Darth Kage VS Kade and Burns, Animal City slapstic police

The red moon hung over the plaza like a wound that refused to close, and Darth Kage stood at its center, breathing the cold air through the grill of his horned mask. The plaza was vast—an abandoned municipal square of cracked flagstones and broken colonnades, wide enough that sound returned as echo rather than answer. Somewhere beneath the stone, machinery groaned: the old substructure of Animal City, still alive with residual power.

He had not come looking for police. But the two shapes moving along the far arcade were unmistakable—blue uniforms, badges catching the moonlight. A fox in a dark blue coat, and a raccoon crouched beside a machine of gears and spikes, its blue holographic screen flickering a warning icon into the dark.

Kage's crimson blade ignited with a sound like tearing silk. The hum rolled across the flagstones.

Kade rose from the machine, gripping a massive mechanical spring in both gloved hands. "Burns," he said, voice steady and low. "Our appointment with Don Alligator just got complicated."

"Noted," Burns said, welding tool still in hand. "Recommend immediate deployment of the tension frame. We have maybe ninety seconds before close range."

They did not run. That was the first thing Kage noticed, and it pleased him. They worked.

Kade drove the spring into the ground between two broken columns. With a shriek of released tension, steel cables snapped outward and drew taut—a spider's web of wire strung across the plaza's mouth, each strand humming with stored force. Burns fired his welding tool at the base of a tilting crane, deliberately weakening its seam, letting the great arm sway overhead like a hanged man.

Kage walked forward. Not fast. His boots were slow and deliberate on the stone, the way a man approaches a door he intends to remove.

He read the web in three strides: the anchor points, the tension angles, the way the cables would flex if struck. Then he raised his blade and cut the central column instead.

Not the wires. The column.

Stone screamed. The pillar collapsed inward, and the entire tension frame lost its geometry—cables whipping loose, spring snapping sideways across the flagstones in a shower of sparks. Kage was already moving through the gap before the dust rose, his body folding low and then unfolding at an angle no upright spine should permit. He came at Kade from the left when every line of his approach had promised the right.

Kade swung the spring like a club. It was a good swing—heavy, honest, aimed at the center of mass. Kage's blade met it, not to block but to redirect, and the spring's own momentum hauled Kade half a step forward. The fox recovered instantly, boots skidding, already reaching for the next tool on his belt.

"You're good," Kage said, voice flat and resonant through the mask. "You build. That's rarer than it should be."

"Stay back, Burns," Kade called.

But Burns was already committed. He had weakened the crane with intention, and now he triggered its release. The great arm swung down across the plaza, a sweeping shadow of iron and counterweight, meant to pin the Sith against the far colonnade. A clever trap. A trap built for a man who stood still.

Kage did not stand still.

He turned into the falling crane. His free hand rose, and the dark sorcery answered—a pressure in the air, a wrongness in the ears. The crane's descent twisted. It struck the ground where Kage had been standing, and the flagstones buckled in a wave that ran outward, and Kage rode the collapse itself: one boot on a tilting slab, then a leap from the falling edge of the stone, blade cutting a red arc through the dust.

*Architect of Ruin.* He had sacrificed the plaza's stability to steal their footing, and the ground beneath the two officers was no longer ground. It was a slope, a shifting field of broken stone, and everything they had built was now debris.

Kade lost his balance for one heartbeat. That was enough. Kage came out of the dust behind him, not in front, and the crimson blade passed through the spring's chain mount, severing it clean. The spring dropped. Kade lunged forward with a baton, quick and professional, and Kage let him—took the blow on the armor's jagged plate, felt the shock travel through him, and answered with a backhand strike of the blade's pommel that sent the fox sprawling across the rubble.

Burns fired his welding tool. A jet of blue flame cut toward the mask. Kage tilted his head, almost lazily, and the flame passed his shoulder. Then his second weapon—the handle at his waist—snapped into his off-hand, and a shorter crimson blade ignited. Two blades now, one long and one short, and he moved between them like a man walking through his own shadow.

He broke Burns's device first. Not the raccoon—the device. One cut through the gear housing, one through the holographic emitter, and the warning screen died with a soft blue sigh. Without the machine, Burns was a technician in an open field.

"Fall back to the arcade!" Kade shouted, hauling himself up. "Burns, now!"

They retreated together, covering each other, professionalism intact even in defeat. Kage let them go. He stood in the ruin he had made—the collapsed column, the fallen crane, the scattered cables and dead device—and watched the two blue uniforms disappear into the dark of the arcade.

"You build well," he said to the empty plaza, extinguishing the short blade. "But you built on ground that was never yours."

The red moon watched. The substructure groaned beneath the broken stones. And Darth Kage walked on, unhurried, through the wreckage of every trap they had raised against him.