Dark Lord: Bride of Vader

Chapter 21: The Nameless World - Part 3

I do not own any Star Wars and DC characters and ideas represented in this work.

"The dark side is a ravenous hunger. It requires everything you have, but it gives you the universe in return." —Darth Sidious

​Darkness swallowed Vader as it does once more and always will. The light of the cavern faded into nothing as did the cries of his young wife. What was with him now as he fell into the deep, seemingly bottomless shaft, as walls blurred, was the hollowing wind as he fell, and the tentacles that strangled his legs.

The Imperium overmind fell with him and was the source of the tentacles that pulled him closer to its mass. Putting Vader in a death grip. One large tentacle held Vader's torso hostage; the other two held his arms and his legs separately. "Do you really think that YOU could defeat me?" The Imperium snarled, and it seemed that Vader's attack was audacious as it was ludicrous. "A pesky creature like yourself is beneath my notice!"

"If I'm nothing! Then this shouldn't be a concern for you!" The Dark Lord grumbled defiantly. He willed the Nth metal that comprised his cybernetic arms into hot ire. The ability of convection was an obscure Force talent but nonetheless deadly for those who are victims of it. Using the Force through their body, one can imbue intense heat energy into their limbs so that a strike from them can boil skin, set bodies afire, and melt absolutely. Since Vader had updated his bionic arms to Nth metal, this effect was only made more deadly.

The girthy tentacle around his arms sizzled then bubbled as if being cooked. Once Imperium recoiled the limb away with a sharp scream, the section that held Vader in a grip was burnt to black. Hands free and smoldering, one of Vader's hands made a downward chopping motion, and the tentacle that held his legs hostage went into two while catching on fire.

The Imperium shrieked in agony and retaliated with one of its uncurling tentacles that struck out against Vader and ripped an opening maw into his helmet. The obsidian alloy was shredded, and the result of the attack opened a fissure into the right side of his Sith helmet.

There was a yell of pain that left Vader's vocoder, then a growl. His exposed yellow eye burned more vibrant with hate and exaggerated with his pale, damaged, and scarred skin. The pain resounding within him was then consumed by the Dark Side like some caged beast getting its due meal.

Another tentacle lashed out and was caught by Nth metal arms. One strong tug and the appendage was ripped from the mass. The Imperium creature shrieked and counterattacked with a telekinetic storm directed at Vader. The Sith defended with a strong barrier, but barely, and he was thrown upward like a bullet projectile. His momentum was lost shortly, and he began to fall downward again.

Admittedly, Vader realized that the overall telekinetic strength of the overmind might have been underestimated by him. But in other times the impossible tried to snuff out the Sith, he nevertheless found victory, even barely.

A familiar presence was sensed, and Vader rotated his body to face the chasm up; his lightsaber was flying down to him. He called it to his hand, and a bar of blood-shine energy burst forth. He faced down the falling Imperium and used the Force to propel himself to it with his lightsaber out. Tendrils made an effort to keep Vader at a distance, but the cuts made by his lightsaber sliced them out of his way. Before the Imperium could muster any attack to repel the cyborg Sith, Vader was already within his defense and plunged his red saber into the center mass of the creature.

A horrendous scream echoed in the long, tunneled chasm that they raced down to. Out loud and psychically. It was stopped short when he collided against the wall of the chasm, causing it and Vader to break away and cascade down further, spinning uncontrollably. The chasm ended abruptly but fed into a gigantic cavern with a cooled and old magma lake at the bottom. The height of this colossal cave was large enough for them to still fall from the chasm shaft.

The ground quickly reached him; Vader twirled to where his boots faced the incoming black rock. The Force cushioned his fall, but his boots' spider cracked the ground, causing the thin layer of cooled magma to shatter and explode into shards. In the epicenter, fresh hot magma was revealed that surrounded Vader.

The molten rock pooled enough to reach the bottom of his calves but no further than that. His Nth metal absorbed the heat, yet his shin guards melted into the hot magma. His black armor weave cloak withstood the extreme heat with all of its might; it failed when it touched the magma, and it started to flare. The cavern, uninterrupted, could easily cook a lesser being; now they have woken it up, and temperatures are rising.

The floating abomination caught its fall with telekinesis and avoided crashing into the ground and into the magma. It convulsed, agitated. The heat made this so. Perhaps not only had it absorbed the strength of its Martian victims, it had also taken their weaknesses. The natural furnace that they were in may have had an effect on the Imperium overmind; Vader was undeterred by it.

