Ned POV
Darth Akrul Veyth nearly killed me.
Let that remain in the record without softening.
Not inconvenienced. Not delayed. Not theatrically wounded so that victory might appear better dressed afterward. He nearly killed me in the red sand below Korriban's tomb ridge, in front of my army, Varis, Omega's distant medical channels, Renn's command lines, Lana's watchful silence, and the old Sith who needed, more than water, to see that the Red King could be made mortal before them.
Akrul fought like a dead empire given muscle.
His first blow broke my guard.
The blade struck with such weight that my armor did not deflect so much as survive disagreement. Plates cracked across the left arm. Nanites surged and were burned away by ash-runes carved into his weapon. The impact drove me back through a standing stone and into the red earth hard enough to blacken half my vision.
The army saw me fall.
So did Korriban.
Akrul did not speak.
That made him better than most.
He came again, and I rose too late. His second cut opened the armor beneath my ribs. The third would have taken the head if the Force had not moved my knees before thought completed itself. I entered White State and found it strained immediately, not broken, but pressured by the old planet beneath us, by tomb imprints, by the gravity of thousands of dead Sith insisting that all power must become appetite or ash.
Fear entered.
I had known fear before. The falling spire. The moon gun. Nereth. But this fear was smaller and more intimate: the knowledge that the body itself, the great engineered answer, could be insufficient under a single man's blade.
Good.
Fear is information when not allowed to become ruler.
I changed the fight.
Not stronger. Lower.
Akrul expected godhood to answer with scale. I gave him economy. A step inside the arc. A cut at the wrist hinge. A Force pulse against the sand to blind his lower sight. He took the wound and answered with his forehead into my face, breaking the bridge of my nose and making the world white again.
Varis shouted something in old Sith.
Not warning.
Insult.
Akrul turned half a breath toward him.
I used it.
No noble duel survives strategy. Only songs pretend otherwise.
My blade entered beneath Akrul's right arm, where the ash armor had opened to move. He roared then, at last, and the Force around him erupted in black heat. My skin burned under the armor. Warnings filled my vision. Order tried to flood the body with stabilization routines.
"Do not close pain," I told her.
"You are exceeding safe load."
"I need to feel timing."
He lifted me from the ground with one hand around my throat.
For a moment, I saw over his shoulder: my soldiers held in breathless horror, Lana's eyes bright, Renn giving orders because if I died he would still try to keep the structure from collapsing, Varis staring not like a servant but like a man watching his own sin approach consequence.
Omega's voice came through the channel.
"Ned."
Not order.
Not plea.
Name.
I drove a black side-blade from my wrist armor into Akrul's elbow, severing enough nerve and tendon to make the grip fail. As I dropped, I brought the saber up through the broken seam beneath his chin.
It did not kill him.
It opened him.
The second stroke killed.
Akrul Veyth fell on Korriban with enough force to shake red dust from the statues.
For a long moment I remained on one knee beside him, bleeding into the sand, unable to rise without admitting how close the ending had come.
Then I stood.
Not quickly.
That mattered too.
The old Sith saw me bleed and live.
My army saw me bleed and continue.
Those are different religions.
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