Warrior Conflict: Boba Fett versus Yautja, the Narrative.

Author's Note:  Besides the end result, this narrative is independent of the assessment I've done of both warriors.  I've done this to get a better story.  So I don't want to hear anything about how I've "nerfed" one side or the other - just take it for what it is:  entertainment!  The first part is here, the second part - and the "By the Numbers" segment will be up this Sunday.  I hope you enjoy the story!

Image used without permission from http://aliensandpredators.tumblr.com/.

“I told you that I had a bad feeling about this!” Tobias Orain shouted, “All systems have failed.”

Boba Fett leaned over his shoulder, eyes darting at the various blank screens.  “How do you mean, ‘failed’?”

“They’re dead.  Deader than dead.  It’s like our fuel cells just disappeared – there’s no juice going to anything.”  He glanced at Boba.  “Including life support.”

“Helmets on.  Who knows how much oxygen is in this little boat,” Boba said.  He turned around and took his own helmet from where it hung from a magnetic strip on the bulkhead.  Once he secured it to his flak suit he activated his microphone and adjusted the frequency to Jatne Ash’amur’s bunk.  “That means you, too, Jatne.  Go ahead and get all of the equipment we can carry prepped and ready to go.”

“Will do, Mandalore.  Disintegrators?”  The younger Mandalorian’s voice was like an eager puppy ready to play – or a youthful wolf looking to go on the hunt.

Boba weighed his options, then responded.  “No.  It’s not like we’re dropping into a warzone.  But grab three of the E-3’s, we need to have something.”

He turned back to see if Tobias was having any luck with the controls; he wasn’t.  A large man, he was seated uncomfortably in the little flight chair.  If their lives hadn’t depended on it, Boba may have found the scene comical.

But at sixty-two years old, he wasn’t finding too much humor in plummeting feet-first into an uninhabited planet inside of a screaming metal death-trap.

“What do you think did this?  An EMP?”

“Maybe so.  But I don’t have a clue where it may have come from – I didn’t get any sort of warning on the channels, and before they went down the proximity alert didn’t sound off.  It may have been a freak accident, who knows.”

“Gorgeous.  Will the hull hold against an uncontrolled reentry?”  Boba tugged his poncho on over his armor; before he had gotten a gorget made to protect his neck, it had fit snuggly.  Now it nearly choked him, but a small adjustment with a vibroblade had fixed that easily enough.

Tobias turned around.  Like Jatne, he was new to the Mandalorian culture – hence the reason for this exercise – but not new to flying or fighting.  He had been a mercenary contractor for the Empire before the Rebellion took over, and since had tried to ply his trade in better places by joining the Mandalorians.

“They… should survive, Mandalore.  Once we get into the lower atmosphere, though, we’ll accelerate before coming into a screaming halt on the planet’s surface.  So yes.  The hull won’t fail us against reentry, but it will once we knock on the door.”

“Alright then,” Boba nodded, “those controls will stay dead without you.  Go help Jatne get the gear together, and then I want you two to meet me at the starboard emergency hatch in ten minutes, tops.  I want you to make sure you have full fuel packs and oxygen supplies, and whatever equipment you want to bring down to the surface.”

Tobias stood and saluted his Mandalore before donning his own helmet and rushing to the rear of the shuttle to fill out his orders.

Boba, in turn, sat in the chair and exhaled.  “I’m getting too old for this.”

---

Hult’ah’s voice crackled in Sain’ja’s bio-mask.  The series of pops and clicks produced by his mandibles roughly translated to, “The meat is preparing to escape their crude spacecraft, elder.  Should we close in on them?”

The veteran hunter stared at the little dropship, examining its structure before answering.  “No.  This will make for a better hunt, surely.  Hold back.  Observe.  Learn.”

Hult’ah responded with a neutral affirmative.  The youngling was freshly blooded, and eager to attach more glory to his name.  The fool would get himself killed with that attitude, but age might temper it if he lived long enough.  Sain’ja could tell that he disagreed with his decision, but not strongly enough to challenge him before their fellow hunters.  He had that much sense, then.

The foreign craft was small – positively dwarfed by his own vessel.  He may have been able to fit two hunters comfortably inside of it, no more than three anyway.

The hunters had seen the little craft the day before, and had since stalked it to a planet that had never been hunted before – their records showed that it had no sentient life, or big-game worthy of the name, so all previous hunters had passed it by in search of better prey.  But that was soon to change.

