weaponry ; the mandalorian

IIS: NINETEEN

"You will be the last."

"Tatooine belongs to the Syndicate. As long as the spice keeps running, everyone will be left alone."

"Get up."

"Hey! Hey! Over here!"

"We need help! Someone call the Doctor!"

"Someone check on her! Is she breathing?!"

"Get up, Chosen One."

"We need a medpac for the Marshal!"

"Get the stims!"

"Get up."

"Get up!"

"GET UP!"

Jana bolts up with a gasp, eyes darting around frantically. There had been a voice in her head that she didn't recognize. There are hands on her shoulders, a kind townsperson telling her to take it slow.

Sitting up, aided by the young woman, Jana groans, shaking off the helping hands and dropping back to her elbows and wincing at the sharp pain in her chest. A burning, scalding pain. She'd been shot. By Cad Bane.

Her heart thuds against her ribcage wildly. She'd been shot. By Cad Bane, and she's alive.

Jana raises her hand and brings it to her chest, immediately flinching at the heat she finds. A hole had been burned through her deep blue tunic and the white long sleeve she wears under it, the edges of it black and ashy, parts of them still alight with an ember. When Jana sees what lays beneath, what saved her, she lets out a relieved breath.

Cad Bane had shot her exactly where her Beskar Medallion rested on her chest.

He hit the one piece of beskar she wears.

An inch in any other direction, she'd be dead. The thought sends a chill up her spine, especially when her gaze wanders and she sees Cobb Vanth laid out in the sand, many of the people of Freetown surrounding him, tending to him. Trying to pull him from the precipice of death.

She finds Weequay's eye, groaning at the pain from the force of the blast as she slowly gets to her feet, "Where did he go?"

"The-the Marshal."

"Weequay. Where did he go?"

"Back the way he came," Weequay says, voice shaking as he watches Jana sway on her feet, her back hunched slightly, and breathing labored, "Are you going after him?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"The Pykes sent him as a warning, and it'll get worse from here. They'll move in on this territory, even if you stay out of this fight. They're going to take your home, and the rest of Tatooine with it. This is exactly what Fett is trying to stop," Her jaw clenches, and she continues, "Plus, you heard what he said," Jana breathes, her eyes narrowing as she glaces back to where Cobb lays. Where her friend lays, "I'm a cold-blooded killer, and unfortunately for him; He just pissed me off."

Adjusting her vambraces where they lay on her forearms, Jana points another look to Weequay, "If you want Justice for your Marshal, get to Mos Espa and fight for it."

Then on shaky legs, Jana takes a weak-kneed step towards the waiting desert, then another, and another. Each step she takes she dives deeper into the well of killing calm she knows is within her. Each step gets more steady, more sure of herself.

She moves through the desert, after the stranger that had emerged from it, and swears to herself the next time she's at the end of his gun, she won't hesitate. She won't be too slow. And for what he did, Jana would watch the life fade from Cad Bane's angry red eyes of it's the last thing she does.