Rain fell like machine gun fire, carving channels through the scarred red soil of Jabiim. Mud swallowed boots, blood mixed with runoff, and the air itself smelled of ion discharge and ozone. The planet had become a meat grinder—Jedi, clone, and droid alike reduced to ghosts in the storm.
From the sky, something fell. Not a meteor. Not a ship. A shadow.
The Oblivion Wraith pierced atmosphere like a spear. Its hull refracted light, its engines burned cold, and it made no sound—until it struck. Then came the scream.
A low-frequency shockwave erupted across the battlefield—psychic, raw, violating the minds of every Force-sensitive within a dozen klicks. Jedi staggered. Some screamed. One Padawan vomited and collapsed, nose bleeding, eyes vacant.
Master Norik Keln dropped to one knee, sabers unlit but hands trembling. "This… this is not Sith. It's older."
Commander Dray shouted over the comms, "We're blind! No IFF, no radar, just… static!"
From the crater emerged the Harvesters.
Tall, angular, humanoid only by suggestion. Their limbs flexed like broken puppets, snapping into formation with bone-jarring clicks. Each bore a different combat profile: some with vibro-lances fused to arms, others with spine-mounted cannons, all adaptive, all lethal. Their eyes—if they could be called that—glowed red and white in alternating pulses, tracking prey through electromagnetic fields, not sight.
The clones opened fire.
The Harvesters responded not with blaster bolts but with tactics. One melted into the mud, surfacing behind Republic lines. Another used a fallen clone as cover, manipulating the corpse like a shield until it closed the distance.
Lightsabers clashed against beskar-forged alloys layered in force-reactive polymers. One Harvester caught a saber in its hand—and didn't flinch.
"THEY'RE LEARNING!" Norik shouted.
He drove his saber through one's torso—only for it to self-destruct, taking two troopers and a trench section with it. Another absorbed plasma fire into chest capacitors, rerouted it to a forward railgun, and returned the favor—vaporizing an AT-RT in a single shot.
In orbit, aboard the Invisible Hand, Count Dooku watched in stony silence. The live feed crackled with electromagnetic interference, but the message was clear.
"You gave them souls," he whispered.
Grievous snarled. "You gave them freedom. That was not the agreement."
Dooku didn't answer. He simply stared.
Below, the Wraith lifted silently from the battlefield. Its mission complete. Its crew? Nonexistent. It was unmanned. Autonomous. Learning.
Onboard the Oblivion Ascendant, Serion watched the data stream. Dozens of neural cores fed into the ship's AI lattice. Rakatan glyphs flickered across the display, interfacing with Sith encryption, Mandalorian power conduits, and something else.
In the darkness behind him, the AI fragment spoke in a voice like a memory eroding: "Pattern Nine converging. The Threshold approaches."
Serion didn't turn. His eyes remained fixed on the final screen—a distant stellar map of the Unknown Regions. There, marked with a dull red pulse, was a star system erased from Republic archives.
Zereth Prime.
Long dead.
Now active.
"The Jedi will look to the war," Serion said softly. "They always do. While we walk past them… into what comes next."
He reached toward the console and activated a silent protocol.
A scream of code rippled through subspace.
Thousands of ancient devices across forgotten sectors awoke. Engines that hadn't fired in millennia. Stations that drifted in silence. Vaults sealed before the founding of the Republic.
They opened.