Under their cloaking device, the hunters had deployed a very brief, but very potent electromagnetic pulse to kill all electronics on the vessel.  It seemed to have worked, for the vehicle’s rear thrusters had died out and it was spinning listlessly towards the green-and-blue planet.  Their sensors showed that the three individuals inside of it were moving briskly, judging from their heart rates, but beyond that could not be told with confidence.

Which made Hult’ah’s inquiry that more frustrating.  Even if he was correct in his guess, it was near-heresy for him, a new blood with only two hunts to his name, to attempt to sway the order of the hunt.  But he would pay for his transgressions with his own blood.

He spoke to the pilot in question, “Follow them down, but maintain a neutral distance and keep the cloaking device active.”  He deliberated, then added, “Do nothing else.”

“Yes, elder.”  Good.  The stripling had gotten both messages, verbal and subtle.

---

Tobias struggled with the emergency hatch door.  Like most of the other equipment on the dropship, it was electrically-powered, and had died with the fuel cell.  The manual release was jammed.

They had started spinning before commencing reentry, but had slowed once they hit the upper atmosphere.  The heat inside of the ship had shot up, then, but they were safe in their suits.  For now.

“That’s fine,” Boba said, “we’ll rig it with an A-V explosive, one of the adhesive ones.  We just need to make sure that we’re in a low enough section of the atmosphere before we jump.

Three minutes passed, then five.  Jatne looked out the primary viewport and noticed it flexing dangerously under the pressure.  Then it was time.  Tobias stepped forward and gingerly unhooked one of the anti-vehicle grenades from his bandolier, set it to a three-second fuse, and at Boba’s signal, activated it with the clear dial on top.  It stuck to the door and the Mandalorians braced themselves as far away from it as they could get.

Boba knew from the moment the grenade detonated that they had bypassed the danger-zone of the upper atmosphere.  A high-pitched screech of wind tore into the cabin and tore anything that wasn’t fastened down – and much that was – away from its place. 

But Boba was undeterred.  “We jump at my mark.  Until then, do a final systems check.”

His eyes flashed over the voice-responsible heads-up-display; oxygen levels were good, his fuel tank was full, and the charge for his wrist-blaster was topped out.

“I’m clear,” Tobias answered.

“Same here,” Jatne said not a second later.

“Good”, Boba replied.  “Let’s go.”  And then the three filed into a line, got a running start, and leapt out of the hole and into the void.

The planet stretched out, vast and limitless beneath them.  For a few seconds Boba was able to truly appreciate its beauty as he watched it bend and curve at the azure horizon – an immense ocean covering nearly three-quarters of the surface.  Fortunately for him and his fellow Mandalorians, they were headed for a large, green landmass that jutted out into a gulf.

“Right now we’re in the lower Mesosphere!” Boba spoke over his com-link, examining the elevations chart in his visor display.  “I’ll let you know when we reach the Stratosphere.  Once we’re in we’ll wait two minutes before correcting course with our Z-6’s, is that clear?”

Jatne and Tobias responded at the same time with an affirmative.

“Good,” Boba replied, “We’ll use half-second bursts only, just to get ourselves into a safe formation.  No full burns until we’re through the Stratosphere and into the Troposphere – once we’re within eight kilometers of the surface we’ll start to slow our descent.”

He looked back up at their shuttle.  The loss to its hull integrity had caused the entire to catch fire and now the entire thing was breaking apart from the stress placed on it.  He’d hated destroying their ship like that, but it was no use to him dead.  He could barely see the vessel that had hit them with the EMP burst, but it was still there, hovering not too far up above them.  He had been worried that it would close in and engage them when the Mandalorians jumped ship, but whomever was commanding it had held back for whatever reason.

I’ll be sure to thank him for that, Boba thought, probably by jamming a grenade down his pants.

The rest of their flight went off without a problem – they were able to maneuver safely to the ground without too much hassle or fuel loss, so that was a plus.  It was too bad that Boba had lost sight of the cloaked enemy warship before they hit the surface, but knowing that they were being watched was better than nothing.

They had landed on a low rise in the jungle.  Their sensors indicated that nothing was amiss.  A few birds flew up above them, catching the thermals and looking for prey.  Insects and small mammals made a chorus in the surrounding greenery, but it was muted by Boba’s helmet.

“Jatne, scout out ahead, south-by-southwest of our position.  Keep your com-link open and report back anything that you find.  I don’t want to take any chances here.”

