Chapter 103: SW Gray Tale 106: Boon or Curse? Part I

__The alleyway smelled of ozone and wet trash, but the Force carried a scent far more rancid.

I couldn't move, not even to turn my head. If before it was due to whatever metaphysical hold it held over my body, now it was because of how extensively it had engulfed me.

It had me pinned like an insect in amber, covering everything from my toes to my sternum in a slick, pulsing shell. I could feel it creeping higher with each heartbeat, another millimeter toward my throat. I could feel it seep deeper too, reaching into my heart.

Arachnae sat three meters away, shock prods still sparking, but she couldn't hear orders I couldn't give. Her optical sensors tracked the spreading black with the frantic blinking pattern that meant she was cycling through every emergency protocol she had and finding none of them applicable.

I regretted not installing an external comm unit on her, fearing signal interception from distributed networking, favoring a single dynamically encrypted communication channel that connected solely to my systems. She could have called Master, which would have tremendously helped the situation.

Now the only comm links to Master were in that half-destroyed helmet or in my wristpad—both buried under the black matter.

As they say, to solve a problem you have to look at its roots.

My perception narrowed to a pinprick focused entirely on the devastation occurring beneath her skin. This black substance had defied every logical boundary I understood. The viscous darkness had existed initially within the metaphorical construct of my mind, yet it had breached the barrier into physical reality with terrifying ease.

I traced the corruption with my senses.

The sludge behaved differently within our respective physiologies. Inside my own veins, the substance acted as an invasive flora. It dug deep, anchoring itself into my muscle fibers and wrapping around my bones like ivy claiming a trellis. I could feel it settling, weaving into my nervous system with a possessiveness that made my skin crawl.

I didn't know what it wanted to achieve, but I couldn't afford to wait and see. Best case would be me dying and that being the end of it. Worst case could be the second coming of Abeloth herself through my body.

But inside Reva, the process lacked that symbiotic structure.

It didn't seem to be bonding with her at all. It was pure chaotic deconstruction of everything that made her living, transforming it into this eldritch matter.

Simply put—it was eating her.

Her cellular matrix was dissolving. The black goo acted as a potent acid, breaking down the complex proteins of her biology into a primordial, necrotic soup. I watched the microscopic devastation unfold in real-time. The most harrowing detail was not the melting flesh but the sudden, violent extinguishing of the midichlorians.

They were blinking out of existence.

Thousands every second. Gone. Just like that.

My breath hitched in my throat. This was a massacre on a cellular level. I needed a solution, and I needed it five minutes ago.

My mind raced through the catalogue of conventional heroics.

What would a protagonist do here? The Power of Friendship? Should I shake her shoulders and scream at her to wake up?

I imagined the scenario with bitter clarity.

The thought tasted like ash.

She was effectively lobotomized. I had her memories, her trauma, her entire identity sitting in my own head. It was better to assume I was dealing with a dying and simultaneously decaying corpse rather than a person.

I needed a mechanic, not a motivational speaker.

I discarded the idea before it fully formed. My brief and disastrous attempt on Tatooine had proven that particular technique required a tithe I could not afford to pay. Transferring life energy was a zero-sum game, and I was currently running on empty. If there was any possibility of her being alive, I would simply kill myself to buy her another three seconds of agony. And if not—Force knows—I might just accelerate the black matter's growth.

I looked at the microscopic lights dying in the darkness of her body.

The word hung in my thoughts.

Could they help? They were the bridge. They connected the biological to the mystical. If I could command them, force them to push back against the darkness...

I scoffed internally.

I had spent dozens of hours trying to coax a reaction from the microscopic organisms. I had subjected them to pressure, electrical stimulation, chemical baths, and focused Force intent.

They were completely chemically and physically inert. Even with Force. They ignored everything I did. They sat attached to the cell nucleus like stubborn barnacles, refusing to move, refusing to react to anything but disturbances in Living Force.

I watched a cluster of cells in Reva's shoulder succumb to the black goo. The membrane ruptured. The nucleus dissolved.

I watched the light vanish.

I started to pull away, ready to abandon the train of thought, when my mind snagged on the sequence of events I had just witnessed.

I froze.

I replayed the observation. The cell structure failed. The biological coherence ended. And in that exact fraction of a second, the midichlorian detached and transitioned out of physical space.

My heart hammered against my ribs.

I couldn't move them in the lab because they were anchored. They held on tight as long as the host was viable. But if the host was dying... if the cell was dying... they had to let go. Not for long—perhaps not even for a normally perceptible duration—but they did.

And my experience with Force healing and Living Force had already made clear that the latter responds to vibrations similar to its own. Then who was to say that midichlorians, intimately linked to the Living Force, wouldn't have some synergy with that too?

And there was already a medium present. The goo itself.

