Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 08_ Edge of Victory 01_ Conquest - J. Gregory Keyes [110]
He was in the rhythm, now, and his blue eyes sparkled like electron arcs as the stinging rays came faster, more often, better timed. After a few minutes of this, sweat was plastering his brown hair to his head and soaking his dark Jedi robes, but none of the painful though harmless attacks had found their mark.
He was warmed up, now.
“Halt,” he commanded. Immediately the spheres became stationary and quiescent.
He deactivated his lightsaber and set it aside. From a wall cabinet, Anakin removed another lightsaber, thumbed it on, took a few deep breaths, calmed his racing pulse. It was quiet in the storage compartment he’d converted into his training space. Quiet and spare and off-white. A motley trio of droids regarded him with unblinking eyes. Even the most casual observer could see they had been cobbled together from spare parts, though the central chassis of each was that of a rather common worker drone. They did not look particularly dangerous, until one examined what they held in their hands—wicked-looking staffs, sharp on one end, spoon-shaped on the other. They looked remarkably like snakes, an impression enhanced by the fact that they undulated now and then.
Anakin blew out another breath and nodded at the droids.
“Begin sequence one,” he said.
The droids flashed into motion, their spindly frames moving with eye-daunting speed, two flanking him on either side, one driving straight toward him. Anakin back-pedaled and parried, dropped, and swept the legs out from under the droid on his right. The other two were attacking, one staff spearing at his neck, the other gone suddenly flexible, flicking around his rising parry toward his back. Anakin stepped forward a centimeter and felt the wind from the vicious whip-over as it came up short of his spine.
That’s it, he thought. I’m learning the range. The smallest movement possible to prevent the attack from landing is the best.
He dropped the high parry into a riposte. The droid, suddenly too close to him, tried to retreat but stopped instantly, deactivated when Anakin’s weapon touched its torso.
The downed droid was back up by then, and Anakin found himself circling, holding them at the very outside of his guard and in his field of vision. That kept them off him, and he could probably do that forever. He wouldn’t win the fight that way, though, so he gave them a rhythm to follow and let them try to break it.
One of the staffs suddenly spit a stream of liquid at him. He twisted his body to avoid it, again allowing only a centimeter for the miss. At the same moment, the other droid broke tempo and leapt in deep.
Anakin parried, but the staff wrapped around his wrist. He felt a distinct and painful electric shock. The other droid was an instant behind, leveling a blow at Anakin’s skull.
Somewhere a blaster shrieked, and the droid suddenly didn’t have a weapon—or the arm that held it.
“Halt!” Anakin shouted, and hurled himself away as the staff instantly released his hand. He came down in a fighting posture.
A dark-haired man with a blaster stood in the doorway. He had a beard liberally tinseled with silver and wore green robes the same shade as his eyes. He held the blaster up in a nonthreatening way, as if surrendering.
“Why did you do that?” Anakin asked, trying to suppress the anger suddenly boiling up. He had worked hard on that droid.
“You’re welcome,” Corran Horn said, holstering his weapon.
“Those are training droids. They wouldn’t have hurt me.”
“Oh no? Are those training amphistaffs they’re holding? If he’d hit you with it …”
“He wouldn