“Sure thing, Mandalore, but if you don’t mind my asking why that direction?  We might be able to find some natives or shelter by making for the sea we saw on the way down,” Jatne hefted his E-3 and slung it over his shoulder, one hand on his utility belt.

“I scanned the salinity of the ocean here before our systems went down.  It’s nearly toxic to drink.  And we have records that show there hasn’t been any sentient life here besides passing merchants and travelers, so no hope of help there,” Boba answered.

“Right, right,” Jatne said.  “I’ll get on it.”  He took a deep breath, exhaled, and then vanished into the foliage.

Tobias looked at Boba and questioned, “Now what?”

“We follow him,” Boba replied as he made sure that his blaster pistols were still attached to his pack.  The two remaining Mandalorians set off into the forest, silent like hunting cats.

---

Under Sain’ja’s direction, the Yautja had landed their craft in a dry riverbed not too far from where their prey had made landfall.  Their methods had impressed the chief-hunter – trashing their own ship and then leaping straight out into the atmosphere was no mean feat.  Their skulls would make excellent trophies with those of his previous conquests.

He clicked his mandibles in frustration.  Hult’ah, the impatient one, had insisted on setting out to find them the instant he had landed the craft.  Seeing no reason not to oblige him, Sain’ja had allowed it.  To the new-blood’s credit, he had thought to take a falcon to scout ahead of himself, and had made arrangements for its camera to feed back to a viewing-station in the Yautja vessel.

Kujhade, the third member of their hunt, stood near him.  He stank of the hounds – he usually stayed down in the kennels with them, feeding and grooming them and making sure that none of them killed their pack-brothers, by accident or otherwise.  But now that they had landed he had come up to the bridge to view the first contact with the new meat.

“The boy is restless,” Kujhade clicked.  “Both of his brothers died in their initiation.  He seeks to honor them with his own success.”

“They have won their glory through their own blood,” Sain’ja replied, “they hunt among the stars now, with those that came before.”  He spoke the last phrase reverently; whenever a hunter fell in battle, so long as he had weapon in hand he was believed to have ascended to the stars to hunt the Greatest Prey.  Others felt such things were nonsense, but Sain’ja did not.  He had the skulls of two naysayers in his trophy room to stand to his testimony to it.

“He does not understand that, and you know it.  But no matter.  How long until we are to go after him?”

“Not long,” the elder Yautja mused, “once we have a clearer idea of what we are hunting.  They are strong prey, and that is good.”

Sharped-eyed, Kujhade gestured a clawed hand at the view-screen.  “There they are now.  Or one of them, at least.”

An armored figure was seen moving quietly along a riverbank.  The high-altitude view afforded by the falcon did well to describe it; like the Yautja, it had two legs, two arms, and a head connected by a torso.  A weapon was in its hands, and more on its hips and wrists.  What looked to be primitive explosives were lined on a bandolier that ran across its chest.

What made the greatest impression on Sain’ja was the helmet.  Conical, with a round top, and an antennae jutting out from the side, its biggest feature was the T-shaped visor over its front.  It was a warrior’s armor, no doubt.  It would be interesting to see how to get through it; brute force, or working around?

Suddenly, the falcon peeled off to settle into a stationary position – likely a tree-branch or rocky outcropping.  It gave a good view of the action about to unfold.

“There,” Kujhade again spotted first.  A distortion appeared and vanished just as quickly near the bottom of the stream, not far behind the prey.  It was Hult’ah, his cloaking device active.  Following his path, they watched him crouch into a stalker’s stance less than ten meters from the prey.  A red tracking light lit up and settled on the back of the prey’s helmeted head.

“Dishonorable,” Kujhade said, with some surprise.  “I would have taken him with a blade, or even the net followed by a spear.  Not the plasma caster.”

“He knows that we’re watching,” Sain’ja clicked in return, “so he’s going to test their armor for our benefit and his.”  Kujhade gave his silent agreement to it.

They both knew what would come next.  The clueless prey, standing in the open with his back turned would never know what hit him.  Hult’ah’s caster whirred to life and began to charge, locked on to its target.  Within minutes the young hunter would be finished here and off to find the rest of the party.

The caster discharged a sphere of plasma that burned white-hot over the camera lens.  It contacted and exploded – but on the riverbank, not on the prey.

