The Battle of Coruscant -- Battle for Centax-2, Top Gun

[Just Matt Now]

Shakti maneuvered his fighter as well as he could, though his fighter was not built for such movement as the Reaver was. Blaster shots filled his canopy, hitting the Sluissi directly. Just below his waist, Shock's tail was now covered in blood, the shock and realization of what just happened hitting him even harder than the shots had. Though he was fortunate, the only part of his ship that was hit was the canopy, which the holes were quickly filled and the cabin re-pressurized. Still Shakti did not know if he would make it. His own senses were failing and his grip on the control rod was slipping away. He could no longer steer his fighter with the same nimbleness that he had before. Though all of his concentration was on doing such.

Forgetting about the fight, Shock focused on regaining his own senses, though everything was starting to get blurry. Little did he know, he was a sitting duck. The Reaver was sure to sense this and end the Rogue Wing, after such a good dogfight. Shock's vision was fading, though he could only barely see the HUD display warning that he had been hit. All he could think about was his family, but mostly his brother. He only hoped that Loogo would not let this destroy him, he knew it wouldnt. He knew that his brother was much stronger than he.

In his last moments, Shock recorded a single message and sent it out, hoping that it would make its way to Loogo.

 

[Brandon Rhea]

Across all means of communication, be they nearby HoloNet screens, personal communication devices, military communication systems, and more, a small hologram of the injured Alliance Chief of State, Nathanaeu Bastele, appeared before everyone who could see it. His face was shredded, with one of his eyes practically hanging from the socket. His body was torn apart, with his insides visible. It was a gruesome sight, showing just how bad the battle was. If the Chief of State could be this hurt, anyone could. Anyone could be killed.

But he had a message to send, one more important than what happened to him. It was garbled, with the chaos of the battle and Sith jammers preventing it from fully being reached, but there was enough to understand what Bastele was saying:

"This is Nathanaeu Bastele. A Sith warship… descending… Jedi Temple. I don’t know… planning but... If you can hear… evacuate or head underground… all costs. Coruscant… gone. The Alliance is falling. Save yourselves and… Force… with you."

With that, the transmission faded away. The end of the Alliance had come.

 

[Brandon Rhea]

Life itself was dying. Coruscant, in this moment, was the closest any mortal would ever come to understanding what it would be like if Death reached out its cold hands and reaped the Force, or God, or nature, or whatever it was that made the universe spin. On the surface, and even in orbit, every living thing felt the destructive power of what the two tiny figures atop the hull of a Star Destroyer were doing. Life was being drained, sucked into the blackened and decrepit soul of a curse called Skywalker.

Those adept in history might have drawn a comparison to the ancient Dark Lord of the Sith called Darth Nihilus, a devourer of worlds, and life, and all the energy around him. Like that Dark Lord of old, Andraste was a wound in the Force, craving all of its energy and devastating everything in her path. No being escaped feeling its impacts; they felt drained, weak, like even the simplest of tasks required strength of herculean proportions. Escaping Coruscant, or even hiding, would feel like an eternity.

The planet itself was breaking. As the Empress drained the life and energy from all around her, the Dark Lord Vereor was ravaging the surface. A storm of pure Force energy was growing; lightning, real lightning and not artificially created from satellites, struck down from the clouds from all directions, in all streets and crevasses in the city, tearing swaths through buildings and dirt. The energies even reached into space, tearing apart ships and disrupting systems on so many others. The wind howled all through the sky, and tornadoes formed to destroy the artificial world that they were touching down on.

The temperature was dropping. At once it felt sickeningly hot but also colder than the snowy wastes of Hoth. The rain falling from the sky froze, turning into shards of ice as it fell, stabbing through the heads and bodies of countless thousands, if not more. The carefully constructed weather of the once-great capital of the Republic and the Alliance was torn asunder. The planet itself was now just as much the enemy of the Alliance as the Sith.

Yet at the center of all this madness was something beautiful. At the Jedi Temple, above which the Imperial Star Destroyer sat, a beautiful aurora was forming. Dark and dangerous energy collided into a green display of dancing lights, one that could have been a calming sight were it not for the life being drained from everything below it. At the core of this beauty, though, was something rotten, for the light was not a mere byproduct of the attack. It was the attack itself. The dark energies and lightning being displayed was the eldritch energy sucked into the very heart of this labyrinth by the Dark Lord himself, a reflection of the souls being sacrificed for more power.

Anyone with any sort of psychic awareness, be they Jedi or anyone even remotely attuned to the Force, could feel as those souls were taken and twisted into a dark purpose for which the Force should never have been used. It was a warning, a reminder of what the Chief of State said across the HoloNet.

Leave or die.