Star Wars Republic Commando: Knight of Honor ✓

Chapter 10

Author's Note: I am very grateful to everyone who is taking the time to read, especially comment and vote! If you have any tips writing tips, please feel free to comment.

As always, I continue to hope that I am doing justice to the spirit of Star Wars as well the respective authors and characters from which I borrow. Again, I gratefully accept constructive criticism as a means to help me develop my skills further as a writer.

Mandalorian (Mando'a) words

Kotyc (koh-TEESH): strong

Ba'vodu Gan: Uncle Gan

Ner vod (nair-vohd): "my brother/sister"; colloquially also "my friend"

Fierfek: was a slang word that meant "hex" or "curse," but was commonly accepted to mean "poison" by non-Huttese-speaking races, most commonly . During the Clone Wars, it was adopted by clone commandos as a curse word. Boba Fett and Han Solo would later use it during the Second Galactic Civil War.

Shabuir (SHAH-boo-EER): extreme insult - "jerk", but much stronger

Buy'ce (BOO-chay, BOO-shay): helmet; Colloquially: pint, bucket

Haar'chak (HAR-chak): Damn it

Aruetiise (ah-roo-ay-TEE-say): traitor, foreigner, outsider

Barve: was a small, six-legged animal raised for its meat. Their unclean reputation led to the word barve, or adjective barvy, being used across the galaxy as an insult. The insult was especially prevalent among bounty hunters. The insult was also used to label Jedi affected by force psychosis, with people calling them "barvy Jedi".

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Chapter 10

Hearts see what blinds the eye.

Old Tochinite proverb, generally given as advice prior to an arranged marriage

Tochin Moon III, 784 Days ABG

Crimson Squad watched with uncertainty as the princess now sobbed heavily. Her body shook with the strength from the crying and the emotional explosion that had overtaken her.

 Her weeping sounded like she was in pain, her breath gasping. She appeared to show no signs of letting up, and whatever was going on in her mind was not loosening its grasp on her.

Jas knelt before her, and his memories suddenly flashed back to one of his first live-fire training exercises when his body was not much older than that of a young child. He thought he had been prepared for it through the flash training and the practice exercises, but nothing could prepare him for the shock of live-fire combat. 

When he let his memories wander too far away, he could still hear the sound of bombs, see the blaster fire grazing the ground where he had been moments ago, and he could still experience beneath his boots the feeling of tripping and falling over clones that hadn't survived - children's faces just like his. 

Jas didn't remember any of the debriefings of that exercise.

 But he vividly remembered that about an hour after the training was over, he had gotten violently sick. Losing everything he had eaten all day. Then, his crying had started, turning the racking and uncontrollable fits of sobbing. 

The Kaminoans had thought he was a failure and wanted to recondition - terminate - him. Seeming to come out of nowhere, Ba'vodu Gan had stepped in and took Jas in his arms, demanding that the Kaminoans allow him some time to emotionally absorb his ordeal in the training.