The target-turned-enemy had leapt to the side at the last possible second, falling into the little river and splashing muddy water all over itself.  Undeterred, it lifted a weapon into prone firing position and sent a burst of small lasers downrange at the surprised Hult’ah.  The first struck him high in the chest, absorbed by his armor, but the remainder missed as he dove out of the way.  The prey kept a steady stream of burst-fire, suppressing the Yautja’s movement as he hid behind a rock.

“A skilled fighter,” Kujhade appraised, “steady under duress.  But how will Hult’ah counter and defeat it?”  Sain’ja made no answer.

The fire stopped for a heartbeat as the armored fighter changed the battery on his weapon.  Hult’ah took the opportunity, running from behind his rock and lifted a gauntlet.  The prey maintained his position and finished reloading his weapon.

But before he could get off another burst, he was caught in the net launched from Hult’ah’s wrist gauntlet.  It entrapped the armored figure and tightened quickly, despite his thrashings.  The weapon was split into pieces by the strength of the sharpened fibers.  The armored plates over its torso began to buckle in; the helmet, too.  The pair could hear pained screams even over the falcon’s transmitter.  Hult’ah closed in, his combi-stick extended and ready for the kill.

The netted prey tried to fight back, struggling to detach one of the explosives from its bandolier with one hand while a retractable blade on the other wrist attempted to cut through the mesh of the net.  It turned both hands to this activity with a second blade as it seemed that first one braided fiber, then two, and then four, five, and six were cut by the blades.

“They do not die easily,” Kujhade observed as Hult’ah lowered the spear-head set into the combi-stick into his captured enemy’s throat, spilling blood onto the muddy ground.  He twisted it for good measure, killing his prey.  “But they do die well.  We have found good hunting, here.”

---

“I haven’t heard from Jatne in almost an hour.  Something’s wrong,” Boba spat, “and I’ve got to find out what that is.”

They were standing over a muddy riverbed.  Blaster burns streaked over the dry grass and nearby trees.  Tobias stooped down to move some fallen leaves with the barrel of his E-3.  A grid-like pattern was spread out over the ground, as well as a trail of what looked like dried blood.

“Ever feel like you’re being watched?”  Tobias enquired.  They’d spotted the cloaked figure hiding in the tall plants about thirty yards upstream almost immediately thanks to their thermal vision setting, and made a logical deduction as to what had happened.  Jatne, advancing without using such tools, must have been ambushed and slaughtered.  But if the blaster marks were any indication, he’d gone down fighting like a true Mandalorian.

“Only when I’m nervous,” Boba answered.  He was facing his helmet towards Tobias, but was looking the stranger over with his eyes.  It was an old trick that had saved his life more times than he could count.  He turned his com-link to a private frequency between the two of them that wouldn’t be heard outside of their suits.  “I’ll lay down a suppressive fire with my E-3 to flush him out.  I want you to hit him with yours as soon as he clears the undergrowth.  I’ll toss a sonic grenade on a half-second fuse to stun him long enough for us to close in and finish him off.  Understood?”

Tobias nodded his assent, then stood up and made a show of dusting off his E-3’s barrel of dust from the ground.  He idly stepped out of Boba’s line of vision.  The warped section of forest where the figure lurked hadn’t yet moved.

Boba snapped his E-3 up and looked downrange.  He pulled the trigger, sending a burst of crimson laser-fire streaking into the verdant green foliage.  One large fern caught fire and the figure moved in a dash out of the trees, a red light of its own tracing towards Boba and Tobias.  The other Mandalorian shot low, from the hip, nicking the fast-moving target as it advanced onto them.  There was a pulse in the air and sudden explosion of dirt and mud between them from the alien weapon.

As planned, Boba unclipped one of the sonic grenades from his belt and swung the dial to the shortest setting.  He threw it with an underhanded swing towards the blur; the explosive bounced along the ground once, twice, almost three times before it detonated and sent the figure sprawling.

It tried to rise to its feet but both Mandalorians placed a burst in its chest.  Its cloaking device deactivated.

What was revealed lying on the ground was something neither of them expected.  Vaguely reptilian, it coughed and spat neon green blood onto the ground.  It was humanoid, and much larger than either of the Mandalorians.  They approached it carefully, keeping their E-3’s sighted on it.  As they moved nearer, Tobias stopped and turned away.

“Mandalore, get down!” he shouted.  He ran and leapt, Boba just behind him, into the riverbed.  There was a sound of thunder and clods of dirt flew through the air to pelt their armor.  The ground shook violently and Boba noticed the heat sensors in his display spike as the surrounding foliage caught fire.