He was burned once and by powers that were to be, Palpatine, the Force, and himself; the pain of such immolation scarred him and never went away. But in that pain that never washed away, his resilience was tempered and became the master of his agony. For the heat around him was nothing compared to the inferno that burned within his heart.

The creature was vexed beyond measure. Its irritation was open, its domain and center of its power high past them. But a wounded animal backed into a corner could never be played with or else be bitten. Worse in Vader's case.

"You are going to pay for this worm!" The Overmind seethed while gathering telekinetic power around itself. "I no longer plan to assimilate your empire and subjects. They will wish that I would do so after I have dealt with you. And only then, the last being that I will grant them death is your little Empress."

A flicker of anger fired in Vader. "It is delusional to think your actions will have any consequences. My forces will continue to spread throughout the Galaxy. Your infestation will end here, for I have come for you, pest"

The Imperium attacked. A psychic wave, invisible to the naked eye, but its approaching onslaught rippled, scraped, and vaporized the cooled-off magma as if it were a knife cleaving off skin to reveal raw flesh. In a fraction of a second, Vader used the Force to become a black blur of preternatural speed and evade the attack. The wave continued peeling and unraveling the solid rock to bare magma, then it dissipated before touching the wall of the cave.

As soon as Vader stopped his evasion by subplating his feet, he was almost brought down to his knees when a great telekinetic force pressed him. Force energies shielded around him, yet it struggled to keep him up, and furthering the resolve of his defense, the onslaught seemed close to unbearable as what seemed like the might of dozens of psychic Martians willed for his end.

The Imperium laughed a pleasurable, satisfied glee. "Ha ha ha. You are so close to bending to the knee but still resist me." A tentacle shot out and wrangled around the Sith's torso in a crushing grip. It pulled him towards it and held him out as if in analysis of some pest in one's fingertips.

"How does it feel, Sith Lord, that everything you have built will be destroyed?" It took mirth of Vader's pain. The slimy appendage brought Vader to the Imperium's mass, and like some amoeba absorbing its prey, the overmind was slowly enthralling Vader into its tear-shaped body.

The mucus membrane clung to Vader and pulled his arms first. The pain was unimaginable. The sensations from the Nth metal arms felt like they were melting, and it seemed all of the nerves were screaming out to him. Worse, a telepathic assault was made on him, and it seemed like the overmind was winning. It was a sensory overload quickly cascading into a nightmare.

The Sith struggled but to no avail.

"What is the feeling of knowing that everything you have done, every moment, every action, every sacrifice that you have made, will all be for nothing? A pathetic man with pathetic plans that can't even amount to saving everything that he has."

And in this moment where all of the pain and screaming nerves seemed new and foreign, now was old and long festered. It was where that flicker of anger roiled into that rageful inferno seen at the Tusken raider camp, at the Jedi Temple, and on Mustafar, where everything that he had done—Jedi and Sith, Son, husband, and father—accomplished nothing.

Nothing but the death of all those he loved. And now it was going to start all over again. Here, he thought this new galaxy, universe, or whatever he was in was a new start to regain the desires he once had, only to be destroyed now. All because he was too weak to save the ones he lost.

Weak.

"I wasn't strong enough to save you, Mom." The young Jedi said to the tombstone under the twin suns. His voice was coarse and strained from the raging screams he made in the slaughter of the sandpeople the night before. "I wasn't strong enough...but I promise, I won't fail again."

"Love won't save you, Padme." The newly omitted Sith stated to be the love of his life. The one whom he murdered so many to save. But drunk with the power of the Dark Side, he did hear her say her plea. "Only my new powers can do that." His love said something to bring him back, but it was hazy, like the heated sky on that molten world. "I won't lose you the way I lost my mother."

"Anakin Skywalker was weak." The Sith told the failed apprentice of the Jedi Knight in the slopes of Malachor's temple before fighting in the duel that killed her. "I destroyed him."

And now it seemed like Darth Vader, the culmination of all his life, was weak.

"YOU WILL KNOW HOW IT FEELS!"

"You can't-WAIT!" The Imperium couldn't finish its words. A storm of dark rage erupted, its eye the Sith Lord the Imperium wrongly struck, less so than it thought it could win. Dark side energies blasted in a repulse of magnitudes that shook the cavern like some earthquake before it; stalactites fell loose, cooled magma turned into dust, and the shocked, ruptured molten rock was pushed away in a wave from the epicenter.

