The Hotshot Mandalorian

Chapter 22: Missing is for the Innocent

Chapter 22: Missing is for the Defenseless

Lotal

Outer Rim

3648 ATC

Flare P.O.V.

For the most part, Zar had found a quiet spot on top of the Ghost. He no longer was interested in carrying out any sort of conversation with anyone. He just wanted some time alone; his solitude was one thing he valued the most. Conversation was simply an arena he had abandoned long ago.

So the first thing he did was disassemble the "liberated" sniper rifle, inspect it for damage, clean it, calibrate the scope, adjust the power cell so it fired stronger shots, and reassembled it. It was far from an ideal sniper rifle, but it would suit his needs. The weapon would serve him well until he returned to the Excalibur and got a proper weapon worthy of his title of Flare. He now just had to wait for the calibration program to do its work.

The next thing he did was check his personal things. For one, his personal savings. Even though he was borderline rich beyond necessity, he still kept a tight grip on his fundings. If he was being honest with himself, he had more money than he knew what to do with. And he was not certain why he felt the urge today, but he decided to transfer considerable sums of credits to various charitable organizations and hospitals under a mysterious and anonymous donor. And even after he was done with that, he still hadn't made a dent.

Well, he would be lying if he said that all of his savings came from his own work. Certainly bounty-hunting, assassinating, and the various odd jobs he did was more than enough to pay the bills, but he had also learned a very nifty trick that he personally developed himself. The Empire was a war machine. Their strength was sheer numbers, be it ships, troopers, walkers, fighters, cannons, weapons, scientists, they could buy anyone because they had all the money in the galaxy.

Trillions of credits to spend, all of it away from the public's eyes. So he had developed a very discrete viral worm that had embedded itself into Imperial funds and transferred small and miniscule amounts of credits to his own person account and various other accounts. The small amounts collected at a certain time were hardly worth noticing, but since the worm attacked various holdings at once, and millions of times, it was enough to say that the rather large fortune he was sitting on was very big.

Turning his thoughts away from his seemingly useless amounts of credits, he turned to his wrist-mounted hologram. Reading was probably one of the few calming things he ever did besides sleeping and eating. Although he would not admit it to anyone, he was a serious reader, taking in whatever he could, regardless of whether he agreed with it or not. He was aware that not everything he read was true. Regular news articles and feeds these days were filtered and heavily monitored by the Empire, so it stood to reason that everything they said was more or less truth filled with omissions.

So he resorted to more historical things. Unsurprisingly, the Empire had been ruthless with the history books as well. It painted the Republic in a terrible light while obviously avoiding issues about the Clone Wars. So Zar had to do some deep digging to get historical readings before the Empire came into the picture.

History was one of the things that he read with rapt interest. History often held the key to the future, more so than a lot of people realized. In fact, it would be appropriate to say that thee takeover of the galaxy courtesy of the Empire was not really a truly original idea. There was a historical event some thousands of years in the past that pointed to a mysterious faction that fought against the Galactic Republic and Sith Empire. They were led by a name of Valkorian, a name that mysterious and not very-well accounted for. This Emperor had tried to take control of the galaxy and ultimately failed to do so.