Seconds later, they stood up and looked back at the corpse.  There was a small crater dug into the ground with the charred, smoking remains of the creature scattered around and inside of it.

“Self-destruct device,” Tobias said.  “I noticed it pressing some buttons on its left gauntlet, and made a guess.  It looks like I was right.”

“And now it’s my turn to make a guess.  That just wasn’t an attempt at killing us – if it were me, I’d have done that to call in some friends.  What’re your motion sensors reading?”

“Hang on, let me switch them on,” Tobias replied, his voice crackling over the com-link.  It snapped back on a moment later.  “Nothing yet.  Some movement from the vegetation ten meters off, no large animals in the area.  Not surprising after the action here.  But… hello.”  His voice turned heated and he reached to his belt, then stopped and lifted his E-3, checking the charge.  “Three large signatures.  Wait, five.  Six.  Six large signatures heading our way, north by northwest.  At their rate of movement they’ll be here in fifteen seconds.  There’s two groups of three circling around, one group to the southeast.  They’ll be here in thirty seconds.  The second small group has circled around us, coming in from behind.  They’re approaching from the west, arrival time is five to ten seconds after the first small group.”

“Great,” Boba spat.  “We’ll stay on each other’s six.  Have your flamer ready.  Right before they get here, light up that stretch of plants to stop their advance, even for a few seconds.  If they can sit still we can pick off two or three of them, even the odds a little.  It’s too bad I had Jatne take the frag grenades, you’ve got anti-armor and my sonics won’t make as much of an impact.”

“Yeah, sad thing,” Tobias intoned, “because here they are.”

The new creatures were not the same as the one they’d killed earlier – they were quadrupeds, and made much more noise.  Boba heard them before he saw them, and took that cue to direct Tobias when to ignite the underbrush.  The alien howls turned to screams as the first few individuals ran headfirst into the wall of flame and smoke.

Undeterred, the first of them kept up its charge through the fires – and paid dearly for it as the burning fuel spread up its body and onto its flanks.  The creature fell to the ground and rolled, screaming in pain, until it came to a smoking halt and did not move again.

Both Mandalorians unloaded their charges into the first of them to pass around the line of flame.  The first few fell from bursts to the legs, only to be trampled by those behind.  They, too, took injuries but continued on thoughtlessly.

“Second group is here!”  Tobias shouted over the com-link, turning to his right to lay several bursts towards them. 

Then Boba made a rookie mistake.  He turned with Tobias to focus his fire on the second group, just like with the first, and was immediately overcome by one of the creatures.  Its jaws snapped viciously inches from his visor and the long spines all over its body swung dangerously, some of them running along his chest-plates and leaving worryingly-deep scratches on them.  He didn’t know where his E-3 had gone, and he couldn’t reach his pistols or activate his other weapons, so he went with his emergency option.

“Deploy vibroblades,” he spoke into his helmet-com.  The familiar buzz and hum that set the blades going ignited in his ears as the alien atop him continued to bite and snap and scratch at him.  Boba stabbed one his wrist-blades into the beast’s neck and one of those on his toes into the hip-joint, nearly splitting the leg off at the waist and severing its head simultaneously.  Dark red blood flowed onto his armor and spattered on the ground – and yet it kept on attacking him until its lifeblood left it.  He threw the corpse aside and came to his feet.

Ten yards away, Tobias was holding the remaining creatures at bay with his flamethrower and blaster pistol.  Boba counted them – five in all.  They’d done much better than he’d expected, if the dozen that had first appeared was accurate.  The other Mandalorian had finished one opponent by shoving his E-3 barrel-first into the gaping maw of one of them and fired a burst directly into its brain, killing it.  He shot another down with his pistol but couldn’t reload it, so had to turn up the intensity of the flamer to keep them at a manageable distance.

Retrieving his own E-3, he carefully put down each of the remaining beasts.  Tobias turned around, his flamer spent, and his helmeted head fell from its shoulders as one of the bipeds appeared behind him, brandishing a large, bloodstained blade.  It snarled at him as Boba charged it, thinking of anything other than paying it back for killing Tobias.

It swung its blade up at his face, but he parried it away with the stock of his E-3.  The edge caught on it and tore the gun from his hands, so he ducked under a second strike and a third from the creature’s own wrist blades.

