!”

  “Only if it doesn’t work!” Shepard retorted. “Now get ready, we’re probably only going to get one shot at this!”

  Ignoring Liara’s attempt at a protest, Shepard waited until the Atlas turned to aim where Garrus was still putting bolt after bolt into its canopy to shoulder the rocket launcher and fire a shot at the plating just under the mech’s left arm where the armor was thinner. It hit and to Shepard’s relief, she could see the hole in the metal plating.

  Great! They still had a chance.

  Pushing down the voice in her head that was screaming this was a terrible idea with the ease of long practice, Shepard vaulted over the divider she had been using as cover and triggered a Biotic Charge straight towards the Atlas.

  The mech shifted to target her forcing her to duck under a flailing limb as she jumped onto the chassis and held on tightly. She only had a few moments before the pilot realised what she was doing so the second she was stable, she pulled out the second rocket she had covered in omnigel and shoved it as deep into the hole in the plating as possible. A quick electric pulse from her omnitool essentially welded the missile in place half a second before the Atlas pilot moved and knocked her off.

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  “Now Liara!”

  A heartbeat later the missile was wrapped up by a bright blue corona of dark energy and exploded as the shifting biotic fields triggered the warhead just under the Atlas’s protective plating and doing far more damage than a single missile should do to a heavy mech.

  It just wasn’t enough. The Atlas was still moving.

  Shepard scrambled to move even as she stared down the barrel of the mech’s mass accelerator cannon knowing even a near miss would reduce her to a red smear on the floor. So thank God, Buddha, or even Revan’s mysterious Force that before the pilot could pull the trigger a red energy bolt streaked into the now much wider hole in the mech and hit something important.

  The mech locked up as systems overloaded and Shepard briefly saw the pilot fighting with the controls before the Atlas detonated with the force of a small bomb. The Spectre was knocked head over heels into a wall from the blast wave, but she was still alive.

  “Shepard! You alright?”

  Liara was by her side in seconds, running a medical program on her omnitool. Garrus wasn’t far behind, though he was more focused on scanning their surroundings for any remaining Cerberus troops.

  “Yeah, a little tender but I think I’m fine.” She grunted out. “Besides, my plan worked great, right?”

  “If you mean the string of lucky coincidences that you not only managed to secure an IED in a very small hole, that Liara was able to detonate it despite the safeties built into the missile to stop it from doing exactly that when hit by biotics, and that I happened to have a somewhat clear shot with a rifle that uses concentrated plasma instead of normal ammunition? Then yes, it was foolproof.” Garrus said dryly and looked at Liara. “How did you manage to cause that explosion anyway?”

  “Shepard disabled the safeties beforehand.” The Asari grumbled. “She’s lucky her Charge didn’t set anything off.”

  “Ah, more of her brand of insanity then. That makes sense.”

  Shepard glared at the both of them. “If you’re done picking on me, we’ve got a krogan to secure. Liara, call Wrex and let him know we cleared the landing site. Garrus, keep an eye out for more Cerberus. I’m going to try and get a hold of Revan again. I don’t like that we’ve heard nothing from her since we lost contact.”

  “You got it, Commander.” Both her squadmates straightened up as they focused back on the mission.

  While they split off to do as she ordered, Shepard glanced out over the increasingly damaged looking facility, wondering what exactly had managed to hold Revan up for so long.

  -o-

  Revan leaned back as a glowing blade narrowly missed her throat. Another stabbed towards her leg that she parried with a small twirl of one of her own lightsabers. A third assailant moved to try attacking the Sith Lady from behind, but a burst of Force Lightning forced them to back off.

  “I was a bit worried when I saw that Cerberus managed to create a lightsaber design of its own. But if this is the extent of your knockoffs then I must say I’m disappointed.” Revan said coldly to her seven remaining opponents. “In fact I might go as far to say it is more a mockery than an effective weapon design.”

  She wasn’t exaggerating that last part either.

  When she had turned to find ten lightsaber wielding opponents, she had initially been cautious. Even if the blades looked like ancient proto-saber designs that had fallen out of use millenia ago in her own galaxy, a lightsaber was a lightsaber. In the hands of a skilled enough warrior, it could cut down almost any opponent.

  There was a reason they remained the iconic weapons of Jedi and Sith after thousands of years.