The victim of this calamity was only spared by raising a defensive telekinetic shield at its full strength, yet still garnered the sting and fury of a Lord of the Sith. Its body was nearly burned away as if it faced a nuclear explosion point-blank. What were colors of cloudy appearance now turned black and brown from a quick immolation. Had it not been for its own telekinetic defense, then the overmind would've been atomized.

In the center of this shallow crater, Vader was on one knee. Every drop of blood within him was hot with fury, and the bloodlust in his being couldn't be stopped or controlled, only unleashed.

"You can't defeat me!" The overmind's pathetic expression to boast itself had a haggard effect in its voice. It regenerated all it could but slowly attempted to hover back up. "I am a god compared to the worm that is yourself!"

The Sith got back to his feet as a thin layer of magma was seething back to cover the crater. The broken eyelid of the dark warrior's mask glowed with pure hate. The Imperium's comment traced a long-forgotten memory that could've been a dream but undeniably felt too important to be so.

"A god? I have killed gods before. If so, then you are a pitiful one at that. Your death is here, puny god."

"Who are you to make this happen! On what a lowly thing can you do!"

"I am Darth Vader! I am a Dark Lord of the Sith! I am Death!"

In a desperate attempt to strike at Vader right after his statement, Imperium launched a telekinetic shockwave at the Sith. But both Nth metal hands held out and absorbed the telekinetic wave that dragged Vader through the crust while standing.

His hands were held out again with Force energies given shape that crackled into a ball of lightning. The kinetite ball was launched from the gauntlet and crashed through the invisible shielding erected by Imperium; the tangles of energy tortured the alien overlord, which sent him back to the ground with tentacles writhing and its large mass, constricting and unconstricting.

"I will not be defeated..." the Imperium wheezed out stubbornly and weakly. "...by a lowlife such as yourself!"

Hidden in the boasting of the creature that he put his open gaze on, fear lurked in it. Vader had sensed the abomination's fear as would a predator smelling the scent of its prey. It was, at first, fear of heat and fire that might have the consequence of its adoption of Martian powers. But the fear has now mutated and grown into a terror of one being...

"If you desire to have my power, then let me give you the first lesson to obtain it. The pain is your friend, embrace it."

His hands raised like a conductor of an orchestra ordering a massive climax. Two tall geysers of molten rock were raised in explosive blasts, one on each side of Imperium; then they merged in the middle to have magma fall down. "NOOOO!" Was the last thing the Imperium overmind made before it was doused by hot magma.

There was no stench from it, for the entire cavern had the smell of sulfur and hot rocks. Gases escaped from its melting and burning body, and it was dissolving like sugar in water. The screams that escaped from Imperium were shrieks, but over time died and little away to a gurgling. Finally it passed as the raining magma totally consumed it into its hot mixture.

For any other ordinary being, that would've been the end. But the Imperium was a pest beyond ordinary. The Sith Lord felt the presence of the creature escape its physical coil before its destruction and risked away itself to someplace else.

Vader had an educated guess on where it could go while wishing that this psychic ability that this overmind had and used to escape death was one ability that he could use. Perhaps with his own rising power, he could.

But in this moment, there was no triumph or victory in Darth Vader. The creature was defeated and, in short order, would die soon enough. The campaign in this area of the Galaxy will come to a close, and a new one will start that will bring Vader and his Empire closer to his objectives. Yet satisfaction eluded him.

It was like the feeling when he had gotten to this Galaxy, captured by Mongul, then promising to kill him, killed the tyrant. But close to what had happened before, Vader felt no great accomplishment. Not truly, quite.

Where before, Vader felt as though he had a hole within himself after learning he was marooned away from his home galaxy. At the present, he has his own Empire to control and much more freedom to do whatever in the name of himself and of the Dark Side. But that gap wasn't precisely filled by those achievements; rather, something else made him feel less...alone. More accepted for what he was.

It wasn't a thing that caused this, however, as it was a who.

With nowhere else to sit, Vader put himself on the ruins of a stalactite now just rubble. The magma flowed into the crater while the Sith put himself away from the molten rock. Sitting himself down, Vader examined his exposed arms, then his legs. There would be no good things to come if he were to return to his wife in a state such as this.

Mechanical hands dialed and operated the martial transmutation device upgraded to his belt. A preset function was already programmed into the system: it repaired much of the suit. The need to return up and leave this inferno became apparent. He manipulated his teleportation device on his belt, and a gateway burned into reality with blinding light.