Star Wars_ Darth Bane 02_ Rule of Two - Drew Karpyshyn [100]
An eerie silence hung over the scene; the vocal cords of the unfortunate creatures had disintegrated hundreds of years earlier. The only sound was the faint whirring of mechanized joints and the rusty scraping of metal across the stone floor as they milled about in slow confusion. Occasionally they would bump one another with a hollow clank, their movements awkward and clumsy as they jostled for position to move ever closer to the Holocron in the center of the room. But though they were clearly drawn to it, none dared to come within three meters of its pedestal. Instead they congregated in a loose, scuffling circle, an army of the living dead awaiting orders that would never come.
Bane stepped into the room, lightsaber drawn. The technobeasts ignored his presence, their attention focused only on the Holocron. He made his way slowly through their legions, trying to estimate their number as he edged ever closer to the center of the room. Fifty? A hundred? It was impossible to count; their bodies of rusted metal and mummified flesh all seemed to blend together into a single ghastly mass.
Reaching the pedestal at the heart of their numbers, he paused, uncertain what would happen when he reached out to claim the Holocron as his own. Would the creatures bow down before him as their new Master, or would they fall upon him in single-minded fury to protect the idol they worshiped? There was only one way to find out.
As his fingers closed over the Holocron he heard a noise that caused him to pull his hand back with a start. It sounded like the moan of a long-dead god rising from the grave; a hundred mechanized limbs sprang to action with an angry hum as the monsters swarmed over him.
Bane thrust out with the Force, and a dozen of the oncoming creatures exploded into dust and tiny flecks of small, twisted metal. But the others surged forward like a wave, driving him under. Their feet stomped and kicked at him; their bladed arms slashed at him as he lay prone on the floor. But none of their attacks could pierce the chitinous shells of his orbalisk armor.
From his back, Bane slashed indiscriminately with his lightsaber, hewing off limbs with every swipe. There were no screams of pain or gouts of blood—the bodies of his enemies had been exsanguinated when their flesh had crumbled away centuries before. The only sounds of battle were the Dark Lord’s own grunts of exertion, the clatter of metal falling to the stone floor, and the occasional small shower of sparks.
Even in their rage, the creatures were slow and cumbersome. Bane’s vicious strokes quickly cleared enough space for him to find his feet again. He rose to see the wall of creatures pressing in on him, and he unleashed a wave of lightning through their ranks. The bolts arced through the mostly metal bodies; the nanotechnology that animated their frames and gave them life smoked and smoldered, and a dozen more of his opponents toppled over never to rise again.
A heavy blow suddenly struck Bane in the back, the metal rancor sending him flying with a swipe of one massive, club-like claw. He slammed face-first into what might once have been a human, and the technobeast opened its mouth and released a cloud of tiny metal spores directly into his face.
Bane breathed them in even as he cut the creature down, chopping it diagonally clean through from shoulder to hip. He could feel the technovirus inside him, its nanogene spores burrowing up to his brain to eat away his frontal lobes and begin the process of transforming him