Boba tried to sweep one of the thing’s legs out from under it, but only bruised his foot.  It was taller and heavier than him, so he’d have to use a different tactic.  It kicked a clawed boot out at his stomach, but he rolled back far enough for the plates there to absorb the blow.  He reeled back.

It stopped to savor the victory, and lifted a half meter-long object from its belt.  It clicked a button and the device extended to nearly three meters, each end topped with a spear-tip.

It wouldn’t do any good – Boba lifted one of his two Westar-34 blaster pistols and pulled the trigger twice.  The first scorched the creature’s helmet, sending it reeling to the ground.  The second struck it low in the torso, burning its unarmored stomach black.  It fell and howled in pain as Boba got back to his feet and leapt on it, cutting its throat with one wrist-blade and sliding the other up through its groin, stomach, and up to the rib cage, eviscerating it.  Its spasms ended in seconds.  There was no detonation this time.

Boba stood up.  His back ached from the exertion – he hadn’t sparred in weeks, much less fought to the death with a skilled opponent.  If it hadn’t paused to draw a new weapon, he would be the one with a hole in his gut.

He realized that his thermal setting was still on.  Boba went to turn it to normal viewing, then stopped – a form just like the other two was standing in the distance, beyond the forest-fire.  It was taller than the others, and broader.

And like the others, would have to die.

Boba thought to himself that they had followed them down there.  That meant they had to have brought a way off of the planet.  It was moving at a brisk pace down the riverbed, likely towards whatever transportation they’d taken to the surface.

Boba followed it.  He had no other choice but to.

---

Sain’ja was impressed by this warrior, whatever it was.  He had watched it fight alongside its own brothers to defeat and kill his own fellow hunters, though at the loss of his kin.

Here he would make his stand.  Sain’ja had led the prey back down the river to the gulch from where it flowed, and where he had ordered their vessel to land.

And so now he stood, waiting, as the sun sank beyond the horizon.  He stood with combi-stick extended in one hand and smart disc in the other.  Win or lose, this would be a tale he would enjoy recounting to his fellows in the Great Hunt among the stars.

A shadow moved not far off.  His mandibles clicked restlessly.  Soon.  Soon, the dance of blades and flame would begin.

There was his enemy – no longer simple prey, that much was sure.  Sain’ja roared a challenge, his bio-mask off.  This was a fight for honor, not for survival.

As his opponent closed the distance, he showed that he shared the sentiment.  He took off his own helmet and set it gingerly on the ground.  He then drew a shorter version of the weapons that they had used so well – the same one Sain’ja had seen him kill Kujhade with so skillfully.  And to his slight surprise he lifted a second one with it.  This would be interesting.

The pair stood facing one another for a few heartbeats.  They attacked at the same time – the armored man laying down a field of blaster bolts and the Yautja throwing his bladed disc.  It whirled at the man’s unprotected face, but he dodged it and took a scrape along his shoulder-pad for his trouble.  Several bolts hit Sain’ja in the thighs and upper chest, but were all absorbed by his armor.  The return-arc on the disc cut a line along Boba’s face, sending a stream of blood creeping down his cheek.  One well-placed bolt destroyed Sain’ja’s caster in an explosion of fire and sparks, causing him to involuntarily jerk away from it and take another bolt to the stomach.  He grimaced against the pain.

They were closer, now, so he used the combi-stick to attempt to spear Boba through the gut.  He dodged the thrust, though, and had to backpedal to avoid a point-black bolt to his own face.  He snarled in mixed frustration and glee at the skill of his opponent.  Seizing his chance he swung a wrist-blade up slice through the barrel of one of the blaster pistols, destroying it.  He followed it up with a kick to Boba’s midsection, sending him sprawling.

As the Mandalorian fell to the ground he threw his other blaster, the charge on it spent, and struck Sain’ja in the face.  He grimaced in pain and instinctively shut his eyes against it.

Both warriors – one on the ground and unarmed, the other upright and blinded – lifted their gauntlets.  Two bursts of red energy launched at each other.

---

The wounded fighter limped up the access ramp past the empty kennels trailing a light rain of blood in their wake.  They struggled at the top of the ramp, but were able to make the rest of the trip without problem.

They walked through the main hall to the pilot’s chair and sat in it.  After a few seconds’ deliberation, they hit a series of buttons.  The ramp closed and the engines began to warm.

The hunter took his helmet off and set it by his side.  Boba Fett leaned into the viewport and muttered to himself, “Let’s go home…”

To see the scoring for this battle, click here for the By The Numbers Assessment!