Bane was on her in an instant, his lightsaber slashing viciously, his heavy boots kicking and stomping at her prone body. Zannah thrashed and twisted on the ground, her lightsaber flailing desperately to parry Bane's blade. She felt a sharp crack as the toe of his boot caught her in the ribs, but she rolled with the impact and managed to end up back on her feet.
Her vision was blurred with stars, pain shooting through her left side with each gasp as she tried to catch her breath. Bane didn't let up, coming at her with a frenetic assault. The next few seconds were a blur as Zannah relied purely on instincts honed over twenty years to parry the wave of blows, miraculously keeping him from landing a lethal strike.
Zannah threw herself into a back handspring, flipping head over heels three times in quick succession just to put some space between her and Bane. Before the fourth one she suddenly stopped and went into a crouch, thrusting forward with her lightsaber like a spear to impale her opponent as he charged after her in pursuit:only Bane wasn't there.
Anticipating her move, he had stopped several meters away.
Gritting her teeth against the pain from her broken rib, Zannah rose to her feet. Bane hadn't killed her, but her survival had come with significant cost. She was tired now, the desperate scramble to escape after tripping on the grave had pushed her one step closer to physical exhaustion. She felt the broken rib with each ragged breath, and she sensed that the injury would make it harder for her to pivot and turn, limiting the effectiveness of her defensive maneuvers.
She couldn't wait any longer. She'd wanted to surprise Bane, slowly gather her strength before unleashing it so he wouldn't be able to properly defend against it. But she knew she wouldn't survive another clash of lightsabers.
Opening herself up to the power of the dark side, Zannah reached out and touched the mind of her Master.
Bane sensed the attack, bracing himself.
He had encouraged Zannah's training in Sith sorcery, knowing she might very well use it against him one day. If it turned out he wasn't strong enough to survive, then he wasn't worthy of being the Dark Lord of the Sith.
That didn't mean he was unprepared, however. Dark side sorcery was complex; it attacked the psyche in ways that were difficult to explain and even more difficult to defend against. Bane had no talent for it, yet he had done his best to study the techniques. What he learned was that the only real counter was the victim's strength of will.
Zannah's assault began as a sharp pain in his skull, like a hot knife stabbing directly into his brain before carving down to slice the two hemispheres in half. Then the knife exploded, sending a million burning shards in every direction. Each one burrowed into his subconscious, seeking out buried fears and nightmares only to rip them free and haul them to the surface.
Bane let out a scream and dropped to his knees. When he stood up the sky was thick with a swarm of flying horrors. Their wings were torn and ragged, leather flaps of skin hanging from exposed bone. Their bodies were small and malformed, their twisted legs ending in long, sharp talons. Their flesh was a sickly yellow: the same color as the faces of the miners who had died on Apatros after being trapped in a gas-filled chamber.
Their features were inhuman, but their burning eyes were unmistakable: each creature was staring at him with the hate-filled gaze of his abusive father. As one, they swooped down on him, their mouths screeching out a cry that sounded like his father's name: hurst, hurst, hurst!
Swinging his lightsaber wildly at the demon flock, Bane crouched low to the ground, his free hand coming up to cover his face and ward off the talons clawing at his eyes. As the swarm enveloped him, he caught a glimpse of Zannah standing a few meters away, her face frozen in a mask of intense concentration.
Bane knew it was a trick; the beasts weren't real. They were just figments of his imagination born from the repressed memories of his childhood, his greatest fears manifested in physical form. But he had conquered these fears long ago. He had turned his fear of his abusive father into anger and hate-the tools that had given him the strength to endure and eventually escape his life on Apatros.
He knew how to defeat these demons, and he struck back. Unleashing a primal scream, he channeled his terror into pure rage and lashed out with the dark side. It tore through the swarm in a burst of searing violet light, utterly obliterating them.
Zannah watched as Bane huddled against the ground, his lightsaber flailing wildly at invisible ghosts, but she didn't let her concentration falter. Bane's mind was strong; if she let up even for an instant he might break free of the spell.
For a second she thought she had won as Bane let out a shriek, but the burst of energy that followed sent her reeling backward.
Regaining her balance she saw that Bane was on his feet again, and she knew he had resisted the spell. But she still had one more surprise for her Master.
Again she opened herself up to the dark side. This time, however, she didn't attack Bane directly. Instead, she let it flow through her, drawing it from the soil and stone of Ambria itself. She called to power buried for centuries, summoning it up to the surface in wispy tendrils of dark smoke snaking up from the sand.
The thin tendrils crawled along the ground, reaching for one another, twining themselves together into writhing tentacles each several meters long.
Then, in response to her unspoken command, the tentacles rose up and lashed out at her foe.
Bane saw the strange black mist crawling across the dirt and knew this was no illusion. Somehow Zannah had given substance and corporeality to the dark side, transforming it into half a dozen shadowy, serpent-like minions rising up from the ground.
Suddenly the tendrils flew at him. He slashed out with his lightsaber to chop the closest one in half, but the blade simply passed through the black mist with no effect. Bane threw himself to the side, but the tip of the tentacle still brushed against his left shoulder.
The material of his clothes melted away as if it had been splashed with acid. A chunk of flesh beneath simply dissolved, and Bane screamed in agony.
Once, orbalisks had fused themselves to his body with a burning chemical compound so intense it had nearly driven him mad. Ten years ago they had been removed when Bane's flesh had been literally cooked by a concentrated blast of his own violet lightning. During her interrogation, Serra had pumped him full of a drug that had felt like it was eating him alive from the inside. But the excruciating pain he felt from the mere touch of the dark side tendril was unlike anything Bane had ever experienced before.
The damage was far from life threatening, but it nearly sent Bane into shock. He fell hard to the ground, his jaw slack and his eyes rolling back into his head. His mind was reeling from the brief contact. The pain radiated through every nerve in his body, but what he felt went far beyond any mere physical sensation. It was not the raw heat of the dark side but rather the empty chill of the void itself spreading through him. It touched every synapse in his mind, it clawed at the core of his spirit. In that instant he tasted utter annihilation, and felt the true horror of absolute nothingness.
Somehow he managed to stay conscious, and when the next tentacle coiled in he was able to scramble to his feet and roll out of the way.
His wounded shoulder was still throbbing, but the hollow darkness that had threatened to overwhelm him had faded, allowing him to ignore the pain.
The tendrils were massing for another assault, moving faster as Zannah fed them with a steady stream of power. Bane unleashed violet lightning from his fingers, but when the bolts struck the sinewy black forms they were absorbed with no apparent effect. They were made of pure dark side energy, and there was no way he could harm them.