  But the things Cerberus had deployed against her? They barely deserved the name. Not when out of the three dead assailants, Revan had only killed two. The third had burned to death when the power pack connected to the blade overloaded and exploded from the operative blocking too much in quick succession.

  With that limitation in mind it made sense why Cerberus deployed these saberwielders in such a large group. It wasn’t specifically because they thought Revan was a large enough threat ten operatives were needed, but that they needed around that many to allow individuals to swap out and bleed off the heat building up in their powerpacks otherwise Revan could simply overload the packs by attacking one person at a time until the packs overloaded.

  Something the Cerberus agents seemed well aware of because unlike the troopers’ bulky armor, their suits were much lighter and more flexible and they seemed to prefer assassination-style strikes rather than any actual saberfighting.

  “I don’t believe the Illusive Man is deluded enough to believe something like this would be enough to kill me.” Revan said aloud. “Which means I was not your initial target. So I wonder, what were you all supposed to be here for?”

  Revan wasn’t expecting an answer.

  Even the most basic Cerberus troopers implanted with Reaper technology were poor conversationalists. This group had been modified much more extensively going by the amount of metal Revan had cut through when killing two of them. She would be very surprised if any of them were capable of more than doggedly carrying out their orders. Even extensive torture would likely be borderline useless at extracting information even if Revan had the time or inclination for it.

  “No matter, Cerberus went through the effort to send those toys all the way out here.” Revan said, raising her own sabers into a ready position. “I may as well show you how far your scientists still have to go!”

  A burst of speed put the Sith directly in front of one of the Cerberus cyborgs. It was telling how fragile their weapons really were that the agent tried to dodge instead of using his saber defensively. The protective barrier around him held for only a brief moment before Revan’s red saber cut through his heart.

  The female agent that was the Sith’s next target learned from that at least and managed to parry two of Revan’s attacks before three others rushed to intervene. Revan’s blades whirled around her in intricate patterns of light to fend off the rush of attacks, mentally counting down how many strikes each blade had left before they risked exploding.

  It quickly became hard to keep track though because one agent would cycle out when Revan estimated they had half a dozen strikes left with one of the remaining observers.

  But if they planned on simply outlasting her, Revan had a nasty surprise for them. While she very rarely ever found herself facing numbers like this, she had dueled several Jedi Knights and even Masters at once on her own before. And they had been much more dangerous than these indoctrinated cyborgs could ever be.

  Revan sidestepped a lunge from behind and almost casually sliced upwards at her attacker’s arm, severing it halfway below the elbow. Continuing her sideways motion Revan pivoted so her recently disarmed opponent was between her and another attacker.

  The attacker didn’t seem to care they were about to slash through their fellow agent. At least they didn’t until Revan grabbed the still ignited proto-saber in a telekinetic grip and guided it up into the attacker’s chest while she stabbed the first agent through the back with her own saber.

  Reduced to less than half their original number it became clear to the remaining Cerberus agents there was little hope they would be able to defeat Revan, yet she couldn’t sense even a hint of flicker of emotion from any of them as they threw themselves at the Sith in a fashion eerily similar to the Collector drones.

  Revan sidestepped a stab, blocked a slash, parried another so it forced the fourth opponent to dodge or impale themselves on their ally’s saber. A counter-slash was blocked, an incoming attack parried, a near miss on an agent that stumbled backwards, slash, parry, stab, block, ripost, one of the remaining agents fell to the ground with a burning gouge across their chest, slash, slash, stab, parry, a jump to the side followed by a Force Push as an agent attempted to use their powerpack overloading as an improvised explosive, slash, parry…SLASH!

  “And then there was one.” Revan said lightly as the Cerberus agent she just attacked split in two, bisected from shoulder to hip. “But it seems you discovered the design flaw that made proto-sabers a relic of the past.” She looked at the severed power cord dangling from the now useless saber hilt. Revan had deliberately not targeted the glaring weak point until now for one reason only.

  She needed information.

  Reaching out a hand towards the final agent, Revan focused on the Force and used the most complete Stasis she could. A shimmering energy field appeared over the agent that prevented them from moving at all. There would be no last stand, no attempt to escape, and no suicide attempt to deny Revan what she was after.

  Afterall while Revan was disinclined to use torture to gain information…

  “Now then, let’s see what Cerberus was hoping to gain with this little attack.” She muttered, placing a hand on the frozen agent’s head.

  …she had little need to rely on such crude methods. Not with the power of the Force on her side.