Or rather, the corrupted Living Force that it was pumping into me, facilitating its movement and infection. It had already seeped into more than ninety percent of my body, connecting my own Living Force to hers... like a bridge.

A chaotic, reckless theory began to assemble itself in the frantic quiet of my mind.

I looked at the spreading corruption. If Reva's body was a sinking ship, the midichlorians seemed like rats preparing to jump.

It was madness. It was based on a hypothesis derived from three seconds of observation and desperate conjecture. If I was wrong, I would likely accelerate the infection or lose whatever remained of my autonomy to the rot.

I took a steadying breath, centering my awareness until the alleyway faded into a dull background hum. I did not focus on healing. I did not focus on flesh. I focused entirely on the moment of death—on the split second of release.

The theory was simple.

The execution was anything but.

I needed a target zone. Somewhere the black goo had already penetrated my body, somewhere the corrupted living force had established its filthy bridge, but also somewhere that corresponded to still-living tissue in Reva's rapidly liquefying corpse.

The overlap was shrinking by the second.

Gone. The cells ruptured before I could lock on.

The resistance was immediate and brutal. Trying to modulate my own living force felt like arm-wrestling myself underwater while wearing mittens. During the healing on Tatooine, I'd had time to concentrate, to gradually tune my frequency to match Herana's damaged neural tissue.

Now I had fractions of seconds.

The black tide swept through that region before I could even begin the oscillation.

I fumbled the frequency. My living force vibrated at the wrong pitch, and the midichlorians vanished into whatever cosmic garbage disposal they went to when their hosts died.

I was failing more than I was succeeding.

Actually, no. I wasn't succeeding at all. Just failing in increasingly creative ways.

The problem was the constraints. Too many of them stacking on top of each other like a sadistic puzzle designed by someone who hated me personally.

Limited viable regions. Limited time windows. Limited ability to match frequencies before the moment passed.

Pick any two and I might have a chance. All three together? I was playing a slot machine with my life as the bet.

I forced my brain into overdrive, splitting my attention across multiple zones at once. Left palm. Right elbow. Section of abdominal wall. I tried to track them all, to match all their frequencies in parallel—

The mental strain was immediate. My thoughts started fragmenting, each thread demanding resources I didn't have.

No. Absolutely not. Every scrap of Force energy I spent on brain-boosting was energy I couldn't spend on the actual frequency matching. The opportunity cost would kill me faster than the goo.

Three zones. Four. Five parallel attempts.

My skull felt like someone had wrapped it in barbed wire and was slowly tightening.

Failed. Failed. Failed.

The goo crept another centimeter up my sternum. I could feel it kissing my collarbone now.

Six zones. Seven.

My vision was starting to gray at the edges from pure cognitive overload.

Then, in the chaos of my fractured attention, something clicked.

One zone. Deep in my left side, where the goo had reached but the corrupted bridge was still fresh. A cluster of cells in Reva's corresponding anatomy that hadn't quite died yet—

I matched the frequency.

The timing aligned.

The cells ruptured, transformed into black sludge—

And the midichlorians didn't vanish.

I dropped every other zone instantly, pouring all my focus into that single point of contact. The million-plus pinpricks of light remained suspended in place.

They flickered. Existing and not-existing simultaneously, caught in some quantum limbo between life and the cosmic drain.

I refined the frequency match, smoothing out the rough edges of my living force oscillation. The flickering steadied slightly.

The black tide washed over the cluster.

Nothing happened.

For one heartbeat. Two.

The flickering stopped.

Every point of light went still.

Then they started flickering again. Violently this time. Erratically. Like a swarm of fireflies being electrocuted.

The violent flickering propagated outward.

I watched, stunned, as the oscillation spread beyond my target zone. It jumped to adjacent regions. Then beyond. Racing through every section of Reva's anatomy that still held any spark of biological coherence.

Her entire remaining cellular matrix was lighting up now. Millions upon millions of midichlorians, all caught in that same furious, unstable flicker.

The black matter froze.

In her. In me. The creeping tide halted mid-expansion, suddenly rigid, like someone had flipped a switch and turned fluid to stone.

I couldn't process what I was seeing fast enough. My perception struggled to keep up with the cascade of impossible events—

Then the flickers synchronized.

Every single midichlorian in Reva's body pulsed at the same instant.

The resulting explosion of light seared through my hyper-perception like staring directly into a star. Everything else—the goo, the alley, the trash, my own body—faded into irrelevance against that blinding, overwhelming radiance.

More than the brightness, it seemed loud. So loud that even with my ears clogged, even with my perception focused solely on her body and mine, I could feel the Force on my skin.

The Force itself seemed to be screaming, and I—

"AAAAAAGHHH—"

—was screaming with it.

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www./AbstractoX