2021, Everything Will Ultimately Be Under My Control
...Darth Malthael opened his eyes and saw nothing but endless debris, with no end in sight.
And he himself? He was drifting weightlessly, spinning through the void.
A shattered gun turret floated past him. A mangled corpse still hung from its twisted, razor-sharp break.
Darth Malthael opened his mouth, then realized he was in the vacuum of space. Rage surged within him.
A Neimoidian Scyk-class shuttle flew over under the escort of countless Swarm Drones and took him aboard. After Darth Malthael breathed in fresh air, his first words were a furious curse. "Fuck! Who the fuck detonated it?! I'll rip that bastard's soul out and torture it for ten thousand years!"
Even he could not clearly explain what had happened in that instant. But one thing was certain: someone had set him up.
Just before this, Jikstus, the High Coordinator of the Grysk Hegemony, had taken out the warship's self-destruct remote to threaten him. Yet Darth Malthael had not cared in the slightest. A mere warship self-destruction could not harm him—not with Kresh's Gauntlet protecting him, his incomparably powerful Dark Side Force, and his mastery of Essence Transfer and Death Force. Even if his body were destroyed, he could reassemble it.
In that instant, Darth Malthael used the Death Force to wither the hand Jikstus was holding the remote with. His Death Force was unlike ordinary Force power. Even a supreme powerhouse like Darth Sidious had been badly caught off guard the first time he faced it.
Thus, no matter how powerful Jikstus's psychic energy was, he still fell for it. His palm shriveled, unable to hold the remote any longer, and Darth Malthael seized the chance to rush forward and snatch it away.
But the unexpected happened at that very